To be clear: I don’t think viewers need to know everything, and keeping the audience in the dark, or holding back pieces of information, can be a very effective tool. We never really got to know the crew of supporting characters enough for me to pick them out when the ante was upped, and as they dashed around in the frame of shaky cam, on a darkly-lit set, there were a few moments where I couldn’t tell you what was happening. I can’t honestly say that I was always on top of what was actually going on. But the sleep feels like a device, rather than anything sinister in itself.Īnother thing. Steven Moffat, for instance, is expert at taking seemingly simple things – blinking, the things you spot in the corner of your eyes, even breathing – and turning them into effective Doctor Who threats. Yet the way the idea of sleep in your eyes is used feels like the ball kicked wide of the goal. Presumably, there are other things it can do, if it can make itself into a monster, or a camera, but I get that you need to choose something and focus on it. The dust also spies on people, giving us the point of view shots used throughout Sleep No More. I may be having a dim day there – I do have lots of them – but after two viewings, I wasn’t much the wiser. And I eventually concluded that whilst that may not matter, if I’m actively thinking about it in the middle of the story, then the story can’t be fully working for me. Yet I just couldn’t really understand how they worked. Furthermore, credit to director Justin Molotnikov, who makes the most of the dark corridors, the abandoned sheep, and the shaky camera approach, to make them quite sinister at first. The idea behind them, of taking something as simple as sleep in your eye and turning that into a monster of sorts, was potentially creepy. Let’s talk about the monsters, for instance, that came about as a consequence of Morpheus. Yet other parts of Sleep No More didn’t do much for me. I wasn’t a mad fan of Gridlock, but its core thinking stuck with me. It made me think of Russell T Davies’ Gridlock, which used science fiction thinking to logically expand on where things around us today would head, left unchecked. I do like the fact that there’s a good science fiction idea here, even if I struggled with the episode itself. Not for the first time in Gatiss’ Doctor Who writing, his finger is very much on a modern day pulse. Again: we’re in an era where more and more of us work longer hours, drink more coffee, and sleep less. A pod where human beings can trade in their need for sleep, in order to become efficient. Then there’s the Morpheus technology at the heart of the story. Right now, wars are being fought with drones, and Gatiss explores a logical extension of that. Take the cloned “grunt”, genetically engineered to be the brute force in battle. Gatiss fuses in Japanese culture into his 38th century story, and presents us with a disparate bunch of people, caught in the middle of a monster-on-a-spaceship story. There, he meets a rescue mission, and we explore just what’s happened from that point on. The Doctor and Clara thus arrive on the space station Le Verrier, 24 hours after it happened to fall silent. It requires a minute or two of explanation, and then we’re down to business. We’re only allowed to view what’s happening either from the POVs of characters who are alive, or via flashbacks to Rassmussen’s (that’s Reece Shearsmith) video diary. Gatiss then structured, with some discipline, Doctor Who‘s first found-footage episode, wrapping the camera points of view into the plot of the episode. If you were looking for clues that this would be the latest Doctor Who episode to take a left turn, there they were. Guest star Reece Shearsmith kicks things off, talking to the camera, with the credits being replaced by swift computer text. It’s immediately different, after all, as Gatiss gets the tone of what was to follow over quickly and effectively. Taking it away from the superb Zygon two-parter that it followed, Sleep No More started intriguingly. “Even I sleep” “When?” “Well, when you’re not looking” Unfortunately, I found it a bit of a muddle. But as a consequence, writer Mark Gatiss gives himself a lot of work to do, to set up, explore and pay the episode off.
#Watch doctor who sleep no more series
It’s a coincidence that it’s first standalone story in a series run that’s been compromised of two-parters thus far.
But Sleep No More never really took off for me. I think this series and last of Doctor Who have been the best in years, and I was hardly writing letters of complaint to the BBC about the Matt Smith era before that.
It’s easy, after all, to jump on a hate bandwagon.
0 kommentar(er)
