The Ood Cast

Best known as the mortal enemies of the Sontaran Empire (you’d be disappointed if you’d been battling someone for more than 50,000 years to only be considered a minor irritation), Rutans – or Rutan Hosts – are famous in the Doctor Who universe for having the highest mention-to-appearance ratio*, only appearing once in the long history of televisually documented encounters but being mentioned on numerous occasions. Mostly by Sontarans.

The only recorded encounter the Doctor had with a Rutan took place when his Fourth incarnation visited a delightful holiday spot called Fang Rock, and it was his investigation into the deaths of the lighthouse keeping team there which uncovered the ability and methods of the Rutans. It also uncovered their true appearance – that of a mis-shapen cloudy green jellyfish with a lightbulb underneath. In fact, I could swear I won a marble that looked exactly like that Rutan in a playground game when I was 7…

As their appearance suggests, they are essentially amphibious but can happily function on dry land – and are even able to cling to sheer surfaces – like the side of the Fang Rock lighthouse. Their voice doesn’t quite go with the appearance, sounding a little like small man trapped in a tin box.

Tactically, they are similar to Sontarans in that they have a habit of sending down single scouts ahead of a larger number of soldiers. But these scouts were just as dangerous and more cunning than a Sontaran would be. The Rutan scout discovered in the lighthouse, for example, targeted specific humans, killed them and then impersonated them in an effort to disguise its presence.

Knowing that the Rutans’ home planet, Ruta 3, was an icy world, the Doctor killed the scout by rigging a weapon to overheat him before he could be rescued, and dealt with the mothership by reflecting the light from the top of the lighthouse at it using a diamond. A pretty blingin’ end.

What do we learn after all of this? That jellyfish and potatoes do not play well together. Also, as a species, they may get less love than Sontarans, but they’re much more interesting…

The Essentials

First (and only – and therefore best and worst) appearance: The Horror of Fang Rock (1977)

Sworn Enemy: Sontarans.

Strenths: Victim impersonation, electric tentacles. Great sense of humour.

Weaknesses: Extreme heat, sea shanties, the plays of Bertholt Brecht **

*This statement is based purely on speculation to make a point. Please don’t be mean and picky about it if it’s not quite true.

**Well, if you swallowed the first unsubstantiated bit…

The “Whoniverse” is a complicated place.  Ever aware of this, and the confusions that can arise, your friendly Oodcasters present the beginning of the end of your confusions…  The Oodcast Guide.  Each entry in this weighty online tome will be compiled using the very best of what remains of the Oodcast’s collective memory, and therefore absolutely and thoroughly under-researched.

So, let’s get cracking.  First up, we’ll take you through the most important part of the series…  The Doctor.

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The First Doctor __

The Doyen of doctors, the original was a crotchety old man who insisted on surrounding himself with young people and wearing a hat the shape of a fur-lined cone (which, combined with his white hair gave him the appearance of a time travelling Mr Whippy…)  He also chose the TARDIS with the broken chameleon circuit, presumably, so we can’t assume his judgement in travelling methods was any less flawless than his fashion sense.

He travelled with teachers, space pilots, resistance fighters, rescued spaceship passengers, secretaries and sailors before collapsing and regenerating for the first time.

Tremendously knowledgeable on scientific matters, but curiously awful at flying his own time machine, was the first to encounter Daleks and Cybermen, as well as taking jollies to Mexico, Ancient Greece, China and revolutionary France, met cowboys, cavemen and the Celestial Toymaker.

Oh yes, and he had a library card (see Vampires of Venice).  Eventually, old age took its toll and he regenerated for the first time, into a time-travelling bad-hair-day.

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The Second Doctor __

Slightly shambolic and unpredictable, the second doctor had the appearance of a tramp that wandered into Mr Benn’s favourite costume shop: with a shaggy pudding-bowl haircut, the occasional massive fur coat and Rupert Bear’s favourite trousers.

But there was more to him than fashion statements.  He was mercurial and fascinatingly clever, while clumsy and caring towards those in distress.  He also established the formidable team with Alastair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart, and was the first to openly (and shamelessly) use a sonic screwdriver on screen.

Surrounded by frightened Victorian teenagers, certain UNIT officers, hot-headed Scottish warriors and stupidly intelligent young women, he took on the cybermen and daleks again with nothing but his intelligence and a recorder, is still the only Doctor to take on the Ice Warriors as enemies, guided his friends through an attempted mind robbery, faced creatures from the deep and Yetis in the London Underground before being forced to become Worzel Gummidge by the Time Lords.

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The Third Doctor

Geriatric jujitsu exponents everywhere raised a cheer – for this was their doctor…

Beginning as a victim of friendly fire, and then becoming a confused clothing and vehicle thief as well as saviour of mankind in a plastics factory was something of a rollercoaster of a first day.  If it was possible for a Time Lord to have a mid-life crisis, this was it: fast machines, short-skirted female companions and more action than is seemly for someone of advancing years, this doctor was a kind of Budget Bond.  With his own Blofeld too: enter… the Master.

During the course of his careering about, he encountered the daleks again, the Master, daemons in Bronze age barrows, the Master, giant green poisonous maggots, the Master, fascist versions of reality, the Master, two sets of underwater cousins (who’s idea of “self-defence” is creeping aboard sea forts and murdering people), the Master, mind control machines, the Master, lost aliens, the Master, potato-headed warrior Sontarans, the Master, and the giant spiders which would ultimately be his end.  And the Master.

Did remarkably little travelling around his immediate environs for someone with itchy interstellar feet confined to just the one planet.  He did, however, reverse the polarity of more things than any other doctor.

Radiation brought his dashing about to an abrupt halt, and he regenerated soon after into that one-legged sailor in Blackadder II that drank his own wee and wanted to marry Nursey.

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The Fourth Doctor

Described as looking like a “Space vagrant”, the fourth incarnation was eccentric both in action and dress sense (although not quite as much as the previous doctors, it has to be said).  He pioneered the use of scarves as weaponry (see Hand of Fear), the use of confectionary to calm agitated beings, and the construction of jacket pockets from Mary Poppins’ old carpet bags.

Superbly intelligent, witty and fond of jelly babies, this doctor would stick around longer than any other and inspire thousands of children to beg mothers everywhere to get knitting.

In the TARDIS, which gained a glorious oak-panelled look for a time, he entertained journalists, (oddly clumsy but very likeable) UNIT medical officers, savage warriors, Time Ladies, robotic dogs, one rather annoying stowaway boy genius, an aristocratic brainbox and, just before his end, a loudmouth air hostess.

His battles though, were many and varied – taking on all manner of robots (giant ones, servile mining ones, mummified ones, half-human pirate captain ones and reproduction human ones), ancient alien powers, criminal time lords, Sontarans again, female radioactive creatures conveniently buried for centuries under a quarry, disturbing scary mannequins, amphibious lifeforms hiding in lighthouses, art-dealing monsters and – perhaps most famously – the daleks.

His end came when he met the Master again, and fell from a radar dish.  Thus becoming the chap off of All Creatures Great and Small.

Next time…  Doctors 5 – 8…

When I was at school, Doctor Who was cancelled.  I tried to replace it for a while – I desperately wanted something to plug that gap.  Several things nearly did – cricket only lasted through the summer months though, and “Escape To Victory” was only ever on at Easter.  It was hopeless.

For a while, the discovery that my local library stocked a small clutch of Target novelisations and a couple of battered Make-Your-Own-Adventure books with Colin Baker’s permed noodle on the front cover had kept me going.  But they soon ran out.  I did read the Target novel of The Awakening four or five times though.  Each time, absolutely transfixed.

Then, one afternoon, I walked into a tiny (and otherwise pretty rubbish) bookshop near where I was living then, and I spotted the words Doctor Who printed on a thin-ish navy blue spine of a book on the top shelf.  I pulled over the little steps that were in the shop for customers, and clambered up to reach it.  It was, apparently, the first in a new series of Classic Script books.  The Talons of Weng Chiang.

I’d seen Talons before – one summer, my best friend at the time had broken his leg playing football, and spent the summer holidays inside with his leg up, watching endless videos of Doctor Who.  Partly to keep him company, and partly to see a lot of Who I’d never seen, I spent a lot of my time there.  That’s when I saw Talons.  And Pyramids of Mars.  And The Hand of Fear.  Three of my favourite stories to this day.

Anyway, back to the bookshop.  I bought the script and took it home, thinking it would keep me going for a couple of weeks.  Maybe by then the BBC would have resurrected the show.  Well, they didn’t… and I finished the book in less than two days.  By the end of those two weeks, I’d read it three times in all.  Not very long after that, I found myself sketching out small scenes from the start of my own story in script form.  That’s where it all started for me.

But Talons is still a story I go back to time and again.  Reading the script definitely helped me through the first viewing, although like Andy’s view of the audio taped episodes, reading the script left the worlds completely to my imagination without limitations of budget or film cameras.  So nothing prepared me for the close-up footage of a rat…

The story fed my other interests too, which helps.  Sherlock Holmes was one of the things that did manage to fill the gap between Who stopping and returning (and if you’re interested, you can find my views on Moffatt and Gatiss’ “Sherlock” over on my own personal blog here).  London and its history (and mysteries) has always been a place that fills me with wonder.

This period (I think) is the zenith of Robert Holmes’ time as script editor.  Don’t forget, this story came hot on the heels of the absolutely brilliant Robots of Death, and was followed by the wonderful Horror of Fang Rock.  I sort of think of them as a mini detective trilogy, although it doesn’t take too much of stretch to make a case for most Who adventures to be thought of as detective stories, at least on a very basic level.

And this starts a bit like a faithful reassembling of the elements to be found in many a Holmes story, I think – enigmatic foreign hypnotist showmen, Chinese heavies murdering strangers in back streets, horrific giant rodents stalking the sewers…  And then, Robert Holmes throws in a 51^st Century despot, who arrived on earth in a Time Cabinet that was then taken away by the Chinese Imperial Army who is draining the life-force from people to keep alive.  If that isn’t genius…

There are a number of Sherlock Holmes connections, aside from the deerstalker that the Doctor wears.  The Giant Rat of Sumatra is one of those cases that Watson famously mentions but never expands on, like The Abergavenny Murder and the Camberwell Poisoning.  Even Leela is a sort-of connection… (was going to say semi, but that would have led to all sorts of unintended embarrassment) – “savages” aren’t all that rare in Conan Doyle’s originals… in The Sign of the Four, for example.

The characters in Talons are full, rounded and colourful – it’s a masterclass in character writing.  Henry Gordon Jago and Professor Litefoot are lovely (and gloriously brought back to life by Big Finish this year) – but Li’Hsen Chang is creepy and Magnus Greel himself is hideous…  and a distant ancestor to the Moff’s stories, maybe, Mr Sin is absolutely terrifying.

There are lots of longer stories in the classic series which drag their feet and look obviously spun out to fill more screen time, but in my opinion this one doesn’t.  It’s marvellous, and not just to the sentimental fool in me.  Go back and watch it again, you’ll not be disappointed.