Storm Front, chapters 26 and 27, in which Dresden repudiates his author

The long journey ends.  As venomously as I dislike Dresden, I won't rule out getting into another Dresden book at some point--probably the vaunted Book Seven, which legend says was designed to lure in new readers--but obviously I'm not subjecting myself to that right now.  I have confirmed that I own The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss, which I understand is a contender with WOT for most unnecessarily long fantasy nonsense, but I also have The Way of Kings by Brandon Sanderson, a brick of a book (part one of ten!) by an author who definitely has his issues but, as near as I can tell, is actually educating himself over time.  (He's spoken of having to teach new aspiring authors that having one token lady character is deeply inadequate and admitted to making the same mistake in his past writing, for example.)  So Sanderson is a bit of a mildly-problematic fave for me, which could make his book better or worse as material for our purposes.  These two are my current leanings, but I could always be convinced in a different direction; please feel free to continue suggesting.  In the meantime, let's wrap this sucker up.

Storm Front

Chapter Twenty-Six: A Truly Shocking Twist

We rejoin Dresden listing off for us at length the reasons that his current situation is bad (evil wizard, gun-toting zealots, perpetual motion scorpions), which he literally did one page ago, so this is like that moment when a show comes back from commercial and decides to replay the last twenty seconds.  That always vexed me.  Wevs.  Dresden suddenly snaps out of his doom-moping and realises that he has a broom, and therefore a fighting chance.  He quickly enchants the broom and commands it ("Pulitas!") to clean the kitchen, which includes sweeping out the swarm of not-yet-giant scorpions.

I'm pretty sure it got all the dirt on the way, too. When I do a spell, I do it right.

I mean.  Some authors would take the opportunity to have their hero note that their salvation broom didn't quite manage to sweep all the way out to the edges of the linoleum, self-deprecating shrug, at least it got the job done.  But Dresden, we are told, just has to be so awesome that his scorpion-fighting broom also flawlessly cleans the kitchen.

Aside: this is also the first time we've seen magically-animated objects put into play.  Now, I'm generally pretty happy to see things like 'hey, that old cleaning cantrip I was forced to learn at age 14 will actually buy me the time I need', but I am also kinda stuck asking now why this is the first time we've seen such a thing at play.  If it takes only a few seconds to pour enough magic into a broom that it can not only fly but outmaneuver evil scorpions, is there an actual reason Dresden doesn't have, like, a hand towel in his pocket that he can enchant to try to wrap itself around Victor's face?  Or, more simply and brutally, a paperweight that will do its damndest to tackle Victor in the back of the head over and over?  I'm sure there are ways these things can be explained (e.g., the Pulitas spell is only easy because it's a traditional and very useful spell that's been practiced and refined for centuries until it's got a form that can be done in five seconds, but free-form animation magic is really hard) but it's kind of exhausting to be forced to do all that justification work for the story.  (Expect to hear the same thing repeated in our upcoming post about indie timewarp game Life Is Strange.)

The broom successfully sweeps all the scorpions off the ledge before Victor grabs it and breaks the spell.  The Beckitts have swapped to revolvers, which are immune to techbane because look over there, but while they're reloading, Victor tries to tell Dresden he can surrender and walk away or wait for the fire to spread and kill him, but Dresden calls this bluff with the knowledge that if Victor waits, all his drugs will burn as well.  This leads to a truly bizarre hero-villain dialogue that would fit easily into a hundred formulaic adventures and tremendously not this one.

"Fire's the simplest thing you can do. All the real wizards learn that in the first couple of weeks and move on up from there." [....] 

"Shut up!" Victor snarled. "Who's the real wizard here, huh? Who's the one with all the cards and who's the one bleeding on the kitchen floor? You're nothing, Dresden, nothing. You're a loser. And do you know why?" 

"Gee," I said. "Let me think." 

He laughed, harshly. "Because you're an idiot. You're an idealist. Open your eyes, man. You're in the jungle, now."

Idealist.

Harry Dresden is being told that his critical flaw is that he is an idealist.

I don't... I am barely able to comprehend this assertion, let alone respond to it.  Dresden is a cynic who can't be bothered to comfort people he has personally terrorised, who keeps an immortal sex offender in his basement for his knowledge of recipes, who cheerfully carries on telling people about magic in a setting where they might be killed for knowing too much, and that's just in this book.  We haven't even gotten to him nonchalantly accepting the enslavement of a teenage girl by a parasitic monster because it fits his incredibly precise definition of true love.

Dresden doesn't believe in the effectiveness of law, doesn't believe in helping his fellows or his community, doesn't particularly care about the well-being of his clients (look at his scorn for Monica when he thinks her husband 'only' ran out on her), and gets confused when he feels empathy for other people's suffering.

The only ideal this man can be accused of believing in is 'fuck you, I got mine'.

Faith and begorrah.

I was in the mood to tell a white lie. "The police know all about you, Vic. I told them myself. And I told the White Council, too. You've never even heard of them, have you, Vic? They're like the Superfriends and the Inquisition all rolled up into one."

I mean, that does sound like an excellent description of the council, overflowing with power and zero recognisable morality beyond their personal definition of personal purity, but why hasn't Dresden done this, again?  He's had time in cabs when he could have at least written a letter for Murphy.  He could have told Mac 'I need your car so I can go fight the murderer Victor Sells, here's his address'.  But nope.

Victor insists that Dresden is lying, but demands to know who gave him away to start with.  In a shocking twist I did not see coming, Dresden decides not to give up Monica's name, on the basis that Victor might conceivably survive this fight and go exact vengeance.  Totally thought he was going to say it on the off chance that it would provoke Victor into a rage-mistake.  Victor just tells the Beckitts to go (apparently they're going to march out to the car naked; very subtle) and then sets about re-summoning his toad-demon, whose name turns out to be Kalshazzak.

Dresden scoffs at Victor making the rookie mistake of letting him hear the demon's name, chants it back in the thing's face, mind-wrestles with it for a second, draws heroic inspiration from the mental images of Jenny Sells, Karrin Murphy, and Susan Rodriguez (so, the actual child and two grown women Dresden just personally infantilises), and it begins to writhe on the floor.  Victor turns to run, Dresden casts a final wind spell to tackle him off his feet, and then it's What Have You Done time.

"The Fourth Law of Magic forbids the binding of any being against its will," I grated out. Pain was tight around my throat, making me fight to speak the words. "So I stepped in and cut your control over it. And didn't establish any of my own."

The toad begins stumbling toward them as Dresden makes it clear that he's okay with dying as long as Sells dies too, they wrestle at the edge of the indoor balcony and of course both throw each other over, so on top of all the other cliches we also get the hero and villain simultaneously dangling from a ledge.  Ahead, the incoming demon.  Below them, a sea of black smoke (the burning potions, I think?) with a half-dozen giant scorpion stingers sticking up like periscopes.  Victor's got a better grip and Dresden fears he'll manage to ward off the demon, so--who called it?!--blurts out that Monica was the one to betray him.  This indeed throws Victor off just long enough for the demon to sink its fangs into his throat.  Dresden is sure that he is soon to fall and die as well, but realises that he still has the handcuffs dangling from his wrist and manages to anchor himself while yanking Victor and the demon to their doom.

All y'all take a gander at this for me:

With my right [hand], I flicked the free end of the handcuffs around one of the bars of the guardrail. The ring of metal cycled around on its hinge and locked into place.

I'm preeeetty sure that this is supposed to indicate the other cuff was not merely empty but open, as in 'not locked'?  Even though the reason he needed to force the cuff off Murphy's wrist and leave it attached to his own was that he couldn't open them.  Is there something I'm missing here, or did Dresden subconsciously unlock the handcuff with magic while none of us were looking?

The scorpions kill Victor and tear the demon apart (apparently demons aren't all that after all?) and Dresden hangs painfully by one wrist, mulling his imminent death in a way that Butcher presumably wanted to be deathly stereotypical and absolutely succeeded at.  He insists for a full paragraph that he's just hallucinating as he sees Morgan burst in, carve through one of the giant scorpions ("snickersnack", which I will fully admit I would enjoy from a different author), and begin to swing his sword in Dresden's general direction when Dresden finally blacks out.  His last thoughts are of how typical it is that he would survive the villain only to get killed "by the people for whose cause I had been fighting".  Uh, Dresden, I know your 'allies' seem to turn on you a lot, but has it occurred to you that's because you constantly lie to them and have physically assaulted Morgan twice this week?

Chapter Twenty-Seven: Making Out In The Rain

Dresden awakens outside and immediately reminds us that HE'S NOT GAY.

Rain was falling on my face, and it was the greatest feeling I'd ever known. Morgan's face was over mine, and I realized he'd been giving me CPR. Eww.

NOT THAT THERE'S ANYTHING WRONG WITH THAT

JUST

I HAVE SURVIVED A LITERAL HELLHOLE BECAUSE MY PERENNIAL NEMESIS RUSHED IN TO SAVE MY LIFE AND IMMEDIATELY ATTEMPTED TO RESUSCITATE ME REGARDLESS OF ANY PERSONAL DISCOMFORT

AND I WANT YOU TO KNOW I'M NOT INTO THAT

I get that it's supposed to be a tension-breaking joke, but consider this: fuck you, Jim Butcher.  Get your cheap laughs out of a different bargain bin.

"I saw you risk your life to stop the Shadowman. Without breaking any of the Laws. You weren't the killer."

Wait, why does Morgan call Victor 'Shadowman'?  That's a nickname that Dresden has only used inside his own head.  Again, in a better book, that would be the kind of slip-up that would cause our hero to realise that there was another layer to this mystery and Morgan was hiding something.  But not here.

Here, we can't even have character development.  Despite agreeing that Dresden isn't the killer, and in fact worked to stop the killer at personal risk while still following the council's code of conduct, within a page Morgan is declaring that "We will watch you day and night, we will prove that you are a danger who must be stopped".  Dude can't even be allowed a little tsundere 'well, I guess you might not be a lurking serial killer after all, but don't think this means we're friends or anything'.  They could have formed a tenuous trust that would still allow Morgan to leap to conclusions next time something implicates Dresden's guilt, compounded with 'I can't believe I even began to trust you'.  Morgan might as well wear a sign around his neck reading I'm Not A Real Character.

At his accusation, of course, Dresden just collapses laughing.  When asked if he's all right, he responds NO HOMO "Give me about a gallon of Listerine [...] and I'll be fine", because that joke isn't played out yet.  Also, Dresden, I'm pretty sure you're bleeding from some important leg veins?  But Morgan just says the police will arrive soon and wanders off into the woods, like he do.

The police arrived in time to catch the Beckitts trying to leave and arrested them for, of all things, being naked. Later, they were implicated in the ThreeEye drug ring, and prosecuted on distribution charges.

Did... uh, did the drugs survive the fire?  How were the Beckitts connected to ThreeEye?  Did the scorpions survive the fire?  They were clearly still running around after Victor was proper dead.  Seems like that's the kind of problem Morgan might have wanted to clean up before he left.  I assume he didn't wade into the flames to finish them all off before he went back to breathe in Dresden's mouth.  (Side note: modern CPR actually doesn't call for the breathing thing, only chest compressions, but real CPR also isn't expected to resuscitate a person on its own, so whatever).

Thanks to Morgan's testimony, the council removes the Doom of Damocles ("which I had always thought a rather pretentious name in any case" uuuuugh) from Dresden's head.

Dresden ends up in the hospital, and his techbane inexplicably doesn't burn the whole place out, although they do have trouble with the x-ray machine every time they try to scan his spine, har har.  His room is just down the hall from Murphy (who survived after three days in critical care).

I sent flowers to her hospital room, along with the surviving ring of her handcuffs. I told her, in a note, not to ask how the chain between the rings had been so neatly severed. I didn't think she'd buy that someone cut it with a magic sword.

...Why not?  Murphy believes in magic, remember?  That's why she hired you?  And tried to arrest you?  You just have a fetish for withholding information, Dresden; at least admit it.

The flowers must have helped. The first time she got out of bed was to totter down the hall to my room, throw them in my face, and leave without saying a word.

Oh, those irascible womenfolk.  (I was going to say that you know a male cop wouldn't have been written expressing their anger in such an impotent way as throwing flowers in Dresden's face, but then I remembered Dresden wouldn't have sent flowers to a male cop in the first place.)  Murphy nevertheless makes sure Dresden gets paid well for his consulting, and rescinds his arrest order, and calls him in again for advice the day after she gets back to work.

But we don't joke anymore. Some wounds don't heal very quickly.

Dresden, I'm still busy being shocked that she didn't drag you into an interrogation room after all.  If nothing else, you can be sure in her place I would demand some very clear guidelines about what information is Super Secret Wizard Knowledge and what information she can actually trust out of you so she doesn't waste her time shaking you down for things you've already admitted next time.

Monica and the kids get into mundane Witness Protection, which strikes me as odd given that they had no real part in Victor's business and he's dead now.  Who are they being protected from?  Marcone's lone claim to non-super-villainy is that he wouldn't murder people if there wasn't any profit in it.  (The Beckitts, we're told, ended up in Michigan prison, apparently outside Marcone's reach.  Um.)

Susan's article headlines the next issue of the Arcane, and she drops by to flirt with Dresden in the hospital and talk about how unfortunate it is that his hips are in a cast, because, again, she's the Spicy Latina and exists entirely to be fuckable.

I used the sympathy factor to badger another date out of her, and she didn't seem to mind too much. That time, we were not interrupted by a demon. And I didn't need any of Bob's love potions or advice, thank you very much.

HAVE I TOLD YOU I AM HETEROSEXUAL TODAY

Speaking of Bob, he returns home amongst rumours of "a particularly wild party at the University of Chicago" that Dresden ignores.  I'd really like to think that 'wild party' just means that Bob used his undefined magical powers just to throw a really sweet rave with bodacious laser shows and fonts of endless champagne and non-alcoholic beverages of choice, but this is Butcher writing and I just can't quite make myself believe that.

The final page is Dresden's navel-gazing, with timeless prose like "What did I get out of it? I'm not really sure. I escaped from something that had been following me for a long time. I'm just not sure what."  Uh.  What?  Does he mean the Doom?  (I think he knows what that is.)  Does he mean the temptation of evil magic?  He didn't escape that, and he goes on to say as much at length: "The power is there. The temptation is there. That's just the way it's going to be."  This whole temptation thing would have worked much better if it had been a running theme of the book and not just shoehorned in at the last minute.  Like if back in chapter six Bob had been all 'Hey, you realise we could solve this whole problem in five minutes if we harnessed an abyssal hound' and Dresden was like 'Awesome, how do we do that' and Bob was like 'Okay, first we need the blood of three different children' and Dresden was just 'Okay, gonna stop you there'.  Temptations should be real and constant--you can stop this killer right now if you'll just pay this one little price, just compromise once--if they're going to be meaningful.  Otherwise you get, well, this slapdash mess.

Dresden continues to monologue for a bit about how the world is getting weirder and darker and heading for rough times and he's just going to try to keep his corner as safe as he can, so if you are in trouble, who ya gonna call, et cetera.  Curtain.

Well.

If it's true that Butcher wrote this as a backhanded homage to Anita Blake, intentionally working in every cliche he could possibly think of, then he absolutely succeeded.  And clearly when his teacher told him that it was publishable, she was right.

But gracious, at what cost?

I mean, that is the closest this book gets to having a moral, right?  That there are things not worth doing for success.  That even if it means you stay stuck in a rubbish little office getting laughed at by the guy who delivers your mail, it's better to be honorable than powerful, better to be good than prosperous, better to be honest than rich.  That the temptation to do something cruel for the sake of personal gain is omnipresent and it is worth resisting every time.

That if the cost of becoming a best-selling author is hammering out misogynistic, incidentally racist, casually homophobic dreck in which sex workers die messily for the reader's titillation, if the cost is writing something that you personally believe is composed of reprehensible nonsense and telling people to spend their money on it, that cost is too high.

Pictured: DJ Khaled's memetic "congratulations, you played yourself".

So that's it for our time with Dresden.  Next week will probably be a post on Life Is Strange or some other one-off thing, and we'll get into our next book after that.  Feel free to get out any remaining vitriol for Dresden in the comments below, or construct your own outline for an alternate version of this book.  Maybe one that doesn't feel like it was slapped together over the course of an afternoon.

The Liveblog of Impossible Things: Doctor Who, season eight, episodes 1-3

Oh my stars and round things, have I never made a Doctor Who post on this site before?  That is amazing.  Let's fix it really hard this week.

My abiding love of Doctor Who was once so strong that I watched The Impossible Astronaut (episode 6.01) and said aloud to my mother "If it were anyone else writing this show, I would be worried that the plot twist for this season was going to be terrible, but I know that Moffat has something great planned."  Doctor Who was as close to religious ritual as I got: new episodes were like holy days, brief periods of time in which we imagined what could be and what was and what we would do in the worst possible moments of our lives.  Rose becomes a god.  Martha laughs in the face of armageddon.  Donna shines brighter than anyone in the universe.  Jack lives.

My adoration of the show even let me look past the varied weak points of the fifth season and brush off (as rough edges to be soon fixed) the perennial flaws of Moffat's writing.  To this day, while I won't argue with anyone who says the Eleventh Doctor is a terrible person, I personally like to maintain that he was a great man and his actions were unfortunately misrepresented by inept writers who meddled with the truth.  (This applies triply to the 50th Anniversary episode.)

The show has since devolved into a case study in Special Smart White Guy Privilege about a man who travels the universe being rude to everyone and getting away with it because he's good at his job, also known as 'that plot you've seen a million times before', but now with more rayguns and women who literally tear apart the universe over their infatuation with Our Hero.

So while I downloaded Deep Breath (the first episode with the Twelfth Doctor) and watched it immediately when it was released, I then set about a strict regimen of completely forgetting about the show for the rest of the year.  I am told I didn't miss much, but it's the holidays and a friend has lent me the boxed set that she just got for Christmas, so let's just marathon the lot of them and get it over with, shall we?

Episode 8.01: Deep Breath

I'm skipping rewatching this one.  Summary: the Twelfth Doctor is rude in that way that's supposed to make white male heroes charming, his human companion Clara is a spunky young lass who puts up with his antics out of loyalty to his previous self, the Doctor definitely would/wouldn't voluntarily kill someone, and he has a new hidden nemesis who is a vaguely posh pretty thin middle-aged governess-type woman, also known as 'the only kind of female villain Moffat knows how to write', and the word 'knows' in there is generous.  Come with us on a journey of discovery to find out why the Doctor's new face has previously been seen on a patriarch in Pompeii and a government monster in modern London.

Final score: Creepy, striking, weird, pointlessly adoring of the cranky old white man, Vastra and Jenny's kiss didn't need an overlay of 'we must share oxygen' to justify it.

8.02: Into the Dalek

The episode opens with the crew of a not-X-Wing ship trying and failing to escape a Dalek mothership in space.  The surviving pilot awakens on the TARDIS, where the Doctor is Charmingly Rude to her about saving her life and how she can't kill him and claim his ship because "you'd starve to death trying to find the lightswitch".  I'm trying to imagine the Ninth Doctor acting like this around someone whose brother just died beside them, victim of Dalek cannons, and I take a moment to shake my fist at the uncaring gods who let Moffat do this to us.

He returns her to her warship, where they intend to kill him for security purposes but decide instead to zap him with a shrink ray and jam him inside a captured Dalek.

The new intro graphics look intentionally low-budget, like they're trying to find the most expensive way of simulating a papier-mache model dangling from a string in front of the camera.

We then cut to a dude pretending to be a drill sergeant but proving to actually be a gym teacher at the same school where Clara works.  He's also an ex-soldier, and tears up when a student asks if he's ever killed someone who wasn't a soldier.  He's running a cadet program at the school, which he insists includes a moral element beyond shooting people, which Clara summarises as "Ah, you shoot people and then cry about it afterwards", which puts me much more on Clara's side than his so far.  He is all awkward in ways that clearly are supposed to be adorable, but luckily for him they are in mutual boners for each other.

Clara gets whisked off to join the Doctor on his new journey, because the captured Dalek has declared its intention to destroy all Daleks, which has the Doctor thinking about saving it.  (He asks Clara if he's a good man, she says she doesn't know.  I'm not sure he's an anything man anymore, myself.)  He guesses that it's so damaged its hatred toggle flipped around in the wrong direction  The lot of them get shrunk down and injected through its eyestalk.  They're not actually that small; maybe five-ten millimetres tall?  I'm pretty sure this is all in the realm of normal slicey-slicey surgery, not even futuristic robot surgery.

The inside of the Dalek body turns out to be a 'perfect analog' of a living body, and therefore firing a grappling hook into the metal plating summons antibody drones.  The Doctor tells their unfortunate redshirt to eat a pill before the drones vaporise him, which lets him track the residue to some waste tube.  Trying again to imagine Nine's response to an about-to-die man being "Hey, chew this and you can still be useful to me" rather than any kind of apology or sorrow.  Who the fuck is this man?  (Also, what kind of internal sensors react hostilely to a tiny puncture in a metal plate but ignore complex radio communications beaming in and out of their robo-intestines?)

A radiation leak is killing the Dalek, but also caused it to reach a reversal of the normal conclusion: it saw a star born as concluded that 'resistance is futile', but not resistance to the Daleks, resistance to life, which keeps coming back and keeps fighting.  Ten seconds later, the Doctor seals the radiation leak and the Dalek immediately sets about slaughtering everyone on the ship in dramatic slow-motion.  Clara slaps the Doctor for being pleased that he was right that all Daleks are evil, but they have the dramatic realisation that good Daleks are possible and set about mucking with its robo-brain and its memory banks.

Sidenote as I watch the actiony climax: this episode is rubbish on any kind of mental health-relevant philosophy.  The Daleks "are" evil, but the Doctor points out that they have mental suppressor tech that quashes any hint of empathy, but then the mentally-damaged Dalek "is" good, and when fixed it proves that it always "was" evil.  It's not clear to me either that the Dalek ever "was" any of these things, given that we have no idea what it would be without its suppressor working.  (Why did no one think of breaking the suppressor to start with?  Why was anyone surprised that it would start murdering people as soon as the leak was repaired while its suppressor was still running?)  The conclusion appears to be that if someone has any kind of factor impairing their ability to be kind or polite or generous, this reflects on their innermost morality and nature.

The climax seems to lean pretty hard on this as well, when the Doctor mind-melds with the Dalek to show it the beauty of the universe and it instead latches onto his hatred of the Daleks and goes on a rampage to rescue the remaining redshirts.  So, even a Good Dalek is fundamentally evil and destructive after all.  The Doctor says this isn't victory, "victory would have been a good Dalek", and it responds "You are a good Dalek", referencing episode 5.06, 'Dalek', a vastly better episode that covered basically all the same plot and philosophical notions, on a lower budget, with a more family-friendly script and kinder Doctor.  Moffat fucking loves referencing old episodes in a way that he has not narratively earned.

The soldier girl from the beginning, Journey Blue, asks to leave with the Doctor, and he sadly lists all her good qualities before saying he wishes she hadn't been a soldier, and turns away.  Apparently forgetting that his own daughter Jenny was literally born a soldier, Dalek-style, and in the space of a day grew to be much more heroic.  (Clara should know this, Clara knows the Doctor's whole life, or maybe she doesn't, I don't even know anymore.)  The important part of course is supposed to be that the Doctor doesn't like soldiers and Clara's new boyfriend is a soldier, oh noes, what tension shall this create.

Final score: Doctor Who is always supposed to be accessible to children, no matter how grim it gets; who was this episode for?

8.03: Robot of Sherwood

Clara reveals that she's always wanted to meet Robin Hood and the Doctor informs her that he doesn't exist, so I just want to take a moment to note that the legends are very liked inspired by the locals who became guerrilla insurgents to resist the Norman invasion of England.  These people, the ones who left behind their families to live in the wilderness and fight the conquerors, were the first Wildmen, and I am their descendant, so fuck you very much, Mr I-Know-Everything, Robin Hood was my nth-great-grandfather.  Naturally, the TARDIS lands in Sherwood Forest and immediately gets an arrow in the door from Robin Hood, who is realistically scraggly for a man who lives in the woods but oddly well-bathed.  Robin Hood declares his intention to take the TARDIS, as "all property is theft", so apparently he got to that line about 650 years before Proudhon.

The Doctor fences with Robin Hood, but using a spoon, which is at once incredibly stupid and charmingly weird.  It's the type of thing I would let go without a blink from the Ninth or Eleventh Doctors; weird for Ten or Twelve.

There is also a Sheriff of Nottingham pillaging the locals villages, stealing daughters and shanking old dudes.  Straightforward enough.  We meet the Merry Men and the Doctor goes around stealing hair and blood and such to try to prove they're not real.  There is the traditional archery competition to capture Robin Hood and the Doctor steps in, also a master archer in addition to master fencer.  When did the Doctor suddenly start studying all the weapon arts?  They do the 'split the arrow' trick about five times total, so I guess this is supposed to be a funny episode?  I should not have taken this long to realise that.  The Sheriff's soldiers are revealed as robots, everyone gets captured, Robin Hood and the Doctor squabble in their cells, and Clara is identified as the ringleader and taken away to be interrogated.

This is the kind of episode that sets out to be all 'women are the truly competent people and very badass' and comes out 'men are infants and need women to mother them forever'.

Down in the dungeons, the slaves are seen running forges, and one of the robo-guards pours the metal into an enormous circuit-board-looking mould.  Uh... that's not how circuit boards work.

Clara has dinner with the Sheriff in traditional villain manner, where he demands to have the screwdriver explained to him.  Clara instead bluffs him into revealing what deal he made with robots from the sky.  They crashed, offered him power, and he now intends to conquer the world.  The Doctor and Robin somehow break free (no explanation how, after a long scene of them utterly failing) and find the hidden ship at the core of the castle.  The robot needed gold to fix their engines, but the Doctor declares they're too far gone and all he can do is blow up half of England.  Et cetera et cetera action scenes, banter.  There's a moment after the Doctor has helped the slaves free themselves by reflecting their laser back at them with gold plates, and the last girl to escape gives the Doctor a kiss on his cheek.  He looks startled, reflected, and I begin to hope that this Doctor is supposed to be seen as a cantankerous jackass who needs to remember that he loves people and they are the purpose for his whole journey, as opposed to self-aggrandisement.

When the world is saved with improbable archery, Robin (who is real after all, not a robot) and the Doctor have a last chat about people and legends and pretending to be a hero and inspiring others, it looks like a pretty good show for a moment, and then the TARDIS leaves and Marian appears behind it for her one line, "Robin!", so that Our Hero gets his Love Object Reward.

Final score: A roundabout, slapdash mess that destroys any shot Twelve has had so far at character consistency, but also less conceptually offensive than the first two episodes.  Terrible, yet charmingly so.  Quoth Rosa Diaz, "And the night gets even worse-better!"

Probably come back tomorrow for the next episodes!  Happy imminent New Year!