Doctor Who 9x09 - Sleep No More (Spoilers)

[Bernkastel]

So, here is the thread for episode 9. So, if you have anything to say, you guys know the drill.

[Iroscato]

I couldn't make it more than 10 minutes in, the acting from the crew was SO BAD.

I'll be giving it another shot soon though.

[madd0ct0r]

I liked it, although I'm still not entirely sure how Sleep expected to spread.

[Bedlam]

I liked it, although I'm still not entirely sure how Sleep expected to spread.

Well from what I recall of the ending by us watching the show. Apparently the electromagnetic thingy needed to make you not need to sleep and triggered the carnivorous dust thing was encoded into the show we were watching.

[madd0ct0r]

Which makes sleep more dangerous then the thing. That's an impressive evil to still wander the galaxy

[Parallax]

This episode was so terrible I didn't even bother making a thread for it last weekend.
The premise of it is utterly stupid, approaching 'the moon is an egg' level of idiocy. Eye muck is alive? What?
The crew were forgettable in their blandness and generally horrid acting. The problem was resolve in an extremely lazy way - self destruct and do a runner.

This episode contained lots of stupid, bad acting from the extras, absolutely nothing new or creative.
While it's not as bad as 'Love and Monsters' or that forest story, this was crap.

[Lost Soal]

Except the problem was not resolved. The Morpheus Machines were superfluous by the end and all he needed was the signal he transmitted, meaning The Doctor lost.

[Eternal_Freedom]

That was pretty crap. And I really don't like the "found footage" format. It's just a pain, especially since you know, as soon as that Rasmusson bloke "dies," you know he isn't dead because he recorded the film. Urgh.

[Hillary]

Couldn't really get past the monsters being eye muck - agree with Parallax, it's on a par with Kill the Moon stupidity.

The worst part though is the ending means that they will almost certainty return. Probably part of the finale.

Worst episode of the season for me. A shame as I generally like Reece Shearsmith as an actor. Gatiss's scripts, however, have always been fairly patchy.

[Tsyroc]

I didn't really care for it.

The carnivorous eye sand seemed like a reworking of the carnivorous dust from several years ago but not as good.

The end reveal was kind of cool though.

[SpottedKitty]

After watching the repeat, I noticed the bit near the end where Rasmussen states "I lied about the infection method changing, it's always been the same". Unless he was lying when he said that...

I also realised the episode makes perfect sense if you consider it wasn't the product of a nerdy 21st Century screenwriter, but a nerdy 38th Century mad (and ain't going to take no more) scientist whose brains have been lightly munched on by his own creation.

[Batman]

That was just pants on head stupid. Apart from the incredibly silly premise, Neptune's gravity is a whopping 14% bigger than Earth's. And who builds a space station that needs 'gravity shields' to stay up instead of just putting it in a stable orbit?

[The Romulan Republic]

Scientific inaccuracy (as has already been pointed out here) and at times a style over substance approach, though that's typical for Doctor Who. As far as style goes, it was pretty good, apart from my general dislike for artificially sly meta stuff that thinks its clever.

[SpottedKitty]

Neptune's gravity is a whopping 14% bigger than Earth's.

That's a bit of a misleading figure, actually. 1.14G is accurate, but that's "apparent surface" gravity — Neptune is about 17 Earth masses, but over 50 Earth volumes. This means the surface (it isn't, of course, it's just the cloud tops in the very, very deep atmosphere) is a lot further away from its centre than the Earth's surface is from its centre. Neptune's actual gravitational field is a lot more than 14% more intense and 14% deeper than Earth's.

(Anyone else out there remember Isaac Asimov's science articles? I'm sure I remember reading one of them that covered exactly this subject, and explained it a lot better than I just did.)

And who builds a space station that needs 'gravity shields' to stay up instead of just putting it in a stable orbit?

The Who writers have never been immune to the lure of stuffing a bit more technobabble into their scripts.

(Including the fact that an object in an actual orbit doesn't immediately start falling when its engines fail...)

[Eternal_Freedom]

(Including the fact that an object in an actual orbit doesn't immediately start falling when its engines fail...)

That does kinda indicate it wasn't actually in orbit. Or at least, not an unpowered one. I can't recall exactly, but couldn't we see clouds outside the windows, as if it were already inside Neptune's atmosphere? Maybe they were hoving in the eye of a storm of something, for some reason I can barely speculate about.

[Batman]

That's a bit of a misleading figure, actually. 1.14G is accurate, but that's "apparent surface" gravity — Neptune is about 17 Earth masses, but over 50 Earth volumes. This means the surface (it isn't, of course, it's just the cloud tops in the very, very deep atmosphere) is a lot further away from its centre than the Earth's surface is from its centre. Neptune's actual gravitational field is a lot more than 14% more intense and 14% deeper than Earth's.

So? The gravity acting on you in the space station is going to be 1.14G (slightly less depending on the height of the 'orbit'). Whatever things look like globally and/or deeper down the gravity well, local effects should have been negligible.

Including the fact that an object in an actual orbit doesn't immediately start falling when its engines fail...)

That does kinda indicate it wasn't actually in orbit. Or at least, not an unpowered one. I can't recall exactly, but couldn't we see clouds outside the windows, as if it were already inside Neptune's atmosphere? Maybe they were hoving in the eye of a storm of something, for some reason I can barely speculate about.

Nevermind that science madman explicitely said it was in orbit, we see an outside shot of the station as the rescue ship approaches, and it looks to be a pretty good distance away from the planet.

[Eternal_Freedom]

Oh yes, so we did. Still, he says it's on orbit, but as spottedkitty said, stuff in an actual orbit doesn't start falling when you shut down the engines.

[Batman]

Yeah. It's not like I commented on that or anything. Also, things absolutely can be in orbit and start falling down when engines (or whatever technobabble you use instead of them) fail, they're just not 'stable' orbits.

[Eternal_Freedom]

True.

[SpottedKitty]

Also, things absolutely can be in orbit and start falling down when engines (or whatever technobabble you use instead of them) fail, they're just not 'stable' orbits.

<nod> I've heard them called "powered orbits" — a well understood concept, but with today's technology, only possible in fiction. At least, until we have a high-thrust spacecraft engine that can run for hours, days, or months non-stop.

[bilateralrope]

Does anyone else get a vibe of "trying to improve humanity is bad" from the episode ?

They could have done something interesting if the sleep machines were not functioning quite right, causing serious problems in people who were forced to use them. Even turning them into monsters could have worked. Instead the episode makes it quite clear that using them is completely optional by having the character with a rank of conscript be the one who refuses to use them. The only thing that is wrong with them is that sleep is how everyone fights against an enemy that only the Doctor knew about. For anyone who doesn't know about the sand monsters, the sleep machines look like a good deal.

Also, things absolutely can be in orbit and start falling down when engines (or whatever technobabble you use instead of them) fail, they're just not 'stable' orbits.

<nod> I've heard them called "powered orbits" — a well understood concept, but with today's technology, only possible in fiction. At least, until we have a high-thrust spacecraft engine that can run for hours, days, or months non-stop.

Even if you could do a powered orbit, is there any good reason for doing one for that space station ?

[SpottedKitty]

Even if you could do a powered orbit, is there any good reason for doing one for that space station ?

Not really — the stories I remember seeing them used in referred to a need for very fast, very low orbits so that high-detail surveillance could be done a lot faster than it would using a natural unpowered orbit. And yes, these were fairly old stories, long before the current capabilities of space-based telescopes were really well thought through. Not much use with "modern" futuristic technology, doubly useless for a research space station that isn't even interested in looking at the planet.