{"id":1863,"date":"2015-11-16T14:17:36","date_gmt":"2015-11-16T14:17:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/?p=1863"},"modified":"2015-12-02T15:38:59","modified_gmt":"2015-12-02T15:38:59","slug":"so-what-did-i-think-of-sleep-no-morezzzz","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/2015\/11\/16\/so-what-did-i-think-of-sleep-no-morezzzz\/","title":{"rendered":"So… what did I think of Sleep no Morezzzz…."},"content":{"rendered":"

\"sleep\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\"2.5
\n<\/p>\n

I rather like formal games. Movies like Rope<\/em> (all shot in one take \u2013 supposedly) or Interview<\/em> (with essentially a speaking cast of two) excite me immediately. The best of them make a virtue of the formal constraint, telling a story which wouldn\u2019t make sense without it. Some of them make the constraint into more of a gimmick, which might still be admirably clever but is less likely to quite so thrilling. Sometimes, it\u2019s just an annoying distraction.<\/p>\n

Doctor Who stories with this kind of constraint are rare and usually the product of a last-minute scramble to get a script ready. The Edge of Destruction<\/em>, a faintly demented psychodrama set entirely inside the TARDIS and featuring only the regular cast was an act of desperation on the part of the first script editor David Whitaker when not only the TARDIS set but also the Dalek seven-parter had proved far more expensive than anticipated and two more cheapie episodes had to be magicked out of nowhere to keep the show on the road. Similarly, when Derrick Sherwin cut The Dominators<\/em> from six episodes to five, The Mind Robber <\/em>had to gain an episode which would only the regular cast and some standing sets (plus some left-over robot costumes from another series).<\/p>\n

In the modern era, despite both show-runner\u2019s zeal for headlines, most of the attention-grabbing aspects of the stories have come from their content rather than their form. Sometimes just their titles: The Next Doctor<\/em>, The Doctor\u2019s Daughter<\/em>, The Doctor\u2019s Wife<\/em> etc. Midnight<\/em> has something of this quality, but the prologue and coda and the overall large size of the cast mean that it doesn\u2019t have quite the same feel. 42<\/em> has a very clear constraint \u2013 played out in real-time in exactly 42 minutes, but otherwise feels like quite an ordinary slab of mid-Russell Who.<\/p>\n

So because of its found-footage gimmick Sleep No More<\/em> already feels like something a bit out of the ordinary, and it\u2019s not clear (even less so than with The Girl Who Died<\/em>) whether it is part one of a two parter, contributing to the overall season arc, a true stand-alone story, or some other kind of narrative hybrid. The question will be \u2013 does the gimmick satisfyingly integrate itself into the story, is it an unwanted distraction, or is a nice addition but scarcely essential?<\/p>\n

From the opening minutes, it\u2019s clear that writer Mark Gatiss and the rest of the production team are doubling-down on the found-footage gimmick. There is no opening title sequence (a first in the show\u2019s 52 year history), just a sort of space word-search (sorry, Doctor), and a dire warning from Reece Shearsmith, finally completing the League of Gentlemen guest star box set. We are introduced to yet another set of hard-to-differentiate cannon fodder, and then we meet the Doctor and Clara.<\/p>\n

What follows is rather disappointing. Firstly, the found footage camera style largely just makes the action hard to follow. Secondly, surely someone at some point must have noticed how similar this is to Under the Lake<\/em>? I don\u2019t just mean they are both base-under-siege stories. They are both base-under-siege stories in which a largely deserted base is set upon by faceless and not entirely corporeal monsters with whom they struggle to communicate and from whom they must hide in special rooms. And this isn\u2019t just linguistic trickery, pulling out the bits which sound the same and ignoring the rest. The two shows feel very much the same, even down to the use of closed-circuit camera footage, except that Sleep No More<\/em> doesn\u2019t have the time travel element to keep the narrative going.<\/p>\n

When it doesn\u2019t feel almost the same as Under the Lake<\/em>, it has another problem. In the excellent book The Making of Star Trek<\/em>, Gene Roddenberry recalls a studio exec coming to see the filming of a scene from The Devil in the Dark<\/em>. One of the more highly-regarded episodes of the series, turning a science fiction clich\u00e9 on its head, the monster which is attacking innocent people turns out to be a mother protecting its young. However, on the day that the studio exec is present, Spock is being treated for his injuries and has the rather graceless line: \u201cCaptain, the monster attacked me!\u201d So what the exec sees is a pointy-eared alien bleeding green blood attacked by a monster \u2013 pure sci-fi pulp nonsense!<\/p>\n

Imagine turning on Sleep No More<\/em> about half way through and seeing Peter Capaldi running away from those lumbering foam-rubber sleep monsters babbling about sentient mucus, or rolling around on the floor while they shake the cameras because of a \u201cgravity shield failure\u201d. It just looks and sounds like complete drivel. It doesn\u2019t help that as the basically indistinguishable crew get gobbled up, and the explanations are slowly forthcoming, less and less makes any real sense, to the point where the Doctor himself is forced to conclude that the episode is basically nonsense.<\/p>\n

And then, there\u2019s that coda where Rasmussen admits that, rather too much like the Angels in The Time of Angels \/ Flesh and Stone<\/em>, the speck of magic sand dust sleep mucus is embedded in the video rather than a physical item, and that the whole thing was just intended to make us watch so as to infect us. So \u2013 wait, does that mean that what we were watching didn\u2019t really happen? If so, why not create a story which did make sense? Or at least not include a character who complains that it didn\u2019t make sense. If it did really happen then how did Rasmussen avoid death? And it\u2019s very out-of-character for the Doctor to leave with so many unanswered questions (or maybe he will continue his investigations next week). And if he has left (assuming he was there at all) and permitted this lethal message to be transmitted back to Earth, does that mean that in the 38th<\/sup> Century, humans on Earth were wiped out by the Sandmen? Bluntly, this is a total mess and none of it makes any real sense at all.<\/p>\n

All of which would be much more forgivable \u2013 the slightly pointless experimentation with form, the pick-and-mix supporting cast, the aching familiarity, the gibberish ending \u2013 if the whole thing had been even a little bit less dull. But this was probably the most boring episode of Doctor Who I\u2019ve sat through in quite a long time. Bland characters in stock situations, a real dearth of good jokes and no spark of imagination.<\/p>\n

Well, Shearsmith I suppose was good value and the notion of the Morpheus chamber, if not hugely original, is at least a compelling science-fiction hook. The \u201cno helmet cams\u201d reveal is quite nice \u2013 although what was that heads-up display stuff in the first five minutes in that case? \u2013 and Capaldi and Coleman continue to do good work with the very little which is available to them.<\/p>\n

So, a major misstep in what has been quite a strong season so far. It\u2019s hard to say whether I would have liked this more if it had been transmitted before Under the Lake<\/em> rather than after, so I\u2019m disinclined to mark it down too harshly for being repetitive, but for being nonsensical and especially for being boring, I have to deduct quite a lot of points. It\u2019s better than the total nonsense of Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS<\/em>, the wholly unsatisfactory In the Forest of the Night <\/em>or the complete gibberish of The Wedding of River Song<\/em>, but not nearly as interesting as good-but-not-great episodes like The God Complex<\/em> or The Lodger<\/em>. Let\u2019s say two-and-a-half stars, whether or not any of these questions get answered in later episodes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I rather like formal games. Movies like Rope (all shot in one take \u2013 supposedly) or Interview (with essentially a speaking cast of two) excite me immediately. The best of them make a virtue of the formal constraint, telling a story which wouldn\u2019t make sense without it. Some of them make the constraint into more […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[11,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1863","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5JY5l-u3","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1863","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1863"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1863\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1866,"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1863\/revisions\/1866"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1863"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1863"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1863"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}