Doctor Who Confidential (2005–2011): Season 4, Episode 3 - Oods and Ends - full transcript
NARRATOR: The Ood are back.
You've got to love an Ood.
You've got to love an Ood.
NARRATOR: And apparently,
as yummy as ever.
You just want to bite them.
That's a bit of a worry.
NARRATOR: It's an ice-cool reception
for the slaves' return,
so join Confidential backstage
as we serve you an insight into the Ood.
I wanted the Ood,
I wanted the ice planet,
I wanted humans as slave traders.
Get up!
Back here, you can have that shot
lined up for Dave,
and you can have a tighter one
that stops him.
-Yeah?
-Yeah.
So we can come off the line here.
There's your effects...
We're in a warehouse today,
filming a scene where the Doctor
is chased by a giant claw.
It was trying to find ways
of making it look as risky as possible
and sort of trying to find maybe
different ways of coming round a corner
so it didn't look like you
were just running away all the time.
And, of course, the claw
was being added in afterwards.
We've got a previs
that we put together with Neill,
and we've already worked out
the rough moves of the CGI arm,
and we're going to try and match it in
with the action.
HOUGHTON: Yeah, absolutely.
So when we come to film
the elements that we need here
of David running down
through the aisles,
we know exactly what we want.
Action!
I haven't seen
the finished sequence yet,
so I hope they don't stitch me up.
They could make the claw
look decidedly unthreatening,
in which case, I'm running for my life
away from some fairground grabber.
NARRATOR: And for today's shoot,
cast and crew ready themselves
for some rough and tumble.
TENNANT: It looks quite flash,
doesn't it?
Oh, yeah, it looks great.
David has to fall over, trip over
some barrels later, and fall down,
and he's very good at
anything like that.
Anything physical, he's great, so I'll
pad him up and we'll get him to do it.
TENNANT: ff wasn't
particularly dangerous.
I wasn't doubled for any of it,
I don't think.
It was really just throwing
yourself around,
which I always quite enjoy.
Cut! Phil loved it.
NARRATOR: Of course,
this is not the first time
there's been ups and downs
when the Ood are around.
We should find out who's in charge.
VOICE: Open door 19.
Right, hello. Sorry.
-I was just saying, nice place.
-We must feed.
First time we met the Ood,
they were introduced on
The Impossible Planet as a slave race.
Your refreshment.
Oh, yeah, thanks.
And they're slaves, the people who cook
the food and do all the physical labour.
I'm sorry, what was your name?
We have no titles. We are as one.
We never found out much about them.
They were sort of mildly telepathic,
all identical,
happy to serve, which is a very odd
and strange thing
that's touched on fleetingly during
The Impossible Planet and The Satan Pit,
but we never really got to
the bottom of that.
So I always felt there was a lot more
to be explained about them.
There's always a danger
that you bring stuff back
just because it's been in there before
and isn't it fun to kind of
have a reappearance from old monsters
or characters or whatever.
And what's important is
that you only do that
when there's a story to tell.
NARRATOR: As the tentacles return,
the production team
at last get the chance
to reacquaint themselves
with an Ood friend.
Today we are filming
in St Athans Airbase.
Wales.
And we're using the inside of the...
I don't know what this is.
A hangar thing,
as a sort of... It's like an ultimate
battery farm for Oods.
MAN: Good morning.
Good morning, chaps. Here we are.
So each container is kind of like
crammed in with slave Oods.
And myself and the Doctor,
we discover this.
Or I should say
the Doctor and myself, really.
-Go.
-And left, right, left, right...
The movement of the basic Ood
hasn't really changed.
They still have the same presence,
the same calmness,
and the same walking movement.
They're very distinctive
and they're very different,
'cause they're not a Doctor Who monster
in that they're not rampaging
and chomping and destroying,
as aliens often are.
There's a real slowness and precision
to the Ood
that is very, very carefully worked out.
The guys in the suits
work very, very hard at doing that.
Action!
BERK: And then you've got
the sheer anger coming out
and the frustration of the Ood,
with the running Ood or the rabid Ood.
So we've got a really nice contrast.
They don't just walk calmly.
You're seeing a whole
better dimension of them.
NARRATOR: If updating the Ood
for another outing wasn't enough
to send chills up the spines
of the design team,
they also faced a cool challenge
realising the ice planet.
Snow!
Ah, real snow. Proper snow at last.
Ice planet is one of the things
I've always wanted to do.
It's one of those
science fiction staples, actually,
and actually quite easily done.
A quarry, a snow machine,
a bit of white paint.
I say it's easy.
People slaved night and day over it.
Today we're dressing
the ice plane scene.
As you can see behind,
there's paper snow going down.
There's a fine spray of water
which goes down first,
and then paper snow is blown
on top of that,
which just makes it adhere a bit better.
It's a fairly fast process,
as you can see.
We're up at Trefil quarry, which
is on the edge of the Brecon Beacons,
and as you can see behind me,
we've sprayed a lot of it with snow
for the opening scene, scene 4,
where the Tardis arrives.
We had the most fantastic summer day,
blue skies,
very pleasant,
very warm and very pleasant,
with this snow landscape.
It was really peculiar.
It's just one of the quirks of filming
that whenever you're meant to be hot,
it's freezing cold,
and whenever you're meant to be cold,
the sun is beating down on you.
-What is it?
-An Ood. He's called an Ood.
But its face...
Donna, don't, not now.
It's a he, not an it. Give me a hand.
Donna's reaction to the Ood
is brilliant,
'cause it's like... She's honest.
When she first sees them,
not only is she horrified,
she's quite freaked out,
you know, 'cause they're...
They're not nice-looking,
from a human point of view.
She's there to do those clumsy things
that we'd all do.
-My name's Donna.
-No, no, no, no. You don't need to.
Sorry.
Donna presumes that to speak to it,
you have to use that translator ball.
She picks up the translator ball
and talks into it,
which is terrible, it's like a faux pas
in front of someone who's dying,
but I really believe you'd do that.
Face value, it's a shocker, isn't it,
you know what I mean?
Seeing that lying in the snow
with purple blood, it's not nice.
And she is mystified, she is fascinated,
and she actually starts
questioning the Ood
more closely than
the Doctor's ever done.
Are there any free Ood?
Are there Ood running wild somewhere,
like wildebeest?
She finds great, you know, empathy
and compassion with them.
She's properly disgusted by what
she discovers going on in the cages,
and quite right, too.
And I think she's quite good
at reminding the Doctor
of the cost of things, possibly.
NARRATOR: And it's not only
his companion that's challenging.
My character's called Klineman Halpen,
which is obviously the name
of a villain. That's very clear.
Halpen's a businessman.
He's a nice sort of
middle-level Doctor Who villain.
What I mean is
he's not out to take over the universe.
He's a management body,
he's doing his job,
and he's making a profit,
which we sort of use a lot of
in Doctor Who
because I think it's closer to
true-life villainy.
The Ood are born with a secondary brain.
Like the amygdala in humans,
it processes memory and emotions.
You get rid of that,
you wouldn't be Donna any more.
You'd be like an Ood, a processed Ood.
So the company cuts off their brains.
And they stitch on the translator.
We had a lot of fun
developing this script,
working out who would be the
secret operative of Friends of the Ood
working behind the scenes
to release the Ood.
It is Dr Ryder in the end,
which we sort of tried to hide
by writing him down, actually.
It's a lovely performance, that,
from Adrian.
NARRATOR: After a decade
of discrete dealings with the Ood,
Dr Ryder finally gets his moment.
But sadly for him, on set today,
his moment is being murdered.
Being a friend of the Ood
has made him an enemy of Halpen.
C camera.
It's taken me 10 years to infiltrate
the company.
And I succeeded.
Yes.
Yes, you did.
The death of Dr Ryder
is actually very important
because I think without that,
Halpen wouldn't quite deserve
what's about to happen to him
'cause Halpen's fate is disgusting.
What have you done?
There's something very gothic, I think,
about the ending of this episode.
The fact that Halpen is transformed
into the very creature
that he's been abusing,
that he is forced to walk
in an Ood's shoes,
actually, literally, at the end.
Hopefully,
in school on a Monday morning,
everyone will be going, "Oh, did you see
that man turn into an Ood?"
So, job well done if they are.
The circle is broken.
The Ood can sing!
(MELODIC SINGING)
It's quite important, these first
three stories with a new companion.
You write them into the history
of the programme,
and so they become embedded in it.
It's absolutely great for those two.
-Take this song with you.
-We will.
Always.
And know this, Doctor, Donna,
you will never be forgotten.
Our children will sing of
the Doctor, Donna,
and our children's children,
and the wind and the ice and the snow
will carry your names forever.
You've got to love an Ood.
You've got to love an Ood.
NARRATOR: And apparently,
as yummy as ever.
You just want to bite them.
That's a bit of a worry.
NARRATOR: It's an ice-cool reception
for the slaves' return,
so join Confidential backstage
as we serve you an insight into the Ood.
I wanted the Ood,
I wanted the ice planet,
I wanted humans as slave traders.
Get up!
Back here, you can have that shot
lined up for Dave,
and you can have a tighter one
that stops him.
-Yeah?
-Yeah.
So we can come off the line here.
There's your effects...
We're in a warehouse today,
filming a scene where the Doctor
is chased by a giant claw.
It was trying to find ways
of making it look as risky as possible
and sort of trying to find maybe
different ways of coming round a corner
so it didn't look like you
were just running away all the time.
And, of course, the claw
was being added in afterwards.
We've got a previs
that we put together with Neill,
and we've already worked out
the rough moves of the CGI arm,
and we're going to try and match it in
with the action.
HOUGHTON: Yeah, absolutely.
So when we come to film
the elements that we need here
of David running down
through the aisles,
we know exactly what we want.
Action!
I haven't seen
the finished sequence yet,
so I hope they don't stitch me up.
They could make the claw
look decidedly unthreatening,
in which case, I'm running for my life
away from some fairground grabber.
NARRATOR: And for today's shoot,
cast and crew ready themselves
for some rough and tumble.
TENNANT: It looks quite flash,
doesn't it?
Oh, yeah, it looks great.
David has to fall over, trip over
some barrels later, and fall down,
and he's very good at
anything like that.
Anything physical, he's great, so I'll
pad him up and we'll get him to do it.
TENNANT: ff wasn't
particularly dangerous.
I wasn't doubled for any of it,
I don't think.
It was really just throwing
yourself around,
which I always quite enjoy.
Cut! Phil loved it.
NARRATOR: Of course,
this is not the first time
there's been ups and downs
when the Ood are around.
We should find out who's in charge.
VOICE: Open door 19.
Right, hello. Sorry.
-I was just saying, nice place.
-We must feed.
First time we met the Ood,
they were introduced on
The Impossible Planet as a slave race.
Your refreshment.
Oh, yeah, thanks.
And they're slaves, the people who cook
the food and do all the physical labour.
I'm sorry, what was your name?
We have no titles. We are as one.
We never found out much about them.
They were sort of mildly telepathic,
all identical,
happy to serve, which is a very odd
and strange thing
that's touched on fleetingly during
The Impossible Planet and The Satan Pit,
but we never really got to
the bottom of that.
So I always felt there was a lot more
to be explained about them.
There's always a danger
that you bring stuff back
just because it's been in there before
and isn't it fun to kind of
have a reappearance from old monsters
or characters or whatever.
And what's important is
that you only do that
when there's a story to tell.
NARRATOR: As the tentacles return,
the production team
at last get the chance
to reacquaint themselves
with an Ood friend.
Today we are filming
in St Athans Airbase.
Wales.
And we're using the inside of the...
I don't know what this is.
A hangar thing,
as a sort of... It's like an ultimate
battery farm for Oods.
MAN: Good morning.
Good morning, chaps. Here we are.
So each container is kind of like
crammed in with slave Oods.
And myself and the Doctor,
we discover this.
Or I should say
the Doctor and myself, really.
-Go.
-And left, right, left, right...
The movement of the basic Ood
hasn't really changed.
They still have the same presence,
the same calmness,
and the same walking movement.
They're very distinctive
and they're very different,
'cause they're not a Doctor Who monster
in that they're not rampaging
and chomping and destroying,
as aliens often are.
There's a real slowness and precision
to the Ood
that is very, very carefully worked out.
The guys in the suits
work very, very hard at doing that.
Action!
BERK: And then you've got
the sheer anger coming out
and the frustration of the Ood,
with the running Ood or the rabid Ood.
So we've got a really nice contrast.
They don't just walk calmly.
You're seeing a whole
better dimension of them.
NARRATOR: If updating the Ood
for another outing wasn't enough
to send chills up the spines
of the design team,
they also faced a cool challenge
realising the ice planet.
Snow!
Ah, real snow. Proper snow at last.
Ice planet is one of the things
I've always wanted to do.
It's one of those
science fiction staples, actually,
and actually quite easily done.
A quarry, a snow machine,
a bit of white paint.
I say it's easy.
People slaved night and day over it.
Today we're dressing
the ice plane scene.
As you can see behind,
there's paper snow going down.
There's a fine spray of water
which goes down first,
and then paper snow is blown
on top of that,
which just makes it adhere a bit better.
It's a fairly fast process,
as you can see.
We're up at Trefil quarry, which
is on the edge of the Brecon Beacons,
and as you can see behind me,
we've sprayed a lot of it with snow
for the opening scene, scene 4,
where the Tardis arrives.
We had the most fantastic summer day,
blue skies,
very pleasant,
very warm and very pleasant,
with this snow landscape.
It was really peculiar.
It's just one of the quirks of filming
that whenever you're meant to be hot,
it's freezing cold,
and whenever you're meant to be cold,
the sun is beating down on you.
-What is it?
-An Ood. He's called an Ood.
But its face...
Donna, don't, not now.
It's a he, not an it. Give me a hand.
Donna's reaction to the Ood
is brilliant,
'cause it's like... She's honest.
When she first sees them,
not only is she horrified,
she's quite freaked out,
you know, 'cause they're...
They're not nice-looking,
from a human point of view.
She's there to do those clumsy things
that we'd all do.
-My name's Donna.
-No, no, no, no. You don't need to.
Sorry.
Donna presumes that to speak to it,
you have to use that translator ball.
She picks up the translator ball
and talks into it,
which is terrible, it's like a faux pas
in front of someone who's dying,
but I really believe you'd do that.
Face value, it's a shocker, isn't it,
you know what I mean?
Seeing that lying in the snow
with purple blood, it's not nice.
And she is mystified, she is fascinated,
and she actually starts
questioning the Ood
more closely than
the Doctor's ever done.
Are there any free Ood?
Are there Ood running wild somewhere,
like wildebeest?
She finds great, you know, empathy
and compassion with them.
She's properly disgusted by what
she discovers going on in the cages,
and quite right, too.
And I think she's quite good
at reminding the Doctor
of the cost of things, possibly.
NARRATOR: And it's not only
his companion that's challenging.
My character's called Klineman Halpen,
which is obviously the name
of a villain. That's very clear.
Halpen's a businessman.
He's a nice sort of
middle-level Doctor Who villain.
What I mean is
he's not out to take over the universe.
He's a management body,
he's doing his job,
and he's making a profit,
which we sort of use a lot of
in Doctor Who
because I think it's closer to
true-life villainy.
The Ood are born with a secondary brain.
Like the amygdala in humans,
it processes memory and emotions.
You get rid of that,
you wouldn't be Donna any more.
You'd be like an Ood, a processed Ood.
So the company cuts off their brains.
And they stitch on the translator.
We had a lot of fun
developing this script,
working out who would be the
secret operative of Friends of the Ood
working behind the scenes
to release the Ood.
It is Dr Ryder in the end,
which we sort of tried to hide
by writing him down, actually.
It's a lovely performance, that,
from Adrian.
NARRATOR: After a decade
of discrete dealings with the Ood,
Dr Ryder finally gets his moment.
But sadly for him, on set today,
his moment is being murdered.
Being a friend of the Ood
has made him an enemy of Halpen.
C camera.
It's taken me 10 years to infiltrate
the company.
And I succeeded.
Yes.
Yes, you did.
The death of Dr Ryder
is actually very important
because I think without that,
Halpen wouldn't quite deserve
what's about to happen to him
'cause Halpen's fate is disgusting.
What have you done?
There's something very gothic, I think,
about the ending of this episode.
The fact that Halpen is transformed
into the very creature
that he's been abusing,
that he is forced to walk
in an Ood's shoes,
actually, literally, at the end.
Hopefully,
in school on a Monday morning,
everyone will be going, "Oh, did you see
that man turn into an Ood?"
So, job well done if they are.
The circle is broken.
The Ood can sing!
(MELODIC SINGING)
It's quite important, these first
three stories with a new companion.
You write them into the history
of the programme,
and so they become embedded in it.
It's absolutely great for those two.
-Take this song with you.
-We will.
Always.
And know this, Doctor, Donna,
you will never be forgotten.
Our children will sing of
the Doctor, Donna,
and our children's children,
and the wind and the ice and the snow
will carry your names forever.