10 Doctor Who Scenes More Terrifying When You Know The Truth

It’s not just the way a monster looks that makes them scary, it’s the reason they look the way they do. This was the case for the suited Silents, the cloth-faced Mondasian Cybermen, and the bandaged Foretold.

It was also the case for the Ood – not because of their mottled skin and pink fronds, but because of their translation orbs, which are stitched onto them by the merciless Ood Operations.

It’s an ironic name for a company that literally performs surgery on its workforce, removing their secondary hind brains to make the necessary alterations. It’s a grim thought, but the Ood as we know them have been mutilated.

Planet of the Ood writer Keith Temple originally planned to make this more explicit, with a sequence set inside the abattoir-like conversion centre. Though deemed “too horrific” for the finished episode, this material was reinstated in the recent Planet of the Ood novelisation, which reads:

“The hydraulic system of surgical devices, hanging above the conveyor belt a short distance away, had one purpose: to amputate natural Ood’s hindbrains.”

So if you though that Donna went through the ringer seeing the Ood in the cage, her trip to the Oodsphere was nearly much more harrowing.