The idea of doing a “found footage” episode of Doctor Who about the horrors of a world without sleep is very exciting.
There is surprisingly little ambition to Sleep No More. The Doctor and Clara arrive in a scary location, discover a mad scientist, fight some monsters and escape. Up until the stinger, it would be reasonably possible to convert Sleep No More into a more standard episode. For all that Sleep No More adopts the basic trappings of a “found footage” horror – with no title sequence and no ambient music – the episode never capitalises on the creative opportunities presented by the departure from the norm. The last minute threat from Rassmussen feels more like a stinger or a punchline than a core concept. In fact, the ninth season already had an effective “base under siege” two-parter in Under the Lake and Before the Flood, rendering another such story redundant. These postmodern self-aware twists feel like they have been grafted on to a standard “base under siege” tale, a cynical effort to add something just a little unique to a story that Doctor Who has told dozens of times before. The problem is that all of these elements feel like they were added on to a very conventional episode. “It wasn’t just my alibi,” Rassmussen explains. More to the point, the fact that the villain has control of the narrative is renders the plot as a very literal device. Around the midpoint of the story, the Doctor suggests that the editing and structure are as more for the benefit of Rassmussen than anybody else the suggestion is that the footage represents an attempt to “get story straight”, which is certainly true. As is the idea that the “found footage” narrative is not simply an attempt to tell a story, but is in fact a carefully calibrated and manipulated object.Ī couple of times over the course of the episode, Sleep No More draws attention to the unique format of the episode. Can the audience conjure a monster into being through their imagination? Can an idea be dangerous? Does the suggestion of horror contaminate and infect? It is a very clever use of the episode’s central conceit. It is a nice twist, very much in the spirit of the revelation that “the image of an Angel becomes an Angel” in Time of the Angels. Staring out the screen at the audience, he points to something that he sees… “just in the corner of your eye.” The obvious inference is that the viewer at home as been affected and transformed, that they will breed their own monsters. The final scene finds Rassmussen threatening the audience with his weaponised narrative pointing out that he warned the viewer not to watch the episode, he suggests that they have been contaminated and infected. Indeed, the final act of the episode does suggest a number of sly self-aware twists. That thought should be as unsettling as the Weeping Angels or the conceptual monster from Listen. If the viewer tries to escape those nightmares, they run the risk of creating their own real-life monsters. If the viewer goes asleep, the monsters await in their nightmares. Sleep No More should catch the viewer in a feedback loop of horror and anxiety. Gatiss is not necessarily the best idea for a postmodern horror story about how staying awake after watching a scary episode only makes you more susceptible to the monsters. Cold War suggests the Doctor is okay with genocide so long as a race he knows is responsible. The ending to The Idiot’s Lantern hinges on unquestioning traditional values. In adhering to an old-school horror template, The Unquiet Dead is effective horror with an uncomfortable xenophobic undercurrent. Gatiss is so fond of classic horror and science-fiction tropes that he tends to lack self-awareness in their application. Indeed, Gatiss is a writers whose biggest strengths and biggest weaknesses are tied up in his traditionalism.
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