Sleep No More
(Season 9, Dr 12 with Clara, 14/11/2015, producer/showrunner: Steven Moffat, writer: Mark Gatiss, director: Justin Molotnikov)
Rank: 289
Oh Mr Sandman brings you a scream
He’s the evilest capitalist that you’ve ever seen
Give him two lips you know your time’s over
He’ll have you hiding behind your sofa
I’ll write this review in a minute, I just need forty winks…zzz….
Don’t read this review
whatever you do reader!!!
Oh my, I had this really
odd dream where I was trapped onboard a laboratory orbiting Neptune where
everything was dark and creepy and people kept pointing their headcams at me
and then everyone decided that nothing that happened in the entire story
happened and then…oh wait, it was just Dr Who. Really that was Dr Who? It
definitely felt more like a coma dream. At least you can’t accuse Dr Who of
being asleep at the wheel: ‘Sleep No More’ is one of the most inventive,
original and different stories in the run, made in such a way that goes against
the grain of every other story out there. It’s the sort of worthy thing a
series ought to be trying in its 52nd year, something that breaks every
storytelling rule going. However this story’s strengths are very much tied in
with its weaknesses too: Dr Who’s elastic format
can stretch to include just about anything, but a low-fi story shot on
head-cams and CCTV footage that’s mostly shot in the dark, watching people
stumbling in the dark and trying to work out why things don’t make sense, is
one of the oddest and least satisfying forty-five minutes you will ever spend.
Most fans I know never stuck it out to the end and it was only when trying to
explain what really did happen at the end I realised that it wasn’t just the
way this story was filmed that made it incomprehensible – it’s a story that
would have made very little sense had they shot it normally. It’s (spoilers)
all a big fat ruse by the monster to tell a ‘story’, one which he’s broadcast
to the universe to take us over (presumably The Doctor foils that plot too, but
we never see it).
Things become slightly
clearer when you learn that it was Mark Gatiss story. Before ‘The Unquiet Dead’
was broadcast everyone assumed that Gatiss work for the series would be just
like his other work for Dr Who before the show came back, something best summed
up by two words ‘gothic horror’. His love of Dickens led to him getting the
‘historical’ slot though and the success of that story meant that showrunners
liked handing him similar stories to write. After a half-go with ‘Night Terrors’ (a story that feels
intended to be creepy but is more unsettling than anything else) this is Gatiss
truly unleashed. Only rather than do the sort of ‘gothic horror’ that Dr Who
used to do that was very much of its era (talking stones, vampires, basically
most things from 1978-79 that doesn’t involve a giant squid) ‘Sleep No More’ is
Dr Who doing an almost contemporary horror, making use of all the things
television have done in the field since Dr Who was taken off air in 1989.
Lumbering monsters are out and existential psychological surreal horror is in,
with a story that leans heavily on ‘The Blair Witch Project’ and ‘The Ring’,
with found footage that, although fictional, is delivered in such a way as if
it’s real. Horror used to be scary because you identified with the people it
was happening to, though more recently horror has become interactive, so that
you watch things happen to other people and are then told that it can happen to
you next now you’ve seen it. ‘Sleep’ borrows from the head-cams of the former
and the ‘watch the cursed videotape back and you’ll die’ of the latter, though
both really have their origins in an unlikely source: the board game
‘Atmosfear’ that was played against a videotape that randomly spoke to you at
different moments as if it was in the room with you.
It makes sense on paper,
but when those ideas are transferred to screen you start to see where the
problems arise: like most TV fiction Dr Who doesn’t have a narrator. With a few
exceptions (some clumsy unnecessary voiceovers
and Elton in ‘Love and Monsters’) it’s
a series we ‘oversee’ and ‘overhear’, as if it’s being sent to us through
something or someone (my guess is the Tardis, beamed through the memories of
The Doctor and companions. Though it doesn’t explain why we see bits between
supporting cast who have never been in the Tardis mostly it’s an unspoken rule
that we should never ever mention how we ‘experience’ this series because if we
do the nexus quantum point of the universe will explode and we’ll remember we’re
only watching a TV series. The deal with Dr Who and indeed most scifi is that
it’s scientifically based and plausible, a view of the future (or in some cases
past) that could happen and might be happening in secret right now but hasn’t
necessarily happened yet. Dr Who is by its nature a super experimental series
(the most experimental on TV?) which is precisely what’s allowed it to change
and ‘regenerate’, updating itself with each successive generation so that it
never gets old. However there are a few rules which should never be broken and
the biggest of those is the way the series is told, with making it ‘real’ the
moment when – ironically enough – we realise that it isn’t and could never be
real and stop watching. Having a story that we’re shown by someone else breaks
that convention by making it ‘fact’ in a way scifi isn’t meant to be. This story might have worked if this was an alien
race beaming to us in the present day at the exact same time the story is on
(in the same way the transmission of Dr Who in America got hacked by teenagers
with nothing better to do in the 1980s, see ‘The
Horror Of Fang Rock’ for more), but the script keeps emphasising how we’re
in the 38th century (and how these characters are presumably human).
How can it be ‘found’ footage broadcast in 2015? ‘Sleep No More’ only works if
you disregard the traditions of 52 years’ worth of stories and accept that
you’re now watching a ‘broadcast’ from some alien in the future, which just
happens to be broadcast at the same Saturday teatime slot as your favourite
scifi programme. If you can break those rules then it’s a clever ending, wholly
different to anything we’ve had before – but with most of us those unspoken
rules are so ingrained we can’t (which is why two of the most controversial
moments of Who old and new are the first Doctor saying ‘incidentally a happy
Christmas to those of you at home’ in ‘The
Dalek’s Masterplan’ and The 15th Doctor and Belinda chatting to
their own fans in ‘Lux’). Newbie fans, who
hadn’t seen enough Dr Who to know that it worked differently, saw it as part of
a series that experimented every week with something and liked it a lot better
than, well, ‘us’ ( I’ll assume for the moment that if you’ve bought a book on
the subject and got to here that you are one of ‘us’, but you might not be –
hello whoever you are. Darn it, now ‘Sleep No More’ has got me breaking the
fourth wall, almost as cardinal sin for a reviewer as a scifi series).
While I’m doing that, a
few words about the ‘other’ main plot and my relationship to it. At the heart
of this story is the very clever and worryingly plausible idea of ‘Morpheus’ pods,
a capitalist solution to ‘productivity’ because if you have a super powered
sleep for five minutes a day then you can work for the other twenty-three hour
and fifty-five minutes. It’s the sort of Dr Who idea that’s clearly an
exaggeration of the truth, perhaps the ultimate version of taking something
‘ordinary’ and routine as sleep and making it ‘extraordinary’ but not by so
much you can’t see it happening, one so plausible you hope certain world
leaders didn’t watch this series to get ideas. It’s a clever original warped
vision of the future to be filed under the ‘pay for your own oxygen’ and ‘earn
more credits to pay for your own funeral so you’ll always be in debt’ stories
Dr Who had done in the past (‘Oxygen’
and ‘The Sunmakers’
respectively). The idea of being pushed
to productivity to the point where your body is broken beyond repair and you
turn into a lumbering, stumbling zombie really hits home personally too because
that’s virtually what happened to me. I got sick with m.e. around the time when
the 10th Doctor started travelling with Martha precisely because I
pushed my body so hard it wasn’t able to repair itself in my sleep properly.
This is why I stay at home writing lots of lengthy books in my pyjamas, because
my body still needs multiple naps a day even this many years on and unless
there’s a job as a bed tester with flexible hours going somewhere there’s not a
lot else I can do – no employer would have me when even I can’t predict my own
schedule or when my own ‘monster’ is about to eat me). Seeing an alien caused
by a lack of proper refreshing sleep, that gets into the corner of your eye
from the ‘sleep’ that builds up there, might seem like the silliest monster
ever to most fans (and the appearance doesn’t help: he looks more like a
bogeyman made of bogeys than the actual bogeyman from ‘Space Babies’ weirdly). But it scared
the living daylights out of me because if any monster was going to eat my soul
in real life it’s this one: it virtually already had. There’s no monster
scarier than one that can control your body and defeat your will and, boy, did
I know about that. Gatiss doesn’t have m.e. but he did have insomnia and was
really struggling to keep up with his workload and think straight because of
it. The two plot strands were actually written at different times during two
different bouts of insomnia: one in 2010 when Gatiss began hallucinating an
idea bout ‘found footage’ and another in 2014 that made him think of sleep
deprivation monsters, only realising once he was more awake and recovered that
they sort of belonged together.
The key phrase there is
‘sort of’ though because ‘Sleep No More’ still feels as if it was written
through sleep deprivation and hasn’t quite fitted together properly. The big
plothole at the heart of this story is why the sandman monster wants to take
over people at all. It would make sense if it wants to live and infect one
individual properly but why does it need everybody? How can it possibly have
stayed alive all this time when all it had to go on is the corner of our eyes
that fill with mucus and grit (technical term ‘rheum’, so the monster should be
a ‘rheumboid’) while we sleep? How would an entire race survive like that –
when do they ever get to mate, to change bodies and infect others? Is it
encoded in part of our genetic code so that every human carries it from the
cradle to the grave unwittingly? In which case why does it need to do to such
lengths as presenting itself on film to infect ‘us’ at home? And how can it
possibly ‘be’ a camera, using the grit left behind in people’s eyes when
they’ve been in the sleep pod to film everything? For all that the monster
walks when it’s whole – and even talks if the weird ‘infected’ ending is
anything to go by – it’s not treated elsewhere in the story as if it’s
sentient, just an animal doing the Dr Who thing of trying to live the best way
it can without thought. While admittedly I’ve seen plenty of TV shows in my
time that look as if they were filmed by unthinking zombies, what link does
that have to anything? My guess is that Gatiss started off thinking more about
the sort of society that would want people to be so productive and likened it
to the sort of companies now that install CCTV cameras to check how many times
their staff go on bathroom breaks, but then the sleep deprivation kicked in and
he forgot where that part was meant to fit in. It’s all a bit of a muddle.
My other guess is that
Gatiss had another of his TV productions in mind that he both wrote and starred
in: the rather good 2007 adaptation of Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s book ‘The Worst
Journey In the World’ (Pertwee producer Barry Letts was lured out of retirement
to do the voiceover). One of the survivors of Scott’s doomed 1912 expedition to
the Antarctic, he was the junior on the expedition team who was left behind at
base camp when Scott, Wilson, Bowers, Evans and Oates went on the last march
towards the pole itself. Garrard’s account is a big part of the legend, one of
the first stories ‘told’ in this sort of way, as he wrote from his diaries in
the first person retrospectively ‘as it happened’, with supposition for what
happened in the missing bits he doesn’t know based on the characters of his
friends and their scribbled incomplete diary entries. It’s quite the tale:
Cherry was clearly suffering what nowadays psychologists would call PTSD,
haunted by the fact that he couldn’t save his friend (they died in a blizzard
really close to camp and could have been saved, if only everyone had known
where they were – but of course in those days technology meant they could have
been anywhere out there). He writes the story in what’s actually a very
doom-laden horror type way: it helps that the reader almost certainly knows (or
at least knew at the time) what the outcome would be, so they share his sense
of dread foreboding in every little detail. Sleep, too, is the enemy: Scott and
friends died from hypothermia in their sleep, too lacking in energy after days
of cut rations to have the energy to wake up. ‘Sleep No More’ is written to
much the same formula, only with headcams as the modern equivalent of diary
entries, while Gatiss even has a scene set in the laboratory’s cold storage
room’, in a desperate attempt to lock the monster out (in the hope that cold
will keep everyone awake). The docu-drama was well received, praised for its
accuracy and feel as the ‘real time’ made it involving (with Gatiss rightly
getting special praise for his performance as Cherry, who understands what few
interpreters do: that the young explorer found the expedition a rather mystical
almost religious experience rather than a physically terrifying ordeal). You
can see why Gatiss would want to re-create that. But of course we know that,
however much artistic license goes on, Captain Scott’s story is a true one that
happened more or less like this and we’re seeing a re-creation; we don’t know
that with ‘Sleep No More’.
Sometimes when Dr Who
comes up with good ideas like this that don’t quite tally it can still result
in some really strong stories: plotwise ‘The
Daemons’, for instance, is an utter mess, yet somehow it still just about
hangs together because you’re so wrapped up in the characters and the threat you
don’t stop to think about it. The ‘horror around every corner in a dark space
station’ means that shot for shot a lot of this looks like ‘The Ark In Space’
but dafter (and when a story with a ten foot alien wasp is the more credible
you know something’s gone wrong). But those stories were so involving you
didn’t care what the plot was: you wanted to see how The Doctor would defeat
the monster and whether the people you cared for survive. There’s none of that
in this episode, as it’s just too much effort to work out what’s going on.
‘Sleep No More’ goes to sleep on the basic of storytelling too. You don’t feel
for any of these characters or feel as if you know them, so you’re not all that
fussed when nasty things start to happen to them. We don’t even properly know
what it is this laboratory crew are up to and they’re surely the most
un-curious accepting bunch of scientists in Dr Who. They accept the sleep pod (clearly
not named by a scientists: it’s named ‘Morpheus’ after the ‘God of dreams’
rather than sleep pod 2.750 or something. By coincidence one of Jenna Coleman’s
future acting jobs was in the 2022 film ‘The Sandman’ where she meets Morpheus,
the baddy) at face value for the most part because they’re told it’s good for
them (with some delayed but entertaining exposition from a computer hologram,
played by series producer Nikki Wilson in her only on-screen role to date: the
cast actor dropped out before readthrough so she took the part over and
everyone agreed they wouldn’t find anyone better. She’s arguably the best thing
in it), even though it blatantly isn’t. They laugh at the ‘rip van wrinkles’ in
their society who are too sceptical to try it, even though it’s in a
scientist’s job description to be sceptical of everything until it’s been
rigorously tested. Gatiss is too interested in the horror aspect to give us a
proper nuts and bolts world: had we learned more about why society was failing
in this era, why everyone had been pushed to be more productive (say, to help
the human race recover from multiple Dalek invasions or one of the space
plagues we keep seeing) then we would be able to understand it better. Perhaps
the best line in it is the fact that we got to sleep pods directly from the
sort of stimulants people take to keep them awake, but we never learn more of
how we got from A in our time to B in this time, even though there’s lots of
room to tell that story and an audience who would have understood it. After
all, this story (at least as originally imagined by Gatiss) came from deep in
the heart of the ‘credit crunch’ when everyone’s savings had suddenly collapsed
and we were facing mass unemployment. We would have ‘got’ this story instantly
if we’d been told more about a society that ,mirrored ours. But Gatiss just wants
us to accept at face value without question that it’s bad because capitalism is
bad. I approve of the surreal dreamlike state of this episode, which fits the
idea of dreams at least as an unquantifiable unknown, with scientists at odds
over why we do it (to ‘switch’ our bodies off while they repair? To work like a
battery on charge to re-energise us? To rehearse things that might happen to us
for real? As a chance for our subconscious to break through and give us
earnings?) but to do that properly you need to fully root the settings in the
real world. There’s just one too many surrealistic layers going on here.
Another element that
doesn’t really come together and contradicts other Who stories is Gatiss’
vision of the Earth’s future. He figured that it must surely have been hit by a
solar flare sometime in the next seventeen centuries (why? They’re not exactly
common. At most we had one billions of years ago when the dinosaurs died up but
that’s only one theory – and besides everyone knows it was Adric in
‘Earthshock’!) so has the Earth’s notoriously slow-moving tectonic plates
moving like the clappers as a side effect. Most of the culture we see in this
story is ‘Indo-Japanese’, Gatiss wondering out loud if the two continents and
their cultures might have merged together, even though in reality if the plates
had moved that fast the few straggling humans who’d survived the earthquakes
and floods would be back living in caves, unable to venture out even to the
edges of the continent, not orbiting Jupiter.
Gatiss doesn’t make a big thing of it, it’s just a background detail,
which is a shame: we need to know more about how this would have affected the
Earth and how this country (countries?) became enough of a super-power to send
people into space. In the end it’s not as if you can see any of it anyway with
the set in the dark and it doesn’t help sell this idea that the main part is
played by an obvious Caucasian European.
Though there are other characters (‘474’ is played by Bethany Black, Dr Who’s first trans actress, not that it’s obvious with so much of this story more like an audio play) the story mostly centres around one man, Gagan Rassmussen. Gatis wrote the part from the first for a big mate of his and the first person he’d met who was obsessed with Dr Who himself, Reece Shearsmith, who fans would have already recognised from Gatiss Doc-Who drama ‘An Adventure In Space And Time’, his masterpiece, where Shearsmith played Patrick Troughton). The actor had been pleading for a role in the series proper for some time, but given the pair’s close connections it was feared that it would look like a reunion for ‘The League Of Gentlemen’ more than Dr Who. Gatiss worked hard to write a very different sort of role for his pal than any in the series, one where rather than winking at the camera in a smug knowing way Shearsmith was helpless and hopeless (at least until the surprise ending). But the trouble is we can’t quite forget that we’re used to seeing this actor and indeed Gatiss with another level of irony above what we’re watching. It’s all part of that early 2000s post-modern trend for programmes that knew that we knew that they knew they were taking the mickey that are incomprehensible if you’re not in on the joke (‘The Office’, all of Al Murray’s work and the Tom Baker narrated ‘Little Britain’ are all part of this trend, with the David Tennant-narrated W1A coming a little after). Our brains have been too hardwired to see him any other way. So to have an actor breaking the fourth wall to us, in a story told in jumpcuts, means you automatically don’t trust this narration from the first, so the ‘shock ending’ when Shearsmith is really an alien isn’t actually as much of a shock as its clearly meant to be. You’re meant to be shocked that Rassmussen even survives at the end, given that he dies roughly two-thirds of the way through, but they blew that by having the character talk to us in retrospect from the beginning (in Dr Who that means one of only three things: he was only pretending to be dead, he’s possessed by something that’s kept him alive or we’re in a Missy-led artificial afterlife; see ‘Dark Water’). Also if the sandman grows off humans who don’t sleep and gets bigger every time then presumably at one time there was a small ball of mucus running around knee-high to an Adipose. Why didn’t anyone simply pick that up in one hand and stick it in the waste-disposal or something? It feels as if the whole of ‘Sleep No More’ is vamping, padded with running around in the dark while the author whispers ‘wait for the good bits, this’ll be so worth it!’ But we’ve already guessed them. That leaves us with characters we don’t really know stumbling around in the dark while a monster that looks weird is glimpsed in the shadows. They might have gotten away with this for an episode in the days when Dr Who was twenty-five minutes long, but forty-five minutes of this is just boring.
It might still have
worked had the story concentrated on the 12th Doctor and Clara and
followed them around as they discovered everything at the same time as we do,
but they don’t seem quite ’right’ either. The jump-cuts in time and the way
they’re introduced as if they’ve just ‘appeared’ from nowhere means you feel
less connected to the regulars than normal, with the way the story has been
shot encouraging us to look at them with ‘new’ eyes throughout. Having them
shot from head-cams rather than the usual cameras, so that you’re looking ‘at’
not ‘with’ them also distorts this story terribly, making them seem like
;outsiders’, while both actors seem more self-conscious being filmed in such an
intimate way and give their most mannered, false performances (after all, both
Peter Capaldi and to a lesser extent Jenna Coleman have been trained to give
performances to the ‘size’ of a camera and how to contain and control their
gestures so they look right for it. To change a style by this much is the same
as handing a watercolour artists a sculpting knife and expecting them to get on
with the same drawing because a 3D object isn’t that different to a 2D one). It
doesn’t help that Gatiss never quite gets this pair: like ‘Cold War’ to come they just don’t sound like
‘our’ Doctor and Clara, arguing like a tired teacher and his wayward naughty
pupil rather than the sibling teasing banter we’re used to. Traditionally Clara
is the only person who can see past this Doctor’s grumpy curmudgeon veneer to
the scared little boy behind it all (it helps that she knew the 11th
Doctor first: Bill never gets to see this side of him, though admittedly he’s
mellowed a bit by series ten). She’s also safe to explore and be ‘like’ The
Doctor taking foolhardy risks happy in the knowledge that he’ll rescue her
(something that will lead directly to her exit starting with next story ‘Face The Raven’, a story that only works if
you believe in their unbreakable bond of trust, despite all the many times
Clara has broken it more than any other companion and this Doctor more than
usual). Usually The Doctor secretly admires this aspect of Clara too. But not
today: she gets sucked into a sleep pod by pure accident and he seems to blame
her for it, staying grumpy for most of the episode, while their banter has an
edge we only saw when Clara had lost Danny and was grieving, at war with
everyone not just him. It feels wrong somehow and while they make it up the
strange the way the story’s structured means we never ‘see’ the moment they
come to trust each other again.
The ending especially
doesn’t quite work. The Sandman beast is distracted by, of all things, the
‘Sandman’ tune played on the pod, a song based on a European folklore about a
benevolent being who sprinkles dust in your eyes against your will to send you
to sleep. Why is it there? If fuel is at such a premium they’ve switches the
lights out they certainly don’t need a hologram playing every time someone uses
one (we’re in a big building so presumably there ought to be a big crew to go
with it under normal non-threatening circumstances: is it really running every
few minutes? Can’t they mute it?) The sandman too must surely know about the
hologram if it really has been using everyone’s eyes as cameras: the idea it
would be distracted by something that effectively gives it life is a
nonsense. In truth that song is there
because Gatiss always found it creepy, the idea of a being from another world
coming to throw sand in your face and send you to sleep, together with the sort
of so-innocent-sounding-it’s -creepy earworm feel to it that only the 1950s
could provide. But the Sandman clearly isn’t the being in the song: he’s
benign, kind even, promising sweet dreams to all. And it’s not really that
creepy to anyone but Gatiss (who seems to have a quirky phobia about supposedly
sweet and innocent things that don’t affect anyone else the same way – it’s the
peg dolls in ‘Night Terrors’ all
over again), just weird and out of place. Then the Doctor and Clara simply
leave, breaking a habit that’s lasted more or less unbroken since ‘The Aztecs’
back in 1964: he never leaves a threat and simply runs away ever. Admittedly at
the time he thinks there’s no one else to save, but even that doesn’t normally
stop him because of what might happen if someone innocently stumbles on the
monster (see ‘Tomb Of The Cybermen’ and ‘Fang Rock’ again for examples of him going
above and beyond to a largely empty set). This is a rare story where The Doctor
effectively ‘loses’ and the Sandman beast ‘wins’. Only that shock ending
doesn’t really work either: we know he doesn’t win because those of us at home
watching didn’t turn into zombies (although I did have to pinch myself in my m.e.
fog a second just to make sure) and then you remember, oh yes, it’s just a bit
of telly isn’t it? Dr Who isn’t real. Which is so unlike the experience of
watching practically every other episode ’Dr Who could be real and happening
out there somewhere…exciting’) that it just feels wrong. Even Clara (who
doesn’t know that Rassmussen has survived) comments on how this story doesn’t
make any sense, something most viewers at home are nodding their heads to. We
don’t even get any ‘proper’ credits –
just a bunch of words that form the words ‘Dr Who’ – with the usual sort of
‘writer/producer/director’ credits moved to the final credits for the only time
in modern Who history (something that helps the illusion of this being a
‘separate’ story better than anything else inside it, though the effect is
rather ruined by the ‘flash-forward’ to next week’s raven spotting).
Unlike some other stories
down the bottom of the rankings ‘Sleep’ isn’t one of those stories where you
wonder what were they thinking because there was nothing in there that worked
at all. Had we had a ‘different’ story put together using found footage, one
that followed rather than broke the conventions of how Dr Who ‘works’, then
this could yet have been a great story. The idea of sleep pods, too, is dying
out to be explored fully as part of a fully three-dimensional society that
built them rather than pretty much the only thing we learn about it. There’s
not one but two great ideas at the heart of this story, both brave choices that
deserve applause, but they just don’t work together. The bright ideas, too,
such as the unsettling moments of genuine horror and dread that Gatiss always
does so well, don’t make up for how hard this story is to follow and how
tiresome it is to stay invested in a story that keeps jumping around, is told
throughout on screens or through ‘wobbly’ lo-fi footage (forget the sets: it’s
the cameras that shake this time!) and which refuses to put any lights on
anywhere so you can’t properly see what’s happening anyway (while the monster
looks good in the dark we need to see everything else: if the pods light up
when someone used them, in reaction for going dark inside, that would help a
lot, leading to a proper final glimpse of the monster at the end. Instead it
looks like forty-five minutes of staring at a blank screen with the odd moving
head from time to time). Perhaps they kept the lights down to avoid on set
dressing, because the little we see looks awful (and familiar: this is the
third time we’ve been in Fillcare, a chemical manufacturing plant in Pontyclun:
you can see it with lights on in the finale to ‘The
Curse Of The Black Spot’ and the main battle in ‘A
Good Man Goes To War’). While the ideas behind this story are a dream in many
ways, the sort of inventive thing Dr Who should be doing to stretch it’s legs
in late middle age, actually sitting down to watch this story is a complete
nightmare like no other Who story before or since and is still a jarring
experience on repeat, hard to follow even after I know what happens as if I've
fallen asleep and missed half the plot (gulp...maybe I have and I've been
possessed? And now so have you! Well I did warn you not to read this review heh
heh heh…)
POSITIVES + No other
episode looks like this one. None of them. That’s quite impressive given there
are 334 other stories out there, none of
which have the feel of this story, a complete and utter one off, earning lots
of bonus points for bravery…
Previous ‘The Zygon Invasion/Inversion’ next ’Face The
Raven’
No comments:
Post a Comment