Sleep No More

Dear Gary—

“You must not watch this.” Good advice. Sound advice. I should have heeded it. From those opening words I knew Sleep No More would be a clunker.  “I’m warning you. You can never unsee it.” I should have listened. Because Sleep No More is one huge waste of time.

Those opening lines alone tell me not to trust this guy. This guy turns out to be Rassmussen, a researcher/scientist type on a space station. He stares out at us in found footage fashion from a flickering screen and in a terrified manner warns us not to view the video that he is purposely making—but for what purpose if he doesn’t want anyone to watch it? I quickly lose patience with this conceit.

So I don’t trust this guy to begin with, making the story he supposedly has pieced together in this video suspect. Turns out it probably all is a lie, or at least didn’t happen exactly the way he tells it, so why bother? This is another Doctor Who adventure that never happened. That would be OK if the narrative itself was compelling enough. It’s not. What it turns out to be is nothing more than a tale that kids make up around the campfire to scare each other, and it makes about as much sense as those cobbled together yarns.

It doesn’t help that the group of stranded characters on this base-under-siege are introduced to us by Rassmussen as stereotypes. We have Chopra (“Bit of an attitude.”), Commander Nagata (“Young, for the responsibility.”), Deep-Ando (“Conscript; likes to think of himself as the joker of this little group.”), and 474 (“This one’s obvious from the markings, isn’t it? We all know a Grunt when we see one.”). They never manage to break free from these classifications as assigned to them by our narrator. It also doesn’t help that the grainy, shaky, dark nature of the piece often makes it difficult to distinguish one from another.

In addition, the quality of the picture (or lack of quality) often obscures the action. When the Doctor asks, “Why did they kill Rassmussen like that,” I have to ask myself—Rassmussen is dead? When did that happen? (Of course, Rassmussen isn’t dead, but that’s another matter.)

The Doctor and Clara provide the only worthwhile moment early on in the episode during their “never put the word space in front of something” exchange. After that the Doctor and Clara are about as interesting as sleep dust.

Ah—sleep dust. There’s an inspired monster for you. The Doctor pulls this theory out of the air based on nothing and we are to believe it. Rassmussen backs him up, but then we can’t believe anything Rassmussen tells us. These dust creatures, or Sandmen as Clara dubs them, are rampaging through the space station and somehow killing people. I’m not sure exactly how. References are made to people being consumed. Do the Sandmen have teeth and digestive tracts? Are they sitting down to dine on humans? Or are people being somehow absorbed into the Sandmen (in which case I suppose that would make them distant cousins to the Abzorbaloff)? Why is it that everyone just runs from the monsters? Why does no one think to fight the things? They seem to disintegrate pretty easily. And since they are made of dust, the Doctor could call in a team of space maids armed with space vacuums to clean up the mess. (Who you gonna call? Dust Busters!)

I guess I’m just not sure about anything in this episode. Are these creatures arising spontaneously out of the corner of people’s eyes? Or are they transforming humans based on the altered brain chemistry brought about by an electronic signal? And what about this whole hijacked sight aspect? I assume it is Rassmussen who has been hijacking the Sandmen’s sight, but how and why? And why do they let him? They apparently are in cahoots with Rassmussen, and again, how and why? They communicate telepathically? Speaking of communication—why doesn’t the Doctor ever try to communicate with the Sandmen? He’s always trying to communicate with aliens; why not with these? I’m filled with questions but find I don’t really care about the answers. And neither does the show; just like the show isn’t interested in bringing this ordeal to any sort of conclusion, logical or otherwise. We are left hanging. Was it real? Did the Doctor save the day? Is humanity doomed?  Again, I don’t know and I don’t care.

I’m with the Doctor—“This doesn’t make any sense.”

There is a germ of a good idea embedded in the plot but it is squandered.

“Sleep’s the one thing left to us,” Chopra (the Attitude) says. But now, through the Morpheus machine, They (the ubiquitous They) are “colonizing it.” This could make for all kinds of intriguing scenarios. I can imagine Doctor Who of old expanding this idea out to a full 4 or 6 episode run, exploring a society in which sleep is deprived of its workers, parceled out in 5 minute doses that keeps the peons on their feet and in the factories, all for the greater glory of the Company. (Visions of The Sun Makers dance through my head.)

But we never even get a glimpse of any semblance of a social network. Instead we get dust bunnies hopping around, shaky camera work, and a whole lot of unexplained business that isn’t very interesting. The few mentions we have of society leave me with the impression that Mankind has willingly surrendered to a drone-like existence and is standing in line to sign up for 5 minutes in the Morpheus machine so that they can spend every blessed waking minute working, working, working, working, working. Not me. If I had the choice, I would first choose to keep my precious sleep time, but if forced to take my dose of Morpheus, I would spend my purchased waking moments in something other than work.

We don’t even get any hint of some vast, evil conspiracy. This is all the work of one mad man, Rassmussen. He has somehow hoodwinked the good people of Triton into becoming grunts. Except they grow Grunts. So why the need for human grunts? If they can grow Grunts to do the grunt work, why oh why . . . .

I give up. The real question is, why am I even trying to understand any of this? I think, Gary, I’ll just go to bed, perhaps to dream . . .