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One of the things that has impressed me about this still young season of Doctor Who is the way that it seems more interesting in engaging with Big Themes wrapped up in Silly Ideas than the last few years have been. Last week's episode was a little off-balance in that regard since the execution of its premise was perhaps not as rigourously thought out as it could have been; its attempts to tell a story about prejudice were undercut by having to shrink The Doctor down and physically place him inside a Dalek. This week's episode is built around an even sillier premise - The Doctor and Clara meet Robin Hood and fight robotic knights! - but it worked better for me because it used that silliness as a way to explore the power of myths and storytelling.

But before we get to the heady stuff, let's talk about the silliness. If "Into the Dalek" was a riff on Fantastic Voyage or Innerspace, "Robot of Sherwood" is an overt homage, or at least loving parody, of the 1938 The Adventures of Robin Hood, starring Errol Flynn. Obviously the Robin Hood legend predates cinema by several hundred years, so the show had more material to draw on, but the specific links to that version are too clear to ignore.

The looks of the familiar characters drew heavily on the imagery from that film (though so do most Robin Hood films that came after it; even the ones that don't, like Ridley Scott's aggressively mediocre 2010 version, are defined by how far they move away from the 1938 version). Tom Riley's performance as Robin is clearly influenced by Errol Flynn's cavalier, devil may care bravado, and, perhaps most important, the script by frequent Who writer and Sherlock show runner Mark Gatiss repeatedly pokes fun at the way everyone in the Flynn version is constantly laughing. Seriously, watch that film and take a drink every time Robin and his men break out into laughter. You will die of alcohol poisoning before the end of the first hour.

Actually, don't do that. But do at least watch the film, because it is fantastically fun.

For the first 15 minutes or so, the episode seems dedicated to recreating the familiar beats of the Robin Hood story as faithfully as possible. When The Doctor and Clara first arrive in Sherwood forest, they are introduced to Robin when he fires an arrow into the side of the TARDIS. Robin then challenges The Doctor to a fight for possession of the TARDIS, one which, much like the fight between Robin and Little John, takes place while on a log over a stream. Then they meet the Merry Men, go to an archery contest in disguise to win a golden arrow, and discover that all the Sheriff of Nottingham's knights are secretly robots. Actually, that last part might be new.

Before the sci-fi elements kick in, the thing that most distinguishes this from a Robin Hood story is The Doctor's unremitting disbelief about being in a Robin Hood story. He tells Clara that Robin Hood wasn't actually real when she tells him that she wants to meet him, and only agrees to take her to Sherwood in order to show her. When he is presented with someone who looks, talks and acts like the famed outlaw, he can't help but be suspicious, and so he goes to great lengths to try to figure out what's really going on, determining that Robin and his men are not holograms, but not ruling out that the whole setup could be part of some futuristic theme park. He knows his sci-fi cliches, having lived through pretty much all of them many times before.

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