A good solid ep this week - not exactly spine-tingling, but it was a decent story well done. Nice to see them go back and explore some of the established stuff a bit more - ie, who'd the Ood. Donna's character is still working well, and still holding up against all the Tate criticism I think..

I wasn't particularly looking forward to this week's, but I much preferred it to the first episode. My second favourite thus far, then.

Whenever I've spoken to people who don't like Tate in the role, they just reply with "she just sucks". I can't help feeling this is because it's rather fashionable to have a dislike for her because of the Catherine Tate Show (which has is moments but is hardly pushing boundaries). She works well as Donna. Although, she's done a lot of crying.

And whenever Donna's cried, so have I! She's brought back some humanity to the companion; instead of just taking it all like it's perfectly normal, she's reacting the way I imagine real people would. I think anyone would cry at the plight of The Ood, surely?

I liked the ep, it wasn't earth-shattering, but it was solid and well observed.

It's probably only the second episode of Dr Who that I have watched the whole way through (because I can't sit still for long enough) but I'm glad I did. I thought the Oods' were scarey, but I was wrong!

Ood, not Oods.

Sorry, pedantry.

I did think she from "Eew", to "Awh" a bit quick they found the first Ood.

but that was more than made up for by her reaction the the cheap clothing line. I thought it was going to get all preachy, but she just went "nah". Great!

Wasn't the whole reason he knew something was suspect, because you couldn't evolve a separate hind-brain fore-brain, without conflict?
But an everliving, singular, species-wide, giant Ur-brain evolved just fine.

Would have worked if:
a) they hadn't relied on evolutionary biology to deduce that something was missing.
or
b) said something to the effect of they found several, and this is the last surviving one.

--
All I ask is internal consistency.

I agree at first glance it seems unlikely that a species would have evolved that way, but of course we're not the Doctor and haven't seen the full gamut of intergalactic evolutionary evidence that he has - perhaps he's seen several other races evolve just the same way.. just because it doesn't fit with any earth-bound model doesn't mean it's not widespread in some other galaxy.

The big-giant-brain might simply have been an individual Ood born, through some genetic quirk of evolution, with an overdeveloped brain and an underdeveloped everything else. It might seem "ever living" to us but that's all relative - what's the average life span of an Ood anyway? We don't know, it's not been established, even the most common garden Ood may live for hundreds of years for all we know...

No wonder there's a glut on the market.
"Buy a new Ood? But gan'pappy's Ood been in the familly for generations!"

I quite like that an Ood only cost ten time the cost of a new voice package. Really gives you an idea of how little they value them.