Sleep No More: A Misunderstood Gem

Guest contributor Richard Guga believes Mark Gatiss’ Series 9 episode deserves another look.

While DWTV readers mostly agree that Series 9 was full of gems such as Heaven Sent, The Zygon Inversion, and Face the Raven (just to name a few), one episode in particular seems to have received the most negative reception from fans, and that episode is of course Mark Gatiss’ Sleep No More. Now, while I certainly don’t consider Sleep No More to be the best episode of Series 9, I seriously don’t think it deserves to be considered anywhere near the worst. In my opinion, it is a great episode and here’s why.

First of all, let’s address the most common criticism for the episode. The most dominant one being the fact that it was considered ‘too confusing’ and ‘did not make any sense’. Granted, some episodes might be a bit confusing and hard to follow on your first watch, but does that make it a bad episode? Once it’s been watched a few times, it does make sense because, now you know what’s coming, and you start to piece it all together. I suspect many people who didn’t understand it on initial viewing simply dismissed it as terrible and moved on never to watch again, which I think is extremely unfair.

Sleep No More (like Heaven Sent) is very experimental in which it takes a ‘found-footage’ approach. Personally, I think found footage is a broken genre but with this episode, Mark Gatiss makes it work for Doctor Who and explains everything in the twist ending (I’ll get onto that later). I think it was brave of Gatiss to try this and how he also didn’t simply resort to a normal base under siege template with nothing new going for it.

Sleep No More has a very interesting concept and monster behind it. The very idea of a machine that allows you have to all the sleep you need in under five minutes was a very real idea and seems like something that could be invented one day in the future. The Sandmen being created from sleep dust in your eye was very creepy and just like Moffat, Gatiss took a mundane thing and made it scary. Granted the monster design isn’t the best (excluding their mouths) but apart from that, they were really cool and interesting.

Series 9 was hyped up to be the ‘glory years of the Doctor and Clara’ and to be honest, the only episodes where I found this to be true were Under the Lake, Sleep No More and Face the Raven. Although this episode added little new to the pair’s friendship, it did show them together, just having a bit more ‘fun’ on one of their travels, as promised.

The supporting characters were admittedly the weakest part of the story, as most didn’t have much depth in terms or personality apart from Rasmussen (played by Reece Shearsmith), who was very entertaining and quite creepy at times.

I also found this episode the scariest of the series. The episode has a great variety of jump scares and the very concept of sleep dust consuming your body without you knowing is terrifying. However, the most terrifying scene (and the best one of the episode) is the ending where Rasmussen explains his intentions and the horrifying twist that the whole episode was merely keeping us entertained while a signal was being sent to our brain, turning us into Sandmen. The part where he collapses into dust was so creepy that I slept with the lights on that night. The ending also explains all the problems in the story such as “why is the Doctor looking straight into the camera?” or “why are we seeing this from Clara’s perspective if she doesn’t have a camera?”

To conclude, I think Sleep No More is a great episode and unlike some other episodes last year, tried something new and in my opinion, it paid off. I get very upset when people hate on the episode just because they say it doesn’t make any sense, when in fact it did.

Now, I hope you enjoyed this analysis. I did try to keep you interested. I hope you show it your family and friends. In fact, you’ve got something, there, in the corner of your eye…