BBC One, Saturday
14th November 2015 / Starring:
Peter Capaldi, Jenna Coleman, Reece Shearsmith, Elaine Tan, Neet Mohan, Bethany
Black, Paul Courtenay-Hyu /Written by Mark Gatiss / Directed by Justin
Molotnikov / Reviewed by Sean Alexander
“Sleep isn’t just a function;
it’s blessed. Every night we dive deep
into that inky pool, deep into the arms of Morpheus. Every morning we wake up and wipe the sleep
from our eyes. And that keeps us safe
from the monsters inside…”
As
opening gambits go, being addressed to camera with the words “You must not
watch this” is probably not the best piece of self-publicity that Doctor Who could use right at this
moment. Four million people – hopefully
all awake – tuned into ‘Sleep No More’, which is actually one of the healthier
overnight figures series nine has achieved.
But when placed into the context of over six million Strictly viewers either switching over
or switching off, that figure is a very long way from the heydays of 2005 to
2009, and weak even when placed against the gradual decline post-2010. While insomnia doesn’t seem to be a problem
for the Doctor either on or off screen, absentmindedness certainly seems to be. The show that is attributed for resurrecting
the communal Saturday audience has itself become left behind in a slot that is
neither fish nor fowl, nor use nor ornament.
Collateral damage in the on-going fight between interactive talent show
contests.
By
the by, ‘Sleep No More’ – like much of series nine – warrants a far greater
audience than it gets. Okay, the premise
of a ‘found footage’ episode didn’t exactly fill one with anticipation – for a
subgenre of horror trope all but invented by 1999’s The Blair Witch Project, the camera diary has been done to death in
the last decade and a half. Even Doctor Who has delved deep into this
stylised convention in 2006’s ‘Love & Monsters’. But where the conceit of ‘Sleep No More’
comes from an increasingly unreliable narrator, for once we as the viewer are
robbed of an ‘A-ha’ moment; Gatiss’ script having great fun with utilising the
video confession format to play with expectations and assumptions. And on the whole it largely succeeds.
Part
of the reason why it does comes from Gatiss’ mining of a common Who propensity to make monsters out of
the mundane. It isn’t sleep here that’s
the enemy, but the very organic residues of our existence. Vacuum under your bed or run a finger along
the mantelpiece and dust is everywhere, always rearranged and never
removed. Weaponising such an inherently
harmless yet omnipresent substance is the episode’s coup de grace, with no doubt dozens of youngsters (or at least the
ones allowed to stay up for the show’s current nocturnal timeslot) worrying
about not only going to sleep, but of rubbing a potential monster out of their eyes
in the morning. The creatures
themselves, the Sandmen (though personally speaking ‘Dust Devils’ would have
been equally fitting) are a striking mix of Marvel Comics and Munch’s ‘The
Scream, proving like last year’s the Boneless that there’s still a rich vein to
be tapped when it comes to spinning a new web.
Direction-wise,
newcomer Justin Molotnikov mines the kind of first person survival horror genre
that helped reinvent the console game two decades ago, using dank lighting and
switching viewpoints to create a growing sense of claustrophobic paranoia. The small cast helps – each given a (very)
potted biography by narrator Rasmussen – and while it’s nice to see the 38th
century peopled by ethnic characters with regional accents, perhaps the
decision to cast the show’s first transgender performer in the role of
genetically stupefied grunt wasn’t the most enlightened of moves. As a character though, 474 works fine –
moving from ‘Planet of the Spiders’ Tommy backwardness to acceptance and
ultimately heroic status – while Gatiss ensures that the discrimination she
encounters and her whole disgusting nature as a purpose bred, unthinking army
drone are never far from the surface.
What
also works well is the depiction of sleep in the fourth millennium as an
increasing hindrance to our evermore round-the-clock lifestyles. The Morpheus machine supplying the same
chemical refreshment in just five minutes that usually takes a third of our
lives. Of course, being Doctor Who with one eye constantly on the judgmental and cautionary, this
is done for profit over nature. As
Rasmussen says, ‘Time is Money”, but Gatiss may be digging a little deeper even
than that: his use of words such as ‘drones’ and ‘colonised sleep’ perhaps
having more than a little sub-textual satire than would at first be
apparent. The Mr Sandman song likewise
lends a nice little bit of uneasy creepiness, with it not only being a
corporate jingle but also an encrypted means of getting from one secured area
of the station to another. As with the
best of his previous work on the show, Gatiss’ talent lies in making the jolly
ephemera of pop cultural icons – as he did with television way back in ‘The
Idiot’s Lantern – both sinister and subversive.
For
an episode which takes the bold – and indeed revolutionary – step of excising
the show’s opening titles in order to maintain the ‘found footage’ suspension
of disbelief, it’s a shame to be jolted out of that reveries not once, but
twice right at the business end. As
Rasmussen’s scheme is fully revealed – providing the zenith of a particularly
unsettling turn by guest-star Reece Shearsmith – it is a little disappointing
to have such a clever conceit as the meta-narrative premise being spelled out
so clearly for the benefit of viewers perhaps less blessed with making these
cognitive leaps. Yes, the whole video
has been cut and edited to ensure the proliferation of the dust spores and to
facilitate Rasmussen’s grand plan on a system-wide scale (one apparently to be
returned to in the not too distant future) but do we really need to be told
that we’ve been watching a story for the past forty-five minutes seeing as, er,
we’ve been watching a story for the past
forty-five minutes…? Not for the
first time this year has the viewer been so thrown out of the narrative just to
make sure that those at the back are still keeping up. And the second occasion? Well, the presumably legally-binding
obligation to have the ‘next time’ trailer and the cast & crew list, rather
than fading to black as that icky shot of Rasmussen’s head slowly collapsing to
dust plays out.
“Sleep,
those little slices of death; Oh how I loathe them”, Edgar Allen Poe once
wrote. And while ‘Sleep No More’ may be
yet another extract from the Doctor Who cautionary
guide to interfering with nature, far more doom-laden portents are threaded
through its narrative; not least of which being the increasingly borrowed time
that Clara is living on. But then that
would appear to be a whole other entry from the Poe canon…
Next Time: ‘Quoth the
Raven “Nevermore”’
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