Behind the Sofa - The Collaborative Doctor Who Blog

Revenge of the Calamari

Doctor Who: Planet of the Ood

Any good ecologist can tell you that there are a number of things in any environment that require each other to survive and prosper.  I'm not just talking about things that happen to work disturbingly well together (chocolate and peanut butter, sex and violence, weed and oxycodone); I'm mostly thinking of those things that, without the other, they're bloody useless.  In the jargon of science, their mutualism is obligatory.  Would anyone actually bother going out of their way for Hardy without Laurel?  Chips without fish?  Antony without Cleopatra?  Starsky without Hutch?  Aiding without abetting?  Harold without Kumar?  Sturm without Drang?

No, of course not.  Don't be silly.

With this in mind, it seems obvious to me that a good script and good actors really aren't very useful without each other.  There's not much point in casting Dame Judy Dench for your movie if you're letting George Lucas write it,  and even Shakespeare would fall flat if it had no choice but to be performed by Eve Myles.

Fortunately, Planet of the Ood is just dripping with competent acting and scripting, proving that the two go together like chicken and waffles.  A fair slice of the credit for the episode's success has to go to Catherine Tate, who once again proves to be more than up to the task as long as she gets some proper roughage from the scriptwriters, which she does more often than not in Planet of the Ood.  Despite all the concern from the masses that she'd be a bellowing idiot for the whole of Series 4, she's shown she has the acting chops to pull off an actual range of emotions, and can actually move from emotion to emotion within the same scene.  A fine example I enjoyed is the back-and-forth in the TARDIS at the beginning of the programme, beginning with Donna's palpable excitement and nervousness about the whole "new planet" thing, and then her abrupt reaction to the cold.  (In a nod to the fans, she goes all practical and returns with an anorak.)  Then excitement again with "Blimey, a real, proper rocket!  Now that's what I call a spaceship!"

Her first encounter with an Ood is also well written and performed.  After the Doctor's admonishment at her reaction to Nyarlathotep sprawled in the snow ("Donna, don't!  Not now.  It's a he, not an it.  Gimme a hand."), she sheepishly pitches in to help, even becoming nurturing ("There you are, sweetheart.")

She even manages to remain respectable when delivering bollocksy lines like "You idiot!  They're born with their brains in their hands.  Don't you see?  That makes them peaceful.  They've got to be, because a creature like that would have to trust anyone it meets."  You try saying that with a straight face. 

I think the one significant Donna misfire in the epsiode was the whole "Why'dja say miss?  Do I look single?" line, which hearkens back to the shallow comedy-Donna we were threatened with back in the first half of The Runaway Bride.  Unsurprisingly, these attempts at introducing some broad (read "stupid") comedy to the program rarely seem to work, much like the whole joke with the novelty translator balls, which also fell flat. "After a stressful day, a little something for the gentlemen."  I'm not sure if this would seem less creepy if I didn't know for a fact that this scenario is playing out among tentacle-fetishists at anime conventions across the world all the time.  It does make one shudder at the depraved acts enslaved Ood are likely to be forced to engage in. It just doesn't seem right outside of Torchwood. 

Ayesha Dharker and Tim McInnery acquitted themselves reasonably well as the main villains in the episode, again abetted by some nice twists in the writing.  Although we were all, no doubt, expecting the redemption of Dharker's weasely marketing git Solana after the Doctor suggests that she can help, the writers don't go the obvious direction.  Just when we think she's gonna come around and switch sides, she promptly sells the Doctor and Donna out to the guards.  Shortly thereafter, of course, she tells the guards to "shoot to kill" and is promptly electrocuted by the insidious glowing juice-box of the nearest Ood.

We also got the nice contrast between Solana's polished PR spiel ("As you can see, the Ood are happy to serve, and we keep them in facilities of the highest standard.") and the Most Dangerous Game Ood-hunt going on outside.  "If your Ood is happy..." (cut in footage of a frothing, screaming clearly distressed Ood here) "...then you'll be happy, too."

Much seems to have been made of the fact that McInnery's corporate villain had no other motivation beyond a thirst for wealth and power.  Pardon me...but isn't this enough?  Greedy corporate bigwigs have been doing all sorts of unspeakable things in the name of profit for...well, as long as there have been greedy corporate bigwigs.  At least this was better than "being evil for the sake of being evil" that is so common in your more one-dimensional villains.

McInnery's portrayal comfortably accepts this more realistic characterization, comparing the Ood to livestock and writing off the whole (admittedly homocidal) batch of them for the the insurance money.  Nonetheless, there are elements of McInnery's performance that add a little depth and moral ambiguity to the standard greedy CEO model, most notably his consideration for Ood Sigma's loyalty ("No!  You've not turned.  Faithful to the last.  Go.  Join your people.  While you still can."), as well as at least some sense of stopping the spread of the "red eye" as a "public duty".  I also appreciated his matter-of-factness when faced with the task of shooting the Doctor and Donna: "Can't say I've ever shot anyone before.  Can't say I'm gonna like it."  The only misstep I noted was Halpen's happiness once they return to Warehouse 15.  His boyishly excited "We're gonna blow it up!" seems a little incongruous with the rest of the character.

Halpern's Lovecraftian transformation was fairly convincing.  First, peeling his head like an orange, then coughing up an entire serving of calamari.  I'm sort of surprised that with all those changes going on, including the repositioning of his eyes, the only symptom was hair loss.

We got the rarest of rarities in the New Doctor Who...an actual alien (not-Earth planet!)  Sure, perhaps they went a little overboard in the "how to make snow look alien" department.  A little too far in the "Arches National Park" direction with the panoramic ice-bridges and all that rot.  Nonetheless, I appreciate the attempt, and once the Doctor and Donna got off of the giant matte painting, the snowy industrial setting was, as others have observed, very Blake's 7, which totally works for me.  Just about anything Blake's 7 works for me.

Of course, not everything in the episode came off without a hitch.  There were definitely a few missteps.  One primary example was the entire Oodsong thing, which left me a little nonplussed... 

"The circle must be broken." "Why?" "So that we can sing."

Sing???  That's it?  They're not interested in liberty or equality or reparations or revenge or an end to the dull drudgery of workaday tidal waves?!  They just want a shot on Pop Idol?

The song itself didn't do a whole bloody lot for me, I have to admit.  It was a bit much that Donna couldn't bear it any longer after thirty seconds of bad retro-Renaissance caterwauling.  I think it might have been more effective for me if they didn't bother to try to play it for us viewers.  Maybe we could have imagined something that would have actually been convincingly alien and compelling.  And while the guards and the Ood are going all sharks-and-jets on each others' arses, once we can all "hear the song of the Ood", the soldiers all stop shooting and just look around as the Ood get all peaceful and join hands in big circle.  They put their guns down.  Hug each other.  That sort of thing.  I found the triteness of it all thoroughly cringeworthy.

(The other singing-Ood image I'm having difficulty getting out of my head now is the musical number from Daleks in Manhattan, but with an Ood playing the role of Tallulah: "You lured me in with your bright red eyes, your tentacles, your bewitching lies!  One and one and one is three...my bad, bad angel, you put the devil in me!  Well, not exactly the devil...I mean, he fancied himself the devil, but he was really just a big beast in a pit, orbiting a black hole... ")

The Ood biology was also sort of a weak point.  Despite the Doctor's insistence that Ood couldn't evolve to serve, the episode doen't give us much of an insight as to what exaclty Ood are evolved to do.  I can forgive Donna's assertion that the Ood "would have to trust anyone it meets" despite dragging half their brain around with an umbilical cord.  She's hardly a scientist, and the evidence seems to bear out that the Ood are disturbingly trusting indeed.  When the Doctor and Donna show up and tell the imprisoned Ood "Hey, we're on your side!" and open a can of tuna, the Ood're all "Well, hullo!  Have a butcher's at my unprotected brain."  With a self-preservation instinct this strong the Ood would have gone the way of the dodo as soon as they encountered a stiff breeze, much less a horde of hungry imperialists from Earth.

As much as I'd like to see herds of Ood running wild like wildebeasts, I'm not convinced that they were remotely plausible, and not just because they'd be dragging their brains around behind themselves on a string.  Why would an entire species evolve to share one huge, carnivorous, screaming brain with a sensitivity to hair-tonic cleverly tucked away beneath a glacier anyway?  You'd think at the least the chances of survival would be increased by, I don't know, maybe TWO huge, carnivorous, screaming brains.  There's just something about science fiction that makes me wish people would put more thought into the science.

I'm sure I could find other things to nitpick about in Planet of the Ood (The spurious chase with the grabby thing, some general hamfistedness, arbitrarily-sadistic-guy) but overall, a passable effort of Nu-Who.  That being said, I don't feel much interest in revisiting the Ood anytime soon, so I'm not looking forward to the 2009 bank-holiday special "Ood, Where's my car?"  Sontarans, on the other hand, could be worthwhile.

Noble Slaves On Ice

Doctor Who: Planet Of The Ood

Slavery is bad, boys and girls. Globalisation is bad, boys and girls. Planet Of The Ood takes us back to the first principles of the classic series. Put a whacking great moral lesson in the middle of a bitter, bleak tale of science fiction imperialism and serve with fish-fingers and peas on Saturday.

Doctor Who gives us a treatise on Milton Friedman’s supply side economics when you look at the journey of the Ood out of their ‘slavery’ towards ‘ freedom’ as an analogy to the struggles against the impositions of the free market. The Ood are perhaps representative of the reformist, co-operative might against the golden strait-jacket of the IMF or the World Bank. They’re like the Danish and the Norwegians refusing to accept the way the Euro has ripped down the edifice of worker protection rules and taxes that support the welfare state. Chuck in a few pops at imperialism and it’s like we’re watching The Mutants all over again. Quite apt in the year of the 200th Anniversary of the abolition of slavery.

Donna as representative of those coffee guzzling, Primark wearing members of the audience...

Not that I’m against the series wearing its big leftist heart on its sleeve. It just seems so unfettered in Planet Of The Ood as if suddenly Russell the lion tamer has let one of the big cats out of the cage. It's quite radical for a contemporary family tea-time show to try and address the audience’s own complicity in the cloak and dagger world of global economics whereas in the Letts era, anti-imperialist, pro-environmental themes arrived like an over-frequent bus service. Is this a sign then that the new series is getting much bolder in the way it reflects contemporary affairs? I hope so but then again this was like being bludgeoned a little too aggressively by Davies anti-totalitarian, progressive politics that runs through his reworking of the series. Love the message but not quite sure the messenger was being that subtle in delivering it.

Subtlety is perhaps not something that could be employed, I suspect, when dealing with the emotive subject of slavery and, beyond the obvious visual symbols, – lines of Ood being whipped into submission – there is a more complex subtext bubbling away. The exchange between the Doctor and Donna about the Empire (obviously referring to both the British imperialist past and the USA’s imperialist agenda now) touches on Donna as representative of those coffee guzzling, Primark (other cheap clothes importers are available, readers) wearing members of the audience, clearly aware of the conditions under which their commodities were produced, who may well not want to hear the Doctor offering them 'holier than thou' cheap shots. And she goes on to argue that the Doctor could be accused of having human companions simply to provide him with a conscience. He's the 'Friends Of The Earth', 'Fairtrade' and 'Greenpeace' all rolled into one patronising moment and quite rightly Donna doesn't need lecturing when it is clear she recognises slavery on the Ood-Sphere for the wrong that it is and feels she may at last be in a position to actively do something about it.

It’s too ‘feel good’ a solution to free the Ood and it raises more questions generally about the Doctor’s actions in what must, eventually, lead to the toppling of an Empire.

It’s quite brave for an episode to feel the collar of the audience and suggest that in some ways we are all guilty of complicity in the way that the free market isn't fair on economies in China and India. The Empire is seen as a vast free market trading in Ood. These markets are about the flow of commodities in and out of galaxies without actually being of benefit to their respective economies. The money is being made outside of them. So, Halpern’s activities may well equate with the more dubious practices of the aforementioned IMF and the World Bank. And if indeed an Ood revolution has taken place, as we are told by the conclusion of the episode, and all the Ood are returning to the Ood Sphere, then the story rather overlooks the down-side of this. The Empire will go to hell and probably suffer economic collapse. With the Ood out of slavery, the Empire will surely seek a way to replace them? Doctor, is that a good thing? Do you want that on your conscience too? It’s too ‘feel good’ a solution to free the Ood and it raises more questions generally about the Doctor’s actions in what must, eventually, lead to the toppling of an Empire.

The other problem with this story, which isn’t quite as radically cheeky as Partners In Crime or emotionally gutsy as The Fires Of Pompeii, is the uneven tone. It’s clear that this is one of the first (if not the first) episodes in the filming block and Catherine Tate hasn’t quite got to grips with the character of Donna. The opening scene in the TARDIS and the subsequent landing are shrill in the same way that her flouncing around in a wedding dress was in The Runaway Bride but later she seems to get to grips again with the subtler acting requirements when confronting the dying Ood in the snow. She’s also rather good when she asks the Doctor to allow her to hear the telepathic (protest) song of the Ood and her emotional response connects the audience to the moral battle being played out. She also continues to counter the Doctor’s flippancy, no more fittingly than in their little spat about imperialism and markets I discussed earlier.

There are subtle touches of humour despite the bleak tone of the central message – the goofy Ood advertisement in the pre-credits, the handcuffs gag, the nod to The Simpsons – that are then complemented by some good, kinetic action set pieces (director Graeme Harper’s forte) and nostalgic references to The Sensorites as well as more mentions of missing bees and a note of foreshadowing for the Tenth Doctor in that ‘soon, your song will end’ coda. In keeping with the general themes of this series, once again we have a human being transformed into an alien, which now does seem like less of a coincidence and more of a continuing and developing idea.

Tim McInnerny is suitably oily and ruthless as the low-grade IMF lackey, Halpern, and the whole mutation into an Ood is a bit of simplistic poetic justice, whilst scientifically dubious, and again is as near the knuckle as Doctor Constantine’s possession in The Empty Child but perhaps not quite as effective. Still, it’ll have the kiddies freaking out over their baked beans. The notion of the Ood with their hind-brains is an interesting one but again don’t examine the evolutionary theory too closely. The hind-brain could be seen simply as another symbol of liberty and enlightenment and Halpern is transformed from ranting capitalist to a slave of the Ood holistic hive mind. Whilst the story opens up many questions, it is in itself reliant on some very SF, 'B' movie tropes – the giant brain, telepathy, the base under siege – and whilst Harper’s direction works wonders this does feel a little flat, quite 'trad' (in Doctor Who parlance), and even the ice planet environs verge on the unconvincing with some painfully obvious matte effects in certain shots. Murray Gold's music strikes out in a different direction and adds some strange sounding tonalities that pleasingly seem to have wandered in, along with the moral message, from the classic series too.

As an episode, it’s a strange mix of the traditional and the radical that doesn’t quite come off but at least they went back to the unanswered questions about the Ood’s origins that were left hanging in The Impossible Planet. How well they answered those questions is debatable but at least they tried.

I'm A Slave 4 Who

Doctor Who: Planet of the Ood

So what did we know at 6.20pm last Saturday? That the episode was called Planet of the Ood and it had something to do with explaining how no-one’s favourite noodle-noggined ballcock wranglers came to be such a subservient race. And 45, defiantly surprise-free minutes later… yup, that was still pretty much the size of it. Oh, except it turned out to be a musical. Sort of.

I have to admit, I didn’t see that one coming. It’s just a shame the Song of the Ood couldn’t have been more distinct from the rest of the score – though, who knows, maybe the Ood are just really, really big fans of Murray Gold, and started their careers doing Barbershop covers of Martha’s Theme and Song For Ten? Whatever the reason, someone has clearly taken their eye off The Gay Agenda – after appearances by Soft Cell, the Scissor Sisters and Kylie, I was slightly disappointed the Ood’s song didn’t turn out to be something from Rufus Wainwright’s Judy Garland tribute album. (Or maybe a cover of the Third Doctor’s I’m The Noodle Doodle Man would have been more appropriate?)

But this episode wasn’t just a bit of sing-song to warm us up for Graham Norton’s Search For A Nancy, oh no. Because, although it may have escaped your attention, if you dig deep enough down into the subtext of the story, you’ll find there’s a subtle allegory about slavery tucked away in there somewhere. I know! If it hadn’t been for 95% of the dialogue, it would have slipped right under my radar, too. Although, in retrospect, the Doctor writing “Make Ood Trade Fair” on his hand and doing a direct appeal to camera to the strains of the piano lament from Trouble should have been a bit of a giveaway.

Of course, the Ood weren’t born to be slaves – as the Doctor pointed out, no race that subservient would ever be able to evolve in the first place. Trouble is, it’s not really a good idea to draw attention to a race’s potential evolutionary handicaps – and then reveal they carry their brains around in their hands like teenage chavs welded to their mobile phones. I mean, where do they put it when they’re doing… well, anything? (“Just hold me brain for a minute, will you love, I need to reach the biscuit tin.”) Still, maybe now they’re free, and will no longer be forced to dress like the world’s biggest Beatles tribute band, they can invent some revolutionary form of brain-housing device – like, ooh, I don’t know, a breast pocket?

And speaking of brains, how psyched were we to find out what was in Warehouse 15? I mean, it was obviously some kind of Ood central brain thing – a bit like the Nestene Consciousness – but as they were keeping it so tightly under wraps until the big reveal, I did wonder exactly what this big, world-shattering secret was going to be: A returning enemy? A remnant of old Gallifrey? A 350-ft wide replica of Billie Piper’s gob?

As it turned out, it was just a massive, f***-off brain – a bit like the one in Time and the Rani but, you know, bigger. And a bit less convincing. And - oops! - now it’s got a pretend scientist stuck inside it! Now I’m no neurosurgeon, but that’s gotta smart, surely? Apparently not, as the brain didn’t appear to react at all (unless it secretly changed the Ood song to Can’t Get You Out of My Head without us knowing).

I’m no biochemist, either, but I do know it would take a hell of a special brew to transform a human being’s entire physiognomy into a complete alien species, without him noticing until the moment his face falls off and he chucks up a brain. (Don’t get my wrong, I’ve brought up some pretty nasty things after a night on the poison myself, but this was something else.)

Still, Death by Disappointing Maguffin was the least Tim McInnerny deserved after his scenery-chewing CBeebies turn as Mr Halpern, which saw him comfortably walk away with the Roger Lloyd Pack Beyond The Grave Award despite some pretty stiff competition from Roger Griffiths’ Commander Kess, who snickered and boggled his way through the claw chase a bit like Mutley watching one of Dick Dastardly’s schemes blow up in his face. Except, of course, The Wacky Races would never have shoe-horned in such a clumsily spurious chase sequence with absolutely no relevance to anything around it. Heck, even George “Pod Race” Lucas might have wondered whether this sequence wasn’t a bit “style over substance”. I mean, if they’re going to interrupt the story for no good reason, why not go the whole hog and have David Tennant say, “More action from the Ood-Sphere in a moment, but first, ladies and gentlemen… Miss Barbara Dickson.”

I guess big, noisy action sequences are what Graham Harper does best, though. I’m not entirely sure why old scarf-face is still so lionised. Sure, in old Who, he was clearly light years ahead of his time, but these days it feels like he’s running to catch up with the likes of James Strong and Euros Lyn. He’s a bit like the Ross Robinson of directing – all major chords and clatter, but lacking the lightness of touch required for scenes that ought to strive for some emotional resonance. It’s partly the sledgehammer-to-a-nut scripting, of course, but compare the heavy-handed sequence in which Tate turns on the water works (again) while listening to the song of the Ood with James Strong’s beautifully restrained work with Tennant dangling in the pit in the last Ood story. (Incidentally, isn’t that thing the Doctor does to allow Donna to hear the song technically file-sharing? Time Lord telepathy is killing music!)

But perhaps I’m being harsh. There was a lot about Planet of the Ood that I loved – the Planet of the Ood itself being one. Now I’ve never really taken a stance on the whole alien planets hoo-ha (I won’t dignify it by calling it a debate) other than wondering if RTD’s “they’re from Zog, so f*** ’em” attitude isn’t a bit of an odd message to be sending to the nation’s jim-jammed crumpet-munchers. But the part of me that’s forever 12-years-old (and, being a Ming Mong, that’s obviously the dominant part) does love an ice planet. Oh yes, call me shallow, but sprinkle some bits of white paper about the place and I’ll sit through anything – I’d even watch My Family, if there was a scene in which Robert Lindsay mugged his way through some comic exasperation in a snow drift (though I draw the line at Torchwood, obviously).

Anyway, there’s no denying the brilliant white vistas of the Ood-Sphere marked a welcome change of location from that corridor under the Millennium Stadium we’ve been watching for the last three years - though the show, as always, was careful to keep its feet on the ground: Where else would you find people on a distant planet in the far future talking about Persil balls and doing Homer Simpson impressions? (For more on this, see Professor Jon Pertwee’s paper, “If the Yeti won’t come to the loo in Tooting Bec, you have to take the loo in Tooting Bec to the Himalayas” (Cambridge University Press, 1974)).

So the snow was lovely and all, and there was something pleasingly old-skool about the early scenes, in which Tate and Tennant basically wandered about looking at stuff (shades of Harper’s Revelation of the Daleks, of course, in the scene in which the Doc and his companion discover a dying but feral creature in the snow – except, this not being an Eric Saward story, Donna didn’t pick up a massive stick and batter the Ood about the brains with it).

Sadly, though, Keith Temple’s script just seemed to run out of steam somewhere around the mid-way point, padding out the second half of the episode with endless shots of people running around a factory shouting and firing guns, intercut with the occasional Poignant Bit that might as well have had a caption saying “Cry now” plastered across the screen. Still, I guess if you’re going to carry your brain around in your hand, wearing your heart on your sleeve is no great shakes.

Vote Result: Planet of the Ood

Here are the results for the third blog poll, for Planet of the Ood:

• 75%: Superb - Oodles of Fun
• 25%: Not Good - Oody Hell!

The fourth Doctor Who poll, for The Sontaran Stratagem, will be online later tonight following the broadcast of the episode.

Ood have thought it

Doctor Who: Planet of the Ood

How appropriate.  In the week it’s announced that Sky is resurrecting (or reimagining) Blake’s Seven for the 21st century, the BBC shows that even on British telly budgets you can still do a convincing alien planet.

And that you can almost bugger up an episode entirely with ill-conceived effects shots that completely ruin the mood and tone of what had been, up to that point, a likeable, thought provoking  and charming episode of Doctor Who.

Yes, the giant man-eating brain in the basement.  Surely someone, somewhere, looked at that on the pages being sent in by Keith Temple and went... ‘you what?’

That the episode gets away with it, and indeed remains as good as it did... luck or design, I’ll leave that choice up to you.  I suspect luck more than anything else.

Planet of the Ood was a massively disjointed piece of television, lurching drunkenly from legitimate commentary on slavery and the abuse of domesticated animals to trite action sequence to clunking dialogue.  Like much of the new series, the uneven nature of the script could have sabotaged it.  But like much of the new series, what saved it was the performances.

I know David Tennant’s a divisive figure in these parts and when he’s, as Charlie Brooker once put it, ‘bumming about’ he’s as annoying as a six year old Jamie Oliver mainlining Sunny D speedballs.  But when he’s given a nice, meaty piece of script to get his teeth into, we see why he’s regarded so highly as one of the best actors in the country today.   The quiet rage, the pity towards the Ood, and his interplay with Donna were just tremendous to watch.   

Meanwhile Catherine Tate continues to confound me.  I sat slackjawed in disbelief at Partners in Crime, but both in The Fires of Pompeii and here she was every inch the proper actress we’d been told to expect, convincingly believable as we saw just how out of her depth Donna was when faced with the pre-lobotimised Ood.

And Tim McInnerny, all but recreating his evil JIC chief from Spooks, was great fun, even if his name - Kleinman Halpen  - does sound like some dodgy drugs company from the States.

Of course, Graeme Harper’s direction helped cover up the cracks in the script.  For a man approaching pension age, his episodes always have an astonishing level of energy and pace.  His approach isn’t as innovative as it was in the mid-80s, but that’s largely because everyone on TV shoots stuff the way he does.

So instead of innovation we have energy - bags of it.  It makes the sequence of the Doctor avoiding the claw - an insanely dumb action sequence on paper - work, throwing the camera about the corridors of crates as much as Tennant is bouncing off them.   Coupled with the visual style of the show - pop-art Ood backdrops, a convincing alien planet - it gave the scenes which needed pace an intense kinetic level, and made those reflective moments and confrontations mean more.

It’d been clear that something was going on with Dr Zoidberg’s creepy cousin

But the best thing, the absolutely nailed-on best thing about Planet of the Ood, was the climax.  It’d been clear from the first time Ood Sigma (No relation to Trevor Sigma, presumably despite the cranial similarity) passed Halpen his wee shotglass of hair tonic that something was going on with Dr Zoidberg’s creepy cousin.  And while it may not remotely have made sense, it worked dramatically.

In many ways it was reminiscent of Ghost Light - the ultimate revenge of these put-upon creatures is to leave their evil overlord so helpless he needs them just to wipe his arse, basically.  After so many episodes of villains getting their comeuppance in messy, nasty, fatal manners, there was almost something traditional about this.  A family show returning to family values, if you like. 

After a few hiccups in recent times, Doctor Who is back on song.

Hey Ood, Don't Make it Bad

Doctor Who: Planet of the Ood

Hey Ood, Don't make it bad
Take the Oodsong, and make it better
Just remember to let them into your brain(s)
DoctorDonnaFriend will make it better

Hey Ood, don't be afraid,
Kill the tour guide, she's right there, get her!
Once the boss man starts peeling off his skin
Then you begin to make it better

Na, Na Na, NaNaNa Naaaaa,
NaNaNa Naaaaa,
Hey, Ood!
Na, Na Na, NaNaNa Naaaaa,
NaNaNa Naaaaa,
Hey, Ood!

And with that out of our way, we can get down to the business of reviewing Planet of the Ood. I am glad to report that the "odd ood" pun isn't made in this episode. I suppose after Matt Jones felt the need to make the joke twice in The Impossible Planet the production team got tired of it.

The return of the Ood was heralded with much fanfare, by which I mean a brief press release on the BBC website. And quite rightly, I suppose. If Doctor Who is going to continue to grow and evolve (and yes, it should, as it always has), then the best way to do that is to continue to develop its gallery of recurring monsters so that it doesn't have to fall back on the Daleks all the time. Perhaps that's what they tried to do with the Slitheen, cat people, and Cassandra, but none of these are going to cut it. In truth, I wasn't sure the Ood would either, because they weren't even the stars of their own debut and they didn't do an awful lot other than waggle their Cthulhu tendrils and attack people with their tether-balls. Ood were mere props; it could just as easily have been human crew that the Beast took over and the story would still have worked. And at the end of the episode they all died of irrelevance, with honors, so it was hard to see how anyone could really have much more to say about them. But now I see that the concept did have a set of legs, and despite the Ood threat being apparently nullified by the end of this adventure I think it still has them. I wouldn't mind seeing them in another couple of years, as long as we're not pelted with Ood stories every year like we are with the Daleks.

This episode takes the thinly-developed Ood and not only explains them but also expands the concept into something more complex, surprisingly intelligent, and just a bit wondrous. how unfortunate, then, that it's stuck in this otherwise rather unremarkable episode! Don't misread me, this episode is all right, but it's not great. The dialogue never really shines, and the action, while thrilling, is a bit overly stupid (the grabbing claw? Really?). Unlike Matt Jones's two-parter, which had an interesting and likable group manning the sanctuary base, the guest characters here were entirely unremarkable and one-dimensional (treacherous employee, lifted straight out of The Age of Steel? Really?). McInnerny's great, of course, but they could have had him playing a much better character than this unmemorable corporate baddie. Not to mention the fact that his generic character's fate (Ood transformation? Really?) is poetic, I suppose, but just a bit absurd. As for the other guest characters, none one of them is at all notable. None of these flaws are helped by the fact that they're strung together by a questionably logical plot that's two parts bad horror film, three parts bad morality play (abolitionism? Really?).

No, what's most interesting here is when the show explores the nature of Ood psychology and evolution. It turns out that the Ood have evolved with a three-part consciousness, with their driving impulse in the head, their personality in a secondary brain in their hands, and a final, authoritative force that's located outside of the body common to all Ood. Not only does this make the concept of the Ood's existence as a slave race more feasible, explain why they needed to carry around deadly sporting equipment, and provide a decent explanation for why the Ood are so easily controlled by a single external force, but the concept is  (sort of)rooted in the stuff you learned in school. Or, rather, would have learned, if you were paying attention. The notion of a tripartite consciousness stretches back to Plato but it's known most famously from Freud's notion of the Id, Ego, and Superego. Regular viewers of Doctor Who Confidential are quite familiar with the concept of "ego," although this week they decided to a little bit less of patting themselves on the back and a little bit more irrelevant montage.

In any case, the notion that a part of consciousness can be externalized also seems to fit in quite nicely with The Doctor's current status. It seems that Donna's being pushed at us as the Doctor's external moral compass, or perhaps more like a moral alarm clock with the volume turned way up (see the opening scene of Rose, which scares the hell out of me because every time I see it I have an urge to wake up, which is problematic for reasons I shan't explore). She's loud and she's forceful about making sure the Doctor's sense of social justice is in the right place, as we saw last week in Pompeii. Last week it seemed like her character was off the ming mong hit-list and back on the straight and narrow, but if she continues to come on quite so strong it might wear out its welcome fairly soon.

So, yeah, Planet of the Ood, bit of a poor episode, but the Ood themselves are compelling enough to carry it. Nice to see another episode set on an alien world (now that wasn't so difficult, was it?), and there's some intriguing arc stuff, with the incredible disappearing bees mentioned again as well as a less-than-subtle reference to Rose. Maybe the return of Martha and UNIT will deliver a more interesting story. If not, perhaps it will make us want to hug a Sontaran.

Song From Ten

Doctor Who: Planet of the Ood

This is all very weird.

As a rule, my reviews tend to mercilessly pick apart what I consider to be below-par representations of my beloved franchise while the rest of fandom squees "6 out of 5!" at the top of their lungs. When I do occassionally fall head over heels in love an episode I've been known to squee and shout a little myself, and for a short time at least, I actually join hands with the ming mong majority. Not this time. Today, I find myself adoring Planet of the Ood in the face of mass indifference, petty criticism and mind-numbing pedantry. At the time of writing, this episode has a positive score of 72% in the Behind the Sofa poll. That's practically a drubbing around here. You fools.

So, for one week only, I'm going to bat for the other side. And I haven't done that since Love & Monsters. At least I could understand why fans had a problem with that offbeat, left-field experiment. Planet of the Ood, on the other hand, is probably as purest episode of Doctor Who that we're ever likely to get. The Doctor successfully takes down a tyrannical conglomerate in an isolated base that's under siege from a returning monster - in just under an hour. If that isn't classic Who (with an added splattering of New Adventurism) then I don't know what is. We should be celebrating episodes like this instead of dismissing them out of hand. I just wish it could be like this every week.

Here's to another 2 years of stories set on contemporary f**king earth, you muppets

One criticism that I've seen crop up time and again on the forums is that the Oodsphere doesn't look like a convincing alien planet or, if you really want to be damning, the snow looked a bit fake. Have you ever seen Stargate? Or Battlestar Galactica? Or Dragonfire, for pity's sake!!? If the realism of your snow is a true measure of quality then The Seeds of Doom is in all sorts of trouble. Come on, just look at that beautiful vista. If that doesn't scream alien planet then nothing bloody will. You ungrateful, Zog-hating morons. And at least they made a consistent effort to show us this alien planet. This isn't a quick, tantalising two-shot in the great outdoors before everyone decamps to the Upper Boat studios. Not only that, they probably did this in height of summer (I'm not anal enough to know the filming dates off by heart) and all that some people can say is, "they should have called it the polystyrene-sphere". Well, here's to another 2 years of stories set on contemporary f**king earth, you muppets.

The giant brain did look shit, though. You've got to give the ming mongs that. Anything that stirs up repressed memories of Time and the Rani is never a good thing.

So you can have the brain. But that alien planet looked exquisite and anyone who doesn't at least admire the effort that went into it should stick to watching Holby City. Which isn't even a real hospital by the way.

Laurie Anderson's 'O Superman' meets The Cocteau Twins

The action scenes set around this snow encrusted complex were genuinely thrilling and bold, evoking fond memories of Battle for the Planet of the Apes, classic James Bond high jinx and, of course, Blake's 7; I half expected the guards to be decked out in groovy Federation masks. And in the middle of this insane and superbly directed revolution there's that truly haunting music. I'm not talking about that aria that the Doctor gives to Donna (it sounded quite sweet to me and it wouldn't have turned me into a gibbering wreck), I'm referring to the surreal and utterly intoxicating 'ooooo-oooooo' noise that permeates the last ten minutes; Laurie Anderson's 'O Superman' meets The Cocteau Twins is the best description that I can can come up with. It gave me the willies.

But the argument that really perplexes the hell out of me - sorry, Stu - is the contention that the episode is too polemical and preachy. If the episode was telling us that smallpox is nasty for 40 minutes, I could just about see the point - because smallpox doesn't exist anymore and banging on about it would be pointless. But, as the Doctor himself says, slavery does exists on our planet and if the Doctor Who team want to use the Ood to draw paralells with this controversial topic - instead of what's in that week's TV Quick - then I'm all for it. In fact, the analogy drawn to the slave trade that thrives right here, right now was far too subtle for my liking.

Of course they keep showing us that slavery is bad. For starters, it is bad. And secondly, the plot is about the Doctor stopping this slavery from continuing. How can you do that without showing the slavery? It's like critcising The Happiness Patrol for banging on about fascism or The War Games for having the temerity to suggest that war is stupid for ten solid weeks. And it's not as if we got 40 minutes of people sitting in rooms talking about how terrible awful slavery is - this is an action-packed romp with serious intent. There's a pitched battle, gripping scenes of people getting killed by iconic "monsters" and a giant claw running amok! What more do you want?

You ungrateful, Zog-hating morons

Ah, the giant claw. The biggest criticism I've seen trotted out regarding this inspired scene is that it's an utterly pointless chase and the guard just should arrest the Doctor the old fashioned way. With a gun. Like this would make for better television than a wild and exhilarating race against a giant f**king claw! Maybe it was too fake for you. You know, compared to that real giant claw that you saw in Norway that one time when it was snowing real snow. The claw scene also illustrates a character point - the guy who decides to grab-a-Doc highlights how this particular fruitloop thrives on torture and humiliation, which is probably why he's managed to work his way up the ladder until he's in charge of the whip on an Ood farm. Plus, it gives you a reason to cheer loudly when the bastard gets gassed. This is almost as satisfying as the moment when the PR spin doctor doesn't redeem herself and dies a pointless death because she's more concerned about her next annual appraisal than the rights of an entire species. Brilliant stuff.

Another criticism that I've seen heaped upon this episode is that Halpern isn't much cop in the villain stakes. His low-key villainy is exactly why I enjoyed him so much. He's middle management. He isn't trying to take over the world, he just wants to keep his shipments running on time. He obviously hates his job and, crucially, it wasn't his idea to enslave an entire race - he's perpetuating a crime that has become normalised over the centuries, which is far more interesting and chilling. Halpern's attempts at crisis management are far more entertaining than ranting and raving like a nutter with a "master plan" and his world-weary annoyance as chaos erupts around him is portrayed brilliantly (and occassionally hilariously) by Tim McInnerny. He's comfortably my favourite guest star in nu-Who so far.

But what's really interesting is that Halpern ends up a slave himself. And the Doctor allows this to happen. He almost revels in it.

How dark is that?

But yeah, you can have the Ood transformation if you want. That made no sense at all, even if it meant that Mary Whitehouse must have been spinning in her grave, and you've got to give the episode points for that. And I'm right behind you when it comes to condemning the pat, messianic ending, too. I didn't buy the fact that the whole of humanity, spread out across dozens of worlds, simply agreed overnight that Ood slavery might have been a bad idea after all. It would have been far more interesting if the Doctor had inadvertently kick-started a civil war that ended in bloodshed and retribution. Given the tone of this episode I wouldn't have put it past them. Instead I had to console myself with the insinuation that David Tennant might be leaving soon.

I just wish that Tate was staying. Once again she managed to completely overturn my initial expectations, and while she does teeter dangerously into comedy caricature at times, she always manages to pull something magnificent out of the fire. Donna's righteous anger and heartbroken despair show a range that Janet Fielding could only dream of. She's a terrific audience identification figure and I think I love her.

In summary, Planet of the Ood is a grim, brooding, occassionally surreal, but nearly always exciting slice of pure Doctor Who.

It has to be a 6/5!
 

Let My Betentacled People Go

As Abraham Lincoln might have said: "A little less of the Shadow Proclamation. A little more of the Emancipation Proclamation."

Doctor Who: Planet of the Ood

I'm confused. So very confused.

Firstly, I've been standing far too close to a sizeable telepathic influence so all I can hear in my mind is a badly produced G4 concept album where they decided against traditional instruments for their backing track and instead resorted to the plumbing isle from Wandsworth's B&Q Warehouse. Secondly, I thought we'd been commanded to not give so much as a tinker's cuss for any alien race as we always had to connect with humans in peril - which is a little hard when the humans in peril are, to a man, objectionable odious pieces of work that would force your average participant from The Apprentice to recoil in horror, probably forcing them to immediately reassess their life and spend the rest of it tending to the sprained ankles of deer in Berkshire. Even the only sympathetic human, the member of Friends of the Ood, looked like he was barely tolerating the situation - most likely eaten up with anger inside at not being able to join Vague Acquaintances of the Ood, or I Don't Really Know Them But I'm a Facebook Friend of the Ood. And thirdly what, exactly, is a tinker's cuss?

It wouldn't do much for the Doctor's sense of gawping religious spectacle.

Don't get me wrong. After years of adherence to the repeated Mission Statement it's nice to finally be dropped ankle first into a world where it's the indigenous population in peril and the monsters are human corporate shills. And for the Doctor to become someone else's Saviour for once - extending his limited range of god impersonations to the tune of one.

Let's hope that the predominant faith of the Odd-Sphere is big on messianic imagery and doesn't, in any way, involve regular worship to a being, probably known as The Great Bearded Tentacle, who prefers instead to appear in cheese form. It wouldn't do much for the Doctor's sense of gawping religious spectacle. Unless he likes to be submerged in coagulating Ood-Milk.

Operating heavy machinery in dangerous places (like the ones in that radioactive Pacific atoll that are keeping Anne Robinson alive).

Things that just failed for me were two fold: the Doctor being placed in jeopardy by a gigantic fairground grab-a-toy machine and Halpen being slowly Oodified. The former smacked of action sequence for action sequence sake and the latter rather pointless and totally illogical. If the Ood were being influenced by the shared mind because of their proximity, fair enough. But Halpen and his personal Ood travelled the human empire and so were infrequently in contact with the brain - we were told that it was only on the Ood-Sphere that problems were occurring. So everywhere else they were going about their daily tasks of making clothes for Primark and operating heavy machinery in dangerous places (like the ones in that radioactive Pacific atoll that are keeping Anne Robinson alive) and not ruthlessly savaging anyone (or at least giving them a damn good suck) with a tentacle face scrub. This would surely lead to the Ood only periodically dousing him with transmogrifying juices - forgetting everything once out of the brain's sphere of influence. And once the current batch of fake Dimoxinil hair restorative had worn out (yes, The Simpsons can now be considered canonical) it would be replaced with actual hair restorative. How much more satisfying to have the Ood simply throw Halpen an overall at the end of the story and point to a pile of half made trainers and have him trudge off to a life of back breaking servitude (slap a comedy wha-wha-whaaa noise over it if it'll make you feel better).

That time he made the Sensorites an armoured tank from parts he found lying around the shed.

Hair-based issues must have been foremost in the Doctor and Donna's mind as it looks like they've both been for a post-erruption shampoo and set. Donna, looking like she's set for a classy night drinking WKD down West Ham high street, and the Doctor's hairdo attempting to cover up his own rapidly receding hair line. Or perhaps David Tennant needs his hair sculptured like that because his lines are attached to it? Worked for Billy Hartnell for those stories where he had his lines attached to a 7-foot Mohican fin and used an array of carefully positioned concealed mirrors to read them.

Having previously visited this universal backwater (back in his racist, forgetful, period) it'll not be long now before the whole area will be littered public art dedicated to the Doctor - monuments symbolizing his pivotal role in the Ood freedom struggle and that time he made the Sensorites an armoured tank from parts he found lying around the shed he and his friends, BA, Faceman and Murdoch, had been locked in.

Although because these simple aliens were left with no pictorial records, and no concensus on his appearance, in a cruel twist of fate every single monument erected would probably look more like a gurning Abraham Lincoln. With a Mohican.

Ood Do The Funniest Things

The Doctor Who News Page reports that unofficial overnight figures show that Planet of the Ood got 6.9 million viewers (a 33.4% share) and won its timeslot against ITV1's showpiece Saturday night event tv spectacular Animals Do The Funniest Things (which got 4.0 million).

Desolate Hole

Doctor Who: Planet of the Ood

Well, they can’t all be classics.  The signs weren’t good for Planet of the Ood, title included.  The previews didn’t help – The Guardian Guide were so disinterested they accidentally illustrated their piece with a shot from Pushing Daisies, the TV Cream mail out quoted one former DWM editor as saying it was "the worst since the series returned" before giving away the ending (though weren’t forthcoming with his identity) and Radio Times loved it (which is never a good sign).  Personally I couldn’t stand the prospect of spending another forty-five minutes in the company of the Ood; like the Doctor I almost totally ignored them during their first appearance and a certain loathing has crept in during the interim, as their heads – which look from the back like over designed comedy dildos – have appeared in profile on the cover of what seemed like every other issue of Doctor Who Adventures. 

Plus it was one of those pre-destined episodes, an occasion when a plot point or idea planted in a previous story was bound to be returned to and expanded upon and as soon as the oppressed Ood shuffled on doing menial tasks, I can’t imagine any fan, considering the propensity for these marching aliens to return wouldn’t have looked at their sad little vomiting spag bol faces and realised that at some point they’d have to sit through a polemic about slavery.  Sure enough, Planet of the Ood was two thousand, seven hundred seconds (approx.) of being told that slavery is a very bad thing, punctuated by chasing, running, Homer Simpson impressions, tears and shouting making the mistake which the very worst science fiction makes when it thinks it's doing allegory, of rubbing the consumer’s face in the issue to the point of becoming literal.

This might have been the least subtle allegory since Star Trek’s Let That Be Your Last Battlefield 

If the episode had scheduled properly (ie, later) and I’d had the inclination, I would have made a list of all the scenes I might have expected.  Donna questioning an Ood as to why he’s subservient?  Tick.  Ood being marched around like the concentration camp detainees?  Tick.  Ood huddled in a cage and darkness and yearning to breathe free?  Tick.  I didn’t have Ood going stark raving bonkers and gaining the ability to repel bullets but you can’t have everything.  This might have been the least subtle allegory since Star Trek’s Let That Be Your Last Battlefield where Frank Gorshin (60s Batman’s The Riddler) had one half of his face covered in black paint, the other half white and we were told as battled someone who looked almost but not exactly like him that racism’s bad.  The Wikipedia says that the original concept for that episode had Uhura and McCoy trapped on a planet where white people were slaves and black people were the masters but even they spent three years rewriting the thing so it wouldn’t be quite so on the muzzle. 

Planet of the Ood was a Naomi ‘No Logo’ Klien campaign film as science fiction; when the Doctor asked who made the clothes on Donna’s back, her reply, about rubbing her nose in it, was probably the best line in the whole episode because it was exactly how I felt at that stage in my cheap Asda t-shirt drinking (fair trade) coffee from a Starbucks mug.  I could just be experiencing back burn from having also watched Spielberg’s Amistad for the first time this week.  But at least Amistad had Sir Anthony Hopkins doing a good Spencer Tracy impression and Anna Paquin’s amusingly dodgy Spanish accent to enjoy.  Like Amistad, the episode tried to engage our sympathy by presenting the culture of the captured and horrors being inflicted upon them by their masters; but whereas that was an all too graphic demonstration of man’s inhumanity to man, this episode made the mistake of trying to have us feel sorry for an alien even less loveable than a Dalek, an even trickier task when their main claim to fame is carrying their heart-shaped brain around in their gloved hand.  Ugh.

at least Amistad had Sir Anthony Hopkins doing a good Spencer Tracy impression 

To compensate, writer Keith Temple made the corporation harvesting the Ood as dastardly as possible.  In Confidential, Russell described Klineman Halpen (anagram Mean Napkin Hell) as a kind of mid-range villain, not attempting to take over the universe but simply trying to make a fast buck on the back of other people’s misery.  How dull.  How undemanding.  How as Russ says, realistic.  I can understand why every villain can’t be a Zaroff or Scaroth, but they have to be bean pushers in suits (leaving aside the fact that fashions having changed much in two millennia)?  Yes, there’s the argument that the more normal the evil looks and sounds, the creepier it is, but despite Tim McInnerny large performance, I can’t think of a single interesting thing the character said, up to an including his transformation into an Ood.  I also felt rather sorry for Solana Mercurio whose gone from playing the Queen of Naboo in Attack of the Clones to herding auditionees for the Gamestation version The Apprentice around the new set for BBC News 24.

Despite Graham Harper’s efforts, the action sequences didn’t seem to work; the best sequences in the series still manage to provide some new bit of plot or reveal something the Doctor didn’t already know.  Here they were the kind of padding you might expect from the classic series, substituting the Doctor heading to certain doom strapped to a cart going down a hill with him being chased by a giant CG claw.  The realisation of the Ood planet didn’t gel either, with an obvious quarry giving way to matt paintings which lacked the kind of realism we’ve come to expect from the new series and that shot of the Doctor and Donna looking towards the complex seemed unfinished.  But the computer graphics overall weren’t great with the white-coated friend of the Ood's expiration in the giant brain harking back to the dissolve of the anti-plastic from the first series.  It seems harsh to criticise this work considering the number of man hours which must be engaged, but just now and then these shots look inconsistently cartoony and you can’t help wondering if Mike Tucker and friends couldn’t have produced something more convincing using miniatures.

I also felt rather sorry for Solana Mercurio whose gone from playing the Queen of Naboo in Attack of the Clones to herding auditionees for the Gamestation version The Apprentice around the new set for BBC News 24.

All of which said, if the episode was at all watchable it was because the central duo, like the greatest Doctor/companion packages, are intensely entertaining even as the rest of the story is crashing about around them.  If now and then David seemed to resort to some of his ticks in an attempt to compensate for the deficiencies in the script, Catherine once again impressed with her range, entirely understated in the places where she needs to be and presenting the kind of quiet understanding of tragedy that we’ve seen few actors undertake in the series thus far.  The finest scenes of the episode were at the opening and her first experiences of an alien world, rationally returning to the TARDIS to get a coat, clever woman.  The influence here must have been Arthur Dent just as he prepared experience the ancient planet of Magrathea:  "don't you understand, this is the first time I've actually stood on the surface of another planet ... a whole alien world...!  Pity it's such a dump though."  Or in this case, cold.  She even got to say “That’s what I call a space ship…” as Thunderbird 3 flew overhead. 

It's these scenes which make me wonder if I'm just judging it all a bit too harshly and after seeing it again, I'll simply judge it on its own merits.  It's clearly not a  New Earth after all.  But every useful moment seemed underscored by a misstep.  Some meagre sympathy for the Ood was generated during that scene were Donna heard their song of captivity and gently weeped -- only to be  spoilt by the aforementioned brain reveal (seriously, where do they put it when they sleep?).  Also, in places it was difficult to be tell the Ood’s song from some of the incidental music.  A more stylish option might have been to have dropped everything but wooden percussive instruments from the score once the Doctor and Donna had entered the complex, making the song even more beautiful and chilling.  Instead, composer Murray Gold was in a plonky mood, and much of the action was underscored by track which seemed to be intruding from a LucasArts point and click PC adventure from the mid-nineties.

much of the action was underscored by track which seemed be intruding from a LucasArts point and click PC adventure from the mid-nineties 

Finally, and meanwhile back at this month’s arc plot.  The lack of bees on planet Earth was repeated very loudly just in case we missed it through Donna’s gasping in the opening episode and the Ood gained a hitherto unseen power of sinister clairvoyance in suggesting that the Doctor’s song would end soon.  What, someone’s going to throw a timebomb into the pocket dimension Chancellor Flavia’s singing in from?  The good people at the Doctor Who Forum have already got the Doctor killed off or regenerated and David replaced on the strength of this one line.  Given the sneaky set reports from the Christmas special and the fact that Dave, Russ and the BBC have already stated he’ll be around for the specials (however many there are), that might be a bit premature – and haven’t we already had a talk about real world programme making politics influencing the extent of internal storylines?  No mention of the Shadow Proclamation this time though, but having the Doctor all but say the word Sensorite was good enough for me.

Next Week:  “The last time you Sontaran’s attempted something this dastardly was when an operative was nicking scientists back in time from 1973.  You remember that don’t you Brigadier?”  Possibly.