Review: Sleep No More (aka Blair Witch Who)

WARNING! “You must not watch this. I’m warning you. You can never unsee it.”

WARNING! “You must not watch this. I’m warning you. You can never unsee it.”

WARNING! “You must not watch this. I’m warning you. You can never unsee it.”

WARNING! “You must not watch this. I’m warning you. You can never unsee it.”

It will scare the sleep out of you! 🙂

“You must not watch this. I’m warning you. You can never unsee it.” The admonition comes at the top of the episode from Professor Gagan Rassmussen, who has made a scrappy video of the events that befell Le Verrier, an Indo-Japanese laboratory in orbit above Neptune.

Mark Gatiss’s Sleep No More uses the “found footage” format favoured by that sub-genre of horror movies, kickstarted by The Blair Witch Project and perfected in Cloverfield. This is by no means as chilling, although Gatiss does break new ground for Doctor Who. For the first time ever, there’s no title sequence; there are also no easy answers.(Radio Times)

I like this episode a lot. The origin of the Sandmen, not so much.I just didn’t buy it.

But the overall episode was very engaging otherwise. The Narrator and ultimate bad guy (Reese Shearsmith-n who was briefly The 2nd Doctor at the end of An Adventure in Space & Time) was a creepy dude.

While the anti-capitalism and anti-corporate sentiment was a 2X4 to the head with nail sticking out I have no doubt it could give someone  the idea to try and create such a thing.

But I have to wonder about it from a different angle.

These days especially, aren’t we all saying, “But I don’t have enough for that.” constantly.

It’s why I’m not watching “Arrow” or “The Flash” because I didn’t start watching them from the beginning and don’t have the time off to bing watch that much back catalog. And those are just 2 TV Shows.

I have books and films and more I’d like to catch up on. I just don’t have the time. I have to get 8 hours of sleep to function.

But imagine if you could be awake for a month, what on that terminally long “to-do” list would you get done.

All of it and more I’d bet.

Which is where Ashildr probably slots into the next episode. She has that time, just not in that way.

It will be interesting to see how it ties in with this episode, if it does.

38th Century and 21st Century. Hmmmm… 🙂

I have never watched “The Blair Witch Project” but I am aware of it and it’s style.

The switching between the greyish “security cam” footage and the crisper more “regular” type footage was a bit jarring at first but the overall effect they were going for was good.

With the Narrator sounding like a victim recording his explanation for the future to camera but when you find out the footage is from the monsters themselves you start to smell a rat, but it’s not until the end when you are told the WHOLE EPISODE is a gigantic con-job by a psychopathic humanity-ending nut case!

“You must not watch this. I’m warning you. You can never unsee it.”

Ah, man!

Sucker!  🙂

Brilliant.

Loved it.

Overall, it’s one of my favorites for the season. I will overlook the “sleep dust” BS that I just can’t buy it piling up and becoming creatures.

It is formed by a combination of mucus (in the case of the eyes, consisting of mucin discharged from the cornea or the conjunctiva), nasal mucus, blood cells, skin cells, or dust. Rheum from the eyes is particularly common. Dried rheum is in common usage called sleep, e.g., to have sleep in one’s eyes). —Wikipedia

The concept and the execution of it are top notch so I can suspend that disbelief to enjoy the sheer brilliance of it.

And I have to give the line of the episode to Capaldi for the “But I get to name the monsters” gag and the very sly, very nerdy, mention of the origins of naming of The Silurians, which is a complete misnomer that even the monsters themselves use. Hilarious.

Having no Title Sequence for the episode works for the effect they wanted, but I still think a clean title sequence at the very beginning (with no pre-credit sequence) would not have hurt the episode at all.

A great episode. Many kudos to Mark Gatiss, who I still want to take over from Moffat as showrunner.

Next Week, Doctor Who does Harry Potter…And is it the end for The Impossible Girl