Dr. who sleep no more movie#
Dr. who sleep no more series#

The Doctor theorizes that the monsters are made of literal sleep. Rassmussen finally enters the story as a proper character, and it’s revealed that he’s the inventor of the pods. Sandman.” Is pop culture so dire in 1,700 years that they’re still listening to music from the 1950s? 21st century life would no doubt seem positively molasses-like to these people, who are increasingly dependent on the product – enough so that society has devolved into “wide awakes” and “rip van winkles.” Clara is lured into one of the pods, which play the fifties tune “Mr. Enter the Morpheus pods, a popular technology that allows people in the future to cram a night of sleep into five minutes.

Everybody runs, some in different directions.

Dr. who sleep no more series#

Over lit and on videotape, they’d surely look an awful lot like a classic series Doctor Who monster, but brief glimpses of them in the dark are effective enough (though this viewer was mostly terrified at the inability of the picture to settle the fuck down). The Doctor: “There’s something going on here - something we’re not getting.”īeastly, lumbering monsters attack. The psychic paper takes care of any questions the soldiers may have about the time travelers (“We’re here to assess stress” is an amusing line), and soon enough they’re all six in it together, trying to figure out what’s happened. They soon come across the Doctor and Clara who are simply passing through, unaware there’s a situation, though all the dark should have clued them in. A mission from the moon Triton, consisting of three Indo-Japanese humans and one genetically grown grunt (more on 474 later), has arrived in response to the station going silent 24 hours earlier. It’s set in the 38th century, on the Le Verrier Space Station, a lab orbiting Neptune. Aside from the found footage angle, it’s also a riff on the haunted house/mad scientist & monsters formula.

“This is what happened here,” he tells us at the start. “Sleep No More” purports to exist as an edited collage of events assembled by one Gagan Rassmussen (Reece Shearsmith, who among his many credits counts Patrick Troughton in An Adventure in Space and Time). “Sleep No More” isn’t remotely elegant nor is it particularly poetic. Even “ The Time of the Doctor,” which I all but loathed, had a sort of elegance and poetry about it that ended up warranting two. I’ve never given a Doctor Who episode one star. A 45-minute assault on the senses, the final seven or eight of which remain so indecipherable, Steven Moffat must surely have been in awe of his colleague Mark Gatiss. “Sleep No More” is as relentlessly unpleasant as any of the footage found in the Black Hills of Burkittsville, Maryland maybe even more so, since it’s a part of our beloved Doctor Who. Now I’m in a position where I have to write about it, so forgive me any trespasses.

Dr. who sleep no more movie#

The concept of a found-footage anything is messy by design, isn’t it? Admittedly, my experience with such concepts pretty much begins and ends with The Blair Witch Project, a movie so insufferable that it put me off the gimmick ever since. To call it a mess, though, surely misses the point. Proudly billed as Doctor Who’s first “found footage” episode, it seems as if the footage that would’ve made sense of the whole affair ended up on the cutting room floor (yes, a horribly outdated turn of phrase in the digital age).

Well, the streak of perfection (or at least near perfection) had to end sooner or later, didn’t it? Season nine had been charging forward like some kind of long form narrative Roadrunner, and with “Sleep No More” it has smashed into one of Wile E. Rassmussen could easily have been speaking about “Sleep No More” itself with that very first line of the episode. Gagan Rassmussen: “You must not watch this! I’m warning you. Photo: Simon Ridgway/BBC/BBC Worldwide 2015 Picture shows: Peter Capaldi as the Doctor