Doctor Who: Series 9, Episode 9 – “Sleep No More” (2015)

Not one of my favorites – quite possibly my least favorite of the season.  Fortunately, it doesn’t annoy or aggravate me the way something like “The Caretaker” does.  Instead, it’s just sort of messy (both narratively and visually) and not all that interesting.  My chief reaction is “meh.”

Shot found-footage-style, a rescue team arrives on an imperiled ship to find its crew gone, its corridors swarming with monsters, and the Doctor and Clara just as perplexed by the mystery as they are.  The answers lie somewhere within Morpheus pods, a revolutionary new piece of technology that compresses the restorative sleep-equivalent of a month of nights into a mere five minutes.

First of all, found-footage can be a tricky narrative style, and I don’t think it works here.  It seems to keep the Doctor and Clara at arm’s length, always viewing them through someone else’s recording.  They don’t feel immediate like they should, and I came away from the episode feeling I never got a decent perspective from either of them.  What’s more, between the shaky cams, the dark spaceship interiors, and the images going fuzzy at inopportune moments, the whole thing has a muddy, ill-defined look to it.  Not infrequently, I couldn’t tell what was happening onscreen.

What’s worse, the story itself isn’t engaging enough to really make me wish I could see what’s going on.  The monsters of the week (the origins of which are bizarre and kind of gross) feel really half-formed.  Their motivations, abilities, and very existence are inconsistent at best and incredulous as worst.  They don’t feel like characters in the story, which happens often enough with the “brainless monster” variety of Who foe, but they also don’t really feel like monsters.  They feel like a collection of ideas, none of which got properly fleshed out by more than a second draft.  Since the one-shot characters are pretty thin on the ground and, like I said, the Doctor and Clara don’t have much to work with, either, that doesn’t leave a lot for a viewer to hang onto.

What I did like is more individual moments.  The idea of Morpheus pods, which would be so exploitable in a workaholic society, is a good one, and both the Doctor and one of the rescuers have some interesting things to say about the value of sleep.  There’s also a fun exchange between the Doctor and Clara about the annoying use of “space” as an adjective (as in “space restaurant.”)  Plus, the Doctor quotes Macbeth, and you can never go wrong there.

Mark Gatiss isn’t one of my favorite Who writers, but I normally like him well enough; “The Unquiet Dead” is terrific, “The Idiot’s Lantern” has some fine character work, and the Ice Warrior/Soviet Union thematic combo in “Cold War” is neat.  This episode, however, doesn’t feel like one of his.  Not sure what happened here.  For me, it’s just too unremarkable to say much more, which is disappointing.