10 Dropped Doctor Who Plot Threads We'll Never Get Answers To

4. Sleep No More's Cliffhanger Ending

Doctor Who Sleep No More
BBC Studios

Sleep No More is a standalone episode in a series that's stuffed with two-parters, so it's actually quite funny that it concludes with a cliffhanger.

At the very end of the story, it's revealed that narrator Rassmussen is actually one of the Sandmen, villains that are made up of that crusty stuff you find in your eyes after a long sleep. Yes, really. Turns out that Rassmussen edited the whole episode together himself, found footage style, embedding a signal within the video that will convert anyone who watches it into a Sandman too.

He finishes by saying that he's going to broadcast the episode to the whole solar system, meaning that billions of people could potentially watch the footage, transforming them into Sandmen and basically destroying the Earth as a result.

So what happened after this point? Did Rassmussen's plan work? Was the entire solar system turned into a Sandman playground? We just don't know.

At one point, writer Mark Gatiss was planning to do a sequel to this episode in Series 10, indicating that he had a bigger story planned. However, he ended up writing Empress of Mars instead, leaving Sleep No More's ending unresolved.

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Danny has been with WhatCulture for over ten years, and is currently Doctor Who Editor and WhoCulture Channel Manager, overseeing all of WhatCulture's Whoniverse coverage. In 2022, he took charge of WhoCulture and has grown it into the biggest Doctor Who channel on YouTube, and one of the biggest Doctor Who communities on the web full-stop. He has been writing and video editing since his early teens, and first got a taste for content creation after making his own Doctor Who trailers, off the back of a burning obsession with the Matt Smith era of the show. Like many his age, he first got into Doctor Who with the 2005 revival, but has since gone back and fallen in love with the classic years too. If you need someone to recite every Doctor Who episode in order, or to give you a random factoid about the making of Gridlock, Danny is the person to ask!