Came here tonight to rock the microphone.
PLANET OF THE OOD
Let's get the boringly obvious stuff out of the way first.
Humans treat Ood as lesser species (indeed as 'made in our image' - "What is an Ood but a reflection of us?" Treacherous PR Girl asks).
Nasty human thinks he has the right to 'cull' whole batches of Ood.
Nasty human turns into Ood.
Move along, move along...
"The fear, the wonder, the joy..."
The Doctor suggests that, after all this time, it's the excitement of just not knowing what's going to be outside the TARDIS doors that keeps him going.
"You had a life of work and sleep and rent and tax and takeaway dinners and birthdays and Christmases and two weeks holiday a year and then you end up here."
The Doctor delivers a sermon on how inferior are the lives of
almost everyone watching his show compared to the life he's bestowed on Donna. Or at least he would do if it wasn't for some typically great Tennant-acting. Watch when he gets to 'birthdays and Christmases' and he gets this wistful note as if he's realising that the mundane lives he's dismissing nevertheless do have something he doesn't. We'll come to what that might be later.
The Ood are exemplars of having thier internal states manifested on thier outer bodies. Processed Ood who go a bit loopy have 'Red Eye' and Unprocessed Ood are probably the most
literal example ever of the mind being displayed on the body - they hold external brains in thier hands!
Which makes Ood Sigma all the more interesting - the Ood who is the means of thier liberation is the only one whose body
doesn't tell you what's going on inside it.
Why does Klineman Halpen do what he does? Because it's what his father did and it's what his grandfather did. To steal another phrase from Terry Pratchett, this episode is about 'Unoriginal Sin'. Everything terrible that anyone does here they do because they've
inherrited the idea. Whether it's the mass cull that previously worked for foot and mouth or the whole economic logic of maintaining a people in 'slavery' that goes unchanged from Donna's day to Halpen's. Or back further to, say...Pompeii. Nobody being evil here is doing anything new - they're all just doing what mummy and daddy did.
Change, it seems, only exists as 'new and improved' advertising gimmicks. D'oh!
If you doubt it... typical lines of Halpen's dialogue include "My grandfather drew up this plan" and "Nothing ever changes".
Then again...while the logic of subjugation may not change over time, its specifics do. Whoever made Donna's sweatshop-originated clothes, I'll bet good money that thier skin wasn't white. Yet Double-O are notably multiracial.
Now look at the 'chain gang' scene where Donna goes all "OMG! IT'S SLAVERY!" Donna already
knew the Ood were in slavery so what's the big wow here? The shock lies in that here the Ood's slavery
looks like slavery. Our culture's single mental image of slavery is of a line of black men shackled together and that's what's evoked here. Except its a black man holding the whip. The singers change, but the song of captivity remains the same.
"All the better for seeing you..."
Would you want an Ood giving you seductive sweet talk? Probably not, because you can
see them. But to thier users they've become invisible. That's why they're so comfortable having them standing around in the background when they know they could turn into killers at any time (same concept as
Robots of Death). Double-O's clientele are blind to the physicality of the Ood so it doesn't sound to them like a come-on from a squid-mouth, because they're not seeing the squid-mouth anymore. It's just a disembodied voice, like that of the sat-navs this scene is parodying.
A bit of a week off from this sort of thing. Though there's a brief callback...
"I couldn't save them. I had to let the Ood die."
Again, it's a dangerously self-centred perception of reality that understands any tragedy as happening because "I had to let it".
"Say hello to daddy!" says Halpen as he shows Ood Sigma the big squashy brain thingy.
This is a story about children rescuing thier parent.
It may not be the last we see this year.
The Ood in the transport crates seem to be there to remind us of the images we see in the papers of people smuggling. Specificly the shot looks exactly like the back of the tomato freight container in which 58 economic migrants suffocated to death to 2000. By coincidence, 54 Burmese migrants died in similar circumstances this month.
We're shown these images at the exact moment that the Doctor starts talking about economic unfairness in Donna's century.
More questioning of why the Doctor needs companions. Donna's suggestion that it's to take cheap shots at seems like a diversion and a refusal to engage with the Doctor's criticism of her non-Fair Trade wardrobe, but in fact it
is an answer to the criticism. She's pointing out that as the magic spaceman with the keys to the universe, he too benefits from a disparity in status.
Trapped in the container with the red eyed Ood, Donna tries to convince them that she's "Not like that lot" - the oppressors bossing them about.
Then we cut away, and when we cut back, she's attempting to give them orders.
Treacherous PR Girl joins the journalist from
Partners of Crime in the 'not good enough' category. But where Penny's failure was one of competance, Treacherous PR Girl's was one of character and vision. Donna wears what she wears because she hasn't seen a child sweatshop in India, just like the Ood users back on Earth have never seen Ood production. They fail morally because they've never made themselves think about those things...but they're a step above Treacherous PR Girl who
has seen and who
does know that what she's doing is wrong.
The Ood, with the circle broken, are a species that share one third of thier mind with each other. Notice the way they continue to address 'DoctorDonnaFriend' - they can't even conceptualise that they're two seperate entities, rather than a group mind of two. The 'song' that they have resumed is thier union as a consumate collective. They're utterly
together.
On the other hand, the Doctor is the consumate individual. As the series has pointed out once or twice, he's a bit on the lonely side. What the Ood are offering when they invite him to join their song is an end to loneliness. "There is room in the song for you" means room in the collective.
He doesn't take the offer of a place in the chorus as he's "sort of got a song of my own." He's a soloist. But this solo, apparently, is coming to an end.
Never mind the self being reflected in the body and the body in the self...Donna's taken it a step further and inferred a whole society from its members' physicality.
"They're born with thier brains in thier hands...that makes them peaceful"
The Doctor seems very impressed.
If Donna's logic is right, it makes the scene where Ood-Halpen voms up a brain strangely touching, as the change in his body has turned a killer into a pacifist.
Some people seem to be reading the Doctor's insistence that a servant race could never evolve as a direct endorsement of Richard Dawkins' 'Selfish Gene' theory. I wouldn't go that far myself, but we'll be hearing more about Dawkins later on, don't you worry.
"I can't tell what's right and what's wrong anymore."
"It's better that way. People who know for certain tend to be like Mister Halpen."
Last week the Doctor's scorn was for the prophets who had certain knowledge of events, this week the Doctor's scorn is for people who think they have certain knowledge of morality.
"Our children will sing of the DoctorDonna. And our children's children. And the wind and the ice and the snow will carry your names forever."
For the second week running, our heroes are turned into Household Gods.
