12.3: Robot of Sherwood

In which they accidentally make a clever metafictional commentary.

Broadcast: September 2014

Watched: February 2022

“At last, something real,” the Doctor says as he walks into a spaceship made of silver tinfoil.

Gatiss does Magrs [Paul Magrs, magical realist novelist who wrote assorted metafictional Who novels in the late 1990s, plus some frankly fantastic audios starring Tom Baker]. Someone on Twitter told me that Gatiss originally wanted to have the merry men be a bunch of lads from a stag do, who just *thought* they were the merry men, but that Moffat told him to make Robin real. No idea if this is true, or just a natural impulse to credit the bits that work to Moffat. 

Either way, the reason this works so well is because Robin is real. There’s a tension between Gatiss’ urge to do incredibly trad, silly fun (Ben Miller camping it up as sheriff, the sword fight on the bridge, the archery competition, enemies defeated with some shiny plates) and the fact this version of the Doctor claims to be aggressively rational.

The result is something that is uncharacteristically, quite possibly accidentally, clever, a commentary on the relationship between Doctor Who and All Other Fiction. One of interesting things about Who is the way it can plug into any other story, in a way most (all?) other franchises can’t – this story is in the same sort of mini genre as All Consuming Fire [a New Adventures novel where the 7th Doctor meets Sherlock Holmes] or that comic where the TARDIS lands on the Enterprise D... but the meta joke is Doctor doesn’t realise he’s that kind of character, he thinks he’s science not magic. It is extremely bold to write a story which ends with Robin Hood saying to Doctor “I’m just as real as you are” and that he hopes their stories will never end.

Oh yeah, the bit where a spaceship achieves escape velocity because they add to its weight with an arrow is nonsense, but this is still a Gatiss script.

Other thoughts:

• The 12th Doctor spends a lot of time drawing on things with chalk doesn’t he? He does it on the floor in Deep Breath, here he's got a blackboard, by his third season he's a teacher. Not really registered that before. 

• It’s quite funny that the TARDIS manages to land within about 100m of Robin Hood. What are the odds? It must have decided it likes Clara now. Also, cute how it automatically repairs the damage done by the arrow.

• The robot appears just before the 16 minute mark, quite a long way after the title... To be charitable, the joke is that the robot isn't Robin.

• LOVE the bit where Robin is disguised without being even slightly disguised, he's just wearing a hat. Also the way his laugh is at first a bit annoying, then becomes a plot point when he and the Doctor argue, then becomes a marker for the sadness he’s hiding. Oh, and when he beats the sheriff, he does so by nicking a trick from the Doctor. Honestly this is far cleverer than any other Gatiss script.

• There’s a miniscope reference, obviously; amazed there isn’t a Time Warrior one. But we do get lines about turbulent priests and peasants’ revolts, and a lot of random cross shapes (in the dungeon windows; the pattern of the robots’ weapons).

• Alan-a-Dale is played by Gatiss’s husband. Aww.