The Ood Cast

The Smugglers
Kidnapped to find loot,
Doctor breaks smuggling ring,
then leaves when fight starts.

The Tenth Planet
Estranged twin returns,
metal men come to convert.
They get too greedy.

Regeneration (I)
Exhausted old man
fades into baggy trousers
and wakes with bowl cut.

The Second Doctor
A cosmic hobo,
Lord of time and twinkling eyes.
But not recorders.

The Power of the Daleks
Colonial deaths,
traitors and inert old foes
stopped by power surge.

The Highlanders
Captured by Redcoats,
resorts to smuggling arms
and gains a piper.

The Underwater Menace
Raising Atlantis
is deranged Prof’s evil scheme.
Doctor drowns the dream.

The Moonbase
A plague on the moon
is cyber-caused with poison.
Cocktails save the day.

The Macra Terror
“Hi De Hi” mind games
keep big gas-run crabs alive.
They just break a pump.

The Faceless Ones
Young people vanish,
replace a generation.
Doctor brings them home.

The Evil of the Daleks
Daleks play with genes,
Doctor spreads the human touch.
Civil war ensues.

A rule or pattern that specifies how a certain input sequence (often a sequence of characters) should be mapped to an output sequence (also often a sequence of characters) according to a defined procedure.

Ah. No. Now that there is a “macro”, isn’t it?

Macra are giant, crab-like and crabby in all sorts of ways, living on gases which would be poisonous to humans and prone to eating one or two ape descendants when peckish or feeling rather peeved after a hard day.

When the Tenth Doctor discovered them prowling underneath the motorways of “New Earth”, he called them the “scourge of the galaxy” – a race which once owned and ruled over a large empire. However, when the Second Doctor found them, they were roughing it in a gas refinery – brainwashing the inhabitants of a nearby holiday camp into continuing the production of the vital gases they need to survive. They were masters of manipulative mind control techniques, duping their RC humans into keeping them alive and putting on a fake smile in the process.

If you ask me, it’s not the Macra’s fault – I mean what type of idiot wants to holiday next to a whopping great gas plant in the first place?! And frankly, you’re just asking for trouble if you shove your holiday camp next to the one with the infestation of gigantic crabs, too…

Having been outwitted by the Second Doctor (who incited a revolution and blew them up using a combustible mix of gases), the Tenth Doctor found them hiding from Rick Stein underneath New New York, surviving on the traffic fumes, nicking cars and eating the contents on his way to have a chat with the Face of Boe. It seems that billions of years on from their explosive first encounter with the Doctor, all evolution had done for them was reduce them to nasty, bullying predators.

I read somewhere that these were the only monsters to have appeared just once in the new series. But that’s blatant nonsense, so I’m not going there. Only returning monsters to only feature once, I can believe, but then, how do you fit a Crabzilla into caves under Stonehenge?

The Essentials

First Appearance: The Macra Terror (1967)

Best complimented by: mayonnaise and lemon wedge. Maybe some of that pink seafood sauce.

Weaknesses: Explosions. Large pans of boiling water.

Leather jacketed baked potatoes with a general disposition to violence and long-lasting warfare, often quoted as being short, stocky and unbelievably powerful due to the extreme gravitational pressure on their home world: Sontar. Their chief impulse is to die with honour in battle, and therefore frequently try to construct reasons to fight anything that steps in their way.

These warriors are a neat little combination of the genetic integrity of a GM tomato and the tactical awareness of a lemming, and their frequent wars often resulted in huge losses to their number. Their solution was simply to clone waves upon waves of warriors to battle their perpetual enemies, the Rutans (incidentally, large green light-up jellyfish).

Over the course of the Doctor’s many travels, the Sontarans have cropped up a number of times – usually on earth, which they seem to view as a marvellous little maternity ward for their baby Maris Pipers.

Their first appearance being memorable because the Sontaran causing havoc in late-medieval England wasn’t beaten by the Doctor at all, but by a quick-witted archer who managed to hit the one point of weakness on the Sontaran body: the probic vent (a small aperture at the back of the “neck”).

Since then, they have been discovered performing nasty experiments on humans (imagine Mr Potato Head swapping your limbs around), using a group of Vardans as a smokescreen for their attempted invasion of Gallifrey, a brief but baffling visit to a Spanish villa (with a captive Second Doctor and a small troupe of savage Androgums) and most recently when Mike from the Young Ones improbably joined forces with an obnoxious teenage genius to gas the world using sat-navs.

One lone Sontaran was discovered trying to destroy some nuclear power stations and was sent packing by Sarah Jane Smith and her school-age friends using some high heels and a little persuasion. She probably used her lipstick. I mean, why not?

The Essentials

First appearance: The Time Warrior (1973/4)

Most baffling appearance: The Two Doctors (1985)

Known weaknesses: Probic Vent in the back of their “neck”. Also known to get nervous at the sight of coleslaw or butter. In fact, any popular jacket potato dressing.

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…