Chris Jordan continues his coverage of Doctor Who Series Nine with Sleep No More, the year's first weak episode.
Sleep No More
is a bit of an odd episode for Doctor Who;
one that is conceptually interesting, and sometimes very effective,
but overall rather flawed and uneven. In a different season it might
be viewed more favorably, but in the hitherto uniformly-excellent
series nine, I regrettably must say that it stands out as the first
weak episode of the bunch. It's still not bad, mind you; it just has
compelling strengths and unfortunate weak points that more or less
evenly balance each other out. The story is a bit silly and more than
a bit underdeveloped, and it certainly suffers from being so far the
first standalone episode in a series of richly-written two-part story
arcs. But on the other hand, it has fantastic atmosphere, some
genuinely tense moments of suspense, and marks a Doctor Who
narrative first: Sleep
No More is the show's attempt at
a found-footage horror story.
 |
| "There's some sort of activity on this space station, Clara. It feels almost paranormal." |
The
found-footage horror elements are what work the best about the
episode. Fear not, we're not talking about handheld shaky-cam; the
whole episode is seen in first-person through the visors of its
soldier characters, and through security cameras around its abandoned
space station setting. This successfully adds a bit of tension and
immediacy to the mystery of the station, and recalls the experience
of playing Dead Space
more than the experience of watching The Blair Witch
Project. Equally fitting to the
Dead Space or Doom
parallels are the genuinely
freaky monsters they encounter. Scenes in which characters are
peering out from a hiding place as the beasts shamble past recall the
iconic first reveal of Pyramid Head in Silent Hill 2.
The narrative experiment is very effective, and could have made for a
truly memorable, one-of-a-kind episode. Too bad the script – one of
Mark Gatiss's weaker ones – lets everything else down.
The
concept at the core of Gatiss's script is intriguing – in a way, a
bit of a follow-up to his excellent Night Terrors
from series six – but the specifics leave much to be desired. The
explanation behind the nature of the monsters is silly at best; a
different angle on the same concept could have worked well, but the
one we get is ridiculous enough that it distracts from their
creepiness. The ensemble cast of soldiers is very underwritten;
they're all basically interchangeable stock characters. After the
great depth given to the team from Under the Lake/Before
the Flood, this is a great
disappointment. The mad scientist type who resides on the creepy
space station is the most interesting of the bunch (though he rather
amusingly comes off as an odd cross between Data from Star
Trek and Telekon-era Gary
Numan), but even he ends up getting very little development and not
much to do.
 |
| "One, two, Freddy's coming for you..." |
Most
disappointing is the total waste of Bethany Black as one of the
soldiers. While the season was in production, much was made about the
casting of Black as the first openly transgender cast member in the
history of Doctor Who.
She was announced quite prominently as a guest-star, and it was
specified that she would not be playing a trans character. This made
me hope that she would be playing, you know, a woman who was some
sort of major presence in her episode. Instead, she gets the
extremely thankless job of playing not only one of the disposable and
underwritten military types, but one who feels almost insulting as a
role for a trans actress. No, she's not a trans character... but
she's a genderless and nameless clone slave-soldier who talks like a
robot with wonky language programming and never gets a chance to
develop into anything more than simply “one of a bunch of clones.”
Don't get me wrong, she's not stuck in some small token role; she's
absolutely one of the episode's main characters. But the episode has
no time for any of its
characters: she gets no more or less development or screen time than
anyone else, but her character is the one who really needed it, and
is hurt by its absence. It seemed like maybe her character would grow
to question this future's cruel and dehumanizing use of clone worker
bees to do its dirty work, but ultimately the script is just too busy
to be bothered. I'm sure the role was written as a gender-neutral
part in which anyone could be cast, not as some stereotyped part for
a trans actress, but casting a transgender woman as an androgynous
faux-human feels insulting, even if the insult was probably just an
unfortunate coincidence. It's made even worse when her attempts at
flirting with another team member are flatly rejected with disdain
and snobbery; the rejection comes from the other character feeling
superior to a clone, not from that character being transphobic, but
it nonetheless leaves a bad taste. Why couldn't she have been cast as
the commander of the squad, or at least a part that wouldn't
accidentally play into stereotypes? This is exact opposite of how
well Sophie Stone's deaf character was handled with
prejudice-smashing strength and grace in Under the
Lake/Before the Flood.
So
there you have it: excellent, suspenseful use of the found-footage
horror concept almost exactly counterbalanced by silly plot points,
underdeveloped characterization, and a role for its much-touted
transgender guest-star that falls somewhere between unfortunate and
offensive. Its redeeming qualities save it from actually being a bad
episode, but Doctor Who can
do so much better, both narratively and in terms of inclusiveness;
indeed, those other episodes earlier this season show exactly where
this one fails and what it should have done differently. This will
most likely be the weak point of series 9. Fortunately the preview
for next week's Gaimanesque fantasy tale looks much better.
Score:
-
Christopher S. Jordan