The Time Bandits take on the Sheriff of Nottingham

You know what sucks? Coming home from school to find your folks are gone and your back door has been smashed to bits. This is the sight that greets Kevin Haddock’s sister Saffron as we begin the third episode of Time Bandits. While our hero knows what became of his folks (they were turned to coal, a.k.a. “coaled”), his sib only knows that she put herself to bed last night, took herself to school this morning, and now nobody’s home.

She seems oddly calm about it, too—irritated, for sure, but not afraid. This gives us the impression that the Haddocks have been so checked out as parents, drawn in by their gadgets and gizmos, that Saffron has encountered a similar situation before. It doesn’t strike her as—oh, I don’t know—a goddamned emergency. (My sensitive, tween or teen self would have been flipping the fuck out. My own tweens would be losing it, too, in that situation.) 

Anyway, when Saffron is searching Kevin’s room, the wardrobe jostles a little, and she opens it to find a body of water, and, in the distance, some shirtless people rowing a wooden canoe. She closes the door, then opens it a second time: just some flannels and hoodies in a normal-ass wardrobe. Suddenly, the wall behind her rattles, she turns to face it, and now she’s in it, boys! She’s off on her own quest. The episode, of course, cuts back and forth between her journey and her brother’s to keep things interesting, but let’s just get into her story while we’re here. 

It’s worth noting that Saffron doesn’t enter the time-jumping realm with any bandits to lead her through it, so she’s very much on her own. And remember that translation cap? With no bandits, she gets no cap, and it turns out it’s a lot harder to navigate through time without sharing a common language with anyone. Saffron struggles with this but still ends up a good enough non-verbal communicator to ask Madame Zheng (from the premiere) some crucial Kevin-related questions in an intelligible way. For the most part, TB skips over the inevitable tediousness of these exchanges. She just rows over to the portal, with Zheng guiding her from her own big ship. A portal opens up, and the girl (presumably) paddles in.

Now, we don’t find out whether big sis is truly alone in these realms, unaided and unfollowed, until the very last cliffhanger scene of the episode. Fianna is revealed a few paces behind Kevin’s sister in the midst of some ancient battle. She’s gripping and sniffing Saffron’s unicorn sweatshirt to continue to follow the trail of her scent. The demon smiles, exposing her pointy teeth, and that pretty much sums up the Saffron stuff this episode. All in all, I’m glad she jumped in after her brother. It adds some variety to the viewing experience and makes the world of it feel more established to have two characters exploring it in such different, yet similar, ways.

Meanwhile, the bandits have found themselves in some ordinary-looking woods—that is, until they encounter some massive eggs by a stream (perhaps laid by a “double ostrich,” Bittelig wonders). Soon enough, he’s fighting with their mama: a colorful, pissed-off pteranodon (Judy [Charlene Yi], the empath, feels every hit). By the time Kevin has dragged the epic triceratops skull he found over to the group, they’re fully fleeing the scene. The bandits crash through the roof of a peasant’s hut, completely smashing it, and Kevin follows with his cool skull. Penelope gifts the peasants some gold-ish candleholders in a sad attempt to make up for having destroyed their house.

Into the medieval village they go, Kevin dragging the skull along with him, which gets the group mistaken for dragon-slayer. (Before seeing the skull, the townspeople freaked out thinking they were witches.) It’s a title Kevin attempts to refute, telling the villagers that the skull had belonged to a triceratops, not a dragon. Penelope, though, is quick to take credit for the assumed slaying, adding that Kevin had only “carried the head,” a claim that haunts him as it’s repeated all episode with varying levels of contempt/praise.

Kal-El Tuck in Time Bandits (Photo: Apple TV+)

As it happens, the villagers don’t need a dragon slain, though. They’re actually worried about the cruel, torturous Sheriff of Nottingham, who has exacerbated the “bit of a famine” they’ve been experiencing by taking what little they do have. The villagers want the bandits to stand up to him. (If you were wondering, Robin Hood is nowhere in sight.) These are desperate times for these people. The best they’ve got to offer the bandits in the way of crafts is just one booth with twigs for sale, and their primo sources of entertainment include Merek the Snail Juggler, who has since eaten all of his snails, and “a pig in a wig—a wiggy piggy!” This stuff with the villagers is some of the funniest in the series so far. Of course the setting here harkens back to Monty Python And The Holy Grail, and the banter is delightful throughout. (That “wiggy piggy” line was perfect, especially with the accompanying visual gag of a pig walking by in the crappiest looking straw wig ever.) 

Back to the sheriff: There’s definitely drama there. He captures the bandits, then calls them up from the dungeon, mainly to brag that his one flaw is that he “doesn’t know when to stop torturing” and to illuminate a few of his methods. One example, shown via wood etching, is to bind and tickle victims with an “extra tickly” feather. Honestly, that sounds completely horrible. Kevin calls the guy out on his obviously fake dragon head; the sheriff tries to dis the triceratops skull and insists that he still plans to torture the bandits. Bittelig bends the dungeon bars and they escape, but now the sheriff just plans to burn the whole village down.

Judy suggests they use fear as a weapon. It has, after all, been the sheriff’s main tool of maintaining power over the villagers and the true circumstance holding them back. When he and his soldiers arrive, everyone in the village dons a gauzy costume and pretends to be a witch. To demonstrate his sorcery skills, Kevin shows the sheriff his phone with a video he has made of the bandits saying they’re trapped. The Sheriff yoinks it from poor Kevin, and his men tie the bandits and some others to be burned at the stake. Penelope, Widgit, and Biddelig, all untied, head back through the portal to see if the Huns might help them out. While they’re gone, Kevin tries to tell the men who have tied them to the stake to think for themselves, to question the sheriff’s power. And it works.

Peace seems to settle over the land. The sheriff is busy playing mobile games and Kevin is patiently explaining to the villagers, with wood-etched visuals, that dragons aren’t real when the other bandits finally return, weeks later, bringing dino eggs to help with the famine.Though the trip gave the trio more map experience, Kevin is pissed, lamenting, “We thought you weren’t coming back. They’re making me get married tomorrow.” Suddenly, as the sheriff’s newly chill right-hand man is waxing poetic about spiritual matters, one of the big eggs hatch, a baby dino pops out, and its vengeful mom descends upon them all, wreaking absolute havoc. The bandits had left the portal open. Oops! The team portals away to the next destination, and the dino, deemed a real live dragon, perches atop a town building to begin its reign of terror…until a cold snap or virus or something inevitably kills it. 

And with this mashup of the dinosaur era and the Middle Ages, the show feels a bit more creative, like it’s  freshening up its format in a mad-scientist sort of way. Is it just a tad predictable that the dino leaps into the medieval period with the gang? Sure. But it definitely ties together a narrative loose end or two for the precocious sort of kid who would notice the dragon sculpture in Kevin’s room and shout, “That’s not history! Those aren’t real!“ All the while, the show continues to come into its own as a comedic force, with consistently silly and surprising jokes for all ages to enjoy. It makes me excited to see what kinds of experiments the team cooks up next. 

Stray observations

• • Oof. The cut from Saffron witnessing the great powers of Kevin to his forlorn face as he sits on a log holding his coaled parents in his bag is one cold juxtaposition. Kal-El Tuck is very good at looking sad. If there’s an award for that, he should get it. 
• • It’s interesting to consider the ways in which the intersections of Saffron’s identities influence the ways she’s treated by people across time relative to her brother. Of course, he also has the benefit of the Time Bandits’ presence helping him out, which provides him with at least a safety-in-numbers situation. There are some pretty scary, misogynistic time periods this girl could wander into.
• • Another identity-related question: Does the white-Britishness of the two Haddock kids protect them to a degree as they travel to different cultural regions throughout time? It would be interesting if TB ended up directly tackling that, but that seems perhaps a little too ambitious for this kind of program.
• • Also, how is Kevin’s room so immaculate, bed made and everything, when Saffron walks in there looking for him? I’ve known plenty of messy nerds in my day, so that trait alone doesn’t explain the tidiness. Basically, I just want to know why my own kids can’t be persuaded to leave their rooms this clean. (For that matter, why can’t I?)
• • Penelope thinks some guy on a tapestry looks just like her ex-fiancé Gavin and she wonders if Gavin had been there and modeled for the weaver. Let’s see if that comes back somehow. 
• • Kevin’s suggestion for villagers not to kill kitties, to keep the rat population under control and stave off the plague, goes unheeded. They’re super afraid of cats, because the Pope has claimed they are instruments of Satan. Later, the show perpetuates anti-cat bias, though, when Pure Evil’s feline friend “Mr. Boots” tries to kill the bandits by pushing a gargoyle off a ledge at them. This depiction of kitties is slander. My cat Rocky, for one, is suing for defamation.