Type Humanoids Home planet Ogron Planet | Affiliated with Various (mercenaries) | |
First appearance Day of the Daleks (1972) Last appearance Frontier in Space (1973) | ||
Ogrons are a fictional extraterrestrial race from the British science fiction television series Doctor Who.
Ogrons are low-intelligence, ape-like hominids who live in scattered communities on an unnamed planet on the outer fringes of the Milky Way, far from the central spaceways. The dominant lifeform on their home planet is a giant slug-like lizard named the Eater, which preys on and is prayed to by the Ogrons.
Ogrons are hired mercenaries. Those who have employed their services include the Daleks and the Master when he was working for the Daleks. On some human planets, Ogrons are employed as police officers, usually led by a mentally augmented leader.
Appearances
In Day of the Daleks in an alternate 22nd Century ruled by the Daleks, the Ogrons are used as Police Forces. At the end of the serial, Daleks and Ogrons travel back to attack a peace conference and make sure that their version of history remains intact. This force is destroyed by a bomb.
In Frontier in Space, set in 2540, the Ogrons are used by the Master to attack spaceships of both Earth and Draconia, in an attempt to start a war between the two forces, so that the Daleks can conquer the Galaxy. This serial shows the Ogrons home planet.
As well as the original Doctor Who television series, they appear in the Virgin Missing Adventures novel The Romance of Crime by Gareth Roberts, the New Adventures novels Shakedown and Mean Streets, both by Terrance Dicks, and the BBC Books novels Mission: Impractical by David A. McIntee and Interference by Lawrence Miles. In these books, it is explained that the Ogrons are only able to fly spacecraft via their powerful sense of mimicry. Interference states that Ogron speech also uses subsonic frequencies and that they are more intelligent than they appear to be from their audible speech alone. A mentally augmented Ogron named Garshak appears as a supporting character in both Shakedown and Mean Streets, first as police chief for the corrupt megacity on Megarra and later as a private detective.
In The Romance of Crime and Mission: Impractical, the Ogron homeworld is given the name Braah. Because of rapid changes in Braah's climate, the evolutionary path the Ogrons were on got confused, resulting in them being a mixture of primate and carnivore instincts. The Virgin New Adventure So Vile a Sin named it as Orestes. According to the Dalek Survival Guide, written by various Doctor Who novelists, the Ogrons have never named their planet, and a committee has proposed the name "the Ogron Planet".
The Ogrons also appear, in the employ of the Daleks, in the Big Finish Productions audio drama Return of the Daleks.