Friar Tuck: The Original Gandhi?

So, BBC One has a new production of Robin Hood, and it's incredibly absurd. I love it. Robin Hood has emo hair and refuses to kill anyone. Guy de Gisborne wears eyeliner and leather pants. Marian wears pants and sneaks out of the castle dressed as "the Nightwatchman," distributing food to the poor. She was killed by Guy in the second season finale. There's a Muslim girl named Djag in the band of Merry Men. She and Will Scarlett fall in love and get married when the whole crew takes a quick trip to the Holy Land to save King Richard. Basically there are anachronisms galore, all to appeal to modern audiences, I guess.

This fall BBC America started airing the third and final season, and they've advertised from the start that Robin Hood will die in the final episode. The penultimate episode aired Saturday, and Robin and Guy, now working together to defeat the new Sheriff, Guy's little sister Isabella, took the castle with help/hindrance from Archer, their shared half-brother, and Robin's new girl, the working-class Kate. Also, Alan of Dale was killed by the original Sheriff of Nottingham after being falsely accused of betraying the gang. Yeah. Fans of the original legends might want to avoid the series. The one thing that really made me go hmmm, though, involved Friar Tuck and Little John.

Friar Tuck arrived on the scene fresh from the Holy Lands in the third season premiere. Interestingly, in this iteration, Friar Tuck is a preternaturally wise black man, not the jolly wino of movies past. He is very serious and very focused on teaching Robin that the people need inspiration as much as they need his ill-gotten riches. In this episode, he rallied the men of Locksley to take up arms to block a supply train Isabella was sending to Prince John. Everyone marched on the castle, and Friar Tuck got them to...sit down, blocking the path of the supply train. Yeah. The world's first non-violent protest?

It's always surprising the way that we ignore history when we tell the Robin Hood legend, especially since the actual history is so fascinating. King Richard was a more inspiring king than John, perhaps, but better? He spent less than a year of his reign in England. His vast French holdings were more important to him than his English lands. The sheriffs were patrolling the forests on his behalf, not Prince John's. The massive taxes were being raised to pay his ransom after he was captured returning from the Crusades. In fact, the stories of Prince John's treachery come from his not raising enough taxes; it looked as though he was hoping to leave Richard locked up forever. John was a much weaker king, it's true, but England should be eternally grateful for his weakness. His losses in France made England the centerpiece of the Angevin empire. And never forget that he was the king who signed the Magna Carta, limiting his own power and establishing the writ of Habeas Corpus, the foundation of English common law.

Friar Tuck's tactic worked, in total defiance of the brutality that was really the order of the day. Isabella's men refused to massacre them, and Robin Hood's men took the castle, while the original sheriff began to lay siege. It looks like it'll be a tough situation next week, and I'm hoping that at least a few of the Merry Men will live to the end of the episode. Robin will die a noble death, I'm sure, although if they really wanted to be subversive, maybe the writers should turn him into a traitor, hanged by his own men, or perhaps just an ignominious death, hiding in a hole, crying and praying for it to end quickly. That would really turn the legend on its ear.