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| Day of the Daleks |
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 Name: Ogrons
Format:
Television show and Book
Time of Origin: Generally the future; exact time frame unspecified.
Appearances: "Day of the Daleks", "Frontier in Space", "The
Romance of Crime", "Warmonger", "Mission: Impractical", "Shakedown", "Return of the Daleks", "Kursaal", "Interference:
Book One" and "Interference:
Book Two", "Eighth Doctor - Time War 2: Planet of the Ogrons" and "Fugitive".
Doctors: Third
Doctor, Fourth Doctor, Fifth Doctor, Sixth
Doctor, Seventh Doctor, Eighth
Doctor and Tenth
Doctor.
Companions: Jo Grant, 2nd
Romana, K9, Peri, Frobisher, Roslyn
Forrester, Chris Cwej, Sarah
Jane Smith, Samantha
Jones, Compassion, Bliss; Bernice
Summerfield and Fitz Kreiner were involved in a crisis involving Ogrons but didn’t meet them directly.
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| Frontier in Space |
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History: Although a superficially stupid race, the Ogrons have nevertheless developed an interesting history with The Doctor over the centuries, The Doctor being willing to kill them if facing them while they are allied with his enemies but mourning them if they are encountered operating independently. The Ogrons are most known for being the servants of the Daleks, dealing with equipment and situations where the Daleks' lack of hands and legs is a more obvious handicap, although their limited intellects mean that they are of little use in dealing with more complicated tasks.
In his first encounters with Ogrons, The Doctor was forced to fight them directly as they were working for the Daleks; when he faced them for the first time, the Ogrons were serving as Dalek enforcers from a possible future where the Daleks had conquered Earth ("Day of the Daleks") while the second encounter saw the Ogrons being used to sow discord between Earth and the Draconian Empire by using holographic disguises to pose as the opposing side when attacking ships ("Frontier in Space"). On both occasions, the Third Doctor was quick to take up arms against the Ogrons, wielding a stolen gun to kill them immediately despite The Doctor's usual distaste for violence, but this can be attributed to the Ogrons' raw strength and fundamentally basic mental state making it impractical for The Doctor to try and fight them in a conventional manner or reason with them to stop.
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The Romance of Crime
(Gareth Roberts) |
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The Fourth Doctor found himself dealing with Ogrons when he landed on the Rock, an asteroid prison in the twenty-sixth century ("The
Romance of Crime"), these Ogrons having been hired as security thugs for a group of criminals seeking to rob the Rock. Although the Ogrons' search efforts caused significant collateral damage to the Rock, Romana was able to escape capture by convincing the Ogrons that she was working with their employers, allowing her to discover that the whole crisis was being manipulated by Xais, a telepathic criminal who had survived her own death by imprinting her mind into a death-mask made of a unique material. In the subsequent struggle, the Ogrons were killed when their ship was sabotaged by a previously -planted booby-trap, although The Doctor was able to defeat Xais when her efforts to use Romana as a host failed and her attempt to take a new body backfired when she and her new host killed each other in the resulting struggle of will.
On one notable occasion, The Doctor developed a surprising close relationship with a group of Ogrons when the Fifth Doctor was forced to become the Supreme Coordinator of a large inter-species alliance of various aliens - including the Sontarans, Cybermen and Ice Warriors, although the evidence suggests that none of these ever knew that they were actually working for The Doctor - as part of a campaign against the renegade Time Lord Morbius ("Warmonger"). When faced with the task of appointing a personal bodyguard, The Doctor was reluctant to show apparent favouritism by selecting guards from one species in the Alliance over the others while recognising that selecting multiple guards from different races would just create tension among the group, and therefore took advantage of the opportunity presented when a small ship of about thirty Ogrons arrived to volunteer their services for the Alliance by appointing them his personal bodyguards. Despite some minor problems when they demonstrated too great an enthusiasm for their work - such as the Ogrons initially violently assaulting anyone who came to visit The Doctor in his offices before he clarified that they should only consider visitors enemies if they tried to shoot at them - in general the Ogrons proved to be capable bodyguards, even providing The Doctor with his new temporary alias of 'the Supremo' when his full title of 'Supreme Coordinator' proved to be too complicated for them to pronounce. Serving as loyal if dim guards, the Ogrons even helped The Doctor ensure that history unfolded as it should by knocking out the guards around the imprisoned Morbius after his defeat, allowing Morbius's follower Solon to extract his brain while his body was executed (The brain eventually being restored to 'life' before Morbius was defeated once again by the Fourth Doctor ("The Brain of Morbius")), allowing The Doctor to retire from his role as Supremo and the Ogrons to go their own way once again.
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Mission: Impractical
(David A. McIntee) |
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The Sixth Doctor encountered a ship crewed by a family of Ogrons when he and his companion Frobisher were forced to work with The Doctor's old 'friend' Sabalom Glitz to steal a valuable artefact to prevent a war ("Mission: Impractical"). Although an Ogron raiding party had been taking advantage of the current inter-system tensions to conduct raids, when the Ogrons attacked a ship belonging to a duo of bounty hunters currently tracking The Doctor, the bounty hunters recruited them to act as an additional crew. After The Doctor's team managed to successfully pull off the heist, their employer turned out to be after the information in the artefact - an old Tzun data core containing information on how to build their infamous ships - forcing the team to flee once again to try and take the data core back to the Veltrochii after the Ogrons captured them during the handover. Having convinced the bounty hunters of the urgency of the situation, the team fled in their vessel, but the Ogron ship was destroyed while The Doctor and his current allies were trying to escape their current adversary, his own assassin destroying the ship to try and kill the gang because he didn't know that they'd left it. Even after the war was averted, criminal Jack Chance noted that the Ogron children on the ship were the greatest victims in this crisis even if The Doctor's actions averted a war between the Veltrochii and various other worlds.
The Ogrons acted as Dalek enforcers when the Daleks made a second attempt to master the Spiridons' secret of invisibility ("Return of the Daleks"), acting as a security force while the Daleks conducted their experiments. Despite their strength, the Ogron forces were unable to independently quell the riot when the native population began to object to the Dalek occupation, with casualties only being avoided when the Seventh Doctor volunteered his assistance in aiding the Dalek project if they would release their prisoners and leave the natives alone. Eventually, The Doctor was able to defeat the Daleks' plan by restoring the Spiridons' invisibility while inflicting everything else on the planet with light-wave sickness, a disease caused by the massive amounts of energy required to become invisible, killing all the Daleks and Ogrons left on the planet. The Doctor was only just able to survive by returning to the dimensional stability of the TARDIS, and even then he was left ill for some time as his body fought between its current state of cellular paralysis and its natural 'desire' to regenerate before his cells finally stabilised.
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Return of the Daleks
(Nicholas Briggs) |
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When the Remote - a branch of the time-travelling voodoo cult Faction Paradox - attempted to change Earth's history to attract the attention of the Time Lords by posing as arms dealers and selling advanced weapons, they hired two Ogrons to act as their private security, reasoning that anyone seeing them would assume that the Ogrons were merely from some small European nation. During this encounter, Sarah Jane Smith - who was investigating the arms deal as a journalist - learned thanks to K9 that the Ogrons were actually more intelligent than they appeared; most Ogron communication took place at a level beyond what humans could hear, with the result that they had a far more extensive vocabulary than humans believed. Working with an Ogron who introduced himself as Lost Boy, Sarah Jane was able to learn about the Remote's goal to attract a Time Lord to Earth, using Remote equipment stolen by Lost Boy to track The Doctor and the TARDIS to reveal the situation and stop the Remote.
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Emissary of the Daleks
(Andrew Smith) |
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Much later in the Eighth Doctor’s life, as the Daleks engaged the Time Lords in a full-scale war, The Doctor became concerned when a Time Lord agent revealed that they had recently encountered what appeared to be a future incarnation of The Doctor that was part-Ogron ("Planet of the Ogrons"). While The Doctor rejected the idea that he would ever regenerate into an Ogron, the Ogron had arrived at a Time Lord facility in The Doctor’s TARDIS, wearing the current Doctor’s clothes, and even had traces of The Doctor’s DNA and brainwaves with the differences simply those that could be justified as the aftermath of a difficult regeneration. This same encounter prompted The Doctor to ‘realise’ that the Daleks’ use of Ogrons in the past was actually the result of them changing their own history, as they tried to explore new avenues of attack in the Time War. Ogrons were being used as potential foot soldiers for the Daleks, including the Daleks using them for experiments augmenting the Ogrons with Time Lord DNA to help them bypass the isomorphic controls on most Time Lord technology, or even planting Ogron brains in stolen TARDISes. Tracing ‘Doctor Ogron’ back to his point of origin, The Doctor, his companion Bliss, and the Twelve - the latest incarnation of the Time Lord known as The Collective - actually contributed to the creation of Doctor Ogron when the Dalek scientist responsible for the experiments used The Doctor’s DNA to augment the Ogron that would become Doctor Ogron. After the younger Doctor Ogron was created, The Doctor sent Doctor Ogron to Gallifrey in his TARDIS to complete the time loop, but The Doctor Ogron that accompanied them was apparently killed when the Daleks captured The Doctor, Bliss and the Twelve. However, Doctor Ogron’s Time Lord DNA proved so significant that he was able to regenerate, the new incarnation taking one of the Dalek’s augmented TARDISes and leaving before the lab exploded.
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Kursaal
(Peter Anghelides) |
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On a trip to the far future, the Tenth Doctor was uncomfortable to learn that the Ogron economy had been badly affected by their encounters with his third incarnation, their fearsome reputation badly tainted by the ease with which the Third Doctor had dealt with them in his confrontations. As the Ogrons had begun to lose work to the Judoon ("Smith and Jones"), The Doctor vowed to try and redeem them, helping to escort an Ogron ambassador to a crucial conference with the Draconians and the Sontarans, and recommending the Ogrons to the Shadow Proclamation by arguing that the Judoon had proven too easily bribable in the past ("Fugitive").
Despite their reputation as mercenaries, Ogrons have been shown engaging in more leisurely activities; a group of Ogrons once visited the planet Kursaal for a holiday, but were left utterly baffled at how to use the map display, suggesting that the trip was unsuccessful ("Kursaal"). Garshak, an Ogron augmented to a higher intellectual level ("Shakedown"), spent some time working as a policeman before becoming a private detective ("Mean Streets"), but he was the sole success of the experiments that created him, with the few other surviving Ogrons only being slightly smarter than their brethren and the vast majority of them dying.
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