- This review contains spoilers for the latest episode of Sherwood.
After flying straight and straight for the better part of the six hours, the final of sherwood (BBC One) landed with a satisfying thud as the shivers came to a neat stop. Of course, there were a few deceitful storytellers along the way. But James Graham’s drama of murder, scabs and old wounds in a Northamptonshire mining town was that rare beast: a TV show that was as emotionally engaged as it was intellectually captivating.
So who was “Keats”, the ominous spy implanted in the community in the 1980s? And why was Bowman Scott (Adam Hugill) murderous after them? In the end it didn’t matter. In the dry-mouthed interrogation scene in the final episode, Scott turned out to be just a lonely young man with no plan but to “be seen” – a misfit with a crossbow, not an AR-15. After his first victim – Gary Jackson (Alun Armstrong), chosen because he was a “great man” who bullied his father – his targets were chosen at random. His stalking of Daphne Sparrow (Lorraine Ashbourne) was coincidental.
That she used to be Keats, revealed at the climax of episode five, was ultimately by-the-by. Only her guilt over betraying her adopted community, her four decades of life there, put her in danger: this time by her own hands via a concealed revolver. Her afternoon climate kitchen table with David Morrissey’s DCS Ian St Clair was played devastatingly. As with the rest of the series, Graham was less interested in the klunk-bang mechanics of the plot—the sparse fumes that show power like Line of Duty—and more in the emotional truth of his story. Here were credible people, in a credible world, broken on the rack of history and their own mistakes. It was a real achievement. And all the more impressive because it is so unique in today’s TV landscape.
That world was Sherwood’s greatest possession. Sure, the indecently good cast didn’t hurt. But Graham was inspired by two real-life murders in 2004 in the village he grew up in, Annesley Woodhouse, dubbed ‘Annesley’ on the show. And the decades-long feud between neighboring sisters and the mischievous Sparrow family in the dilapidated farm beyond, it sounded true. You smelled the stench of spilled beer and stale grudges in the working gentlemen’s club. And some of the design choices were inspired: St Clair’s eye-candy extension, all light, French doors and four built-in ovens – count ’em, James Brokenshire – was as revealing about his character as the blunt conflict of Morrissey’s performance. It became a glass cage as his quest to capture the intruder “spy agent” became obsessive, sneaking through the village not realizing he was now the real outsider.
The sense of deep England was also evoked with an admirably light touch. There were, of course, reverberating echoes of the mythology of Robin Hood, the green-hooded outsider who devastated a locked-in, dying community. But just as much hard work was done by the sweeping shoots of full-leaf trees, swaying in the wind. The scenery was painfully beautiful and just a little too bright – in some ways it was like a folk horror without the horror.