12.22: Sleep No More
In which a Doctor Who character literally asks us if we enjoyed the Doctor Who story he just showed us.
Broadcast: November 2015
Watched: March 2022
“None of this makes any sense!”
I *think* this is the first episode since the 20th century that I’d not already seen at least twice? Loads of those coming up, though.
It aims quite high, in its way. Like the lake story, it’s a very diverse cast – all the humans are Asian, plus it’s the first trans woman in Who (although, playing a genderless character seen as gross, hmmm). I sort of love the joke about the humans being Indo-Japanese, after a great catastrophe somehow merged the two countries.
Also, it’s playing games with the format, with the found footage thing (no opening credits!) and even aims at a theme (“Would doing away with sleep be bad??”).
But... the monsters are totally rubbish. The guest stars are quite boring, I wasn’t rooting for them as I was for the Lake cast. And the found footage thing makes it actually quite hard to follow – the frequent changes of POV, stuff happening off screen. It keeps moving without ever actually being that compelling. And the “May the gods look favourably upon you” thing is really annoying.
It’s quite fun that the twist is that the whole thing is being deliberately mocked up (“We don’t have helmet cams”). It’s quite lame that it literally ends with a Gatiss character talking into camera about how exciting the Gatiss episode we just watched was.
I prefer Gatiss when he does jokes.
Other thoughts:
Not for the first time in late period Moffat, the space design goes quite Red Dwarf-y – the disembodied head, the dirty space station, even being set in orbit around Triton.
LOVE the chat about how people don’t just put the word “space” in front of things. Also, the Doctor being annoyed at Clara naming stuff feels like a call back to Flatline, plus a good joke (“It's like the Silurians all over again”).
The bit where we hear Rasmussen recording his commentary is quite clever, as it means he no longer has plot armour, we think he can die.
In classic Gatiss pastiche style, someone being spared to get the infection off the ship is nicked from Waters of Mars. That probably nicked it from someone else.
The 474/Chopra romance plot is almost cute in the end.
Is Jeremy Dyson going to be in Doctor Who some time, then?
It occurred to me the other day when I was talking to someone about this that one of the reasons this works so well for me is the structure. Because it sounds and feels exactly like an episode of Doctor Who would be like if it had been written by ChatGPT (and this was, of course, years before the LLMs became a big thing.)
So it has to be superficially convincing as a 'real' episode, but to become less and less so as it goes along as whatever ('morpheus') that is constructing it loses track of the details. Hence I actually like the fact that the guest stars and the monsters are basically so rubbish - because that's what a machine without imagination but excellent auto-complete would generate.
And I love that idea - that on the meta-meta level we as viewers are being convinced to watch the episode as though it were a 'real' episode in series 9 when it's actually supposed to be a transmission vector. (Consider also that it's the one single part story in a season that is otherwise all multi-parts.)
I have a suspicion Gatiss was influenced by ETA Hoffmann’s romantic/gothic novella The Sandman (1817) in certain ways here - not only the antagonists, but it’s a deliberately fragmentary epistolary novel in which we never quite know the truth of what’s going on. And it has a lot to do with eyes, and perception, and horror associated with both. And it has a rationalist heroine called Clara!
Sure, he could’ve read the Gaiman comics, but I know which sounds more up Gatiss’ street.