Timelord Thoughts 9 - Sleep No More

Our first real standalone episode of the series. The first time Doctor Who has used the "found footage" style (a common trope of recent horror movies). But how scary was the story? After watching it did I want to:

Sleep No More

• "You must not watch this". It's a common thing from childhood - parents or teachers telling you not to do something which makes you want to do it even more. In visual terms of course the idea of a recording which contains something horrifying or cursed is probably most well known from  the 1998 Japanese film "Ring" (remade innumerable times since), although the original (and best) "Poltergeist" movie did have an apparently possessed TV set. Once you get into the realms of haunted technology though, the floodgates really open - Stephen King loves the idea, using it in  "Christine" and "The Mangler". "Buffy The Vampire Slayer" did an episode featuring a demon possessing a computer and "The X-Files" practically did a seasons worth of stories across it's nine years. Even Doctor Who has got in on the act with The Wire in "The Idiot's Lantern". I wonder where it will go this time?
• Rasmussen is a popular surname in Denmark and Norway. Lot's of politicians, sportsmen and local film stars as you can imagine. The most famous I could find is fantasy author Alice A. Rasmussen who is better known as Kate Elliot (She wrote the "Crown of Stars" series).
• Gagan is a Sanskrit name which means 'Heaven' or 'Sky'. As a surname it derives from 10th century Gaelic.
• The Le Verrier Lab can only be named after French mathematician Urbain Le Verrier who studied the variances in the orbit of Uranus and correctly predicted the existence of Neptune.

• I love the idea of not having a normal title sequence this week. It would have just taken us out of things too much. The screen full of letters is a nice conceit too. As well as Doctor Who, I also spotted Gagan Rasmussen, Deep-Ando, Clara Oswald, Le Verrier, Chopra, Nagata and of course 474.
• Triton is the largest moon of Neptune - it's actually larger than Pluto (which I still consider is a planet despite what Neil deGrasse Tyson says) , It was discovered by astronomer William Lassell in 1846 and is one of the few moons to be geologically active with a frozen nitrogen surface. Doesn't sound that great a place to have come from ! 
• As is often the case with Doctor Who these days, mission crews are multi-cultural and it appears some northern accents have survived the centuries. Then again, all moons have a north...
• Morpheus - ancient Greek god of dreams. Able to mimic any human form. There will be many more references to him later.
• "Spoken like a true Rip". Presumably someone who likes to sleep .for more than five minutes. It can only be  referring to the story of "Rip Van Winkle by Washington Irving - the man who went to sleep for five minutes and woke up many years later.
• The Le Verrier station looks very Satellite Five.
• The whole look of the mission through the station, with the "marines" searching through dark corridors only lit by a red glow and the lights from their head-cams is of course very reminiscent of "Aliens". But for me it also brings to mind the 2008 survival horror video game "Dead Space". I wonder if someone is a fan?
• Despite being human clones, the "grunts" are apparently treated as little more than intelligent animals.

• Just where are those other B&W POV shots coming from? There is no one else on board with a camera. Is the station watching them?
• I like that the soldiers just come across the Doctor and Clara. They are doing their own thing, wandering around oblivious to what else is going on.We don't need to see them turn up in the TARDIS (and anyway that wouldn't have worked with the "found footage" style). 
• All the stuff about "space" things is just the usual Doctor / Clara flim-flam designed to delay the inevitable time when they notice the lights behind them. Interesting that the Doctor is wearing his more regular jacket and shirt combo instead of his space hoodie. I wonder why? is his clothing significant in the timeline ala the Eleventh Doctor of series 5 ?
• Space Pirates. Please tell me Milo Clancey is not in charge.
• Why? Why does the Doctor break into a line from the musical Oliver? I'll let the terrible joke go this time but if this becomes a regular thing again this episode I will be very very annoyed.
• The idea of a merger between Indian, Japanese and Western cultures reminds me of the Chinese language used in the criminally under appreciated "Firefly". Gorram that show was good.
• The "Great Catastrophe". Is it the collision with the sun from 'Frontios'? The aftermath of the Big Finish Dalek War? The cancellation of the Classic series in 1989? Or something else?
• Yeah nothing says "We haven't progressed at all by the 38th century" than growing your own low intelligence cannon fodder. What happened? The robots all gained sentience and went off to their own planet so you decided the next best thing was disposal humans?
• Very Third Doctor for him to hold hands with his companion. Less so when he's the one needing reassurance !
• Deep-Ando is not very good at following orders. Well who would be when a roaring something is coming at you out of the dark?
• "Not pirates". Understatement of the year. More like hulking yellow monsters that crumble to dust. We've seen that effect before too. "Prometheus" is the most recent example I can think of  - we'll come to Spider-Man later.
• "May the gods look favourably upon you". Mr Gatiss has been on a binge watch of "The Hunger Games".
• While everyone else around him is panicking, The Doctor does what he does best - figuring out what the creatures are made of. 
• Meanwhile Clara is being a smug arse by congratulating herself on knowing basic facts about Morpheus. Some one is going to wipe that smirk off her face very soon - permanently.
• Huh? One second Clara is looking at the Morpheus pod, we look away, and the next thing she is screaming and it's dragged her inside. Isn't that a basic design flaw if your machine drags in anyone who goes near it and it thinks needs a bit of shut-eye?

• You just know that some designer thought that it would be a 'jolly jape' to play a hologram of singers performing "Mr. Sandman" every time the pods activated. It was probably even funny the first thousand times or so. Now somewhere there are homicidal maniacs that will hack you limb from limb when they hear those opening few notes. I know I would. In another strange coincidence with my "800 Day Project" re-watch, I recently saw "Delta and the Bannermen", which features the song quite a lot. There seem to be a lot of McCoy call-backs this series.
• The inside of the pods are of a similar-ish design to those in "Avatar" with the connecting wires and circuitry. 
• Reece Shearsmith is always good value playing obsequious oily little men with just a hint of nutter behind the eyes, even if they do all blend into one after a while. As great as "League of Gentlemen" is, I think that "Inside No. 9" is one of my favourite shows of recent years.
• The idea of a machine that condenses the required amount of sleep down into just a few minutes is not a new one. The Judge Dredd comic strip has used the concept for decades (which may be where Gatiss got the idea from). Who hasn't wished that they could make more of their day or just stay awake a few more hours to finish that blog post.... The problem is (as this shows) corporations would use it to their own advantage. We already work more hours than is good for us and are expected to be available on e-mail at all times of day. I can easily see a time when, with the use of a Morpheus machine, companies might decide that they *really* want you 24/7.
• Ha! Just like an ad to end on a cheesy catchphrase and then sneak back with a "terms and conditions apply".
• Does the Doctor sleep? Well it depends which incarnation you ask. The Fourth Doctor said that "Sleep is for tortoises" and could do with less than an hour. The Fifth and Sixth Doctor's definitely believed in it's restorative powers. The Tenth Doctor even had his own PJ's (maybe). Eleven apparently didn't even have a bedroom on the TARDIS and preferred to go off on solo adventures with River Song. He definitely dreams though - about himself. Personally I think he does need sleep occasionally, just not as often as us poor pudding heads.
• "Colonising our sleep". What does that even mean? I could understand "depriving us of our natural right to sleep" or even "exploiting employees downtime", but "colonising"? That sounds like they are filling your sleep with little people like a piece of land.
• "Time is money". The phrase that every employee dreads.
• "Sleep, that knits up the ravelled sleeve of care. The death of each day's life.sore labour's bath. Balm of hurt minds, chief nourisher in life's great feast." Of course it's a quote from Shaky's "Macbeth", where the episode title also comes from. Lady Macbeth later goes on to say " Dead and sleeping people can't hurt you any more than pictures can. Only children are afraid of scary pictures."...
• Sleep dust (or Rheum) genuinely is made from mucus and blood and skin cells. When we are awake blinking washes it away. But a carnivorous life form created from sleep dust caused by a machine that changes brain chemistry into thinking that we have had enough rest? It fits in with the Moffat liking for taking something familiar and turning it into something scary - but it's a bit far fetched even for Doctor Who. Plus I know the Doctor is willing to believe six impossible things before breakfast, but he comes up with this theory remarkably quickly based on very little evidence.
• No hang on, if the people lying in the Morpheus pods are a "ready made food source" then that suggests that the creatures exist independently of the humans whose sleep dust allows them to come into being. Or the first time you go into a Mark II pod you create a dust monster and then each time you return it consumes you, gradually growing and moulding itself into a humanoid like form. Or it slithers off somewhere when you sleep, collects itself and comes back to eat you. It's all a bit undefined.

• Is this the darkest lit episode of Doctor Who? The red emergency lighting, the black and white "CCTV camera" shots. Was that something moving in the corner? No it's just a box. What's that noise? Oh it's just my own breathing. It's really very atmospheric and nicely done.
• The station computer sounds like it's from another video game - the malicious and narcissistic GlaDOS from the wonderful "Portal". "Do The Song" could be a catchphrase to rank alongside "There will be cake". In the game GlaDOS got to sing a song herself at the end.
• Maha Shivarati is a Hindi festival in reverence to the god Shiva. Oshogasu is probably meant to be Oshogatsu, the Shinto celebration of New Year. Christmas is that thing where we bow to excess and the great red cloaked god of Coca-Cola.
• Typical drunken lab assistants. Making it so you have to sing that mind-numbing song every time you need to open a door. I told you it's a psychotic trigger in waiting. I once reprogrammed a colleagues computer to simulate a systems crash. It didn't go down well. A shame I couldn't make it so he had to sing "Achy Breaky Heart"....
• I do like that up until now we have only had fleeting glimpses of the monsters. It makes them that much scarier. It's only by pausing the video at the right moment that you get a good look at them. I showed the image to my wife (not a Who fan) and told her what they were. She just said "That's disgusting!". Job done.

• It's an interesting twist on the usual use of HUD's (Head's-Up Display) to have it projected onto the glass of the window looking out over Neptune. It also serves to distract Deep-Ando from the thing creeping up behind him. I'm not sure how it got through those doors without making a noise.
• Close up with the gaping maw reminds me of something else. At first I thought it was the Mutant from the Pertwee serial of the same name or maybe Jeff Goldblum's "the Fly" - but they are too insectile. No, the only thing I can think of * is Clayface from the Batman comics. There have been several iterations of the character over the decades, but it's the original Basil Karlo version that must be stuck in my memory.

• So why have the grav-shields suddenly started to fail? The creatures don't seem to have the intelligence to manipulate the stations systems (unlike the ghosts from "Under The Lake which parts of this are starting to resemble). It's almost like there needed to be another peril at this point in the story so here we are. Yes, Rasmussen did say at the beginning that certain sections of the video are missing, but in terms of communicating the story to a Saturday night audience it seems to be a bit too disjointed.
• You couldn't see it very clearly in the background but the creature appeared to suck Rasmussen into it's body with just his legs waving about until they too were gone. Were we meant to notice that? Certainly no-one comments on it. Convenient that the extra gravity caused it to turn to dust before it could get anyone else. 
• Yet again the Doctor doesn't want to put Clara near any chance of her getting killed. He makes  another extensive quote from Macbeth, which references the episode title, but I wonder if it has a wider meaning than just for this episode?
• He's in a very poetic and reflective mood this week isn't he? - delivering what's almost a soliloquy straight down the camera lens. That's when he's not chastising the human race for "bartering away an inconvenience". 
• Hang on, as great as that speech might sound, is the Doctor now saying that the act of sleep and wiping away dust in the mornings stops the "monsters inside" us from escaping? That suggests that we create semi- sentient sleep dust that is just waiting to consume us if we don't remove it. That's three versions of their origin we've had now - none of which make sense.
• For a grunt that has limited intelligence, 474 manages to sum up the situation pretty well.
• Ah the Doctor did notice what happened to Rasmussen. And the fact that there are no helmet cams? And that not everything we've seen makes sense?
• He acts like a humourous petulant child over Clara getting to name the "Sandmen" first. That's his job. Then again she is becoming more Doctor-like every episode...
• I'm sure if the Doctor had been the one who named the Silurians he would have come up with a more accurate name. "Eocences" maybe?
• If there are no helmet cams then where is all this footage coming from? How can this be a "found footage" type story if there is nothing to find? I'm starting to suspect all is not right here.

• A bunch of marauding Sandmen or a fire? I know what I'd choose. 474 does as well.
• Creatures made from stuff out of the corner of our eyes that can't see. Interesting. It does make for a tense scene in the meat locker though. I'm not going to bother to list all the films that this episode is "homaging" - we'll be here all night.
• Goodbye 474. You will be missed, for all the limited time you got on screen. I feel that there was a deeper story waiting to be told about the grunts and there place in 38th century society, but we never got it, It's also a bit of a waste of Doctor Who's first transgender actor hidden behind all that military gear and face paint.
• The Sandmen are blind because their "eyes" are motes of dust floating around seeing everything than goes on in the station and transmitting it back to some mastermind in his lair? In a show full of unusual things that's just ...daft.
• And everyone that went into the Morpheus pod, including Clara, now has a "camera" too. Sentient space dust that lives in the corner of your eye and acts like a webcam. This gets more bizarre by the minute.
• The Doctor sounds far too much like he is trying to convince himself with that speech to Clara. He's also letting (having to defer to) Clara to work things out.
• Who or what is in that pod? I have an idea. Let's see if I'm right.
• The first person view from Chopra has gone full on video game now. He's expendable now so he dies off screen.
• Damn, I thought it was Rasmussen in that pod. Transmitting a hologram of himself or something. Turns out that he's just a regular megalomaniac convinced that the new life form he has created is the ultimate species. How disappointing.

• Patient Zero is just King Sandman. The first person transformed by the Morpheus process into the source of all the others. That's four different origins now. I don't believe that anything Rasmussen has said is true. It's all lies. Bloody confusing for the audience too.
• We've not had a Second Doctor reference for a while. "When I say run, run" is one of the best.
• I'm glad that the Doctor removing the "song chip" from the pod all that time ago actually had a use. Clever.
• Sorry I agree with Nagata. I probably would have shot him too.
• Slowly the pieces are starting to come together for the Doctor. Nothing makes sense for the audience because - ta-dah - nothing makes sense. It's a series of deceptions designed to hide what's really going on. They say the best lies are the ones with just enough truth to make them seem convincing - as long as you don't examine them too closely. I have to take my hat off to Gatiss, it's a clever idea. I'm just not sure the execution delivers.
• The camera lingers on Rasmussen just a little too long. The clues are all these if you know what to look for.
• Destroying the grav-shields (which they had to introduce earlier in order to make this part of the plot work) may be the only way they can escape the Sandmen, but it's also making it almost impossible to work out what's going on. I'm all for a handheld "shaky-cam" in the right places, but this making me a little bit queasy.
• "None of this makes any sense". You got that right. Just this once, the Doctor loses (or so it appears).
• And now we have the big reveal. Rasmussen is the ultimate unreliable narrator. No spores, No Patient Zero. Just a bunch of half-truths and manipulated footage to make us keep watching to find out how it all gets resolved. And that's the trick. There is no resolution and it's too late. We've been infected by the signal all the way through. You could say that it's a commentary on how we believe what's shown to us - how the media can manipulate our emotions and make us think the way they want us to think. Or it's just a scary story.
• Those final moments when Rasmussen is revealed to be nothing more than the final evolution of the Sandmen are just brilliant, even if it does twist the story into yet another shape - this time making the whole thing more TV episode than "found footage" (which it never really was in the first place). The effect did remind me of the *other* Sandman from "Spider-Man 3" but when your villain is composed of particles of grit there are only a couple of ways you can go with it.

 

Conclusion:

While there was a lot of individual parts to like - the concept of a five minute sleep machine (man messing with nature), the lighting, the lack of overpowering music, the scares, Reece Shearsmith - overall it was less than the sum of its parts. It tried to tell a clever story utilising a constantly moving sense of what was real and what was fake through the use of "camera" footage and an unreliable narrator but ended up just being confusing, probably too much so for a general audience. Yes you could work it all out from the dialogue but it ended up being very muddled and never really found its footing. I have to give Gatiss kudos though for trying something different (I'm not a hater of all of his episodes like some).

The *idea* of the Sandmen being created because we didn't sleep properly was okay but to then say that they were actually formed from the dust in the corners of our eyes *and* that these particles are mini cameras might have been a step too far. The Sandmen would have been best left as half seen things in the gloom as close up they looked too much like papier mache.

Perhaps it would have been better as a two-parter. There were certainly lots of things going on in the background that could have been explored - the grunts and their place in Triton society, The "Rips" versus the "Wide Awakes", the effects of a civilization that never slept and what it could / could not accomplish with all that extra time. All in all I think it's more of a misfire than out and out terrible ("Girl Who Died" I'm looking at you), so it's a story of wasted opportunities.

A few final thoughts: Is it possible that this was the scariest episode yet this series? Will parents use the Sandmen to frighten their kids into going to bed on time?  Has Clara really got a sentient Morpheus monster in her eye  - and what could this mean for her future?




 

 

* So I was talking with a friend as I wrote this all up, and he mentioned the thing that I couldn't remember - the image that was bugging me so much but I couldn't pull it from the recesses of my increasingly decrepit brain. It was this cover from 2000 AD Prog 223 featuring an alien from the "Nemesis The Warlock" story illustrated by Kevin O'Neill:

 

Anyway, it wouldn't be right to include it in the main body of the post as I didn't think of it by myself at the time of writing - but here it is to illustrate the weird connections my brain makes and how much 2000 AD has influenced my life.

Excuse me, I've got something in my eye...