Still catching up on missed posts, this is number two of the four I need to write today. It would be a little easier if it was an episode I actually wanted to talk about, but as noted historian and philosopher Mick Jagger once pointed out -- you can't always get what you want.

So let's talk about my least favorite episode of Doctor Who.

Sleep No More

(TARDIS Data Core recap)

Back in the early 80's I was a huge fan of the comic book Moon Knight. Still am, actually, Anyway, back in The Day it was one of the first mainstream comics to go the Direct Retailer route, meaning it wasn't sold on the spinners in normal retail channels (that, kids, is how we used to buy our comic books). Instead it could only be gotten via subscription or at specialty comic shops, of which there were very few. I know it's hard to believe in this era of Mega Marvel Movie blockbusters, but there was a time when comic books weren't cool. 

Yes, yes we know. Give it a rest, Eleven.

One of my favorite Moon Knight villains was this guy called Morpheus. As the story goes, Morpheus was this guy who catches a rare virus and then uses an experimental drug to try to cure it. Unfortunately, the drug renders him unable to sleep. The combination of the virus plus the lack of sleep and dreaming turns him into a madman with dream-like psionic powers. It's all very surreal and horrifying and just the best.

Ah, such fond memories. Unlike the Morpheus in today's episode of Doctor Who.

So, first off, this is the show's foray into trying to do the whole "found footage" thing. That is a very problematic genre, which is a kind way of saying that found footage movies are almost universally terrible. The granddaddy of them all, Cannibal Holocaust, actually works because it makes sense how the footage was created and how it was found. On other hand it features extreme violence, including actual torture and killing of real animals, so it's not something I would particularly recommend to most viewers. Then of course there was The Blair Witch Project, which took the world by storm and made just dumpster-loads of money over a miniscule budget. It worked in the moment, but hasn't aged well. Since then there have been a billion imitators, very few of them worth watching.  (Creep is a notable exception, largely because it is very effective at taking all of the individually-innocuous micro-aggressions that women routinely experience at the hands of men, and focuses them on a man instead to force the viewer to genuinely comprehend the issue. Plus, you know, it's a genuinely creepy horror film.) In most cases, however, it makes no sense that the footage exists in the first place, at least at the level of completion and detail necessary to create  a narrative.

Sleep No More tries to explain how its footage exists, and it's garbage. The plot, such as it is, is that our Terrible Corporate Overlords have come up with a technology that condenses a full night's worth of sleep into five minutes, so that workers can get on with generating profit for an extra eight hours per day. That's actually an interesting idea, if it was given more detail and exploration beyond a few "you're exploiting the workers" complaints here and there. In any case, somehow this technology causes the sleep dust in people's eyes to turn into sand monsters that devour everything, and the Doctor and Clara get trapped in the middle. And somehow the dust particles in the air are filming everything. And somehow the evil scientist slash sand monster (spoilers!) has taken that footage and turned it into a move. And somehow that movie itself is going to infect the rest of humanity, like the haunted video tape from The Ring.

Or, as the Doctor puts it before he and Clara just scarper off in the TARDIS without actually solving anything: "It doesn't make sense. None of this makes any sense."

This episode is the only one in the history of the show to have no actual opening credits. There is just this... thing... that appears for a few seconds after the cold open:

Then the episode goes on to waste 45 minutes of my life and make my daydream fondly about Moon Knight and Creep and did I remember to pick up those prescriptions from the pharmacy and have I made those Anniversary dinner reservations yet for next week and holy Christ, thank God this is finally over.

It's taken a year and a half, but Doctor Who has finally made me hate a story more than Planet of Giants. So, umm.... Achievement Unlocked?

STATS:

Doctor(s): Twelfth
Companion(s): Clara Oswald
Episode(s): Sleep No More
Steps Walked: 7,765 today, 3,494,443 total
Distance Walked: 4.22 miles today, 1,827.44 miles total
Push-ups Completed: 0 today, 6,687 total
Sit-ups Completed: 0 today, 1,029 total
Weight: 246.4 lbs (five day moving average), net change -60.90 lbs