I think somebody’s tweet I saw summed up this episode and it simply read: “David Tennant and Matt Smith would have loved Robin Hood.”
Episode three of Peter Capaldi’s stint as The Doctor and, to his credit, he appears to be a much more frightening and angry Doctor than either of his past two incumbents, but, for the moment at least, not quite as loveable.
When they showed the trailer for this week’s episode at the end of last week’s, being somebody from Nottingham, I groaned and thought: “oh no, not Robin Hood. Please not Robin Hood.”
But to Steven Moffat’s credit, Robin Hood and his band of merry men were vaguely likeable and quite comical in some places.
The ‘banter’ between Robin and The Doctor in the jail was also quite funny, so all in all, a relatively pleasing ‘middle-of-the road’ typical Doctor Who mid-series episode.
I sense though that the next few episodes aren’t exactly going to be cinematic masterpieces or be story lines that tug at the heart strings.
Besides from ‘The Promised Land’ which keeps popping up in every episode, this series is about establishing Peter Capaldi as The Doctor.
The two most recent Doctor’s, Matt Smith and David Tennant were excitable, likeable and bounced off the walls all the time. They were the type of people you want to be your brother or best mate.
Peter Capaldi is morphing into the embarrassing uncle you don’t want anyone to know about.
He winds up Clara (less said about her the better), he makes some risky jokes, he thinks he is always right and he’s old but you know what, three episodes in, I like him.
Okay, so he isn’t going to encourage a five year old to go mental at the site of a Dalek, or make a 45 year-old yearn from their childhood.
Instead, he’ll make that 45 year-old think, “I could do that.”
Peter Capaldi looks like he will here for the long haul and I do hope so, because at the moment, although I’m not 100% keen as of yet, I’m about 75% and sooner or later, I’ll never want him to leave.
So overall, a good stab at Robin Hood. Despite being an overly cultivated and hyped myth, and that’s coming from somebody from Nottingham, Steven Moffat did a good job of making him likeable and added just enough stuff about robots, golden arrows and of course, jeopardy to make it a plausible Doctor Who episode.