Sleep No More

Home Forums Episodes The Twelfth Doctor Sleep No More

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  • #46914
    Craig @craig
    Emperor

    sleep-no-more

    Doctor Who does one of those ‘found footage’ stories like ‘The Blair Witch Project’ or ‘Cloverfield’.

    Right from the start it’s a bit disorientating (although I don’t want to say why). The Doctor and Clara land on a space station which is in need of some care. Why has it been neglected?

    Mark Gatiss provides a terrifying story which is gradually assembled from footage discovered in the wreckage of the space station.

    It may not hit the spot for everyone, but I’m sure some will love it. Even if you don’t like it, it’s ambitious and so should be admired. Feel free to be scared and hide behind the sofa.

    #46927
    Frobisher @frobisher

    Ooh, I liked that one. But that is true of most episodes this series. Poor old grunt (can’t remember her number – sorry).

    More snakes, more stories, more unreality… we are definitely heading somewhere. No idea where yet, but I’m enjoying the ride. 😀

    Any tarot references spotted?

    #46929
    Bluesqueakpip @bluesqueakpip

    Well, that was … weird. I think I liked it, but I’m not sure I understood what the Hell was going on.

    Off to rewatch.

    #46930
    ardaraith @ardaraith

    Creepy! And reminiscent of something I can’t put my finger on. Perhaps it reminded me of the weeping angels and the great intelligence, simultaneously. I am not entirely sure I understand what I just saw.

    Second time the Doctor has said grumpy things about humans…at least, recently.

     

    #46931
    PhaseShift @phaseshift
    Time Lord

    I was a bit wary of this because I’m not a big fan of found footage type projects (your Blair Witch and Cloverfields of this world). If I wanted to get a headache and sea sickness from an experience I’d go to a fun Fair.

    Actually though, it didn’t go down that route too much and I didn’t need the motion sickness tablets. On balance I’d congratulate Mark Gatiss on producing something very different from his previous Who work, which simultaneously feels very Mark Gatiss.

    It misses his usual preference of the past to go for a future that echoes the great Sun Makers (in which Pluto sees a privatised remnant of humanity worked to death while being a convenient tax base for an alien corporation) which was also set in this period. Lots of nice background material delivered in an off the cuff way, which I’d suggest it would be good to develop. This could be Marks future touchstone period in the same way the early 50th century became SMs.

    Bethany Black got the gift that keeps on giving in Who terms: A clone part! I liked the cultural mixup in this that leads to the leader of the taskforce having a Geordie accent, Pet.

    One might almost call it well…. A hybrid!

    Or not because this episode does show the signs it was written at the same time as Robot of Sherwood, and held back. It doesn’t strike you as being linked into this series in the same way as every story we’ve seen so far. You could easily see this alongside Mummy on the Orient Express last year.

    Still, the nice ideas and Reece Shearsmith made it worthwhile. The final monologue and disintegrating head will have left a few kids watching with that lovely horror ending feeling.

    #46932

    So. Anyway.

    As far as I can tell (and do feel free to correct me, since I had a overly needy cat wandering all over me) Clara is still being converted (or whatever you want to call the Build-A-Sandman routine).

    #46933
    Frobisher @frobisher

    @pedant

    Yes, I believe she is. But the Dalek nano tech will fight it off. Or the Time Lord regeneration energy. Or the next thing to hybrid-ise Clara. 😄

    #46935

    @frobisher

    They are really out to get her, aren’t they?

    #46936
    Starla @starla

    They all watched the footage.  Am I right in saying it’s watching the video that infects you? Did they have to have been inside a Morpheus machine to become infected? Is there potential for these sandmen to reappear in future?  I couldn’t tell whether the Doctor had actually stopped the transmission of the video,  or whether at the end there the Morpheus creator is the one who has been shot, but because he’s dust is animate.

    #46945
    PhaseShift @phaseshift
    Time Lord

    @starla

    The signal was embedded at the end. The professor asks if you saw it, and doesn’t it make you tickle, before his collapse begins. The Doctor and the others leave before he can appreciate the plan because they leave without seeing the end of the footage.

    It’s kind of the perfect Penny dreadful/Amicus ending you’d expect from Gatiss.

    #46946
    Richy @richy20

    If Clara is the hybrid than doesn’t that make her part time lord so even if she does die she will regenerate? As there are still scenes they have shoot like when she’s in the dinner?

    #46947
    PhaseShift @phaseshift
    Time Lord

    Question for @janetteb or any other Babylon 5 fan here.

    After callouts to Star Trek earlier in the series I thought ‘Space station’. Everyone is cosplaying Bablyon 5 characters!

    #46951
    Starla @starla

    @phaseshift

    Sorry, I must have missed the part where he stated that the signal was embedded at the end, I thought it was embedded throughout the whole video. Hence my confusion as to whether the Doctor and co. just left, now infected with this thing. Which I would find odd.

    So what were the creatures? Were they created from a signal too, and not the “eye gunk” as theorised by the Doctor?  Then they spread via video signal? I’m asking questions because it wasn’t particularly clear, and I do like the ambiguity… I loved the last creepy sequence where you suddenly realise that you’ve just watched the video and have subconsciously seen the signal. .. watch out! However other elements were a bit unclear.

    Ps – I’d advise not reading any facebook comments on this episode. It’s pretty depressing. I quite enjoyed it.

    #46954
    soundworld @soundworld

    Well, the sofa came in handy,  and some jammy dodgers at crucial moments.  @arbutus Me too!  I liked it, but not too sure at all what its all about and more importantly its significance.

    I take it that since they never saw the end, they haven’t been exposed to the signal burst on the video, so Clara isn’t actually in the process of becoming a Sandman.  That is a very good thing.  But, they’ll be unawares that the virus-signal is now being transmitted around (and probably uploaded to YouTube by now…)

    I just looked up the name of the station ‘Le Verrier‘ and educated myself.  Blessings for French science, on this day of all days:
    <b>Urbain Jean Joseph Le Verrier</b>  11 March 1811 – 23 September 1877) was a French mathematician who specialized in celestial mechanics and is best known for predicting the existence and position of Neptune using only mathematics.

    Very creepy.

    #46960
    iusedtobethedoctorrs99 @iusedtobethedoctor

    did nobody notice clara’s name in the list of names at the very beginning?

     

    and also the morpius machine, no sleep for a month, the previous episode the doctor made a comment about “the longest month of his life”  this must be referring to that

     

    i thought the episode was fantastic, fast paced

    #46961
    Slashum @slashum

    omg did that suck.

    What a total waste of time this episode was.  I’ve never disliked a DW episode, so this is a first.  Total crap.

     

    #46962
    geoffers @geoffers

    well, that was different! i certainly need a re-watch, just to figure out everything i missed the first go round… which, is, erm, almost everything? lol

    my only coherent thought, though, is…

    does this explain how missy was able to monitor the doctor’s every move last series? tiny, dust-sized cameras, or creatures, or whatever?!

    #46963
    Serahni @serahni

    @slashum  What a shame you found the time to join us right when you found the one episode you don’t like!  Thankfully, since you seem to have enjoyed the others, perhaps you can join our discussions on them.  We like a lively conversation, and welcome any new bonkers theories, so welcome!  Hopefully you will enjoy the rest of the series, a little blip once in a while can be easily ignored if the rest is up-to-scratch.

     

    I just watched this and I feel like I need to watch it again.  This episode is a little odd and I still have no idea what’s going on, and the trailer for next week went in no way towards explaining anything.  Still, something has been set in motion, I look forward to seeing what it is!

    #46964
    Ozitenor @ozitenor

    This is a season of two-parters, no?

    confuso io son.

    #46965
    DenValdron @denvaldron

    Not bad.  Decent and nasty in equal doses.  Nothing terribly confusing.  I liked the Doctor’s frustration.  He’s guessing his way through, putting data together and drawing conclusions… and getting it wrong, but getting enough right to leapfrog to his next plot point.

    The Sandmen were out of comic books, shapeless, empty, with great gaping mouths.  Nicely realized, and possibly nightmare inducing.  There was effort to give the secondary characters lives, not sure if it was successful.  On the other hand, Clara Oswald was not annoying.  A nice change.

    I appreciated the echo of Peter Davison’s years, when the Doctor blithely stands there and allows the villain to simply walk into the next room and put him in a deathtrap.

    Overall, I liked it.  Not brilliant, but good, perhaps above average, certainly not below.

    #46966
    CountScarlioni @countscarlioni

    Liked that one a lot; scary and ambitious. Echoes of Gattiss’s Cold War in terms of the very tightly confined action, but thought the sandmen were far more creepy and menacing and embedded in a much more complex story than the ice warrior who was loose on the submarine. With an episode title from Macbeth, there were also I thought echoes of Forbidden Planet, which itself is supposed to have drawn on The Tempest, in terms of the basic plot.

    The Countess picked up another line the Doctor spoke that was from elsewhere: “Consider yourself part of the furniture.” From the musical version of Oliver Twist when Oliver is introduced to the gang of thieves.

    Like others who’ve already posted, I too look forward in the next few days to more viewings, reading comments and getting a bit firmer grasp as to what the heck was actually going on.

    Felt odd too to get a one parter after the diet of two parters.

    @iusedtobethedoctor    Yes, Clara Oswald' is in the collection of numbers and names downloaded at the start. I hunted forThe Doctor’ too. Didn’t see it. Couldn’t find `Basil’ either, or any that might plausibly be the Doctor’s real name (damn).

    also the morpius machine, no sleep for a month, the previous episode the doctor made a comment about “the longest month of his life”  this must be referring to that  

    Now there’s a thought to conjure with!

    #46968
    jphamlore @jphamlore

    More riffs on Neil Stephenson’s Snow Crash.  Recall from Before the Flood that all sentient life is evidently neuro-linguistic programmable by some sort of lower level assembly code, the brain’s equivalent of the BIOS hacked into by the letters inside the Tivolian ship.  In Sleep No More we have the equivalent of the Asherah virus that has both a physical and an electromagnetic component.  It would appear the Thirty-Eighth century, due to some unmentioned catastrophe, may resemble a time similar to that before the Tower of Babel event.  I suppose that makes the Doctor the equivalent of Enki who will eventually find a counter-program to save humanity and the universe.

    I think an attempt to capture some of the cultural vibe of Snow Crash may explain some the earlier exchanges between the throw-away soldiers at the beginning.  However I am afraid no one is willing to embrace the novel’s anarcho-capitalism, so the actual spirit of the novel is lost.

    #46969
    DoctorDoctorWho @doctordoctorwho

    @countscarlioni If you look closely at the names at the beginning, “Doctor” is there, except it’s going vertically instead of horizontally.

    #46970
    jphamlore @jphamlore

    Wasn’t one possible great catastrophe that could completely alter Earth’s nations already shown in a Steven Moffat-written episode no less, The Beast Below? Solar flares are going to devastate the Earth around the 29th century.

    Of course back then revealing the truth to the general populace and having no more lies was considered a noble end to a story …

    #46971
    jphamlore @jphamlore

    The Doctor: “… humans, stupid, filthy, greedy humans.”   The filthy part, not unlike what Missy was saying about humans to Osgood right before Missy killed her.

    I’m thinking whatever happens the last three episodes will free the Doctor from his hybrid pretext for hanging around Earth and humans.   He’ll have to find another one.

    #46972
    Geronimo @geronimo

    I really really disliked this episode at first, it was just too confusing and chaotic for me. However, I just watched it again and it makes a lot more sense now! I still don’t really care for the Sandmen though, I did not think they were scary at all.

    Did anyone notice that at the very end, when Clara went to open the TARDIS door with her key, we got a camera point of view from the TARDIS itself? That felt a bit strange to me..

     

    #46973
    jphamlore @jphamlore

    This episode has almost zero chance of being followed up, but curiously I can see some really potential for the Sandmen, at least for one follow-up story. At least they seem to have some sort of intelligence.

    One of the whole points of the Doctor as a character is negotiation with intelligence if that intelligence is part of a civilization and is not just that of a selfish monster. So have a follow-up episode where the Sandmen have some sort of culture, some sort of civilization, from all the dreams and images they have been absorbing. Then have the Doctor bring them to the negotiating table to find a way for them to feed without slaughtering all intelligent life in the universe.

    It just seems a common sense principle to me that, although people today may enjoy eating chicken or fish, that does not give humans the right to base the entire food supply on slaughtering an intelligent chicken-person or fish-person species, if such an intelligent species is discovered on another planet, when there are plenty of alternative food sources that can be used, such as the efforts now to create various meats in a lab.

    #46976
    Miapatrick @miapatrick

    What was that about the gods every time they spoke on the communicators- and in the advert as well. Is that some consequence of the catastrophe, and is there a connection between ‘gods’ and corporations, other than the names?

    (Incidentally, one small niggle, Clara seemed a little more pleased with herself than she needed to be for knowing who Morpheus is.)

    I definitely need to watch this again. I liked all the individual scenes (baring one, see above) but didn’t quite catch the thread of it.

    Incidentally, I watched Cloverfield the other night. The monster was mostly just glimpsed but actually help up, for once, when seen. And I’m trying to track down another film made around the same time as Blair Witch, about the Blair Witch, but it was the (fictional) making of a documentary about it and creepily good…

    #46977
    Anonymous @

    Really interesting episode above all else, even the lack of a normal title sequence was jarring. (Unless I somehow missed that bit.) Monsters made out of sentient sleep dust is a bit strange, but I liked the found footage style, the way it was made relevant, and even that it was an Indo-Japanese mission over Neptune was a nice mix-up.

    I feel like there are various things that weren’t quite resolved- I mean, the Doctor flees the scene knowing that he’s missing something, and as far as I could tell the scientist’s message was broadcast?

    Edit: Oh, and I agree with Dan Martin that having a narrator, while it made in sense within the script, did feel a bit like holding the audience’s hand.

    #46979
    Starla @starla

    @geronimo

    I too noticed the Tardis viewpoint when Clara is trying to unlock the door.  I thought maybe it could have just been a ‘dust speck’ p.o.v, but I think maybe it was in colour, so perhaps not then? Need a rewatch.

    #46980
    Richy @richy20

    L

    #46981
    Geronimo @geronimo

    @starla

    This shot was indeed in colour, so I don’t think it was a dust speck p.o.v. as those were all in black and white.

    #46982
    Carrieanne @carrieanne

    So before I go read your posts about this episode, I just have to say I love seeing the doctor screaming, holding Clara’s hand and yelling run.  I had a fairly rotten day so this episode, even though creepy certainly made me lol!  Oh and as if all the other stuff in Clara’s mind/dreams wasn’t enough foreboding, now she has sand in her eyes?? I actually did like this one.  I enjoyed seeing the Doctor and Clara together as they are about to part company soon enough. I’m not sure how I can wait for three weeks to see how this season wraps up.  However I am looking forward to each one as an episode.  So those are first impressions from me for now.

    #46983
    Starla @starla

    @geronimo You’re right! Definitely colour. I just rewatched. 😆 It was better on second viewing. I hadn’t realised the first time that the sandmen can form and unform from the surrounding dust. That (probably obvious!) point makes heaps more sense.  Interesting to yet again see Clara attached to a machine.

    #46984
    JimmyP @jimmyp

    Really enjoyed that one, perhaps even more so because I watched it this morning when I got up and I still had sleep in my eyes! Bit too exposition heavy, but that’s to be expected with an episode like this that’s got to at least try and keep everyone in the loop, from restless kids to distracted adults.

    Feels instinctively like a stand-alone just before we get into the home stretch, but there were a few threads left dangling:

    • The Doctor lost! Comprehensively so too.  He ran away knowing he was missing something, that he’d got it wrong somehow, and so it proved to be as Mr-Collapsing-Face revealed his ultimate plan.
    • So the message will still get out there, and humanity is still at risk of all being turned into sand monsters.
    • Plus, Clara still has sand in her eye and presumably without treatment will become a sand monster too. I know the Doctor said to her that he’d do ‘something’ to fix her, but he didn’t sound particularly convinced about that.

    So is it really a standalone, and any consequences from this episode will just be solved off-screen? Or were they solved in-episode and I missed them? Or have we just seen the Doctor condemn 38th century Earth to it’s doom and (more importantly) the beginning of the end for Clara? Part way through one of the next episodes is Clara’s face going to start collapsing into sand? Surely the Moff isn’t that cruel?

    #46985
    Mudlark @mudlark

    ‘The Sleep of Reason Brings Forth Monsters’; and what could be more unreasonable than to interfere with the sleep function?  As the Doctor says concerning the importance of sleep ‘…we wake up, rub the sleep from our eyes, and that keeps us safe – safe from the monsters inside’.  Prolonged lack of sleep makes people first disorientated, eventually psychotic and ultimately dead, so it does not take much foresight to realise that reprogramming the brain to do without it might not be a good idea.  If the episode is analysed critically, the idea that those who used the Morpheus pods might eventually become or be consumed by ‘sleep dust’ might seem a bit too literal, but to work as it did it needed literal monsters which, if not necessarily frightening in themselves, were certainly disturbing and very well realised. And if we choose to see them as a metaphor, they also work very well.

    Gatiss is very good at writing unsettling material, and this quality was reinforced for me by the rapid cutting between the monochrome viewpoint of the dust and the red-lit views of the Morpheus affected humans, especially on first viewing, when I was  hard put to follow all the convolutions leading up to the final twist. A second watch was certainly needed.

    I was expecting the ‘found footage’ format to  be off-putting because, like @phaseshift, I’m not particularly keen on it normally, but it worked for me here.

    As for Clara, things are looking increasingly ominous. The inclusion of her name in the coding at the beginning, among that of the others in the rescue team, and the fact that her viewpoint is included in the footage, clearly signals that the Morpheus reprogramming has at least begun*, and unlike @frobisher I doubt whether the Dalek nano-tech will undo the damage; more  likely it will compound it. And who knows what her contact with a Zygon may have added to the mix.  She sought reassurance from the Doctor that he could fix it, but I didn’t find his response particularly convincing.

    @miapatrick   The invocation of the gods at the beginning of each attempt at radio contact was, I think, a nod to the fact that the rescue team belonged to a society which was a fusion of Indian and Japanese, hence incorporating polytheistic elements of Hinduism and the animism of Shinto.

    * The inclusion of Doctor Who in the coding, which @doctordoctorwho spotted, made up vertically from letters in the names of the others and highlighted was, I suspect, just an Easter egg type joke – but then again, Who nose?

     

    #46986
    Mudlark @mudlark

    One incident in particular which struck me, among the many clues in the trail that the Doctor followed, was when he commented that the station had the appearance of having been dead for a long while, before blowing the dust from an adjacent surface and then staring intently, directly into the viewpoint of the dust which was recording him, as if he could sense, if not see, what was there.  The dust on the station may have been composed largely of human detritus, as he discovered, but unless I misheard or am misremembering what I heard, he went on to say or imply that this was true of all dust, which I found almost as jarring a detail as the eukaryotic prokaryotes in Kill the Moon.  It seems to be a widespread belief, but any inspection of house dust under a microscope will demonstrate that it isn’t true.

    Well, I had to find at least one nit to pick 😈

    #46987
    janetteB @janetteb

    Finally got to watch and enjoyed far more than I expected after reading all the comments this afternoon. Certainly not one of the best but that does not make it bad and  I suspect it will improve on re watch but might not be an episode that invites repeated re watches.

    @phaseshift, That uniform did indeed seem like a nod to B.5 There have been several times this series where I have picked up on B.5 references but thought it probably only coincidence. Maybe not after all. The mural was definitely a Star Trek reference. I wonder if it means anything or is simply a nod to other cult sci fi for us fans.

    @ozitenor Moffat did say that not all of the stories were two parters in the conventional sense. Some are only loosely linked so I am guessing that there is going to be some kind of connection, tenuous maybe, between this ep and next weeks. Perhaps the Doctor will work out what is going on or have to deal with what is happening to Clara.

    @denvaldron I wondered if S.M had the original idea for this story and wanted Gaiman to script it. It does seem to reference the Sandman comic from what I have read.

    @jimmyp I too was thinking that this seems to be a stand along before the next big three.

    What a inventive way to convince children of the importance of sleep. I noted that our youngest turned the lights out straightaway tonight when sent to bed. No sneaky reading or drawing. So thank you Gatiss.

    @phaseshift, interesting comparison to the Sun Makers. I did not realise that it was set at around the same time. I always liked The Sun Makers and was surprised by the bad reviews it received.

    If there is any pattern emerging this series it certainly appears to be Clara becoming something else, Dalek, Zygon, Sandman.. If she is the hybrid then she is a multi being.

    Cheers

    Janette

     

    #46988
    TheBrainOfMoffat @thebrainofmoffat

    As far as the color sand-footage of Clara unlocking the TARDIS is concerned, I think some of the footage that the Doctor reviewed when the sand-as-camera revelation was made was also in color. I noticed it then and thought it odd. Not sure what to make of it.

    When the Doctor said something about the situation being like a story, I immediately thought of Ashildr. Heck, I thought it might be her in the pod near the end until it was stated that the person inside was male. Then I thought of the guy Ashildr gave the second self-repair device to.

    I did see two potential visual connections between this episode and the preview for Face the Raven, but I think one of them is merely coincidental.

    @mudlark “Eukaryotic prokaryotes” — you just summed up, in two words, one of the major issues I have with Kill the Moon (nope, still not shutting up about my opinion on that episode). But it would be interesting if Ashildr were somehow responsible for the “weird” episodes from S8 and S9, don’t you think? I believe this idea has been brought up before, and I would definitely not mind if it were the case, just to rid me of my contempt for the aforementioned episode… and to make ones such as Robot of Sherwood and In the Forest of the Night make more narrative sense.

    #46989
    spacedmunkee @spacedmunkee

    When you watch DW for long enough, any part of an episode no matter how insignificant can appear to be a reference or call back to another episode or story arc. But hey that’s half the fun of DW – trying to figure out what is relevant, what is not, and what fuels the next round of bonkers theories which is done so beautifully in this forum.

    So again with the pods. It seems like every story this year has some sort of pod (or Dalek)  that someone is placed in.

    Was the guy making the video talking to us thus breaking the fourth wall again this season?

    More references to it all being another story.

    Similar settings and similar looking monsters as Journey to the centre of the Tardis in which Clara was seen to die in the future.

    The sleep in Clara’s eye is a little like Amy Pond’s predicament in time of angels when she had the weeping angel in her eye.

    The doctor equating awake and asleep to life and death so a reference to ashildr who will never “sleep” and the consequences of this.

    The computers insistence on the soldier singing the “Song” . Seemed like an obscure piece to add to the story.

    The doctor appears to have an warped perception of time. When trapped in the cold store he asks the soldier what she said 18 minutes ago, when it was really only a couple of minutes. Similar to the longest month of his life when he thought Clara was dead in the previous episode.

    He tells Clara she has so much to look forward to with an impending catastrophe. I had the impression that this will  happen closer to the 38th century rather than in Clara’s lifetime. . . unless she is already immortal but does not know it because her memory was wiped of it being implanted in her (kudos to someone else in this forum for suggesting that. Sorry can’t remember who).

    Can anyone answer me this? When Clara names the monsters “Sandmen” and the doctor is upset because he normally names them, he then mentions how the situation was similar to what happened with the Silurians. I could not see a link between this situation and any previous storylines involving Silurians. Could anyone else?

     

    #46991
    DoctorDoctorWho @doctordoctorwho

    @spacedmunkee I’m not sure about the Silurian thing but I can tell you that The Doctor asked her what she said “1.85 minutes ago” not 18 minutes ago.

    #46992
    spacedmunkee @spacedmunkee

    @doctordoctorwho

    ahh yes. Just rewatched with volume up<i>.</i> Too many concerts and loud music over the years has taken its toll on my hearing. Thanks for clearing it up

    #46993
    DoctorDoctorWho @doctordoctorwho

    @spacedmunkee Haha no problem! =P

    #46995
    Bluesqueakpip @bluesqueakpip

    @phaseshift

    It doesn’t strike you as being linked into this series in the same way as every story we’ve seen so far.

    Not in the same way, no. But what play did our Scottish accented Doctor quote? And whose role did he place himself in? The Thane Who Would Be King??

    They also managed to tie in the constant theme of ‘the Gods’/’God’ and how they never (according to the Doctor) turn up. Now, last week the Doctor placed himself as being old enough to be our messiah, and then promptly placed himself in the Jesus role of forgiving Bonnie. 🙂 The previous story, he brought someone back from the dead. 😀

    Oh, and he jokes to Osgood that his first name is ‘Basil’. Basileus – ‘King’.

    To paraphrase what I once said in a blog, if you spend the entire series complaining that the gods don’t turn up, don’t be too surprised if they decide to put in an appearance at the finale. Alternatively, our favourite Deus Ex Machina is going to get all Scottishly over-ambitious and decide he really is ‘The God In The (Time) Machine’.

    #46996
    Anonymous @

    bummer lost a whole post. Paraphrase:  @Spacedmunkee the Silurians wanted to take over what was theirs when they awoke much like the dust wants to regain, digest the people

    @mudlark I thought he said “dust is…” not “all dust is….” implying some therefore. I must re-watch tho’

    Love Cawdor – – having a child named after a character in Macbeth was fun! Lovely references to stories -I got a sense of fourth wall breaking too. Possibly just cameras. But it happened when the Doctor was talking near the door at the time he brought up Sh’speare actually.

    Clara is hybridised about, what, 6 times now? What the hell will happen to her. Still, I had the impression it just wasn’t finished. That in fact it was a 2 parter. But the Dr can leave confused some of the time. He need not solve all problems I would think?

    Goodness: after 1.30 am!

    #46997
    Anonymous @

    oh and @pedant 4:27:   “pedant”

    Noice.

    Also @jphamlore

    you were talking about the ash of something? From the 38th century: was this some prophecy? Could you explain that, please. I thought you were referring to a film? But I’m not sure.

    #46998
    Juniperfish @juniperfish

    Well I did find the shaky-camera “found footage” style disorienting.

    As much as I like the “monsters on a claustrophobic space station” trope, I feel it has been a bit over-used.

    I’d missed the Babylon 5 tribute @phaseshift but I did pick up on the Gaiman Sandman reference, and felt this also owed something to The Ring (US version)/ Ring (Japanese version) with its story of the cursed video-tape. The Morpheus corporation struck me as very Blade-runnery too. Morpheus co-opted into the over-drive spirit of capitalism, and the Sandmen as the by-product monsters such over-drive capitalism creates was a nice allegory – capitalism will eat itself.

    @frobisher – tar0t-card wise, it seemed to be the Death card, particularly with the “dust to dust” quote, and the ending suggesting a 38th Century human genocide by the Sandmen which the Doctor fails to prevent, as he doesn’t stay for the end.

    I appreciated Gatiss in his literary element, as always. The Doctor quotes Macbeth, “Macbeth hath murdered sleep,” and I thought that was interesting, as that speech is all about guilt. As if the Doctor is carrying a great burden of guilt (which we already know he is for his part in the Time War) but I wonder if this guilt is specifically in relation to Clara.

    @spacedmonkee Yes, Clara trapped in a pod, rather like the Fisher King’s tomb from which the Doctor emerged – more “enemy inside a friend and friend inside an enemy” stuff.

     

     

    #47000
    blenkinsopthebrave @blenkinsopthebrave

    Finally got to it after a troubled night’s sleep (which seemed strangely appropriate).

    Very, very Gatiss. By which I mean, a self-contained meta-fiction, that draws on Gatiss’s love of ghost stories, M.R. James, and BG Who. In fact, for me, it had a real BG Who feel to it. There was something almost Tegan-like about Clara!

    I think it will be one of those one-off Who stories that will grow in stature over time.

     

     

    #47001
    Mirime @mirime

    @janetteb I also thought of Gaiman’s Sandman. Dream had a raven as well…

    And Clara and getting trapped in a pod/enclosed space again. Cables described as snake like in the way they pulled her in as well.

    #47002
    Mirime @mirime

    @spacedmunkee

    The computers insistence on the soldier singing the “Song” . Seemed like an obscure piece to add to the story.

    Seemed a bit of a nod to GLaDOS from Portal to me. I almost expected the computer to offer him cake and a weighted storage cube.  Then try to kill him.

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