Sleep no more? I can hardly keep my eyes open at another base-under-siege story Mark. I’ll thank you for offering up the most boring horror-bent on my birthday, or at least it was at the weekend when I typically watch these. Regardless of that, it is interesting looking back at Peter’s run here, watching the Audience Appreciation Index (AI) as everything dips to a low-80. “Sleep No More,” Mark Gatiss’ lowest-rated episode, hits the dizzying quarry pit of 78. For context, “Fear Her” got an 83, but “Love & Monsters” got a 76. “Kill the Moon” got an 82, and “In the Forest of the Night,” where Clara says killing kids is a good idea, received an 83.

I think I need a deep-sea excavation society to help me plummet these depths, especially after the 76 of “Legend of the Sea Devils.” This was another episode that attempted to use the imagery of Asian cultures, but hardly did anything to showcase and invite you to research it more closely. In fact, it spent more time prattling on about Martha’s new ignorant best friend, Billy Shakespeare. Yes, the title itself refers to the verse of Macbeth with the paraphrased line: “The death of each day’s life, sore Labour’s bath. Balm of hurt minds, chief nourisher in life’s great feast.”

“Sleep no More” puts us into the perspective of the cast via what is assumed to be CCTV cameras, of which there are none. While focused on the monster of the week that is sandmen, it is a little too easy to put the mystery together. The horror is lost after that first chase scene is capped off with some awful CGI. With the perspective of first-person or sometimes third-person from the found-footage concept, we’re frontloaded with exposition shot straight down the barrel of the lens. There is no (as Blake Snyder put it) ‘pope in the pool‘ to keep from your eyes from glazing over while they cake up with sleep.

Well, it is commonly called sleep or several other things, but it is actually called Rheum, mucus and dead skin cell build-up surrounding your eyes after sleeping a while. Why am I talking about that? In true Moffat-era fashion, the nondescript far future time that is so important I’ve forgotten about it straight after watching the episode is also a dystopian capitalistic one. The point of the episode is that humans have grown tired, oddly enough, of sleeping getting in the way of work. Thus Rassmussen, with Reece Shearsmith doing his best Bond-villain impression, invented Morpheus.

I said it before with the Macbeth bit, I said it when the Chinese constellations weren’t used at Easter, and once again, I’m questioning the use of Greek/western references in an episode so focused on Asian culture. The Doctor corrects Clara that the station parked by Neptune is adorned with Indo-Japanese culture as, in this century that is so forgettable, “India and Japan, they were sort of merged.” So why wasn’t Nidra used or even Ratri? Maybe to stretch Shintoism a little, use Ame-no-Uzume, goddess of dawn, or Tsukuyomi-no-Mikoto, god of the moon. The use of Asian culture without actually trying to explore it but exploiting it for being exotic is getting on my nerves now.

Half the cast, at least the ones that were expendable this time out, were to some degree clearly Asian or of close decent. Pawning this off as an oversight when the characters are deliberately cast with this Asian theming buried somewhere feels odd, almost as if there was greater importance to that, which is now on the cutting room floor. Either that or Gatiss threw a series of mildly interesting concepts at the wall and watched as some of it stuck, the rest blowing away in the wind. This attempts to instill the sense of horror that Gatiss is known for, yet if I’m honest, I’m left bored more often than not.

Even the primal urge to see humans survive from the disfigured monstrosity of The Sandmen attacking is flavorless. I also felt exhausted by the overuse at this point of Pat Ballard’s “Mr. Sandman” to express something is nostalgic or sleepy, it has been done and done to death. So much of this episode attempts to use gimmicks to freshen up some of its ideas, yet it all feels trite. The episode alone feels like a straight-to-DVD B-movie you’d find late at night on some sci-fi movie channel years after the initial release.

I spent half the episode wondering if the lab was the same one from “Into The Dalek,” they at least seemed very similar. Though I did enjoy the line “Hungry, so hungry.” A reference or at least a close enough match to one of Gatiss’ better episodes, “The Idiot Lantern.” Equally, the line about someone who hasn’t slept in five years almost felt like a personal attack. I was unsure if I was about to tumble out of the Morpheus chamber and stumble to the kitchen. Though while I am on one-line gripes or other bits I liked, I didn’t like that the Doctor was unwilling to shout about a gun being used on the creatures that seem to be sentient.

“Sleep no More” isn’t the worst episode of Doctor Who, it is just a very boring one. As Rassmussen says, “I did try to make it exciting…” well Mark, you didn’t and I think it was simply the time. Though there was some pacing there to feel like a modern episode of Who, it had a problem both this and Jodie’s era have, it is attempting to be on par with classic Who. Despite being bogged down by Danny and Clara’s date, Steven’s “Listen” is possibly a better example of attempting horror while sticking to a modern style of Doctor Who. At least what’s under the bed is scary, I’ve no idea what is here, Hyper-capitalism?

Ultimately, this was the episode in the “Boom Town” slot, a fine idea on paper let down by simply being up to this point the bottle episode of series 9. Nothing stands out, nothing remarkable happened, no one particular made their mark like Sally Sparrow, it happened but won’t be remembered. In fact, the only good memory of it will be the casting of the first openly trans actor in the casting of the wonderful Bethany Black, who I suggest looking up. Everything else about the episode is forgettable or simply dull, which might explain the lack of a proper ending. Anyway, next week, we’re facing a raven.

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Doctor Who "Sleep No More"

1

Score

1.0/10

Pros

• At least it ended.
• Bethany Black is actually decent, not that the episode cares.

Cons

• It is a tiring episode.
• The use of Asian culture, without tying so much to the plot.