Every actor to have played the Doctor eventually hits the episode where they go on complete autopilot. Tndeed, it’s the “in a nutshell” problem with literally every single one of his scripts for both Doctor Who and Sherlock : interesting things happen, but not to people.īut the other real problem, oddly enough, is Peter Capaldi. The clever ideas remain the only drama on offer, and one is never meant to do more than appreciate that they exist. The Doctor urgently explains the plot, only direct to camera. The supporting cast makes that of Under the Lake/Before the Flood look like Osgood or Ashildir they’re banal cannon fodder for corridor runs. Just smashing, and a bunch of kills in the form of “oh no one got in the room with you and we cut to black.”īeyond that, he remains infuriatingly rubbish at giving his characters interesting arcs or things to do. He doesn’t even go as far as indulging in the obvious grossness of literal snot monsters with people getting transformed into Sandmen and crumbling to dusty snot as they die or anything. Given a concept with all the metaphorical heft and conceptual possibility of sleep monsters, we really should have something more interesting than the smashy brutes that are the Sandmen. Even when he, as he does here, has genuinely brilliant ideas, he’s rarely inclined to push them particularly far. The first is, simply put, the irreducible flaws of Gatiss. There are, however, two significant weaknesses. I mean, these are just the sorts of sentences you live to write as an anarcho-Marxist occultist television critic, you know? The dust is watching us, and the story it tells about us will kill us. The leisure time destroyed by unchecked capitalist growth rises up and consumes us, our dreams taking revenge on us for our failure to attend to them. I imagine Jack and Jane will both be over the moon with aspects of this. On top of that, many of the ideas here are genuinely great. The final scene is particularly beautiful, with just the right amount of ecstatic thrill in his evil plan and clear relish in his transformation into dust.
This is handled smartly on multiple levels, including Gatiss’s script, Justin Molotnikov’s direction, and Reece Shearsmith’s performance, which is a beautifully clever blend of familiar forms of Doctor Who acting that shifts cleverly with each twist.
Information is conveyed through the subtle shifts of the narrative rules, so that the found footage approach moves gradually and cleverly from being a gimmick to being the entire point of the episode. This unraveling is by some margin the highlight of the episode, and is done with deft panache. The result, very cleverly, is a story that gradually unravels into two separate stories, with the Doctor falling out of the narrative instead of slowly overtaking it. But where those stories put the Doctor into a very different sort of story, here he’s put into a found footage horror film. I’ve not, obviously, run the timing of it, but it certainly feels like a Doctor-lite episode, sharing their structural trick of treating a Doctor Who story as a defined thing happening inside another story. It is in several regards outright brilliant, in a giddy and brave way that makes a perfect little quiet breath of an episode in the tradition of Love and Monsters or Blink, which it most obviously resembles. This is solidly Gatiss’s best-ever Doctor Who story.