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BBC Planet of the Ood |
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| Story No. | 205 | 
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| Production Code | Series Four Episode Three | |
| Dates | Apr 19 2008 |
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With David Tennant,
Catherine Tate
Written by Keith Temple Directed by Graeme Harper Executive Producers: Russell T Davies, Julie Gardner. |
| Synopsis: The Doctor and Donna investigate Ood Operations, a company who are selling the Ood as a servant race, to discover the reason the Ood are happy to serve. |
Ood Awakening by Mike Morris 25/8/08
Planet of the Ood stands out amongst the first half of Series 4 as the only episode that's actually worth 45 minutes of your time. Although far from perfect, it has interesting ideas at its heart and some wonderful scenes. It's also competently (in unspectacularly) plotted. If it weren't for a descent into silliness towards the end, it might actually have been in the shake-up for best episode of the season.
The idea of revisiting the Ood is a good one. The idea of a willing slave-race was trotted out in The One With the Devil In It, but the concept itself was never really examined. The questions the Ood give rise to, by their nature, are interesting: is it permissible to exploit somebody, if the exploitation is something they crave? Is it morally acceptable to have a willing slave-race, particularly if they die without that enslavement? The Ood were one of relatively few original creatures from the new series that really had legs, and it's good to see them back. Also good is their homeworld: the design of the Ood suggests they'll come from a swampland, but the ice-bound Oodsphere confounds those expectations and leads to some impressive shots. It's a shame that the CGI isn't quite up to scratch this time; the painted icescapes are pretty, but they look like what they are. Still, this is Doctor Who; in spite of what its producers seem to believe, spectacle certainly isn't why I tune in.
It's a Graeme Harper episode, and he knows what he's doing. This is probably Harper's finest turn behind the camera since Revelation of the Daleks, so well does he combine the requirements of fantastical action, grittiness, and moral outrage. It would have been easy for Planet of the Ood to fall into the trap of a silver-pyjamas abstract story, but the hard-nosed surroundings (an industrial factory, bullet-firing machine guns, metal containers you'll see on any port, and contemporarily bland suits for all involved) keep this feeling real. What Harper can do, what he could always do, was physicality; he understands that television is compelling when huge great lumps of stuff are flying about. The chase sequence, involving the Doctor and a big metal claw, is the best example. In other hands, it would be tedious rubbish. But Harper makes it work, and makes it work well, in spite of the glaring scripting problems behind the whole sequence (more on this shortly).
And there's the problem, then; the script isn't quite up to scratch. It moves efficiently from scene to scene, but it does feel like a storyboard rather than an organic story. Those set pieces can be effective - witness the way that an Ood escape is intercut with a sales pitch, bringing home the duplicity of what the Evil Corporation are doing - but they're so transparently set-pieces. It's one of those stories where you can literally see the structure as you watch, and not in a good way. There's barely a line of dialogue that isn't there to advance the plot or backstory, so you end up watching 'plot' rather than 'narrative'. Warehouse 15, Red-Eye, the Ood as Slaves... all of these crash into the story, thereby announcing themselves as the story's ultimate destination. This is exactly what Steven Moffatt never does, and what Russell T. Davies only does when he's playing to the imagined Stupid Sector of his audience. Watch Planet of the Ood, and wait for that line where the Doctor and Donna see Tim McInerney striding across the workyard. Donna says "that looks like the boss," a line that simply screams 'plot'. How, exactly, would she know who a bloke in a suit is?
In fact, the claw set-piece is the worst offender. Donna gets locked in a container, the Doctor gets chased around by a big metal thing... why, for heaven's sake? The guards have never met the Doctor or Donna, and there's been no indication of their psychosis before now... so why do they suddenly turn into raving sadists? Why on earth would the guards lock Donna in a container full of Ood, when they know the Ood are dangerous, and none of them even know who Donna is?
For all that, though, there are great moments. The "classic foot-and-mouth solution" is a clever analogy, and Marketing Girl at last confounds the stereotype of women who'll go along with the Doctor just 'cos they like his hair. Much of the story's interest, it must be said, comes from the inherent interest of the subject matter; I'm not sure that Keith Temple's ideas are particularly good. The only idea that feels like Temple's is the revelation of natural Ood anatomy; the initial revelation is a great moment, but the truth about Warehouse 15 is roaringly silly (it might have worked if the metaphor hadn't been so spectacularly literal). You certainly have to work hard to find a good line, and the characters work more because of performances than anything else.
Ah, performances. First up; Tim McInerney is magnificent here. The character, as scripted, is yer standard-issue corporate baddie. But McInerney gives him a sense of weakness, a subtlety and quiet self-doubt, that suggests far more complexity than you could imagine. His collapse into neurosis is wonderfully handled, and I liked the character's final fate (even if some of the people I know who watched this found it a bridge too far). However, the scene feels a touch bowdlerised, as if cut for fear of censorship.
Tennant is uneven here, as uneven as he's been since Series 2. He throws some important lines away in a most uncharacteristic way - "it's better that way" is given a horribly careless edge, and his regret that he didn't think to ask about the Ood first time round is muttered like he forgot the shopping. Possibly struggling with the sheer incompetence of some of the early-season scripts, Tennant's performance smacks of carelessness. Again, he's given some odd lines. After Donna's outburst of moral fury at Halpen, when she's (supposedly) furious and disgusted, he's asked to turn to her and say "oh, nice one." It would be difficult not to make that line seem crass. However, as has happened before, the sheer enthusiasm of his performance is enough, more or less, to carry it through.
Tate, on the other hand -
- deep breath -
Okay, here's the thing. Catherine Tate can do two things. She can do hysteria, and she can do tearful misery. Things she can't do, however, are... everything else. In isolation, there are a couple of scenes here where she's really, really good - not least where she reacts to the Ood song, which is lovely. But it comes smack bang after that godawful delivery of "we're locked in", or before that "they know how they treat the Ood?" Remember, Donna is supposed to be confronted with and sickened by the horror of the universe, but she delivers the line like she's trying to start a fight with An Essex Girl who's groped her boyfriend. By the time we reach the scene of the Ood song, I'd already lost my belief in her. In fact, I was already wavering after that initial TARDIS scene, which is so bad that I'm going to try and cut it out of my copy of the story from now on.
In general, in Tate's stories, if you removed 25% of the scenes where she's playing Catherine Tate, you'd have a moderate actress. In her better, later, stories, this ratio is maybe as low as 5%. In Planet of the Ood, it's well over half, and she manages to single-handedly bring the story crashing to the floor in some scenes. She's not helped by some inconsistent characterisation - her furied outburst to McInerney might have achieved some sort of impact, except that the viewer just starts wondering where Donna acquired all this knowledge of alien evolution.
In short, she's bad here, and she comes close to damaging the story irreparably. But it goes deeper than that. Real actresses, good actress, develop a character for themselves. Look at the way, instinctively, the viewer knows all sorts of stuff about Rose they haven't been told. You knew that she and her mother hadn't discussed her father for years, or that she didn't talk about him to anyone else, even before Father's Day aired. You knew she'd gone out with all sorts of "unsuitable" types in her youth, and that she'd settled with Mickey because she was smarter than him. You knew she had no sense of self-worth, that her teachers thought she was useless and that part of her believed them, that she was disgusted with the men her mum brought home.
But Donna? At the end of this series, I can't guess at anything about Donna. I don't even know how clever she is.
But back to the main feature. Planet of the Ood does work, just about, even if you can't help but feel that it should be better. The ideas are good and the direction's terrific, and - and this is well worth mentioning - Murray Gold's music is wonderful. Given that the story is largely about song, it was asking Gold to step up to the plate. He does.
It would be neglectful not to mention the story's worse cop-out; when confronted with Ood slavery, Donna comments that there are no slaves on her earth, to which the Doctor replies "who do you think made your clothes?" This is the most edgy thing the series has asked us sice the days of Ecclesdoc. And yet, Donna just accuses the Doctor of taking cheap shots, and - amazingly - he actually backs down apologises. Apologises for what, exactly?
(There's a point: so firmly has Series 1 become fixed in my head as Doctor Who at its finest, and so enamoured am I with Eccleston's interpretation of the role, that I instinctively find myself asking what he'd do. As with Partners in Crime, where I'm convinced he'd give the Adipose a hand. And I can't believe Eccleston would have left Donna within a hundred yards of the TARDIS.)
Still... even if the Doctor does back down, at least Planet of the Ood made the parallel in the first place. A bit like the story as a whole, really; there's all sorts of things wrong with it, but it still has interesting concerns at its core. I like it, even when it's failing, because it's trying to do something new. That alone is enough to place it firmly above most of Series 4's output.
Beggars can't be choosers, after all.
A Review by Finn Clark 29/8/09
If only I'd liked the 2008 season finale, I'd have been calling it the best year yet. At last they've worked out how to do the early one-parters without making them seem like filler. This story is one of my favourites, with almost nothing I don't love. I suppose the security chief's crane hook feels a bit dumb, but that's about it.
To go lowbrow for a moment, I love the aesthetic. This is the best-looking alien planet in Doctor Who to date. On the one hand, we have that gritty industrial look, reflecting the tone of the other 42nd century stories, 42 (hmmm) and The Satan Pit. It was filmed in a cement factory and an RAF hangar. The guns are real guns. It's also heavily multi-ethnic, which is nice. Just as importantly though, I'm in awe of the snow. That ice-capped wilderness is a thing of beauty. It's nice to be reminded that even alien planets can have weather. It might seem odd that tadpole people with tentacles seem to have evolved on a frozen world, but: (a) we're taking a lot on trust already with Ood evolution, and (b) who's to say that's what the whole planet looks like, all year round? Maybe the original slavers transplanted their big cahooney up to the Ood-Sphere North Pole just to make it harder for the natives to cause trouble?
Then there's the story, which works on three levels. Firstly, it's a good exciting monster bash, with evil bastards and lots of satisfying gross death. This is important. Secondly, it's returning to the slavery theme which was raised but never really explored in The Satan Pit. Mr Halpen and his employees would happily exterminate everyone for a profit, which is even given a bit of real-world context with the infamous line about "who made your clothes?" I liked that bit. It's just a throwaway reference, but it's worth it if it makes a few audience members think twice. I can see why some people would get hot under the collar about Doctor Who dragging such issues into a silly bit of SF nonsense, but, well, sod 'em.
By way of comparison, count the number of slavery references in the previous story, The Fires of Pompeii. You know, the one set in Roman times.
Then the story's third level involves the unpacking of its central puzzle. It's a detective story, basically. Doctor Who isn't normally hard SF at all, but for the space of these 45 minutes it's doing a pretty good impression of it. The Ood are genuinely freaky. They're neither evil monsters, nice people in funny make-up nor SF cliches based on a single trait. Instead, they're a well-imagined alien race, with a culture and psychology that arises from their unique physiology. They're scary, horrible and sympathetic all at once. They react unpredictably to being enslaved and mutilated. They have a double-blink. Admittedly it's hard to imagine them evolving like that in the first place, but I suppose you get a lot of advantages from a telepathic hive mind.
That's why it doesn't matter that the Doctor doesn't really do much this week. Admittedly, we get that rather a lot in New Who, especially in Dalek episodes, but here the action-adventure stuff is only the most basic story level. Donna's in charge when it comes to moral outrage (i.e. level 2), while the Doctor's role is to be our guide on level 3. He's our Sherlock Holmes, if you like. He wants to find out what's going on, which is why I'm not so fussed about counting his plot intervention scenes this time.
I even loved it as action-adventure, though. There's something very satisfying about an imaginatively horrible death, especially if the victim deserves it. Here we have an entire cast full of evil gits who'll have you laughing and cheering as they meet their ever-more-gruesome ends. I was happy to see the public relations officer get hers, but that's nothing compared with the laugh-out-loud demise of Mr Kess, the puzzling-but-gross attack by wiggly face tentacle and the truly freaky fate of Mr Halpern. All that's great fun. Note also that we're in no doubt that these victims mostly deserved it, with both Mr Kess and the public relations officer having been given their chance to be scum. "They're over here!" is one of my favourite moments in the new series, by the way. It's a little acid moment, just to show that life isn't just rainbows and butterflies after all. Give people a chance and sometimes they'll try to kick you in the teeth. Obviously I'm not saying I want an entire show like that (also known as the Saward era), but it's a realistic moment in a series that a lot of people would associate with glossy escapism.
There's an odd bit of internal continuity. The Doctor says that Ood slavery was a phenomenon of the 42nd century, this being the year 4126, but we later learn that it's been going on for 200 years and that it's going to end soon. I think the Doctor's being careless with his terminology again. On a greater level, the bits that looked at the time like important foreshadowing have turned out to be less significant than they looked. There's another nod to those bees, but I honestly can't remember the eventual explanation they threw in of the Doctor-Donna's song being about to end soon. Can't be important, then. It fits quite well with Tennant and Tate both leaving the show, mind you.
The regulars are on good form. I liked Donna without reservation this time, since I wasn't worrying about weaker moments to weigh against the scenes where she's outstanding. As usual, Catherine Tate's line deliveries include a few extreme choices, but for me these worked. "They turned him into an Ood." Tennant is excellent, as always, while Tim McInnery is strong as Mr Halpern. I laughed at "we're going to blow it up".
There are a few monsters who belong to a single Doctor. They're good enough to bring back, but somehow they never made it into the A-tier. I'm talking here about things like the Yeti, Ogrons, Mara and Sil. The Autons and Silurians/Sea Devils used to be in this category too. Obviously it's too early to be able to say for sure, but modern examples of this might end up including the Slitheen (Sarah Jane Adventures notwithstanding) and, yes, the Ood. I like all of those, you know. It's arguably a more interesting line-up than the more iconic and famous ones, which is probably why they got brought back, but not ad nauseum. I'm glad we got more Ood.
Do you take milk and sugar? by Evan Weston 20/1/16
I don't want to mislead anyone here. Planet of the Ood is bad, just like most of its Series 4 brethren. However, I'm going to say a good deal of positive things about it, because there are elements here that work very well. Planet of the Ood is let down by its willingness to place its witless and stupid social commentary ahead of its story, and in the end the episode crumbles under the weight of its pointless drivel.
You see, the message driving Planet of the Ood is "slavery is bad". Wow. What a freaking revelation, Keith Temple. You've really struck at the core of our societal distress, my friend, and you have thus provided the path forward. The Ood are mistreated and forced to serve against their will, are kept in horrible conditions and are prevented from advancing as a race. This, the episode takes great pain to inform us, is bad. And when the story should be rocketing forward and asking serious questions, all we get is more "don't enslave other species" crap. It's a message that's too simple for even the nine-year-old audience Temple is clearly aiming at. Really, it's more Series 4 dumbing down to the lowest common denominator. It's sickening and insulting. Rarely does Doctor Who botched social commentary get worse than this one.
But while Temple is busy writing for a 19th Century audience, he's got a fairly crackling story going, and it's enough to keep me interested for at least a half an hour. The Doctor and Donna land at an Ood factory (never is this established as the Ood homeworld, by the way), only to discover that something is going wrong with the creatures and that, surprise, the factory owner might be responsible for their issues. While most of this is derivative of Series 2's transcendent The Impossible Planet/The Satan Pit, it's not a bad thing to draw heavily from a classic, and Planet of the Ood has quite a bit going for it. The Ood are wonderful in their return, and it's no wonder that they'll pop up a few more times over the next couple of years. They're probably the most interesting new species invented on new Who - excepting maybe the Weeping Angels - with their striking and immaculately designed visuals mixed perfectly with an engaging and tragic backstory. Their song is gorgeous, thanks to ace composer Murray Gold. It's great to see their mythology develop, as we learn more about their origins and what they are capable of as a species. It's actually quite beautiful, and it deserves a better episode in which to reside.
We also get very nice production values here, a large step up from the miserable BBC back hallways of The Fires of Pompeii. The frigid climate looks and feels realistic, and the factory is reasonably imposing. The Ood brain is a fairly weak moment of CGI - especially when Dr. Ryder falls to his death inside it (ew) - but that's the only shoddy moment of production to be found. The battle between the Ood and the soldiers somehow makes sense, thanks to relatively good direction from Graeme Harper, a Doctor Who veteran by this point. David Tennant's central performance is reliable as ever, and, while he doesn't manage to lift the episode out of the tank, he does his best and provides welcome relief from the idiocy when he's on screen. Ayesha Dharkar also does a nice job as the cowardly hostess, nailing the script's finest moment, her subversion of the "small woman who turns face out of the goodness of her heart" trope.
However, Catherine Tate is still in Planet of the Ood, and with that comes some truly loathsome moments. She completely overdoes her reaction to the only attempt at serious social commentary in the whole script, the Doctor's "Who do you think made your clothes?" The scene ends up being played for an awkward bit of comedy, but I only managed a crooked cringe. She also has a tendency to get exasperatingly mad whenever she doesn't get her way, and it's extremely grating. I'm beginning to like Tate's quieter moments, but she's still far more bad than good. Tim McInnerny dryly whips through his lines as the evil Mr. Halpen, not taking advantage of the cruel slavemaster written for him by Temple. Much worse is Roger Griffiths as Commander Kess, perhaps the most over-the-top henchman in Who history. His ridiculous mugging when hunting down the Doctor with a crane is a low point in the whole series, and that says something. His death is the only one the audience actively cheers on.
Some elements here are a good deal of fun, namely the Ood themselves, the production values, Solana and the entertaining run around the facility. But the story is ruined by a good deal of bad acting and, worse, a ridiculously dumb comment that overwhelms everything else. Planet of the Ood had a chance to be a fun, action-packed sequel to The Impossible Planet/The Satan Pit, but by replacing the Series 2 story's message of "you can get through anything as long as you have something to believe in" with "don't own slaves" and then proceeding to beat the audience over the head with it, Keith Temple handicapped his own script at the knees.
GRADE: C
"I Thought It Was So Wonderful Out Here" by Jason A. Miller 3/4/18
As part of my annual 50th anniversary commemoration, I chose five episodes to watch at random for the weekend following November 23rd, and this was one the only I got from the David Tennant years. I hadn't seen it since its original airing.
The episode required some translating, at first. I hadn't watched a David Tennant adventure in over three years. After years and years of Peter Capaldi and my steady personal diet of Hartnell and Troughton episodes on DVD and recon, Tennant felt very much like an interloper, an impostor. Catherine Tate is given some of the sharpest dialogue that a companion can get, but she plays her part so broadly that it can be easy to miss her character's intellect. But, most importantly, this is a Russell T. Davies-era script, one which is careful to stop every five to six minutes and explain the plot. After nearly a decade's worth of Steven Moffat refusing to explain anything, that kind of storytelling just feels odd. Not unwelcome; it's refreshing, in fact. But Doctor Who stopped doing that ages ago, and I had to remind myself of that long-ago time when the series was more user-friendly.
But, in short, watching Planet of the Ood cold -- in isolation from the rest of Series Four, watched out of order (and, in fact, right after Terminus) -- required a lot of Whovian-to-Jason translation.
Moving past that, the episode itself crackles with outrage. The Doctor stops to wonder why he didn't question the Ood's unthinking obedience in their previous outing, The Impossible Planet/The Satan Pit. Donna and the Doctor trade lots of sharp barbs about slavery and the passive acceptance thereof, and they both give each other conceptual bloody noses. Most interestingly, the writers (Keith Temple in his only credited script, and presumably heavy rewriting by Davies) choose to flip expectations, casting an Indian-born actress and an actor of African descent (both countries that suffered heavily for centuries under the oppressive British yoke), as secondary villains, absolute Ood-despising bad guys. Slavery is universal, and the oppressed today may become oppressors by the 42nd Century, say the writers. Nobody gets a free pass in the script. Even the undercover liberal activist (shades of John Leeson's human character in The Power of Kroll) is irritating and is given a comically gruesome death scene.
Overall, in spite of the constant moralizing, it's a fun episode to watch. Graeme Harper, the only classic series director to helm New Series episodes, keeps things moving, with lively CGI visuals (the Ood Sphere looked gorgeous on TV in 2008, and still looks passable in 2017). The shout-out to The Sensorites set my heart aflame; I love that story and its philosophical, scared-of-the-dark monsters. The Doctor being chased through a warehouse by a CGI crane is... let's face it, hilarious; it's an action-movie visual, and Harper more than pulls it off from where I sit. The human villains are over-the-top ranters, yes, but this is Doctor Who; human villains are supposed to do that. We didn't come to this series for subtlety. And this episode will bash you over the head with its morals and its foreshadowing ("I think your song must end soon"). But I think it has aged quite well.