Planet Of The Ood
(Series 4, Dr 10 with Donna, 19/4/2008, showrunner: Russell T Davies, writer: Keith Temple, director: Graeme Harper)
Rank: 114
I wish I had three brains
the way the Ood do: one in their heads running on autopilot, one they carry
around so they can pretend to go ‘yes sir, no sir’ and another big collective
one in a ginormous tank allowing you to work on automatic. I would get so much
more work done and so many more reviews written. Of course I’d hate to be an
Ood in every other way: always at the beck and call of lesser species, never asked
what you think, never asked how you feel, never more than a slave to a species
that has got super lazy when you have such powerful art (specifically music)
waiting untapped that no one ever hears. The Ood have got to be my favourite
‘monsters’ of the modern series – precisely because they’re not monsters. Well,
only when in the hands of the real monsters: humans. The great Dr Who twist is
that even while we’re told the Ood feel nothing and even while their mannerisms
resemble slightly stiff Victorian butlers with impeccable manners their
appearance screams untamed wild beast, with the look of a deranged toddler
that’s spilt spaghetti all over themselves and lots of evidence that not only
do they feel they feel a lot. Far from being monsters, left to their own
devices the Ood are sweet, polite, desperate to please, a universe away from
the Daleks and Cybermen, with the fan-pleasing references to their close
cousins The Sensorites – creatures from 1964 who couldn’t handle bright lights
or loud voices. Not every alien race are conquerors – some are conquerees – and
deserve pity and help rather than fear. For Dr Who old hands that’s maybe not
so much of a surprise (for the first ten years of its life the series was doing
this sort of thing every other story – see ‘The
Savages’ for its most basics sense but it dates right back to the first
story ‘An Unearthly Child’) but if
you were little in 2008 and were used to the more generic sort of scifi then this
sort of concept was mind-blowing and exactly what this series was for.
We haven’t really had
anything in Who like that since the ‘morality’ stories of the Pertwee era – the
Malcolm Hulke ‘and this is how humanity forgets to be humane’ type stories
which were always my favourite (so much for only modern Who being ‘woke’ eh?
Something that’s only true if, ironically, you were asleep for more than half
the episodes). It’s a welcome return, especially since the ‘classic’ series was
still a little bit sensitive over ideas of slavery. In places ‘Planet Of The
Ood’ is quite brutal in the way it shows how slavery isn’t a thing of the past
but is alive and well in the present (and future), with a much-discussed line
where a smug Donna – confident of her own era – is taken down by the Doctor for
wearing clothes manufactured for pennies in sweat shops around the world. The
Ood don’t even get that much freedom though they’re at humanity’s beck and call
always. It’s a story that always reminds me of Asimov’s famous three laws of
robotics (a central theme of ‘Robots Of Death’),
only worse because these are real people who are being told their lives are
worthless and they need to suppress their real selves to better care for their
masters. Another source is the ‘Roots’ series, the groundbreaking TV movies of
1977 (the one that made a star of LeVar Burton long before he was Geordie in ‘Star
Trek: Next Generation’) that told the colonial tale from one man researching
his family tree (turning ‘us’ into the monsters, at least if you were white
watching this as a majority of the audience still was in 2008) and gave a ‘voice’
back to those who had lost it; here it’s a clone race and the only ‘roots’ are
growing out of their mouths but it’s telling the same story, giving a voice to
those who don’t have it, and as such might be the single most ‘Dr Who’ story of
the entire Russell T Davies run. There’s a bravery about ‘Planet Of The Ood’
that makes it amongst the best of modern Who and even though from the moment
the Doctor and Donna arrive you know where all the plot beats are going to go –
that things are going to be put right by the end – even so it’s very satisfying
to see all the right people get their comeuppance and peace restored, just like
the good ol’ days.
There was, however, only
one ‘classic’ story that came even close to the subject of slavery, Steve
Gallagher’s ‘Warrior’s Gate’, though in every sense the two stories are polar
opposites. The 1981 story was a poetic philosophical discourse about free
choice and free will and about the stupidity of Humans who need to escape a
universe that isn’t theirs who think that they can do so by enslaving the local
population and making everyone trapped rather than everyone free. ‘Planet Of
The Ood’ isn’t really like that, not least because the Ood are basically naked
and the Tharils are uber-furry. They differ in other ways too though: you could
if you so wished see Gallagher’s work as a discourse on how all of us are
trapped and even telepathic time-sensitive beings with special powers are more
trapped than most. That’s not true for Temple’s story, which goes for the jugular
and screams in your face that this is a story all about the horrors of slavery
and losing your free will and what that must be like. ‘Warrior’s Gate’ is definitely
more unique and works on several extra levels compared to normal as well as
looking beautiful that brushes past you like a watercolour; ‘Planet Of The Ood’
is a warehouse and a quarry (albeit a more interesting warehouse and quarry
than normal), a photograph that holds up a mirror to just how brutal and ‘real’
the system can be. ‘Warrior’s Gate’ is the story I return to, but there’s more
than room out there for a story like this one too. ‘Warrior’s Gate’ is a Yeats
poem, all hints and miscues and secrets that are only unlocked when you’re the
right age and of the same life experience to unlock every word; ‘Planet Of The
Ood’ is a Dickens novel, with over-exaggerated caricatures to better emphasise
the truth.
‘Planet’ is also rare in
being a sequel that comes with far more depth than the rather flimsy source
material. Generally speaking in Who sequels are less interesting than first
ideas but such was the mess that was ‘The Impossible Planet/Satan’s Pit’ (where the Ood were only the second most alien characters, after, umm,
The Devil) and so popular were they with fans that Russell T Davies wanted to
give them a story that out them centre stage. After all, The Ood must be pretty
unique in Who monster circles in that we still didn’t know much more about them
after we met them: for the most part they were just sweeties who were easily
led by dark thoughts from Lucifer beamed inside their brain (a bit like MAGA
Americans, in other words). Even The Doctor admits to being a bit ‘busy’ the
last time he met them to answer all the questions that Donna has in this
episode. So, with the costumes still in storage (and constituting a saving
compared to inventing a new monster) it made sense to give them an ‘origin’
story. Figuring that it was sounding like a ‘traditional’ sort of a Who tale
Russell gave it over to one of the older modern Who writers, Keith Temple.
Though more of a soap writer who’d dabbled in drama, without any scifi
experience, Russell knew him well; his partner Morag was an executive producer
who had given Russell his big break with ‘Children’s Ward’ and at various
meetings down the years (including a recent reunion at a TV Choice awards show)
Russell had struck up a bond with Keith over memories of the old Hinchcliffe
days of watching Tom Baker’s Doctor behind the sofa. Temple had been keen to
write for the series for a while too, even sending his idea for his drama
breakthrough ‘Layer Cake’ to his old friend as the most ‘Whoy’ work he’d done
(it’s very series one: a girl from a dysfunctional family estate vows to defeat
the poverty and apathy around her by becoming a famous baker bringing joy to millions and is, umm, blessed
with luck by the Virgin Mary when one of her sticky buns comes out in her
likeness; unlikely as it seems it could well be that Russell wanted to give the
‘Ood’ a story where they were on the side of ‘God’ rather than the Devil for a
change. Or perhaps he reads the word ‘Baker’ and started thinking about Tom or
Colin).
It’s a sign of how little
work Matt Jones had put into the ood that Keith was basically handed a blank
template for what the Ood were and how they came about, along with a sudden
flash of inspiration from Russell that ‘we haven’t done an ice planet in a
while’. In every other sense though this is an ‘origin’ story that fits pretty
seamlessly, with a storyline of the Ood as slave labour for a species too lazy
to do stuff themselves. It’s all too sadly plausible that, having explored
space and found a friendly and feeble lot of aliens, mankind’s first thought isn’t
to help them, encourage them, befriend them, trade with them or train them, but
to sell them into slavery to make their own lives easier. You end up feeling
for the Ood more than most creatures, the way you feel for the bullies kids at
school (who tended to be the Dr Who fans anyway, except in this era funnily
enough when we were the cool kids; for Catherine Tate the Ood reminded her of
her newly adopted cat who was still a bit scared of her and stared at all
Humans with big wide eyes). The idea of giving them their own ‘spiritual’, a
beautiful song that the Humans are oblivious too, is a gorgeous bit of writing
too, a window into their vulnerability and sadness that they keep hidden, but
which plays on to give them all a sense of solidarity and hope (much the same
way as slaves on plantations). Note how
it gives them all a sense of community and peace so different to the stressed
and fragmented Humans, who are all out for themselves in this story, each of
them trying to make money and stab each other in the back. If you were ever
sold something you didn’t need by an over-sleazy salesman who wouldn’t take no
for an answer then you know where this story is coming from, even if you’re
young enough and lucky enough to be in the demographic that’s never had to
think about slavery before (and if you have then Dr Who is tailor made for the
child who has already thought deeply about such things and felt they were intrinsically
wrong, but never had the right sort of person to give them hope about putting
things right, till that all-important first meeting with The Doctor).
It’s a clever backstory
because it isn’t that far from what we saw in ‘Impossible Planet’ and doesn’t
take long to set up and makes parallels with the slave trade without ever quite
coming out and saying it. Mankind has been told so many times across so many
years that Oods are less than human don’t feel any pain that everyone has come
to believe it – but they’re all wrong, they’ve just had it bred and beaten out
of them. The Ood just bear the pain stoically, doing what they need to in order
to get by but enjoying their own culture at night when the humans can’t see or
hear (like African Americans and their spirituals). Temple touches on other
ideas too: we see the Ood gathered together in a concentration camp that should
set alarm bells ringing for anyone who knows their history (or has seen ‘The Dalek Invasion Of Earth’) while even after
being diluted in the final draft there’s still the starting point of the Ood
being treated like ‘battery hens’ (they were originally kept in similar cages).
The most telling part of the whole story is when Donna urges a freed Ood to run
– but he is so scared and a descendent of so many Ood in similar circumstances
that he has no concept what freedom is and nowhere safe he can run to. It’s all
handled well for the most part – they could have made the Ood out to be weak
and pathetic but instead you’re rooting for them from the moment we follow
them; equally they could have made all the humans out to be monsters but
instead they’re just ignorant for the most part – it takes Donna, as our eyes
and ears, being uncomfortable to make people feel that anything is wrong about
a part of society they grew up with and never thought to question. There’s
another telling line, for instance, that the Earth ‘customers’ know exactly
what’s going on – but have asked not to know. Humans are good at putting their
hands over their eyes and ears and going la la la. The Ood are also interesting
because they’re not strictly individuals but parts connected to a giant hive
brain via telepathic powers– something that’s relatively easy to take over as
it happens – but for all the representation of them as a replica species they
still feel like they have real personalities beyond being just another ‘clone
race’. The scenes of the Ood singing in captivity, with their minds the only
place they’re free to roam and their spirits the only thing that can’t be
extinguished, are incredibly moving. And then they get revenge, developing
glowing red eyes and a taste for human flesh, making this one of the properly
scary stories of modern Dr Who, even though this is one of those rare episodes
that has you cheering them on every time. Mostly, though, this is a charming
episode, one very much in the grand old tradition but with the budget of the
new series delivering things the olden days could never have dreamed of: there
aren’t just one or two Ood for instance but dozens. That said, though, we never
do see a whole ‘planet’ exactly and the title is more ironic than truthful:
this is not the Ood’s planet but a warehouse where they are harvested. It’s humanity’s
planet: the Ood are just a commodity to be harvested, like a phone or a piece
of meat.
The Ood are central to
everything that happens in this story – even when the characters in it just see
them as another object. That’s another reason ‘Planet Of The Ood’ feels old-fashioned
in the best way (the writer even submitting his early drafts in the form of ‘episodes’
like the olden days): this story is less about the plot and more about world
exploring. You know why the Ood ended up here and there are lots of neat
touches, such as the ‘Andy Warhol’ prints for the company office to make the
Ood look ‘good’ in a shiny must-have way, like the latest i-phone. It’s all
very inhuman, too, for lack of a better word, emphasising that while this might
have started as the Ood’s planet it’s long since been remodelled without any
thought as to the Ood’s welfare. All the doors and ceilings are built with
Humans in mind. It also feels ‘real’ in a way few modern Who stories do: there’s
very little CGI in the entire story; all the lines of Oods you see really are
there (pity the poor extras, often the unsung hero of productions like this,
who are all wearing head-masks) while the amazing things the Ood heads do in
close-up are due to animatronics rather than computers. If nothing else ‘Planet
Of The Ood’ is a visual feast. Which seems an odd thing to say about a story
who’s lead monster looks as if he needs a bib at mealtimes, but such is Dr Who.
It wasn’t filmed on an
alien planet of course, but the Brecon beacons of all places. Rugged terrain that
looks about as close to another planet as anywhere in Britain (give or take a
quarry), it’s one of several Dr Who stories to be filmed in Tredegar in the
Southeast of Wales. The rather flat film version of Douglas Adams’ ‘Hitch-Hiker’s
Guide To the galaxy’ (released about the time the new series debuted in 2005)
was filmed there too, which might be why its uses in Who are more sparing than
you might think for such a famous location area. For once the studio shots line
up with the location filming really well too, so that you can’t necessarily see
the divide between one extreme and the other: this feels like a planet that’s
been turned into a giant warehouse. Perhaps the biggest change, compared to the
olden days, is that the winter base actually looks as if it has real snow. Amazing.
It’s not even Christmas either! After all, this is not the sort of story you
put on at Christmas.
However it’s also Russell’s
insistence on this being an ice planet that arguably knocks this story down a
peg or too: I’m not the first person to point out that a race like that
wouldn’t have evolved on an ice planet – of all the aliens in Who the Ood are
the ones with the most flesh on show, as it were; unless their DNA is
ridiculously different to every known species in every other story they’d freeze
quicker than we would unclothed and as a species we’re pretty feeble in the
cold. Nothing at all about the Ood’s history screams ‘ice planet’. Certainly
not their large round feet (that don’t connect with the ice very well). Not the
lack of fur or hair (the Ood are the least testosteroned aliens since their
close cousins The Sensorites), which would be less obvious if this wasn’t a
story solved – in part – through hair tonic. And certainly not the fact that of
all the creatures that exist in the ‘Whoniverse’ they’re the ones most
susceptible to ‘brain freeze’ (given that they carry one of their triple brains
around with them in orb form). No wonder they’re so outwardly happy to become
humanity’s servants: at least that way they have a chance of a warming fire and
something to look at which isn’t glaciers. The heating bills for this planet must be astronomical – why not transport the
Ood to a warmer human climate and take the big brain of goo with them rather
than keeping them here? (Surely somebody must have tried that –I mean, it’s not
as if these humans are at all worried about inconveniencing the Ood if it can
possibly help them in some way).This is also a rather odd ice planet but nobody
ever seems to be cold, even outside in the snow and the sun is visibly blaring
in every scene (does snow in the future have a higher melting point or
something?) As it happens the truth is more prosaic: with typical luck this story
was swapped around with ‘The Unicorn and The Wasp’, to better make use of what
was meant to be the better English summer weather with this story left for late
August when the weather was expected to turn (and be better suited to an ‘ice
planet’). Only as it turned out peak August was super cold and everyone froze
in their flapper dresses and t-shirts and for ‘Ood’ it was sweltering, just
when everyone was dressed up for cold weather.
There are other problems
that are more Temple’s work too. Telepathic species are, surely, the last
people who ought to be repressed and enslaved: they have the superpower of being
able to organise a resistance without the fear of being overheard (admittedly
this is a problem shared by Steve Gallagher and ‘Warrior’s Gate’ too an even
less excusable there in a universe that’s their own, not just a planet). We see
the physical power that the Ood have by the end and how the Humans are really
just a bunch of cowardly cutlets – the Ood could have taken their planet back
in seconds had they wanted to. Instead they play a long waiting game over a
number of years by ‘poisoning’ their keeper and having him turn into one of
them: a satisfying moral end ‘tis true but hardly practical (and how come that
one last portion is the one that suddenly turns Halpen from 99% Human with some
dodgy hair into a full-on Ood? Even by Dr Who standards of coincidences that
seems unlikely). The Friends Of The Ood
seem to be doing more harm than good in their rather haphazard way of rescue
too; as anyone with any knowledge of colonial history will tell you, there’s no
good freeing one or two slaves if they’re got nowhere to go or their owners
will just take them back and/or make things worse for the ones left behind
(some abolitionists they are!) The ending is also rather rushed: somehow every
Human everyone seems to know when the Ood have gone back to being peaceful
again and they stop their mass slaughter because the script needs them to – even
though, given how things turned out in history, the Oods would surely all have
been murdered ‘just in case’ they went rogue again, Doctor intervention or not.
Talking of Doctor
intervention…That’s the biggest problem with ‘Planet Of The Ood’ all round: The
Doctor and Donna don’t actually do anything. They go on the public tour, then
wander around for a bit and get some Ood to sing for them. That’s it. The
Doctor-Donna are eye-witnesses as much as anything else; ‘The Friends Of The
Ood’ and the Ood themselves do all the heavy lifting. A lot of critics see that
as another way this story is like a throwback to the olden days of Hulke and
Letts against the world, except that’s not true: the 3rd Doctor was
the most hands on of them all. In fact it’s hard to imagine any Doctor beings
as hands-off as Dr 10 is here (even Dr 7 would have gone back in time and manipulated
‘The Friends Of The Ood’ from the very start; the closest in past stories is
the way the 6th Dr and Peri turn up over halfway through ‘Revelation Of The Daleks’, but that’s not characteristic
of Sixie as a whole and is more the writer having a chunter). If anything the
Tardis team just get in the way of the Ood’s plan. That gives ‘Planet Of The
Ood’ a rather odd feel about it, especially given the pair are sent packing
with a celebratory ‘song’ for doing absolutely zip; this is a rare Dr Who story
that might have been better served without The Doctor in it, as a standalone ‘warning’
story from ‘The New Twilight Zone’ or ‘Black Mirror’ (although they’d have ad
to up the technological basis for both series).
Not that the Doctor or
Donna are portrayed badly; if anything Temple is the first writer (creator Russell
included) to truly get the pair’s dynamic, of best friends exploring the
universe together as equals (in a way we haven’t seen since late Romana). Both
get lots of great lines and Donna especially gets quite the range of emotions
in this episode: the thrill of being on a new planet, terror when the new
planet turns out to be scary, empathetically sad for the Ood and the future of
humanity, angry when the mood calls for it. Donna is already a much calmer,
gentler presence than in her first three stories with more signs of the big
heart she hides behind her big mouth when she comforts a dying Ood (a scene
that could have been silly – another throwback to the olden days when the
Doctor learnt all about the world he’s on from a dying character who tells him
everything he needs to know in the opening scene - but is genuinely touching). This
story is Donna’s coming of age in so many ways (and I disagree with the last
minute decision to switch this story and ‘The
Fires Of Pompeii’ around over fears this one was too ‘dark’ – because
characters being buried alive under poisonous ash clouds or burning alive in lava
isn’t?!? – as the resolution to that story only makes sense if Donna has
already experienced tragedy).
It’s a shame, too, that
the Human characters aren’t delivered with the same love, care or attention as
the Ood as many of them are just one-dimensional bad guys, doing questionable
moral things because they have questionable morals, rather than good people who
just go along with the status quo because fighting it is too much work and
they’re desperate to make money or fear of being treated the same way as an
enemy of the state (which is how most evil regimes are propped up, after all,
including the ones we’re living through now). One of them – an un-named rep –
is played by Tariq Jordan, brother of ‘Sarah Jane Adventures’ regular Maria
(actress Yasmin Paige). ‘Ood’ has it’s darker, deeper moments but overall it’s
very much a child-friendly view of a difficult subject and while that might
well have been the only way to handle slavery comfortably it does mean that
there is less in this story to get your teeth into than other episodes. It’s
maybe not a coincidence that ‘Planet Of The Ood’ runs short, with its
forty-eight minute running time a good four minutes shorter than average: this
story feels like it has a lot to say, but it says it all in the simplest terms
possible, without as many b-plots or extra story arcs (the only real ‘extra’ is
Donna’s line about bees going missing: a throwaway line that’s only going to
make sense in the series finale).
It is all, dare I say it,
a bit simple compared to the more complex plots we’ve been getting used to by
2008. Still, they say the devil is in the detail and this time around the story
is all the better for the Devil and the detail not being here, giving the Ood
proper room to breathe and dumping all the things from last time that didn’t
really work in a vat of goo. Not every story needs to be extra-complicated and
there’s more than enough to love about this story than not: the Doctor is
brilliantly Doctorish, the Ood themselves are extraordinarily good in design
and performance, their mass speaking and takeover greatly chilling and a daft
action sequence towards the end breaks up what’s quite a talky episode nicely
and gives Tennant something to do rather than stand around raging or pouting. I
also love the way it’s a futuristic story about how nothing really changes, with
humanity another long slow step on the way to equality and justice. In other
words its very very ood episode indeed, but with maybe a few too many
logistical problems to rank amongst the very best.
POSITIVES +They could
have left this as one of those metaphorical ‘you figure out what we really
mean’ stories but no – they’re actually brave enough to come out and say it,
without actually quite saying it. Donna is appalled at the thought of people
sweating away working for people they’ll never meet because they’re forced to
and quietly smug they don’t have slavery in her own time, unlike the past and
future. Then the Doctor points out that the clothes she’s wearing were stitched
half the world away in a sweatshop for pennies. The parallels with the way that
Earth is picking up free Ood slaves and don’t ask questions about how they got
them (because ‘they don’t want to know the answers’) is one of those moments
new Who covers no other series could get away with but which really needs to be
said.
NEGATIVES - Murray
Gold’s musical score is a bit loud this week even compared to normal and often
gets in the way. Despite being such an intrinsic part of the story he could
have done so much with (honestly it’s hard to see any difference between the
Ood song of captivity that brings Donna to tears and what he uses for emotional
scenes every single week). I SAID MURRAY GOLD’S MUSICAL SCORE IS A BIT...Oh
What’s the use? I’ll stick the subtitles on. One other note in the music: we
get endless references to the traditional hymn ‘Will The Circle Be Unbroken?’,
so much so that you expect that song to be the one everyone is singing. Only,
of course, that is very much the sort of old hymn the white slave owners would
have been singing not the slaves (and could, when viewed a certain way, be a
song about not changing the status quo because it’s God will, slavery included).
Did someone working on this story assume that it was a black spiritual hymn and
Murray Gold’s score is a last minute substitute? That might explain why it
feels more cobbled together than usual.
BEST QUOTE: Halpin:
‘Can’t say I’ve ever shot anyone before. Can’t say I’m going to enjoy it. But
then it’s not exactly a normal day is it?…’
Previous ‘The
Fires Of Pompeii’ next ‘The Sontaron Stratagem/The Poison Sky’
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