![]() It’s set in the 38th century, on the Le Verrier Space Station, a lab orbiting Neptune. Aside from the found footage angle, it’s also a riff on the haunted house/mad scientist & monsters formula. “This is what happened here,” he tells us at the start. “Sleep No More” purports to exist as an edited collage of events assembled by one Gagan Rassmussen (Reece Shearsmith, who among his many credits counts Patrick Troughton in An Adventure in Space and Time). “Sleep No More” isn’t remotely elegant nor is it particularly poetic. Even “ The Time of the Doctor,” which I all but loathed, had a sort of elegance and poetry about it that ended up warranting two. I’ve never given a Doctor Who episode one star. A 45-minute assault on the senses, the final seven or eight of which remain so indecipherable, Steven Moffat must surely have been in awe of his colleague Mark Gatiss. ![]() “Sleep No More” is as relentlessly unpleasant as any of the footage found in the Black Hills of Burkittsville, Maryland maybe even more so, since it’s a part of our beloved Doctor Who. ![]() Now I’m in a position where I have to write about it, so forgive me any trespasses. The concept of a found-footage anything is messy by design, isn’t it? Admittedly, my experience with such concepts pretty much begins and ends with The Blair Witch Project, a movie so insufferable that it put me off the gimmick ever since. To call it a mess, though, surely misses the point. Proudly billed as Doctor Who’s first “found footage” episode, it seems as if the footage that would’ve made sense of the whole affair ended up on the cutting room floor (yes, a horribly outdated turn of phrase in the digital age). Well, the streak of perfection (or at least near perfection) had to end sooner or later, didn’t it? Season nine had been charging forward like some kind of long form narrative Roadrunner, and with “Sleep No More” it has smashed into one of Wile E. Rassmussen could easily have been speaking about “Sleep No More” itself with that very first line of the episode. Gagan Rassmussen: “You must not watch this! I’m warning you. Photo: Simon Ridgway/BBC/BBC Worldwide 2015 Picture shows: Peter Capaldi as the Doctor
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