Planet Of The Ood: Ranking - 114

 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

  'The Song of the Ood translated...

IWe..We love the colourful orb she holds

And the way the sunlight plays upon her folds

Through telepathy we hear the sound of a gentle word

On the wind of the aid conditioning we had installed

We're picking up Ood vibrations

The voice in our head giving us excitations'

 

 I love the Ood, they’ve 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. ‘Planet Of The Ood’ is the closest modern Who has come to repeating 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. Technically this is the sequel, but its all handled one heck of a lot better than in ‘The Impossible Planet’ where they were a nice idea that was never really used properly (they were, after all, sharing screen time with the devil). This time though their story is central to the plot and this story looks not at where the Ood ended up but where they began, 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 is to sell them into slavery. Mankind is 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. 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. A series like DW, that promised to update us on the changes in culture that had taken place since the show went off air in 1989, just had to do a series like this sometime and they handle it 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 not thinking for the most part – it takes Donna, as our eyes and ears, being uncomfortable to make them feel that anything is wrong about a part of society they grew up with and never thought to question. The great DW 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 for once in the modern series the humans are aggressors. For DW 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) but if you were little in 2008 and were used to the more generic sort of scifi then this sort of concept was mindblowing and exactly what this series was for. 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 DW, even though this is one of those rare DW episodes that has you cheering them on every time. 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 – but even so its very satisfying to see all the right people get their comeuppance and peace restored, just like the good ol’ days of DW. Mostly 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, while the winter base actually looks as if it has real snow. I do have a few small questions about this story that prevent it being truly top tier though. This is an 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?) The heating bills 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, its not as if these humans are at all worried about inconveniencing the Ood if it can possibly help them in some way). I’m not the first person to point out that a race like that wouldn’t have evolved on an ice planet either – of all the aliens in DW the Ood are the ones with the most flesh on show, as it were; unless their DNA is ridiculously different to every known species they’d freeze quicker than we would unclothed and as a species we’re pretty feeble in the cold. Telepathic species are also, surely, the last people who ought to be repressed: they can organise a resistance without the fear of being overheard. The Friends Of The Ood seem to be doing more harm than good 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. At the end everyone seems to know when the Ood have gone back to being peaceful again and the Humans stop their mass slaughter because the script needs them to – even though, in reality, the Oods would surely all have been murdered ‘just in case’ they went rogue again, Doctor intervention or not. 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). It is all, dare I say it, a bit simple compared to the more complex plots we’ve been getting used to by 2008. There is, though, far more to love about this story than not: the Doctor is brilliantly Doctorish, 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 but is genuinely touching), 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. In other words its very very ood episode indeed

+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.

- Murray Gold’s musical score is a bit loud this week even compared to normal and often gets in the way. I SAID MURRAY GOLD’S MUSICAL SCORE IS A BIT...Oh What’s the use? I’ll stick the subtitles on.