Doctor Who: 10 Worst "New-Who" Episodes Ever

Mark Gatiss has a long history with Doctor Who and has written many episodes for the renewed series since its 2005 relaunch, with varying degrees of success. One episode that most can agree did not work, however, was 2015’s season 9 episode Sleep No More.

Told in a found-footage style similar to The Blair Witch Project or Paranormal Activity, this episode sees The Doctor and Clara on a seemingly abandoned spaceship where a bunch of soldiers have arrived to investigate what has happened.

Here they discover that the company is using something called The Morpheus Process which allows a person to condense a month of sleep into a single nap. However, this has an unfortunate side effect in which strange gloopy sand men begin attacking the survivors. Oh, and, these gloopy sand creatures? They’re made of the crusty yellow gunk that collects in your eye whilst you sleep. Yep.

Whilst you certainly can’t deny Gatiss’ creativity or condemn him for trying something different with the series, Sleep No More simply doesn’t work as an episode. The supporting cast range from boring to outright unlikeable, the sandmen monsters are pretty goofy and, much like The Power of Three earlier in this list, there isn’t a proper ending to the episode. This is the only episode in the Capaldi era that you really ought to just skip over on repeat viewings.