Doctor Who XXXV/9.9: Sleep No More
"...without soiidarity and without the acknowledgement that we need time to distinguish our essential selves from our careers, our greed and desire for advantage, we might as well be no more than dead cells and mucus." More (not quite) like this (and slight spoilers for Face the Raven) from me at The Event Library.
Also posted at http://sir-guinglain.dreamwidth.org/2015/11/14/sleep-no-more.html.
Denofgeek.com invariably splits between the lovers and the haters, but the haters were clearly in the ascendant this week. Sadly I was among the... well, I won't say haters. 'Confused' is probably a better word. It was atmospheric, but I had no idea what was going on for long stretches of this, including the ending. To be fair, my mental health is not in a good state at the moment and that was distracting, but, again, looking online I see a lot of other people with no idea what was happening.
This whole thing seemed a bit improvised. The artificial nature of the grunts was stressed and then ignored. The bit about the doors only responding to singing the song was introduced surely to lead to a moment of tense comedy where the Doctor and/or Clara have to sing to get to safety, only to be ignored. Rasmussen disappeared, apparently dead (I missed his 'death' entirely) but then was alive again. The whole thing seemed a bit of a mess.
Back on denofgeek.com someone suggested that Doctor Who needs to do more than just be scary, which I would agree with. Someone else was rather worried that the monsters seem to win, to which I responded, with tongue in cheek, that maybe this whole story was a spooky campfire tale told by a future Doctor to a future companion to scare him/her. It would fit the fourth-wall breaking of this and Before the Flood.