Meanwhile, there’s a reason we get to see 474’s bloody demise. Certainly, the Doctor’s speeches bleed into the Shakespeare-quoting beautifully. Even though he has never written a space-set story before, it’s an undeniably Gatiss episode, his affection for the genre and lyrical language shining through the claustrophobia. Where Toby Whithouse’s story played with ghost story conventions in an underwater base, Sleep No More riffs on classic horror aboard a space station, and the Sandmen are easily as scary as those ghosts.
It’s looking neck-and-neck between this and Under the Lake for scariest of the season. You can see how he first envisioned this as a two-parter, and while two hours of found footage would have been way too much, it’s a fertile ground for more stories and I wonder if we shouldn’t visit this world again. A far-flung future where a Great Catastrophe (more on that below) has caused a tectonic realignment on Earth and the Indo-Japanese power bloc is now the planet’s dominant superpower a polytheist society with armies of clone soldiers, and deep political divisions between the “wideawakes” and the “Rip van Winkles” who appreciate their sleep. What I found most impressive about Sleep No More, though, is the level of backstory and context Gatiss that packs in.
#DOCTOR WHO SLEEP NO MORE REVIEW SERIES#
The collaboration of those two is always infectious, and who doesn’t love a mad scientist? But in a series that has already given us Missy and Davros and Evil Clara, he’s unlikely to go down as a classic villain. The other big talking point this week, of course, is the League of Gentlemen quasi-reunion, as Gatiss’s old colleague Reece Shearsmith turns up for a guest turn as Rassmussan. A golden age of peace, harmony, industry. ‘We live in a time of unparalleled prosperity. As if insomnia wasn’t enough of a bummer as it is. Monsters made out of sleep in your eyes? That is good. A corporate efficiency drive pushed to disastrous extremes by a mad scientist might have come over heavy-handed, but for all the technical accomplishment (and it is very accomplished), the exquisite beats of Gatiss’s imagination see him deliver Doctor Who at its most Doctor Who-like. Nobody likes a show off!īut there’s a terrifically chilling premise underpinning this political satire.
But for me, it felt like an experiment that only half works, and it’s a good job we like Gatiss, or Rassmussan’s mentions at the end of “compulsive storytelling” and “a proper climax with the big one at the end” would be calling for some serious side-eye. And that final sting in the tale is the nightmare fuel that gives Mark Gatiss his Blink moment. Difficult to see how that could have been avoided a Saturday-night family show such as Doctor Who needs to hold your hand to a certain extent, and the conceit itself turns out to be the whole point of the Sandmen’s plan in the first place, and so on. You know who’s assembled this from the start.
Having Reece Shearsmith’s Professor Rassmussan hold your hand all the way through it with his commentary takes away something of the nervy uncertainty that made found footage staples such as The Blair Witch Project and Cloverfield such classics. But if there’s a problem with Sleep No More it’s that the scale of the concept can’t help but be undermined by necessities of its execution. Now, risks are always, always better than the easy route.
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