Story 260: Sleep No More

 

In which the Doctor and Clara arrive on the Le Verrier space station, in orbit around the planet Neptune in the 38th Century.

The station is also being visited by a military squad from a settlement on Neptune's moon Triton - come to investigate why communications have suddenly been cut off. In command is a woman named Nagata, and her squad includes Deep-Ando, Chopra and 474, a genetically engineered "grunt" trooper. They find the station seemingly deserted, with the emergency lighting operating. They then locate the Doctor and Clara. He uses his psychic paper to assure the soldiers that they are engineers who are here legitimately.

As they all explore they come across two strange creatures which attack them.

Deep-Ando gets separated from the others, who are surprised to find that the creatures appear to be made of a dust-like substance.

Deep-Ando is killed by them. The Doctor, Clara and the other soldiers find themselves in a laboratory containing some Morpheus pods. These units allow their user to have compressed sleep - getting all the physical and mental benefits of a good night's sleep in a matter of minutes. These were introduced to increase productivity and not everyone agrees with them. Chopra, for instance, refuses to use them. When operated, small holographic singers appear singing the 1950's song Mr Sandman. 

One of the pods is found to be in use, and when it is opened they discover a man named Gagan Rassmussen hiding within.

He is the station's senior scientist, and was the inventor of the Morpheus system.

The Doctor has worked out what the creatures are, and Rassmussen is to blame. They are composed of microscopic parts shed from the human body - skin cells, hair and mucus, specifically eye mucus. They are made of "sleep" - the discharge found in the eye on waking. Somehow the Morpheus process has rapidly evolved them into carnivorous creatures which have consumed the rest of the crew. Nagata tells the Doctor that the pods are used on Triton and nothing like this has ever been encountered, and the Doctor advises that Rassmussen has adapted Morpheus in some way.

The creatures attack once again and they all flee. They seek refuge in a kitchen but Chopra and 474 are separated from the rest. 

Suddenly the station lurches and the Doctor realises that it must be moving out of orbit - sabotaged by the rapidly evolving creatures. Meanwhile, a Morpheus pod is being transported automatically through the corridors towards the docking bay and Nagata's ship.

Rassmussen is next to be killed, and 474 is left fatally wounded when a fire breaks out. They sacrifice themself to help Chopra escape, but he runs into the creatures and is also killed.

The Doctor discovers that the CCTV images they have been seeing cannot be coming from the cameras of the soldiers - as they don't have any. The pods reprogramme their user's brain to turn them into the eyes and ears of the otherwise blind creatures, which Clara has dubbed "Sandmen".

The pod has been transported to the spaceship. On seeing some recorded messages from Rassmussen, the Doctor realises that his death has been faked. The scientist reappears and tells them that he was allowed to live if he helped the Sandmen travel down to Triton to feed on its population. The pod which has ben brought to the ship contains the original Sandman - their "king".

It is destroyed when the Doctor sabotages the gravity field - causing it and the rest of its kind to crumble to dust. He and Clara then take Nagata to the TARDIS as the station will break up as it enters Neptune's atmosphere. Rassmussen is revealed to have been a Sandman impersonating the scientist. Anyone watching his recordings will have become infected with their spores...

Sleep No More was written by Mark Gatiss, and was first broadcast on Saturday 14th November, 2015.

He claimed it owed its origins to a bout of insomnia. He developed a story which was to be a two-parter, as Steven Moffat was looking for these for this series. There would be conflict between two factions - one which used sleep technology ("Wideys" - for Wide Awakes) and one which didn't ("Rips" - for Rip Van Winkles).

Moffat decided that the "found footage" format simply couldn't be sustained over two episodes. (It had been unsustainable in all of its cinema outings, as people simply wouldn't be filming the events they are confronted with in these films).

Doctor Who had never used the "found footage" technique before - mainly because it was already regarded as old-fashioned and unoriginal many years previously, and tended to be used nowadays only for the cheapest of productions.

Gatiss had originally intended The Idiot's Lantern to revolve around a Rock 'n' Roll song, rather than TV pictures, and this image stuck with him and finally emerged here with the catchy song Mr Sandman being indirectly connected with the creation of the creatures which Clara names after the title. The song had been popularised by The Chordettes in 1954.

As well as the outdated "found footage" format, it was decided to play around with the normal episode structure. It is the only story which does not have an opening titles sequence - the letters making up Doctor Who appearing within an alpha-numerical code which flashed across the screen following Rassmussen's opening address to camera. This code also contains the names of all the episode's characters, including Clara.

The episode might not have been so bad if it had featured a more satisfying ending. It isn't terribly clear what is going on - even the Doctor is confused - and the trick ending is even less original that the "found footage" style. Having the Doctor's final line of an episode "None of this makes any sense..." is probably asking for trouble.

The guest cast is led by the last of the League of Gentlemen performers to feature in the series - Reece Shearsmith. Gatiss had been involved ever since the revival in 2005, and Steve Pemberton had appeared in Silence in the Library / Forest of the Dead in 2008. The part of Rassmussen was written especially for Shearsmith.

Nagata is played by Elaine Tan, who had recently broken into US TV series, such as Hawaii 5-0, Person of Interest and CSI: Crime Scene Investigation. Deep-Ando is Paul Courtney Hyu, and Chopra is Neet Mohan, who later became a regular on Casualty.

Bethany Black, who has the thankless task of performing the monosyllabic 474 is the first openly transgender actor to have appeared in the series. She also appeared in Russell T Davies' Cucumber / Banana.

The diversity of the cast is explained in the story as there having been some great cataclysm on Earth, and India and Japan have been pushed tectonically together and have become a major power bloc. Gatiss had visited both countries whilst he was putting this story together.

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Overall, a pretty dreadful story. Doctor Who embraces the "found footage" gimmick 16 years after it was popularised in The Blair Witch Project. In the interim it had become infamous for its use by lazy, unimaginative film-makers. Having an incomprehensible plot doesn't help, and the ending is a joke - just not a funny one.

Things you might like to know:

• A working title for the story was 'The Arms of Morpheus' - from the phrase "to be deep in the arms of Morpheus" meaning to be fast asleep. Morpheus was the god of sleep, according to Ovid's Metamorphoses.
• This episode was recorded in between Heaven Sent and Hell Bent.
• The title derives from Macbeth Act II, Scene 2 - "Macbeth shall sleep no more...". Both Shakespeare and the Scottish Play are mentioned in dialogue.
• Urbain Le Verrier (1811 - 1877) was a French astronomer and mathematician who in 1845 predicted the existence of the planet Neptune purely by calculation. It was not visually confirmed until the following year by an observatory in Berlin.
• Gatiss had hoped to write a sequel to this, but went for Ice warriors instead - no doubt following the universally negative reviews for this story. 
• At one point the Doctor and company hide in a cold storage room. This was something Gatiss had intended for a Sherlock episode, but couldn't fit in in. He recalled filming in such a unit when he played polar explorer Apsley Cherry-Garrard in a TV adaptation of his book The Worst Journey in the World. (He was no doubt aware that Cherry-Garrard had previously been played by Doctor Who producer Barry Letts in the 1948 Ealing production of Scott of the Antarctic).
• The 'Great Cataclysm' which joins India to Japan was inspired by an event mentioned by Turlough in Frontios.
• The Doctor objects to people putting the word "space" in front of things to make them sound futuristic. Doctor Who itself is often guilty of this - some writers worse than others. Planet of the Daleks alone mentions "space garbage" and "space medicine".
• The Doctor also objects to Clara naming the creatures as 'Sandmen', referencing the Silurian misnomer debate (See What's Wrong With... The Silurians elsewhere on this blog).