Nov 17, 2015 19:10
"Sleep No More", as any very experimental episode of Doctor Who, has proven to be very divisive for the fanbase. Some people loved it, and others are hailing it as the worst thing ever to be produced. Which is wonderful. There is nothing Whovians love better than fighting one another, and it is always good to be reminded that we all have wildly different tastes from one another, and that "everyone" caps out at about 30%.
"Sleep No More" takes the format of a found footage documentary or testimonial. What we are watching is therefore not an episode of Doctor Who, per se, but rather a video internal to the Doctor Who universe, assembled and masterminded by Dr. Gagan Rassmussen, the last survivor of the Le Verrier space station in orbit around Triton. It doesn't even use the regular title sequence per se - just a scrolling code title card in the style of older stories like "the War Games" or "Inferno." The whole conceit is really incredibly cool. I love it when this show switches up the format, and this style is both effective at conveying horror (see also, the Blair Witch Project, Diary of the Dead, and the spanish zombie masterpiece R.E.C.) and lends itself very well for setting up an Unreliable Narrator, which is always fun. We are used to trusting what we see on the screen or read on the page implicitly - but we also know that how information is presented can color it significantly: Manufacturing Consent, as Noam Chomsky phrases it. The whole narrative of the episode is manufactured by a madman, and done just well enough that it lures us into a false sense of security, and just poorly enough that when you poke it with a stick the sand starts to fall out. Rather than being full of holes, the genius of this episode is that everything that doesn't make sense is on purpose, clues to the audience (and the Doctor) before the big reveal that the entire episode is a lie.
That I think is the most important thing. There's an underlying joke, as it were, and if you don't get the joke the episode just comes off as unbelievably bad. It's a major bait and switch - we are told that this is a survival horror story about a plague of sand monsters about to be released on an unsuspecting planet. But it's actually a story about one man trying to make a viral video, and doing a sufficient but imperfect job of it. At the end of the day, it's not Blair Witch - it's Cabin in the Woods. The video doesn't document the plot - the video is the plot, and we as the audience are participants and victims of it, moreso even than the characters in some ways. All the hackneyed tropes and lucky escapes and artificial drama and too-cheap character development and character death - all of it is a fabrication and a fiction of Rassmussen's, trying to make a more compelling video. Quite literally, he Did It For The Vine. And without that crucial piece of information, nothing in the episode makes any kind of sense.
I think my favorite thing about this one is that Our Heroes never actually figure it out. They get the beginnings of it and a few of the pieces - enough to figure out that Rassmussen is the villain of the piece - but they never quite put it all together. They escape, but the don't stop him or solve the fundamental problem. The monster wins. And the best part is they don't even know it. Now, I like to see the Doctor win as much as anybody, but it's really nice - and, in fact, crucial - to see the Doctor lose every once in a while. And it's refreshing to me to see a story where the Doctor loses that isn't an angsty character-wrecking fall for him. He's been through enough of that already. He doesn't screw this one up through some massive character flaw - he just doesn't figure it out. You win some and you lose some, and Rassmussen did a good enough job of hiding the ball that he just...succeeds. I also like the idea, reminiscent of the very early show, that sometimes just getting out alive is all the success you can hope for. And I like the Doctor being clever, yes, but not knowing everything. Parts of this reminded me strongly of "Journey into Terror," where it is crucial to the plot that they're inside a defunct haunted house, but they never figure it out. We know something the Doctor doesn't - how utterly delightful! Or in this case, utterly terrifying.
The other thing I really appreciate about this episode is the opportunity to see Doctor Who from the outside, as it were. We're used to following the Doctor et alia around and getting things from more or less their perspective. But here, we meet the doomed rescue mission first, get a bit of the world building, and then get to discover the Doctor and Clara with them and from their point of view. I absolutely adore the moment when our heroes are just off-screen arguing about the productivity of Space- compounds and Nagata and company are trying to figure out what to make of two tourists in an otherwise creepy abandoned space station. I also appreciate the discussion of Space- compounds, because I am awfully fond of words (and lexical semantics and syntax and morphology). I also really really love the faces Peter Capaldi keeps making at the non-existent cameras. It nicely inverts the aboutness of the show. In recent history, the show has been very much about the Doctor, and then things and situations happen to him and the folks he's travelling with. In this story though, the Doctor and Clara are the thing that happens to Rassmussen and the rescue mission. And it's delightful.
I talked in my post on the Myrka how it is good and important for the show, at 52 as much as at 21 years, to try new and different things, to push the envelope, to experiment, even if not every experiment is a success. To me, this was a light and slightly silly Halloween episode. To other people it was unadulterated Nightmare Fuel. And to still others it was an unmitigated disaster. But who needs manufactured consent and consensus? Something new has been dared! And we meet it as we always do - with argument, discussion, and a million voices with a million opinions and differences. And that's wonderful. Maybe there will be a sequel which will put misgivings to rest, and maybe there won't be. But we've seen colonies on Triton and learned about Indo-Japan and have Mr. Sandman well and truly stuck in our heads, and the Whoniverse is richer for it.
twelfth doctor era,
i like doctor who