Neil Gaiman talks Ood
Gaiman revealed to SFX that it was purely for budgetary reasons: “I tried to create a completely new monster. But shortly before shooting it became very apparent that given the incredible amount of money they were going to have to spend on my episode, there came a point where they said, ‘Look, we cannot stretch to doing this prosthetic stuff that you wanted, would you like a classic monster?’ And I said, ‘Well, actually you have this thing that would fit perfectly there, and we could do this to it, and it would make it work…
“So we got to take a Russell [T Davies] monster and bring it back, which made me incredibly happy, in a weird way. It was a nice link between the Tennant era and the current era, and it was nice to bring it back and do something very different with it, turn it upside down.”
He also teased: “The joy of my episode is that you get to realise how much of what’s in the TARDIS is probably still in there somewhere!”
Will we finally see the swimming pool? Probably not.
