Yuku free message boards

Well, this is too funny, considering my "where's the fun in that" remark. In Episode 4, Marian actually does deliver food by day at one point, with Robin's help. When Robin uses arrows to shoot supplies into the village and Marian asks why he can't just throw the food, he replies, "Where would the fun in that be?"

But first things first....

Episode 4: Parent Hood

Hmm.... better than Ep 3, not as good as 1 & 2, IMO. I'd give it a B. Or should we grade the eps on a 10-arrow scale, like the 10-chakram scale we use for Xena eps? 7 arrows out of 10, maybe.

Quick synopsis. While fleeing the Sheriff's men, the gang finds an abandoned baby in the woods. They are then attacked by the Sheriff's men, and one of the not-so-merry men, Roy, is captured and taken to Nottingham. Meanwhile, Marian tries to stand up to the Sheriff who has quarantined a village following a plague outbreak and won't allow any food in; she argues that the outbreak is over. When the sheriff does not relent, Marian takes food to the village and tries to get past the guard; Robin and his men just happen to pass by and help her by knocking out the guards, then (as mentioned above) using arrows to shoot bread and pies and what looks like cheese into the starving village. Even though it's confirmed that the plague is over, the Sheriff punishes Marian's defiance by having his guards shear off her hair in public (on the scaffold under the noose), while Guy stands by silently and scowls. Meanwhile, Roy, in the dungeon, accidentally learns that the baby they found in the woods is the child of Gisborne and a kitchen maid at Nottingham castle, Annie, who believes that Giz took the baby to a convent. The Sheriff tells Roy he'll release him if he agrees to kill Robin; when Roy replies, "I'd sooner kill me own mother," Vasey immediately puts him to the test by having Gisborne bring in his mother and telling Roy she's going to die unless he kills Robin by sunrise. Roy agrees and goes back to the gang after a faked escape; he does try to kill Robin (after several half-hearted moves) but is stopped by Little John. He tells the gang the truth about the baby and they go to find Annie and rescue Roy's mother Mary. Mary's hanging is fortuitously disrupted when Annie hurls herself at Gisborne, holding a knife to his throat and yelling that he's a murderer who left their baby to die. Mary is rescued but Roy is killed by the Sheriff's men. Marian, looking very fetching with short hair, drives Annie to a nearby manor where she's found her a new job.

Pluses: The Roy storyline was well-handled, if slightly predictable (I had a hunch from the moment of Roy's first appearance in Ep 2 that he was going to redeem himself with a heroic death, since he was the most cynical of the outlaws). The Sheriff's cat-and-mouse game with him was truly chilling, and it was darkly funny watching Vasey explain to Roy what a "dilemma" is -- even though I'm pretty sure the word did not yet exist in the English language in 1192. His reunion with his mother, who had thought him long dead, was genuinely touching, and so was the scene of his death, when he succumbs under the swords of the Sheriff's men shouting, "My name is Royston [can't recall his last name], I fight for Robin Hood and King Richard."

The Sheriff continues to be madly entertaining.

The relationship between Robin and Marian is well-handled, even if I'm no R/M shipper. She continues to tell him that any feelings she may have had for him are long gone, but she's clearly warming up to him; she admires what he's doing but she's also irritated (hmm, and perhaps somewhat charmed too?) by his glib attitude.

The scene where Marian gets her hair shorn in public humiliation was quite powerful, even if she continues to look way too sleek.

The action's getting better, and some of the scenes, especially in the dungeon, were quite well-directed.

Minuses. The three distinct storylines -- Roy, the baby, and the quarantined village -- didn't mesh very well. Actually, let me amend that: the Roy storyline and the baby storyline felt connected, but the quarantined village one kind of dangled there, practically unattached to the rest. It might have been better to have it as a "framing" story -- if the teaser had opened with Marian arguing with the sheriff, then we went to the main story (Roy + baby), and then at the end, after Marian helps find a place for Annie and her child, she comes back to the castle only to have the Sheriff declare her punishment. Marian getting her hair shorn would have made for a very powerful last scene.

I know plausibility and logic aren't really the strong point of shows like these (whether RH or X:WP), but the way Roy accidentally learns that the baby they found is Gisborne's is just waaaay too contrived. Annie the kitchen maid just happens to be the one taking food and water to Roy in the dungeon after Guy has finished beating the crap out of him? and she just happens to tell Roy that Guy is her boyfriend, that they had a kid, and that Guy was just off taking the kid to a convent? And Roy just happens to figure out that that was the baby they found in the woods? (Which is especially remarkable since, with all due respect, Roy does not look like someone who'd ace an IQ test.)

Guy still isn't getting enough character development, or screen time -- at this point he's still pretty much The Sheriff's Evil Henchman. That's not necessarily a minus for the episode, I guess, but it is a minus for me as a Guy fan. Obviously the "bad-but-redeemable" memo still hasn't arrived; Guy is quite a bastard here, not only doing the sheriff's bidding with much gusto (watch the nasty smirk on his face when he brings in poor Roy's mom) but leaving his own child in the woods. Moreover, he hits Annie when she confronts him about it (well, okay, she does confront him about it with a knife to his neck and in front of a crowd, but still!). Seriously, if Gizzy continues to develop at this rate, he'll be stomping on puppies and pushing old ladies down the stairs next. Interestingly, it seems he was nice to Annie until the baby-abandonment thing -- she tells Roy that "she's seen a different side of him." Actually, while it's commonly assumed that Guy was leaving the baby in the woods to die for some inexplicable reason, my impression is that he probably left it there for Robin's gang to find. He'd been tracking them, he knew they were in the area. I think he knew the baby would be a major distraction and a handicap for them. Now, that obviously that still leaves Guy far short of contention for the Father of the Year award -- at best he was using his infant son as Robin Hood bait, and in the process putting the baby in a clearly dangerous situation -- but it does make him slightly less evil, and I'll settle for that, because otherwise his behavior here is really difficult to square with his eventual development.



Other random observations:

* At one point the gang discusses what to do with the baby and someone (Allan, I think?) quips, "What are we going to do, make him one of us and give him a tiny bow and quiver with arrows?" At the very end when Annie with her baby is riding off to her new home, one of the Merry Men, Will Scarlett, gives her a little pouch he tells her to open later. It turns out to contain a miniature bow and quiver. Okay, it's amusing, but would the gang concern itself with manufacturing souvenirs when one of their own has just been killed?

* Unlike Allan and Guy, Robin should not have a lot of shirtless time. He's way too scrawny.