Pop Vultures

Doctor Who, S04 E03: Planet of the Ood

This week: The Doctor and Donna leave Earth behind to visit the Planet of the Ood, where they uncover lots of creatures in need of saving. Also, Catherine Tate is becoming the heart of Doctor Who. much to my surprise.

Recap and spoilers after the jump.

You might remember the Ood from their last appearance two years ago - they’re the psychic tentacle-faced aliens who the Doctor abandoned to a fiery fate in 2006’s The Satan Pit. So basically, he owes them one. And they’re really in need of a favour - it turns out that the alien race who are “born to serve” are, of course, nothing more than slaves. They’re “bred” by a huge evil corporation (is there any other kind?) called Ood Operations, run by the immoral Halpen (Tim McInerney, almost unrecognisable from his Blackadder days).

The Doctor and Donna realise something is amiss almost as soon as they arrive, when they discover a dying Ood lying in the snow. He tries to communicate with them using the glowing orb attached to his head that translates his psychic emanations into speech, but after a scary red-eyed psychotic episode, he shuffles off his mortal coil. One quick factory infiltration later, and Donna and the Doctor discover that more of the Ood are turning red-eyed and murderous, and all of them are demanding that “the circle must be broken”.

The big bad businessfolk soon discover the interlopers, whom they assume are Ood liberationists. There is, as usual, a lot of running around as the Ood Operations goons pursue, capture and then lose our brave heroes, who discover some captive Ood trapped in a cage. Each is carrying something in its hands, and it turns out that this is part of the Oods’ brain - O.O. cut this off to essentially lobotomise the poor little Ood and replace the brain with the orb-like communication device. It turns out that the Ood are meant to communicate by singing, but these unfortunate prisoners can only sing a heart-breaking Song of Captivity. Only the Doctor can hear it, and when Donna asks him to help her hear it too, she finds it unbearable. Outside in the complex, more and more Ood are going on the rampage, and Halpen decides to blow up the core of the building, which turns out to be a giant Ood brain, which should be working with each Ood’s other brain (do keep up) to form a collective consciousness.

But Halpen has trapped the brain in a circular forcefield. Oh noes! Luckily (well, not for him, as you’ll see in a moment) one of his minions is really an undercover Ood liberationist and has been slowly reducing the power of the forcefield, allowing the Ood to communicate with each other once more. Halpen pushes him off the balcony into the brain and then gives a bit of an “I’m so happy with my evil plan” speech. But what is this? Something is happening to him! He’s going all wobbly. It seems that the drink his Ood servant has been giving him for ages to supposedly prevent his increasing hair loss was actually some sort of freaky Ood juice or something - and he is now turning into an Ood. He sprouts tentacles and pukes up a brain! It is all very horrible. As a small child I was terrified of any TV programme, film, book or comic in which a character was turned into something horrible, and whenever I encountered this sort of thing, I would feel illogically terrified that, somehow, it could happen to me. If I had seen this scene as a kid, I would have been having nightmares for weeks (and nervously feeling my nose in case it was starting to turn into tentacles). Anyway, the Doctor stops the bomb blowing up the core brain, the Ood are free, and once more they can sing a joyful song. But then they tell him that the Doctor’s song “will soon be over.” Yikes.

This was a pretty good episode. It was nice to have a respite from the usual “humans rule, yay!” stuff, heartwarming as that can be. Here we see humans as slavemasters, and when a shocked Donna says “we don’t have slaves” the Doctor pointedly asks, “who made your clothes?” It’s a potentially heavy-handed (if perfectly true) line, but it works, as does Donna as a character. Her sheer enthusiasm and joy at this widening of her horizons is infectious, and to the surprise of viewers (well, me and most other critics), she’s becoming the show’s voice of reason and compassion. The moment when she overcomes her initial horrified revulsion and comforts the dying Ood is genuinely moving, as is her distress at the Ood’s Song of Captivity. For a while, she just wants to go home - and to my surprise, I found myself really hoping that she’d stay.

There’s only one painfully misjudged moment, when an Ood attendant addresses her as “Miss” and she honks back, “Why do you say Miss? Do I look single?” - a line straight from her annoying sketch show. But apart from that, she kind of rocks. So does David Tennant, as ever, who continues to bring the perfect mixture of light and shade to the role. Also, he’s just ridiculously attractive and has great clothes. Sigh. Tim McInerney is great too, and his villainous Halpen stops just short of being cartoonish - he tells his “faithful” servant (the one who we soon discover has been feeding him Ood-juice) to “return to your people” when the riot breaks out. It’s the patronising reward of a colonist to a supposedly “lesser being” but it’s clear that Halpen really sees himself as somehow being an honourable man. Of course, he does oversee a slavery empire and push the undercover minion into a giant brain, so this one moment of compassion doesn’t exactly balance out his character. Still, no one’s perfect.

Next week: Martha’s back! Yay! As are the Sontaran, the Who villains known to my sisters and I, when they made their last appearance in the mid ’80s, as “the googles.”