Doctor Who Series 4 Episode 3 - The Planet of The Ood

The Ood return in this one part story, set on the ‘Oodsphere’. Last seen in ‘The Impossible Planet’ and ‘The Satan Pit’, the Ood are a race of squid-type humanoids who are quite happy to be slaves for the humans. In this episode, ‘Planet of The Ood’, we learn all about the Ood and why they are in captivity.

The Doctor and Donna land on the beautiful ice world, where they find a dying Ood who seems to be suffering from the telepathic state in which the Ood in the previous stories suffered from and subsequently attacked the humans. They then infiltrate the base, ran by Blackadder’s Tim Mcinerney.

It seems Captain Darling has spent the last 15 years sat in a dark room eating cakes but in this episode, he arrives to sort out the Ood’s ‘red-eye’ disease. Of course everything goes tits-up as the Ood break out and wage war on the dopey humans. Darling is concerned that the whole warehouse of Ood, ready to be shipped across the galaxy and sold, is contaminated.

After a decent start, I was quite disappointed with the episode. They seemed to be preaching an anti-slavery message. I don’t think any kind of political statement has any place in Doctor Who, some of the time they obstruct the story. Most of the time, it’s a load of bollocks! Something which had me up in arms, was the bit where The Doctor asked Donna ‘who do you think makes your clothes.’ Well Doctor, is it the everyday, working class peoples’ fault that some poor foreign mush isn’t paid much for making clothes? Who do you think made your suit and the coat Janis Joplin ‘gave’ you? I bet it was some poor alien bastard with 160 kids to feed!

Then the bit where Captain Darling turned into an Ood was a little bit OTT and put me off the entire episode. It wasn’t that bad, well not in a Torchwood way, anyway! It seemed the episode was building up to something that wasn’t there. The Ood quote at the end had me thinking though. Lets hope that The Doctor’s ‘song’ will last for a while longer! We are getting through The Doctors too quickly!

However, lets go over the good points: Donna keeps on improving, not sure about the West Ham quote though! The Ood looked great, the battle scenes were terrific and that scenery was just magnificent. Now if only they could have kept away from the ‘Slavery is wrong’ theme!

6.5/10

Phew, lets end on a good note. THAT TRAILER FOR NEXT WEEKS LOOKS AMAZING! ROLL ON SATURDAY!

Next Week: Jamie Oliver is revealed to be an undercover Sontaran warrior and he has been secretly plotting to be making our kids grow up into little weaklings, by eating crap food.

'The Sontaran Stratagem' Trailer