Doctor Who – ‘Sleep No More’

Series Nine, Episode Nine

CONTAINS SPOILERS

Written by Mark Gatiss, and guest starring his fellow The League Of Gentlemen co-star Reece Shearsmith, this was an episode I was looking forward to. So, another spoiler alert, it’s a shame I wasn’t keen on it.

The entire episode is a video pieced together from various recordings by scientist Gagan Rassmussen (Reece Shearsmith), who narrates it.

It is in a space station near Neptune from the 38th century. It had stopped communicating, so a rescue team was sent, who arrive at around the same time the Doctor and Clara do. They are then pursued by zombie-like creatures made of dust. After escaping them, they find Rassmussen and his invention, Morpheus sleep pods. Morpheus contracts sleep into just 5 minutes, so you have the same benefits but take up
less time, giving you an edge over your work competitors.

The Doctor isn’t happy that a basic, key function such as sleep has been tampered with, and theorises that doing that has created the dust creatures, who Clara names as Sandmen. The Doctor says they are made from the mucus or “sleep” that is in people’s eyes.

They are impervious to weapons, but aren’t immortal by any means. In fact, they can easily fall apart altogether, such as if the gravity shields are turned off. They completely take over humans and turn them into one of them.

Many of the rescue crew except the captain end up killed, as apparently does Rassmussen. But he in fact faked his death, and was behind the whole thing. He wants to help the Sandmen to spread around the universe, but is killed by the captain before he can. The Doctor, Clara and the captain escape, but the Doctor thinks something isn’t right. It all seems too pre-planned to follow a set course of events somehow.

Rassmussen ends the video by saying he planned the whole thing so people would keep watching the video, giving it enough time to transmit a signal of the Sandmen. This will ensure the Sandmen will infect everyone who watches the video. Rassmussen turns into sand.

This episode has echoes of many “found footage” horror films, the most well known example is probably still The Blair Witch Project. But the ending is more akin to Ring, as a cursed video which spreads the more people watch it.

I like the idea of “found footage” films as a narrative device in theory, but I’ve seldom liked the result. The Blair Witch Project for example I think was a great marketing gimmick, but it’s not that good a film, to be honest. I was looking forward to this episode, but I was disapointed. I guess “found footage” is a tricky thing to get right. Perhaps it’s easy for the gimmick to get in the way of the plot.

‘Sleep No More’ generally seems to have been quite poorly received. Creatures made out of sleep mucus in your eye might be a bit of a hokey concept. We don’t get much chance to know the guest characters. Rassmussen is fine as a kind of a mad scientist type, but he’s not very 3-dimensional. Of the crew, the tough captain Nagata is probably the most fully-developed, but she’s still a little thin in terms of characterisation.  Deep-Ando is killed off fairly quickly. Chopra’s unwillingless to use Morpheus helps the Doctor figure out the mystery, but little else happens with him, except his interactions with 474, a clone who is treated as a second class citizen. There are implications she may have feelings for him, but nothing much is done with this. It’s a shame really, as I think all those characters might have potentially been interesting.

There are good ideas in this episode. They make good use of the song ‘Mr. Sandman’ by the Chordettes, and the corporate computer hologram is quite funny. But the ideas are all thrown together in an untidy pile. You can’t help comparing it to ‘Under The Lake’/’Before The Flood’, which were much stronger episodes and handled the plot and character better. The idea that sleep can be something that can be turned against you could be a terrifying one, but this episode doesn’t really deliver terror. ‘Sleep No More’ is not awful, but it overall feels like a bit of a missed opportunity.

Doctor Who – ‘The Zygon Inversion’

Series Nine, Episode Eight

CONTAINS SPOILERS

Clara is in what appears to be her flat, but she soon realises that this is a dream after looking at a newspaper with a seahorse on the front cover and finding the phrases “truth or consequences” in there. She is trapped inside a Zygon pod.

Bonnie, the Zygon who is assuming Clara’s form, finds another Zygon who has been living as a human, and forces him to transform back to his Zygon form.

It transpires though that Clara has some limited control over Bonnie. She makes sure that Bonnie’s aim with the rocket launcher doesn’t quite hit the plane on first shot,
though Bonnie’s second shot does hit it. The delay gives the Doctor and Osgood time to parachute out before the second attempt. Clara also manages to send a text to the Doctor. The Doctor calls Bonnie, and Clara is able to make her wink at certain points to give away Bonnie’s location.

Bonnie goes to Clara’s pod, and threatens to erase her mind. Clara counters by temporarily
transforming Bonnie back into her Zygon form. The mental link goes both ways. Bonnie says their heartbeats are also linked, so she can kill Clara, and she can tell if Clara is lying.
During the conversation, it is revealed the Osgood Box is under the Tower Of London, and the only ones who have access to it are the Doctor, the Osgoods and Clara.

The Doctor and Osgood arrive at the shop Bonnie was at, finding the Zygon she
transformed. He is distraught and cannot control his transformation. He just wanted to live on Earth and never wanted to fight anyone. He kills himself. More Zygons arrive, including one who is apparently assuming the form of Kate Stewart, and they take the Doctor and Osgood with them to the Black Archives. It turns out that it is the real Kate Stewart however, and she kills the other Zygons.

In the Black Archives, Bonnie has bought along Clara’s pod so she can get access. There are two Osgood boxes, one blue and one red. One box will unmask every Zygon on Earth. The other box will release a gas that will kill every Zygon on Earth. Not only that, but
each box has two buttons, labelled “truth” and “consequences”.

The Doctor, Osgood and Kate Stewart arrive. The Doctor reveals that the blue box unmasks Zygons and the red box kills them, so Bonnie is at the blue box and Kate moves to the red box. But it’s not quite that simple with the fact both have two buttons. One button on the red box will unleash bombs over London, while the button on the blue box will trap the Zygons in their human forms for the rest of their lives.

The Doctor tries to talk both of them out of pressing any button. Bonnie wants a war, thinking the Zygons will win. But even if they do, what then, asks the Doctor. That won’t be the end, because it never is. There will be more wars, and at the end they’ll still have
to negotiate with the opposing side. The Doctor sees war as ultimately futile, and
having been in the Time War, and wants to avoid another. Bonnie realises something. Both boxes are in fact empty. All they are is a deterrant to keep the peace treaty. Apparently this has happened 15 times, with the Doctor wiping their memories. He decides to wipe the memories of Kate and some of the Zygons, but not Bonnie’s. She calls off the Zygon splinter group.

Osgood will still not reveal if she is a human or a Zygon. Furthermore, there are now two Osgoods again, as Bonnie has decided to not use Clara’s form anymore and use Osgood’s instead. They choose to stay with the Osgood boxes to continue to protect the peace treaty.

We learn that Osgood’s first name is Petronella. I suppose you can’t blame her for preferring to go by her surname.

Osgood would make a good companion, and she has that role here taking over from Clara. She is even offered a chance to become one by the Doctor, but it seems she’s going to remain a semi-regular character instead. Or “characters” I suppose, as there are two Osgoods again.

Jenna Coleman was good as Bonnie, particularly in the scenes where she was talking with Clara, managing to show the difference between them.

The Doctor once invented an invisible watch… he is aware of the massive design flaw there.

‘The Zygon Inversion’ was another episode about choices, consequences and the struggle to keep peace. The conclusion it draws is that war, ultimately, does nobody any good and just generates more suffering, so even is peace might even seem to be the harder choice, it’s the better one. The episode works as a drama, being very compelling and even the fact that it seems on a smaller scale to episode one, focusing on just the core characters, works as it allows the audience to see it from a closer perspective.

Doctor Who – ‘The Zygon Invasion’

Series Nine, Episode Seven

CONTAINS SPOILERS

There has been a peace treaty between humans and Zygons, with Zygons allowed to take a human form and live on Earth.

We learn that since the events of ‘The Day of the Doctor’, there were two Osgoods. One is the original, the other is a Zygon clone. However, both considered themselves to be the same. They saw themselves as like sisters or both as a hybrid of human and Zygon, and the pair came to symbolise the peace treaty between humans and Zygons. The Doctor left them both with the Osgood Box, which was never to be opened unless the peace treaty broke down.

However, one of the Osgoods was killed by Missy in ‘Death In Heaven’, and some time later the other was taken hostage by a rogue group of Zygons. Most Zygons want to live peacefully, having settled on Earth in their human disgusies. But some Zygons think that’s not enough, and they should all live openly in their true forms, and have formed a terrorist group.

They are even killing their own, including two high ranking Zygon commanders, who are killed in a video sent UNIT’s Tower of London headquarters. The video also shows Osgood reading a message which says that the Zygon terrorists want to launch an attack in Turmezistan. The Doctor goes there. There are already UNIT soldiers, and the Zygons have completely taken over a village. They also take the form of the soldiers loved ones to prevent them from killing them, and later to get the soldiers into a church hideout unarmed so they can kill them. The UNIT commander gives the Doctor a brief time to find and rescue Osgood before the village is bombed. The Doctor finds Osgood, but the place is bombed earlier than planned. They get on the plane back home, along with a Zygon who was about to attack them.

Meanwhile, Kate Stewart goes to the site where the video was filmed, from Truth and Consequences in New Mexico. She can only find a sheriff here, who tells her the Zygons stayed for a while, but when humans discovered their alien identity they turned on them, so the Zygons retaliated. It’s later revealed the sheriff is in fact a Zygon herself and we see her about to kill Kate.

Clara goes back to her block of flats and spots a little boy who is looking for his parents. Clara finds them, but they are acting suspiciously. Later, along with Jac from UNIT, Clara goes down the lift which leads them to an underground Zygon base. They get some UNIT soldiers to come with them, and discover lots of pods, which appear to have clones of people growing inside them. We see that one of the pods appears to contain a clone of Clara. Clara says they should kill the “clones”, but Jac realises that this isn’t how it works with Zygons. They don’t grow clones from pods, they don’t have to go to that sort of trouble. They simply morph into a copy of an original. So these people in the pods are the original humans. The Clara we see now is in fact a Zygon, and the real one is in the pod! She was taken by the Zygon clones of the boy’s parents. Jac and the UNIT soldiers are then killed by Zygons.

The Clara Zygon, who calls herself Bonnie, then finds the location of the plane the Doctor is on, and fires a rocket launcer at it!

The return of fan favourite Osgood was something which wasn’t exactly kept a secret. It was hinted at in trailers and pre-publicity for the ninth series, not just this episode. The question was more how they were going to explain her return, after all she was killed off in ‘Death In Heaven’. As it happened, the clues were already there. We knew there was a Zygon clone of Osgood in ‘The Day of the Doctor’. So is this Osgood the original or the clone? It almost doesn’t matter, as apparently both Osgoods began to see it as unimportant. But as an explanation for bringing the character back, it made sense from what had gone on before rather, and a lot better than some of the nonsense TV shows, particularly soap operas, have pulled out to explain why a character is “back from the dead”. Though talking of soap operas, I quite liked how Bonnie was like in soaps when they had an evil twin played by same actor. Clara turning out to be an evil clone was a great and unexpected twist.

Doctor Who once again has an episode with a very different tone. ‘The Zygon Invasion’ feels more like a gritty drama series than other episodes, with the focus on government, war and military action. It also has deliberate paralels with topical events, such as terrorist groups, immigration, bigotry, radicalisation in schools, war and fears of larger wars breaking out. The scale in this episode seems international, being a complex, volatile situation with lots going on, so our heroes have to split up. It is very action-packed, and often difficult to keep track of, at times a little overbearing. But I suppose you have to give the show credit for daring to try something new.

Doctor Who – ‘The Woman Who Lived’

Series Nine, Episode Six

CONTAINS SPOILERS

The Doctor, minus Clara, lands in 1651 in England, meeting a highwayman trying to rob a coach. However, he has met this highwayman before, it’s Ashildr, the Viking girl he gave immortality to in the previous episode.

We learn what Ashildr has been up to in the meantime. Having all the time in the world means she had plenty of time to practice and master many skills. She founded a leper colony, was a medieval queen, fought as a soldier in the Battle of Agincourt, was almost drowned as a witch.

But she barely remembers the Viking village she came from and doesn’t remember the people or even her name back then at all. While she may have a superhuman lifespan, she still has an ordinary human memory. Her name has changed several times, and she can’t remember any of them. The people who knew her by whatever name she has all eventually die, so the name dies with them. Currently she is going by the name of Lady Me. She keeps a journal of her life, and some pages are ripped out and thrown if they are too upsetting and she doesn’t want to remember. She keeps some such as a going back to visit a husband who is now an old man, and he thinks she’s a ghost. Then there’s one from the Black Death, where she had children but they died from the plague. She keeps this entry to remind her not to have any more children, as she couldn’t bear to put herself through losing them again.

The Doctor is searching for an amulent known as the Eye of Hades, which is found in a nearby house. It will open a portal to another world. Lady Me is working with fire-breathing lion-faced humaniod Leaodnro who also wants to get it.

Lady Me has become desensitised. She doesn’t care about killing anyone, because from her perspective, people’s lives are short regardless, even if they live to an old age. Now humans are like mayflies to her. Human nature doesn’t change, they repeat the same mistakes constantly, and it bores her. She has “waited longer than I should have lived, lost more than I can remember”. She calls the Doctor out on the big difference between her immortality and his. “You gad about while I trudge through centuries”. He has a magic box which can take him wherever or whenever he wants, she has go through all history consecutively. “You didn’t save my life, you trapped me in it”.

There are signs she still has some humanity, as she has kept her loyal but sickly servant Clayton with her. But she had considered him as the human sacrifice needed for the Eye of Hades to open the portal. She changes her mind though, as soon as she hears a highwayman is going to hang. Instead of killing her poor servant, why not use a guilty criminal who is going to be hung anyway?

When they get there, she attaches the Eye of Hades to the highway man, Sam Swift. But it turns out Leandro was lying to her. He didn’t want to open the portal as a way to get out and go home , he opened it so his species could come through it and invade Earth. The aliens come and fire at the crowd. Lady Me is shocked and saddened by this, making her realise she does care for the welfare of humans. She uses her other Mire immortality chip on Sam Swift, which heals him and closes the portal. Leoandro is killed by his own species for failing his mission.

The Doctor and Lady Me discuss that two immortals would probably be bad company for each other. They need the “mayflies”, as they know how beautiful and precious life is because it is fleeting.

At the end, Clara arrives back in the TARDIS. A close-up of a selfie Clara shows the Doctor reveals Lady Me is still alive in the present day.

Leoandro looks like straight out of a live-action Thundercats movie. (Actually, has that ever happened? Part of me thinks it should have happened!).

‘The Woman Who Lived’ isn’t the second of a two-parter, as it isn’t really continuing the same story. It’s more of a sequel, but it does fit the tone of ‘The Girl Who Died’ more than ‘The Magician’s Apprentice’/’The Witch’s Familiar’ did to each other and ‘Under The Lake’/’Before The Flood’ did to each other. Even odder when you consider they were two-part episodes, and in each, both parts written by the same writer (Steven Moffat the former, Toby Whithouse the latter). ‘The Girl Who Died’ was written by Jamie Mathieson and Steven Moffat, while ‘The Woman Who Lived’ is written by Catherine Tregenna.
But it does share the way episode titles match and reword the previous one, which seems to be a recurring theme this series. ‘The Girl Who Died’ in the last episode becomes ‘The Woman Who Lived’ in this episode.

It has a similar historical daftness to ‘The Girl Who Died’, this time being a bit like the Blackadder episide ‘Amy and Amiability’ which also had a woman posing as a highway man with a dubbed over male voice. I love Blackadder, Monty Python and the Holy Grail and Horrible Histories, but for some reason I’m seldom keen on historical comedy episodes in Doctor Who. I didn’t much care for Sam Swift’s corny joke routine with puns and Doctor Doctor jokes.

But the stuff with Lady Me dealing with her immortality is great. Similar to ‘The Girl Who Died’, it has this introspective and philosophical side, with a fairly light plot that’s there because a plot is needed. I’m all for light and shade, I know you need to balance stuff out, but in this episode the serious stuff was a lot better than the comedy for me.
Clara doesn’t appear until the end, so Lady Me sort of takes up companion role, but she probably works better appearing on a recurring basis rather than a regular one.

‘The Woman Who Lived’ is a decent take on, and maybe even a deconstruction of, the concept of immortality. If immortality were possible, there’s probably a lot of people who would want it, but what would it actually be like? Perhaps it is overall not the greatest episode ever, but it’s based around a good idea.

Doctor Who – ‘The Girl Who Died’

Series Nine, Episode Five

CONTAINS SPOILERS

Vikings vs. Aliens! Guest starring Maisie Williams from Game of Thrones.

The Doctor and Clara find themselves in a Viking village. The Doctor tries to pretend he is the Viking god Odin, but in a case of alien one-upmanship, another extra-terrestrial species tries the same trick by creating a giant floating head of Odin in the sky. It is from The Mire, an alien species who are constantly picking fights. They come out, scan who are the strongest warriors and teleport them on board. Clara and a Viking girl named Ashildr are among them because they are both wearing technology that is futuristic at this point in history.

The Vikings who have been teleported think they are in Valhalla, the rewarding Viking afterlife for the greatest warriors. In fact it is a death trap. A wall closes in and pushes them towards a path of death lasers.

Clara and Ashildr are still alive, because the Mire realise that Clara posses technology far in advance of what should be for this time, so are more wary. The Mire have blended the warriors into a liquid and drink them, believing their strength and skills will be passed to them. Clara tries to talk them into leaving now they have got what they came for, but Ashildr tells them they should pay for mocking the Viking gods and killing the village warriors. The Mire leader is pleased that they have been challenged and says they will come tomorrow for battle.

The Vikings would rather fight to the death than run away, but realistically it’s going to be a massacre rather than a battle. The Mire are far more advanced technologically, and even if they weren’t, they have killed all the warriors in the village, leaving only farmers and fishermen.

The Doctor sees a further problem. He could try and intervene. Saving this undefended village would be the right thing to do, but what are the consequences? If it gets around that the Mire were defeated by one small village there may be more invasions, maybe even causing the end of the world. He ultimately decides he has to stay and attempt to save the villagers. He tries to train them for battle, but it doesn’t get anywhere fast. The Doctor hears a baby crying, and as he can speak baby he translates what she is trying to say as “fire in the water”. The baby settles down when she sees the fish in the barrel, and the fishes that she is referring to are electric eels.

The Mire arrive the next day, to find the Doctor, Clara and the villagers having a party. The Mire say they will go into battle regardless. The villagers attach metal to the Mire’s helmets which they connect to the water with the electric eels, creating a magnet which pulls off the helmets. Then a giant serpent with huge sharp teeth comes through. The Mire teleport away in fear. This was nothing more than an illusion. It was a puppet Ashildr made and the Doctor hooked her up to a machine to project that image to the Mire. Clara recorded what was happening, and it shows the Mire cowering against and running away from a wooden puppet, and they add Benny Hill music to it making them look even more ridiculous. The Doctor threatens to show that to the whole galaxy, which will ruin the reputation as ruthless warriors the Mire spent their whole lives building for themselves. The leader vows revenge, but is teleported away.

The village is happy, but they find that Ashildr has died, the power of the machine overwhelming her. The Doctor is distraught at the fact people he meets end up dying. He notices his reflection, and remembers why he choose his current face. It is the same as Caecilius, a man he met during ‘The Fires of Pompeii’. During the volcanic explosion of Vesuvius, Donna begged the Doctor to go back and at least save someone if he couldn’t save the whole town, and he saved Caecilius and his family. The Doctor chose his face to remind him he can try and save people even if it means bending time travel rules. He gives Ashildr a computer chip from the Mire which repairs them from injuries, and another which she can give to someone she chooses. She is bought back to life, not only that she is now immortal as the chip will continue to repair her whenever she is injured. But soon after, the Doctor thinks he may have made a mistake. He well knows that conceivably living forever is a curse as much as it’s a blessing. Not only that, but as Ashildr is now technically part human and part Mire, she could be the hybrid Davros was talking about in ‘The Witch’s Famililar’. We end with a shot of Ashildr with the world changing around her over time, and she initially looks happy, but becomes sadder as more and more time passes.

This episode finds a way of explaining around the fact that Peter Capaldi played a previous character, similar to how Freema Agyeman’s character in ‘Army of Ghosts’ was retconned to have been Martha’s cousin after she was cast to play Martha.

There is a lot said in ‘The Girl Who Died’ regarding the rules of changing history, the difference between ripples and tidal waves. In other words, it’s OK to change small things but not big things. But as Holly from Red Dwarf once put it, there’s no such thing as small when you’re on about changing time, and as Homer Simpson discovered when he went back in time with a toaster, stepping on a mosquito or killing the dinosaurs by giving them the common cold led to a worlds where Ned Flanders was unquestioned dictator of all Earth or it rained doughnuts.

This episode was a bit daft. I get that the episode is aiming to be comedic. The giant head of Odin is likely a shout out to God’s head appearing in the clouds in Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

I don’t tend to like medieval ‘romp’ episodes of Doctor Who. I quite liked ‘Robot of Sherwood’ last year though. It’s been suggested a difference with that episode and this i that Robin Hood is a myth anyway while Vikings were genuinely part of history, but I don’t think that’s why for me.

I’m not as bothered about the historical inaccuracy as some seem to be. Yes, it’s a myth that Vikings wore horns on their helmets just like it’s a myth that pirates made people walk the plank, but I don’t blame the show for using artistic licence because they think something will be fun to see, and let’s face it, this is a show about an alien with a time machine. I think for me with this episode the problem I have with it is that the plot doesn’t really seem to matter that much even in context. It’s more there because it’s necessary to have one. It would be a filler episode if not for the fact it introduces a character who’s going to appear in the next episode and it reveals why the Doctor has his current face. It also raises issues the Doctor has with time travel. They have to be careful. Then there’s the moral dilemmas, where doing the right thing can have terrible consequences. There’s the Viking/Mire story, introspection from the Doctor and hints of what is to come from Ashildr, and it doesn’t really flow together as a whole, it’s almost like a patchwork quilt. The episode is the weakest of series 9 so far.