Robin Hood: Tattoo? What Tattoo?

(S01E08) There's nothing like a flashback to give a series a bit of a boost. Lost does it as a matter of routine, and Battlestar Galactica wouldn't be the same without them.

Robin Hood jumped straight in this week with a simple flashback depicting Robin in the Crusades, protecting King Richard. A gang of Saracens attacked the King, and Robin naturally defended him -- suffering a serious wound in the process -- but not before he delivered a scarring slash to the tattooed arm of one of the chief assailants, marking him for future reference.

Unfortunately, it turned out that the marked man was Sir Guy of Gisborne, secreted away from Locksley during the Crusades to assassinate the King for political gain. As you can imagine, such news is liable to send a patriot like Robin into a kill-crazy frenzy, even if killing isn't normally his thing.

The only problem with the timing of the discovery, was the capture of one of Robin's right-hand men (or rather, women), Djaq.

And here's where the only flaw in this week's otherwise sterling episode raised its ugly head; the constant capture and escape of Robin's men at the hands of the Sheriff.

For when Gisborne sped after Robin, following the inadvertent discovery of his scarred tattoo, Djaq fell into the Sheriff's hands and Gisborne subsequently became a prisoner in Sherwood Forrest.

Then, as Robin and Gisburne beat each other to a pulp, while trying to reconcile their differences, (Robin torn between releasing Gisborne and slotting him with a sword), the Sheriff was persuading an imprisoned Djaq to make up a batch of her magical potion which mysteriously burns through metal.

And so, we were guided merrily to the inevitable prisoner trade-off (which is slowly starting to become a semi-regular feature of this otherwise burgeoning series), and the trampled revelation of Gisburne's black betrayal of the King vanishing into thin air when the Sheriff poured the melting potion over Gisborne's arm to remove the incriminating tattoo.

The main positive in this week's episode was the divergence from ordinary happy-clappy merriment, to genuine conflict among Robin's men when the found themselves facing a moral dilemma; where Robin's anger was driving him to wreak revenge in the King's name, his men were keen to avoid the slippery-slope into murder, which would make them no better than those they aim to overthrow.

However, with only three episodes to go in the current series, I'm still no clearer on where the overall story is going -- other than emphasising that Robin is a troubled soul with good intentions, and the Sheriff and his cohorts are a bunch of rotten, evil swines -- which I can get on the news every other night of the week.