By Mark Gatiss
“You must not watch
this.”
I can say
I’m not a big fan of found footage movies or television shows. I hated the Blair Witch Project and wasn’t
that fond of Cloverfield either. So when I heard they were doing a found
footage episode of Doctor Who I had big reservations about it. Would it be good and would the scenes be
jumping all over the place was one of my concerns but not that much of a worry
as to who was writing it.
Mark Gatiss
is not one of my favorite writers for Doctor Who but I have enjoyed some of his
episodes and I did enjoy his last story Robots
of Sherwood. Now most fans hate
Mark Gatiss and have probably already written off Sleep No More without even watching it and looking at the ratings I
might be right. But for me he’s 50/50
going as far back as his Doctor Who novels for Virgin publishing during The
Wilderness Years. He has written some
clunkers but has also written some gems.
If you get a chance hunt down the Doctor Who novel Nightshade it is one hell of a story and probably his best Who
story to date. With that said Sleep No More wasn’t all as bad as I
feared and actually was quite good.
Now let me
explain that. I found Sleep No More to
be quite good but I didn’t find it to be one of the greatest stories ever nor
do I find it to be one of the worst. On
first watch it was kind of meh and I wasn’t all that enthralled even though I
enjoyed the scariness of the story. When
I watched it again I really enjoyed it and really loved the scariness and suspense of the story. I also loved the mystery of it also as it
kept The Doctor guessing. It just seemed
like he couldn’t figure it out which is unusual for Doctor Who as we are
accustomed to seeing The Doctor win but in Sleep
No More we actually see The Doctor fail.
The Doctor does as The Sandman releases his video to spread the sand
creatures throughout the galaxy which seems like a return encounter with this
new villain.
Now one of
the things that I thought was a real stretch was the Sandman creatures and what
they were created from. They were
created from the eye gunk that forms while we sleep. Now come on really a creature forming from
eye gunk. Have they run out of ideas for
new creatures? I get the concept but that
kind of ruined the creepy scary part of the story as I couldn’t help but laugh
and roll my eyes when we all found out where the creatures came from. I did like the fact that they used the dust
to see and that brought the creepy aspect back as they used the dust floating
around to use for vision. But still eye
gunk creature’s lol.
Another
thing that was problematic was the confusion factor. I’ve watched this twice and still could not
see how Nagata got killed. Did The
Doctor and Clara just leave her as they ran to the TARDIS. I don’t know.
Was everyone on the space station a sandman type creature like
Rassmussen, played excellently by Reece Shearsmith, or were they real? Still scratching my head on that one and the
only thing I can come up with is that they were sand constructs also but then
how do you explain the rescue mission? I
don’t know but they definitely set things up for another go around.
Sleep No More while not one of the greatest
stories in Doctor it also wasn’t one of the worst. Props should be given to the Doctor Who
production staff for trying to do something different and give us something
outside of the box and not the usual style of storytelling. While I’m not a fan of found footage I thought
it worked really well in Sleep No More
and hopefully when they try something different again that the story is a
strong one. Sleep No More was entertaining and different and not as bad as I
had thought it would be.
Grade C+
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