10 Traumatic Doctor Who Facts You'll Wish You Hadn't Heard

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 Planet of the Ood novelisation which was released in 2023, and it reads as follows:

"The hydraulic system of surgical devices, hanging above the conveyor belt a short distance away, had one purpose: to amputate natural Oods' hindbrains."

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