Every episode of Doctor Who has much more than meets the eye so I like to put together a little post exploring links to the past and other things you might not have known about!
WARNING: Contains Spoilers
The Doctor mentions Richard the Lionheart during his battle with Robin Hood. He is referring to The Crusade, a First Doctor story which featured the king played by James Bond and Indiana Jones actor Julian Glover.
Included on the screen when the Doctor shows Robin famous images of Robin Hood is a shot of Second Doctor Patrick Troughton playing the character in the in 50s children’s TV show The Adventures of Robin Hood.
The Doctor suspects he and Clara are in a miniscope. This happened in the Third Doctor story Carnival of Monsters. Miniscopes are very small externally but like the TARDIS much bigger in the inside so that whole landscapes can be captured within them.
Friar Tuck is played by Trevor Cooper who previously appeared in Doctor Who in as Takis in Sixth Doctor adventure Revelation of the Daleks.
Ben Miller plays the Sheriff of Nottingham and is well known as the comedy partner of Alexander Armstrong. Armstrong has also appeared in Doctor Who, playing Reg Arwell in The Doctor, The Widow and The Wardrobe and voicing Sarah-Jane Smith’s supercomputer Mr. Smith.
When deciding on a destination the Doctor says “What about Mars? The Ice Warrior hives”. He is of course referring to the infamous monsters who last appeared in Cold War, which was also written by Robot of Sherwood writer Mark Gatiss.
The Doctor shows himself to be a great swordsman here and this is a trait which has been seen throughout his regenerations. The Third Doctor had a sword fight with the Master in The Sea Devils, the Fourth Doctor battled with a sword in The Androids of Tara and more recently the Tenth Doctor faced the Sycorax leader in The Christmas Invasion.
As with most of the series of the revived Doctor Who the early episodes have had a set pattern. First there’s the first episode, set in the present day and usually a debut to a Doctor or companion or both (Rose, Smith and Jones, Partners in Crime, The Eleventh Hour,The Impossible Astronaut/Day of the Moon, Asylum of the Daleks, Deep Breath). Then the next two episodes usually involve a historical setting and a futuristic setting (The End of the World/The Unquiet Dead, New Earth/Tooth and Claw, The Shakespeare Code/Gridlock, The Fires of Pompeii/Planet of the Ood, The Beast Below/Victory of the Daleks, The Curse of the Black Spot/The Doctor’s Wife, Dinosaurs on a Spaceship/A Town Called Mercy and Into the Dalek/Robot of Sherwood).
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