Doctor Who "Sleep No More" Review

I think Mark Gatiss is a fan of the Alien franchise! This is Sleep No More, where The Doctor, Clara and a small rescue team are on an empty space station to find what happened to the crew. As it turns out they were all in cryogenic sleep and the sleep dust in their eyes mutated into living creatures and killed them all...Oh and it's all in found footage.

So this has actually been a fairly criticised episode and to be honest, i don't understand why. The first criticism is that the sleep dust idea is silly and stupid...guys it's Doctor Who, of course it's silly and stupid, this franchise's legacy was built on the silly and the stupid. I didn't see anything wrong with this idea and let's be honest, sandmen, the sleep dust in your eyes mutating into a monster, i haven't seen that anywhere else. The rest of the story feels like a watered down Alien movie, think about it, an abandoned space station, alien marines, monster on the loose, horror elements, yeah you've seen this all before.

Then the found footage aspect, something that people have called gimmicky and cheap and pointless...no you're thinking of found footage as a genre, in this case i actually think this was intelligently handled with a nice twist revealing that it's not actually camera footage that we're watching but dust particles, which is also why we don't see any POV shots from The Doctor or that one soldier guy (I don't remember his name and neither do you).

Then finally the twist at the end revealing the entire thing was one giant trick to spread the sandmen via electron...channel waves...mumbo jumbo. One one hand i really like this, using the audiences hook on drama to get them to continue watching something they should not be watching making it our own fault for our demise. But on the other hand i don't like the fact that The Doctor loses in what is most likely a one off episode, that makes it feel cheap and well, gimmicky, not to mention the ending feels quite rushed if i do say so myself. But I would say the positives outweigh the negatives in this case.

I don't get the backlash, i don't see what was so bad about this episode, i still say the underwater episode with the ghosts was still way worse, at least this episode had a style and a creative use of a narrative device. I'm giving it a 7/10.

-Danny