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. 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.
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