There are precious few moments of true POV, and we are never in anyone's point-of-view long enough to feel genuine suspense. And again, "Sleep No More" utterly squanders the advantage, going out of its way to avoid the suspense that found-footage can generate so powerfully. ![]() Again, this is one of the brilliant effects found-footage can provide, and what makes the device so effective for horror stories: the immersive sense of being-even of being trapped-in a first-person point-of-view. The same mistake is made with point-of-view. The result is an overly processed mess that loses the impact of watching raw video, and becomes distinguishable from the average hour of television only in the general crappiness of its images and the incoherence of its storytelling. The patient simplicity of found-footage is what makes the device so effective, but this episode (literally) butchers the effect by constantly editing what we are seeing, jumping from shot to shot, and from angle to angle. How we apportion the blame between Gatiss's script and Justin Molotnikov's direction could be the subject of debate, but there's no denying that "Sleep No More" features some truly wretched visual storytelling. the Vashta Narada, the Weeping Angels, the Silence-it's a wonder he hasn't tackled the idea before.)īut "Sleep No More" not only squanders all the benefits of the format, it actually magnifies every disadvantage. (In fact, given Moffat's obsession with locating danger in seeing- e.g. The show has flirted with the format before-as in the 2013 minisode " The Last Day"-but an entire full-length episode that committed to the device could be very effective. While found-footage is a painfully overused device in horror these days, the idea of doing a found-footage episode of Doctor Who is not a bad one. "I did try to make it exciting." - Rassmussen "Sleep No More" is to Doctor Who horror precisely what " Robot of Sherwood" is to Doctor Who comedy: an appallingly slapdash affair that betrays, at its heart, a contemptuous lack of respect for both the show and its audience. Unfortunately, while his tone and tricks may have changed, Gatiss remains the same. It had some genuine atmosphere it seemed to treat the Doctor and Clara with dignity and-with its found-footage conceit-it promised a new (to Doctor Who) and potentially interesting approach to storytelling. Unlike the painfully tongue-in-cheek, fatally unfunny historical romps that comprise the bulk of Gatiss's output, "Sleep No More" looked to be a more serious and substantial endeavor. ![]() I would be neither terribly surprised, nor at all disappointed, to discover he had penned a truly excellent episode of Doctor Who.Īnd, you know, for about the first 10 minutes of "Sleep No More," I actually hoped he might have pulled it off. Gatiss, after all, has written some very good episodes of Sherlock, the fantastic series he co-created with Who showrunner Stephen Moffat. But I really do go into these things with as open a mind as possible. ![]() ![]() It becomes Scooby Who."Īll of which probably suggests that I was predisposed to dislike "Sleep No More," and-let's face it-I was. "Under Gatiss’s pen," I wrote in my review of " Cold War," " Doctor Who becomes what people who don’t really watch Doctor Who imagine it to be: a silly sci-fi romp. "Sleep No More" is the eighth episode Gatiss has written since Doctor Who returned in 2005, and so far I have liked exactly two of them, and those but mildly: 2005's "The Unquiet Dead" and 2011's " Night Terrors." Otherwise, the 2006 episode "The Idiot's Lantern" was a passable (if utterly forgettable) bit of mid-level mediocrity, and the remainder of Gatiss's output-"Victory of the Daleks," " Cold War," " The Crimson Horror," and " Robot of Sherwood"-were, for me, pretty much as bad as Doctor Who gets. I'm going to keep this short, because it is unfortunate that my return to Doctor Who-after an unscheduled but unavoidable hiatus-happens to coincide with the return of writer Mark Gatiss.
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