Sleep No More (Doctor Who 9.9)

[unfeathered]

Well, that was different. I think I'd have enjoyed it a hell of a lot more without all the handheld camerawork, which I can't stand, even if I can appreciate the reason for it in this one. Unfortunately it not only kept taking me out of the story but it made it very hard to see what was going on at times. For instance, I didn't get that the professor was supposed to have died, so when he turned up again on camera saying "I'm not dead" I was all wtf???

However. It was certainly a very clever episode, with lots and lots to think about. Lots of nice depth to the characters, even though this wasn't a two-parter.

I wish I could figure out how the sleep dust monsters worked though. It bugs me when monsters don't make sense (all too often under Moffatt, it seems)!

Peter Capaldi was awesome as always. I really, really love his Doctor.

And next week we're off to Diagon Alley, apparently???

Comments

[travels_in_time]

The characters are becoming self-aware...even the Doctor said that this story didn't make sense. :)

Yeah, I missed him dying too! He just stopped showing up, and I was like, "...where did he go?" and then they said, "We saw you die." I don't know, maybe I dozed off during that part.

TinyTimelet asked if it was Diagon Alley also. :)

[unfeathered]

Ha! At least I wasn't the only one (both re. Diagon Alley and the professor dying)!

The story not making sense was at least explained by the professor having engineered the whole thing in order to give his audience some thrills to make them keep watching - even if it was frustrating to those of us who like things to make sense. But at least in the end it made sense that it didn't make sense, if you see what I mean...? *g*

[travels_in_time]

Okay, I re-watched, and I caught the professor "dying" this time. Like everything else, it wasn't explicit and it was all in the dark, but when the gravity shields failed and the sleep monsters broke into where they were, it looked like one of them got him. At the beginning he said there were bits missing from the footage, and I thought maybe his death was one of them (for obvious reasons), but now I don't know. What happens when you get eaten by a sleep monster? Did the rest of them see him devoured, and if so, how? Did they just see a "dead" body? Did nobody think to check to make sure he was dead, or to try to go back to rescue him if he wasn't? So much that didn't make sense...

And not only in the editing of the story, but in the characters themselves. So, given that it's the 38th century and editing technology must be super-advanced, did any of that really happen at all? Or was ALL of it just created by Rassmussen, using characters that we would be interested in?

WAS IT FANFICTION?

[unfeathered]

Wow, you're brave (or dedicated?) watching it again! Thanks for doing that for me so I don't have to. And yeah, I was wondering what happened to all the bodies. I think the supposition was that they all decayed into dust and formed more sleep monsters...?

I think I read somewhere that it was sort of supposed to be fanfic. Which is an interesting concept, but not enough to redeem the episode, really. :-(