March 16: "Planet of the Ood"

Hooray!  Another alien planet!  That makes four of any note since the series came back in 2005.  Perhaps Russell T Davies finally thinks the audience won't disappear if we spend a week somewhere other than Earth.  Oh, and another Hartnell reference, as we learn that the Ood Sphere is close to the Sense-Sphere (The Sensorites).

But I'm not quite sure what this story wants to be.  In some ways it wants to be a straightforward action story, with evil guards against the righteous Doctor.  There's even a (frankly silly) sequence where the lead guard, Kess, tries to play a giant version of the crane game with the Doctor.  But it also wants to be a pointed commentary about the Ood, to explicitly address the problem of slavery that was brought up and then set aside in "The Impossible Planet" / "The Satan Pit".  But because it wants to be both this and the action plot, it ends up pulling some of its punches.  So of course all the humans are generally terrible people -- the bit with the PR representative Solana calling the guards over rather than helping the Doctor is a nice reversal of how these things normally work, with the Doctor completely failing to win her over, but it does lump her in with the rest of the nasty humans.  Commander Kess literally cackles with delight at the thought of killing the Doctor and has no qualms with gassing the red-eye Ood, and even Halpen appears to be looking forward to the thought of killing the main Ood brain and starting over in another business, with no second thoughts about the fate of the Ood.

An unprocessed Ood with his hindbrain. ("Planet of the Ood") ©BBC

As such, there's no question whatsoever that humanity is in the wrong.  I'm not trying to argue that slavery is ever a good thing, but it might have been more interesting to have had a race of beings who genuinely wanted nothing more than to serve others (which is sort of what "The Impossible Planet" / "The Satan Pit" was getting at) -- what then would be the answer?  Would the Ood be better off with their freedom?  But I suppose there wasn't enough time in a single episode to explore something more nuanced, so instead we get evil humans and oppressed Ood.  And while there's an effort to be pointed in the commentary ("Who do you think made your clothes?" the Doctor asks, after Donna says she doesn't have slaves), they back down -- Donna gets snarky and the Doctor apologizes.  All this and weird alien biology to boot.  (They have a second, exposed brain that they have to carry in their hands?  How did they possibly survive on their own with something like this?)

The other thing to note about "Planet of the Ood" is how little the Doctor and Donna's presence actually matters.  Nothing they learn is a revelation to the people in power or to the Ood, and none of their actions make any difference until the very end -- and even then, it's not like Ood Sigma couldn't have deactivated the bombs and shut off the telepathic barrier around the big shared Ood brain.  The events we see here were set in motion before the Doctor and Donna arrived (i.e., Dr. Ryder's actions and the slow conversion of Halpen into an Ood... er, yes...) and almost certainly would have happened without them running around.  And yet Ood Sigma says "the Doctor-Donna" will be revered forever because of what they did there.  Hmm.

It's not a bad episode -- there's a lot that this does right -- but it never quite gels into the story that it should be.  It's not exciting enough to work as an action story, and it's too straightforward to work as a political drama.  It's a good effort, but "Planet of the Ood" never quite makes it to the place it wants to end up at.