The second time we cut to something that could only be from Clara’s POV, despite her not wearing a helmet, it was clear there was something else going on. It keeps us from getting too good a look at the creepy, shambling, big-mouthed Sandmen - who are definitely not Space Pirates, or Space Hats - and those clichéd genre details, like Rassmussen explaining the video we’re about to watch, pay off in somewhat surprising ways. Yet I’ll say this in defense of “Sleep No More”: the found-footage gambit manages to slightly improve a fairly paint-by-numbers story, at least tonally. They seem to only exist to 1) give Clara something new to get righteously indignant about in the use of the clone-grown, dim-witted “Grunt,” and 2) provide the red herring of the helmet cams - and by the time the Doctor realizes they’re not actually wearing any, half of them are already dead. Unfortunately, none of them get fleshed out beyond a name and general role, and most have no direct affect on the plot at all. In fact, if you removed the “rescue crew” from the episode entirely, I don’t think anything would change about the result. Sandman” (why everything about the Morpheus interface has a kitschy 1950s vibe goes unexplained.) It’s also the 38th Century, when the world is apparently run by Indo-Chinese corporations, which gives the show a convenient opportunity to select an intentionally diverse supporting cast. This week, Gatiss’s big idea is the “Morpheus Pod,” a semi-sentient sleeping capsule that allows users to catch up on a full night’s sleep in about five minutes, or the length of the The Chordettes’ “Mr. (On the one hand, “Blink”! On the other… “Love and Monsters.”) Limiting our perspective to the helmet-cams and surveillance-cams keeps our heroes at arm’s length, and actually gives a real sense of what it must be like to be around them.Īs with so many “base under siege” episodes, we’re quickly introduced to a handful of cannon fodder characters and some wacky concepts. I particularly enjoyed getting to see the Doctor and Clara as the weirdos they are, wandering into someone else’s story. Nearly every Who episode is told - though not quite so literally - from the Doctor and his companion’s point of view, and breaking out of that formula has had mixed results. Once you accept that this Rassmussen character has had the time to actually edit it all together, we get to see the events entirely from their perspectives, and Molotnikov does a nice job of building the tension in the first 20 minutes. “Sleep No More” neatly solves that - at least at the outset - by relying on what we assume are the helmet cameras of the security force, as well as apparent CCTV footage on the base. Often the director will have to bend over backwards to put their camera in position to get “the shot,” and the writer will go into all sorts of contortions to justify their character continuing to film despite the fact that it’d be much smarter to drop the thing and run. One of the big problems with found-footage films is plain consistency. It’s all in the execution: who’s doing the filming, and why? How would Gatiss and director Justin Molotnikov plausibly graft a documentary structure onto the show’s standard “get chased down a hallway by monsters” formula? The answers, which get revealed in a series of twists, are at first obvious, than half-clever, than just plain strange. So when I heard that Who was taking on the genre in a Mark Gattis-penned script, I was intrigued, but wary. Night Shyamalan’s The Visit is probably one of the worst examples in recent memory. I’d put 2012’s Chronicle at the positive end of the spectrum, which used its cameraman’s telekinetic powers to cool effect aside from the ever-diminishing returns of the Paranormal Activity films, M. They generate cheap thrills cheaply, and only rarely does the storytelling actually justify the approach. While I’m the first to applaud Who experimenting with new things and taking structural risks (what else can you do after fifty years?), I’ve always felt the “found-footage” genre was just lazy filmmaking. Doctor Who’s first “found-footage” episode is as unmemorable as the movies it’s aping.
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