S09.E09: Sleep No More

[Tara Ariano]

Footage from the wreckage of Le Verrier Space Station yields a terrifying story.

[HauntedBathroom]

I don't think Mark Gatiss was the right person to handle a story that wanted to be so deceptive with its narrative. He's better at straightforward plotlines.

[ApathyMonger]

I didn't love the episode, but I did like the creepy non-ending. It suffered a bit for the soldiers/crew/whatever not being very memorable and feeling a bit too similar to those in "Under the Lake"/"Before the Flood," but not as well fleshed out.

[MarquisDeCarabas]

Here's what I don't get, we know the plan doesn't work because humanity lasts well past the 38th century so did the Doctor remove the code from the signal?  it tries a bit too hard to be Blink i feel to successfully pull off that ending.  Though I will say with my allergies acting up my eyes have been itching and this really didn't help.

[penguinnj]

This more than anything else this season- and possibly in all of NuWho- is a matter of taste.  

I happen to detest open-to interpretation type stories so this was really not my cup of tea.  But I also found the soldiers to be overly generic and the acting only so-so.  JMO but I was bored.  I have enjoyed Gatiss' writing but this missed the mark for me.

[whoknowswho]

Well...that was stupid. 

:(

I'm tired of things in and just out of the corner of my eye- The Silence, the Weeping Angels, etc. Just not happy with this series anymore. Please, Clara- be gone.

[elle]

I happen to detest open-to interpretation type stories so this was really not my cup of tea.  

Yes, I detest that too!

 

I am glad I stopped by here first before watching the show.  Unfortunately for me, I turned to the channel to catch the preview of the next episode too soon and caught the dust ending.  blah!

 

As for the preview, was that Ashildr's voice I heard?

Edited November 15, 2015 by elle

[tankgirl73]

I have *no* idea what that just was.

 

It was very effectively creepy, but beyond that I was just like WTF? and that kept pulling me out of the creepy story until I was bored.

 

Sleep in your eye develops sentience and grows (a LOT) and conglomerates into humanoid form? No, wait, it eats humans. But it can't see. Because random dust floating in the air can see. And transmit visual signals. But none of it is real, it's all a story. And watching the story infects you, so you turn into dust too. And the guy was recording his story while the story was still going on. But the doctor is going to destroy the whole ship. Or something.

 

But getting back to the main WTF... the sleep in your eye is a projection of everything bad, or something, and when you don't sleep it turns into monsters. So when you do sleep, that kills the dust? WTF?

[HouseofBeck]

Meh.

Much as I like Capaldi's face, the bug-eyed perspective threw me right out of the story, and I was overall too bored to try to clamber back in.

I'd have liked to have gotten more invested in the characters, but all the interesting ones died and were never more than pawns anyway.

One thing Mr HouseofBeck saw that I didn't: When the Doctor and Clara held hands, the two monsters held hands also.

Edited November 15, 2015 by HouseofBeck

[Rhetorica]

Was this one of two? Will we get "the rest of the story" next week? What was with the shot of Clara opening the Tardis door?

[whoknowswho]

I have *no* idea what that just was.

 

It was very effectively creepy, but beyond that I was just like WTF? and that kept pulling me out of the creepy story until I was bored.

 

Sleep in your eye develops sentience and grows (a LOT) and conglomerates into humanoid form? No, wait, it eats humans. But it can't see. Because random dust floating in the air can see. And transmit visual signals. But none of it is real, it's all a story. And watching the story infects you, so you turn into dust too. And the guy was recording his story while the story was still going on. But the doctor is going to destroy the whole ship. Or something.

 

But getting back to the main WTF... the sleep in your eye is a projection of everything bad, or something, and when you don't sleep it turns into monsters. So when you do sleep, that kills the dust? WTF?

You have captured my confusion very well!

[clack]

The good : those miniature singing holograms were cool. The bad : everything else.

I'll give Gattis props for ambition. Maybe he was going for that Dario Argento Italian horror feel, wherein it's all about the immediate sensation and the overall narrative is not expected to be coherent? Like a dream (or nightmare), in fact. But the sandmen were silly, the concepts were over elaborate and nonsensical, and the characterizations were thin.

A minor quibble : it's a couple of thousand years in the future. Humanity has migrated and formed a society on another planet (or moon to be exact). But there are still distinct ethnic groups? For centuries, Indians have mated only with Indians, Japanese with Japanese, even though Titan doesn't have an India or a Japan?

[Galileo908]

"Allright, what haven't we used to kill people yet?"

"Umm...eye gunk?"

"Brilliant!"

 

This was an odd one, I'll agree. I felt tired during this episode (I spent all day at a Who convention and left before the ep was screened there), and then the ending made that whole feeling kinda creepy. Like what was said above, it tried to be Blink but it was too weird and confusing to be really effective.

[Primetimer]

Wake up and take some rest-related advice from the sleep-dust monsters of Doctor Who.

Read the story

[Cthulhudrew]

They pretty much lost me from the beginning with the whole "Don't watch this! If you're watching, you're already dead!.., but if you're watching, you might as well keep going..." silly message (why would anyone record a message like this if it wasn't meant to be watched, apparently plot reasons that for various reasons I didn't get to).

 

The Blair Witch/Found Footage narrative didn't help matters, because it was too self-aware to really allow me to ever get into the story, much less any kind of horror. There was a moment or two when I found myself starting to get into things, and then they'd pull me right back out with the narrator's dialogue. The "mystery" of the helmet cams/not-helmet-cams was immediately apparent to me once they started showing things from Clara's perspective (obviously not wearing a helmet), so when the captain confirmed the lack thereof, I wasn't at all surprised.

 

And then I dozed off at some point after that, so didn't even see much of anything up until a brief bit of the message at the end with the doctor's face melting away into one of the sandmen and giving some cryptic warning. Having no real desire to go back and re-watch, I picked up the gist of the rest of what happened from here.

 

Overall, it didn't do much of anything for me, although (as noted above) it put me to sleep, which is perhaps a very appropriate result of this show? (Maybe I'm infected.)

[Latverian Diplomat]

For me the highlight was the Doctor hanging a lampshade on what a terrible name "Silurians" is. Bonus points for the "space restaurant" conversation and the cute hologram singers. Though I am a little tired of lighthearted pop songs being dragooned into grim stories for "irony" or whatever.

 

I don't much like horror movies, so this wasn't really for me. Though oddly, I did like The RIng which this bore a little resemblance to.

 

It's always dangerous for a TV character to notice that "This doesn't make any sense" or another to say "[we] tried to add enough things to make it exciting" :-)

 

Did they mean to imply the Doctor never figured it out, and basically lost in the end (did not stop the sandmen)? I know there have been bleak endings before, but has he ever just bolted like that without solving the mystery?

[Kalliste]

I'm glad I'm not the only one that thought this was pretty boring. I'll admit I kept falling asleep and probably missed about a third of it though.

 

So, the ending just doesn't make sense/is open ended and it wasn't just because I missed parts that I didn't understand it?

[ottoDbusdriver]

Not to ask a silly question, but why wouldn't they have helmet cams in the 38th century ?  By that time, cameras should be super tiny and they would probably have multiple cameras mounted all over their gear in order to record Oculus Rift 3-D VR style recordings of every mission.

 

An even sillier question -- it's the 38th century so shouldn't they have nth generation Roombas cleaning the ship constantly ?  So how did these eye boogers aggregate into these larger creatures -- were they expelled all at once by a person's body after using Morpheus ?  And they really didn't explain why the flecks of dust have cameras, but the surface layer of the actual creatures didn't have cameras -- since the dust and the creatures were made of the same material.

[Pyralis]

You mean it wasn't a weird-ass parody of "Forbidden Planet" and other "trapped in a space station" horror movies?  So much for my interpretation. /snark

[Starchild]

First, let me say I adore Mark Gatiss. He is my hero.

 

That being said, this was a mess. Did he wake up one morning, rub his eye and say "Hm, I wonder if I could make a Who monster out of this stuff."

 

No. No you can't.

 

Maybe the whole Cloverfield angle made it worse. I couldn't understand WTF was going on most of the time. How did that pod just suddenly suck Clara in? I was getting the sense that people were losing chunks of time along the way (falling asleep maybe?), but that never paid off so I guess not.

 

And why isn't Clara dead yet?

[Jamoche]

What's next, earwax?

 

I can't stand that song they were playing, so I hit mute every time. I may have missed some exposition, but somehow I don't think so.

[bugsmum]

Well. That was the first time I've ever been bored watching Doctor Who. Enthralled, entertained, amused, sad, mad, irritated (I'm looking at you, Clara Oswald), but until tonight never bored.

[ottoDbusdriver]

What's next, earwax?

 

I can't stand that song they were playing, so I hit mute every time. I may have missed some exposition, but somehow I don't think so.

 

Snotmonsters.

[futurechemist]

I thought the name of the space station was clever.  The episode, not so much.

 

If the plan was to transmit the magic signal out so that anyone who hears it turns into a dust monster, then why are the Morpheus pods necessary in the first place?  

 

I didn't think the Doctor ran away.  From his perspective, they solved the problem by making the station crash into Neptune.  The mystery wasn't quite solved, but the threat was.  Sort of like Midnight or Flatline.    And my interpretation was that I didn't think the events were fictional, just that Rasmussen edited all the "camera" footage to make a more compelling narrative which would get people to keep watching until the end.  Personally, I would have put the magic signal at the beginning, then end the video with "oops, look what you've gotten yourself into".

[Ringthane]

The way the soldiers kept saying "May the gods look favorably upon you" or whatever reminded me of Lexx and the people on the Cluster that were always saying "May his merciful Shadow shine down on you" or whatever. 

 

Other than that...

 

Ummm...

 

Once again, we have about half an episode of story.  And I thought the dust was the Vashta Nerada.  Now it's these guys as well?  Plus it can capture and transmit HD audio/video? 

 

This episode wanted to be a whole bunch of other Doctor Who stories.  The 474 character really wanted to be the robot that wasn't a robot from "Journey to the Center of the TARDIS".  The monsters that couldn't see really wanted to be the other monsters that couldn't see (I swear we just had blind monsters a few weeks ago).  The story really wanted to be the story from the underwater base episodes.  The Rasmussen doctor guy really wanted to be Burke from "Aliens" (all right, so that's not a DW story, but you get my drift). 

 

Beyond that, though...  Another goofy story from Moffat.  He's beginning to rival JNT for odd ideas.  Time for some new blood in the production office. 

Edited November 15, 2015 by Ringthane

[Anisky]

The only part of the episode I found genuinely creepy was the part where the computer wasn't letting that man (the characters were so unremarkable I didn't bother learning their names) through a door until he sang the "Sandman" song, and that was only because I thought the computer voice there sounded really similar to GLaDOS from Portal. I was like, "If he sings the song, will he get cake?" 

 

Besides that... well, the Doctor saying "This doesn't make sense!" all the time really summed up how I've been feeling about Who for a couple of seasons, now. I was like, "Now you know how I feel."

[shandy]

I wasn't confused until I came here. I *thought* the patient zero pod was the evolutionary engine, with the dust constantly evolving from it, developing into a hive mind consciousness and originating the electronic signal that will trigger the evolving process in whoever sees the video (which was a fiction)- the idea felt very 'Ring' like. Maybe I have completely it wrong. But then I started thinking was this whole thing a fiction inside the wider DW fiction- with the Doctor and Clara of this episode merely being characters too that the dust had retained a memory of (if patient zero had met them before entering the pod). Hmm. But being obscure isn't the same thing as being clever. 

 

And Ringthane, omg yes, if this had been a Lexx episode made in 1999, I would have totally been ok with it, but expectations are so different with DW. I can put up with musical numbers in Lexx and think it's great.  I found the first 40 minutes here tedious, and the video effect irritating. Gatiss' work is divisive - he has very creative ideas, but it seems to me he can't sustain them with a satisfying narrative longer than 5 minutes in any of his episodes. In an Adventure in ST the plot was written for him by events, and he could indulge himself in campy trivia, set dressing and dialog derived from gossiping for years with people who were there, and it worked in a way.

 

Here I was less irritated then with Robots of Sherwood, Lantern or his ****ing Dalek effort,  but I was afflicted by the same kind of boredom I get when I watch  Crimson Horror or Cold War, and once you know the pay off, his episodes aren't great to watch again. 

Edited November 15, 2015 by shandy

[benteen]

I didn't like the first half but I thought it picked up in the second half.  I was confused by the ending...I thought the guy was filming a horror movie.  But it seems like it was effective.  Definitely a hard episode to wrap your head again.

 

I will say, the thing I found most unsettling was actually the idea of Morpheus itself.  Mostly because if this technology existed, companies would use it ruthlessly and workaholics would be all over it.  It's not something that's going to happen anytime soon but I can easily believe there are people who want to develop this kind of thing and the idea is horrific.  Well done by Mark Gatiss there.

 

Loved the Silurians line.

[HauntedBathroom]

For me the highlight was the Doctor hanging a lampshade on what a terrible name "Silurians" is. Bonus points for the "space restaurant" conversation and the cute hologram singers...Did they mean to imply the Doctor never figured it out, and basically lost in the end (did not stop the sandmen)? I know there have been bleak endings before, but has he ever just bolted like that without solving the mystery?

 

According to Gatiss at a convention, his aim was to write a story where the Doctor loses, because if you watch the episode all the way through, the creatures have infected you. It's just a shame that it was...rather boring. I know a few people who either didn't watch at all, or who turned off halfway though, and I found the whole thing to be dull. The political one voiced the only really interesting idea of the episode, the idea that corporations would seize upon a device that allowed them to expand the amount of time people could work, but then it got lost in 'RAR!!!!', and running up and down corridors.

 

Interestingly, the first draft for Idiots Lantern back in season 2 involved the Sandman song taking over people somehow. The production team couldn't get the rights to the song (or it cost too much), so they went for the Wire, which was crap in it's own way. But if the idea for this story has been kicking around in Mark Gatiss's head for 9 years, I'd have hoped he would have made it better by now. The whole found footage thing feels like a plaster stuck on a bad idea, to distract us from how dull the basic idea is.

[alrightokay]

I didn't love this episode but I didn't hate it as much as others do.  I think it's better than "In the Forest of the Night" (my least favorite from S8) and better than a bunch of episodes from S7 (for instance, I thought it was better than "Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS," which had a similarly convoluted plot and ashy monsters).  The scary ending to this one made up for some of the nonsensical stuff from earlier in the episode.  I wonder if the Doctor's theory about the Sandmen was wrong (and that's why he kept saying things weren't making sense at the end): Rasmussen implies in his final speech that all of us watching the footage will turn into Sandmen because of the electronic signal embedded into the video.  So maybe the crew of Le Verrier weren't actually eaten by Sandmen created from sleep dust.  Maybe they were exposed to the electronic signal and turned into the Sandmen that were chasing the rescue crew around.  So the whole Morpheus pod/"sleep dust in your eye" explanation (which was so ridiculous) was a distraction to keep the Doctor, Clara, and the rescue team running around while keeping us watching the video.  (I know, there are still a lot of issues with the plot, but that's my attempt to make sense of it!)

 

I'm not sure why Gatiss included the "Grunt" character here--that would have been an interesting idea for another episode.  Maybe he was trying to show how callous 38th century humans would become: getting people to sleep less to work more, creating "grunts" just to fight in wars.  I was getting a Frankenstein vibe from some of the Doctor's comments about Rasmussen messing with Nature for his own gain; maybe that was the point of 474, to show how the humans of this time (and not just the Sandmen) are cruel/arrogant as well: they created this individual with feelings and desires who would only exist to fight and die.

 

I did like seeing from various characters' perspectives--it was kind of fun seeing the Doctor/Capaldi looking right at the camera.  And it was lovely hearing the Doctor recite lines from Macbeth (not only were those lines relevant to the plot, it was fitting that the very Scottish Twelve got to reference the "Scottish play"). 

[Occasional Hope]

Potentially an interesting idea, but realised in a rather boring way.

[ottoDbusdriver]

I did like seeing from various characters' perspectives--it was kind of fun seeing the Doctor/Capaldi looking right at the camera.

 

But that was one of the things I thought was rather bizarre -- The Doctor seemed to keep looking directly into the camera, but as later was determined there were no cameras to be looking directly into.  It was all eye booger dust HD cameras that apparently were interconnected via some sort of Space Wifi that the sonic sunglasses (ugh !) were picking up on.  In addition, the eye booger dust had video recording storage capability because The Doctor was able to review the footage of himself.  So why would eyeboogers develop sentience, the ability to aggregate into larger form, and the technical ability to record and store video footage ?  WTF ?

 

And since Clara was infected by the Morpheus machine, and was never cured of that, how will that affect her in the next episode ?  Will she distribute the Sandman infection/virus/code/whatever wherever they go ?  Will she turn into an eye booger monster ?

 

As for Rasmussen, it was revealed at the end of the episode that he was a human looking Sandman ?  When did they evolve that ability ?  And was the Rasmussen that was released from the Morpheus pod actually human or was he already a Sandman ?

 

If the space station was plummeting towards Neptune, when was this collection of videos made by Sandman Rasmussen and did anyone off station ever receive it ?  

 

Leaving the ending of the episode this open-ended really kind of sucked if it is a one-off

as the preview indicates

instead of a two-parter.

 

And it was never explained what caused the eye booger monsters to spontaneously turn to sand ?  Because it just appeared to happen at plot convenient moments.  

Edited November 15, 2015 by ottoDbusdriver

[Starchild]

So the Doctor loses, the signal is out there, and people are turning in to Sandmen. Is Clara still infected? Is she turning in to a Sandman too? There was footage from her perspective, which I noticed before it was called out. It made me think she was the Zygon, or some other kind of impostor.

[clack]

That whole "Sandmen/sleep dust evolution" plot point seemed seemed so driven by dream (il)logic that I expected that the big reveal at the end would be that the episode events were hallucinations -- that the Sandmen didn't exist in reality. As it is, the end seemed to muddle the issue.

I don't mind an ambiguous ending, but the ambiguity has to be made clear, if that makes sense. That is, make it clear what the alternative interpretations of the story are so that we know what the narrative is being ambiguous about, and not, as was the case here, where the episode seemed to just shrug its shoulders and say, "what just happened? what did it mean? who knows?"

[pcta]

Big Finish did an audio production - Dead Air (narrated by Tennant) - that used the same conceit. If you listened all the way through than you were infected. I sussed that out pretty early on, so . . . not a surprise actually. Pissed me off, that Moffat stole James Goss' (the author) idea. Actually, pissed me off a lot!

[elle]

Once again, we have about half an episode of story.  And I thought the dust was the Vashta Nerada.  Now it's these guys as well?  Plus it can capture and transmit HD audio/video? 

And we must not forget that "the image of an angel can become an angel itself", so don't go watching any sleeping angel videos or you will wind up with statue grit in  your eye and start counting down your own demise.

 

Wait..how have we all survived repeated viewings of "Blink"?.

[buttersister]

Sorry, Mark, no can buy.

 

Otoh, Capaldi was fantastic. That's the 12 I've been hoping to see. More of.

[WatchrTina]

I hated that.  Nothing made any sense and you couldn't see anything properly.  If the point of Morphius is to allow you to avoid having to sleep (basically packing a full night's sleep into 5 minutes in the pod) then why would anyone STAY in the pod for 5 years?  Nothing made sense.

Edited November 15, 2015 by WatchrTina

[Geillis]

I recorded it and am trying to watch it now.  I find it rather boring and a Doctor Who version of the Blair Witch Project, which I also thought was boring

Edited November 16, 2015 by Geillis

[Galileo908]

And we must not forget that "the image of an angel can become an angel itself", so don't go watching any sleeping angel videos or you will wind up with statue grit in  your eye and start counting down your own demise.

 

Wait..how have we all survived repeated viewings of "Blink"?.

 

Because that fact wasn't in Blink?

[elle]

Because that fact wasn't in Blink?

Oh don't try to confuse me with logic!  ;o)

[Toaster Strudel]

7% of the dialog consisted of the word "Deep-Ando" - they must have been really proud of that name.

[clack]

Ok, do I have this right?

If you receive this electrical impulse in lieu of sleep from a Morpheus bed, the gunk in your eyes turn into tiny cameras, which then cohere into blind humanoids who eat people, and then these gunk monsters become sand and fall apart when injured.

But maybe this story is all an invention of this mad scientist and it is this story, in the form of a faked found footage video, that is itself the infecting agent. Once you watch this video your flesh becomes sand.

What.the.fuck.

[Rhetorica]

So, there may be a part two...

http://www.radiotimes.com/news/2015-11-14/mark-gatiss-has-a-sequel-planned-to-doctor-whos-sleep-no-more

[Sunnydayman]

The story literally put me to sleep. Did the writers take the week off?

[darkestboy]

Didn't love it, didn't hate it but aside from trying something different, it didn't really work.

 

Sandmen looked too similar to those time monsters from two series ago.

 

Chopra was the best out of crew but none were really fleshed out. Neither was Rasmussen to be honest.

 

Doctor and Clara seemed sleepwalking too in this.

 

I did like use of Mr Sandman and end scene was ambiguous, 6/10

[cardigirl]

I always like Doctor Who episodes more upon repeated viewings, but I'm not sure that will be the case with this story.  Couldn't see anything and didn't understand most of it.   This entire season has disappointed me for the most part.  Darn it.  As I like Peter Capaldi, but I am not loving these stories. 

 

This episode made In the Forest of the Night episode from last season look good, in comparison. 

[hnygrl]

Okay, I didn't like that one at all. It made zero sense, it was cinematically too damn dark (hard to see what's going on), and it just plain made no sense. None. It was just....bad. This was a great idea for a show that was ruined in the execution.

 

I guess we know now

how they're killing off Clara huh?

 

Just bad. SO bad. Hows about we all pretend this one was never shown, the same way I pretend How I Met Your Mother's series ended on the train platform?

Edited November 16, 2015 by Chip
potential spoiler

[elle]

Lurking over at the "Once Upon a Time" forums, the current episode thread echos much of what has been said here along the lines of "what did I just watch?!".  Maybe we could form a joint support group?

 

So, there may be a part two...

http://www.radiotimes.com/news/2015-11-14/mark-gatiss-has-a-sequel-planned-to-doctor-whos-sleep-no-more

Word to the wise, if you do not wish to be spoiled/confused/really annoyed, do not click on any of the other stories about the upcoming episodes for 12 or Clara or especially the Christmas one (the ones on the side in red).  Not worth it!

 

Snotmonsters.

The animated show from the 90s called "The Tick" did an episode of this.  I have a very low squick/sick trigger, it is the one episode I remember and the one I can not watch ever again!

[cardigirl]

Word to the wise, if you do not wish to be spoiled/confused/really annoyed, do not click on any of the other stories about the upcoming episodes for 12 or Clara or especially the Christmas one (the ones on the side in red).  Not worth it!

Not sure what site you are talking about? From the link from Rhetorica, there is just the info about a possible part two to this episode.