It’ll be something devious and overcomplicated.
Every great hero comes matched to an equally great adversary: Holmes and Moriarty, Superman and Lex Luthor, Tom and Jerry, Kirk and Khan. For the Doctor, that iconic foe, that near-platonic opposite, comes not in the form the Daleks or the Cybermen, worthy opponents though they may be, but in the Master, the renegade Time Lord gifted with all the Doctor’s own advantages, from intellect to regeneration to a TARDIS. Their duels hold legendary status in Doctor Who, but also show a decidedly one-way record of victories in favor of Gallifrey’s favorite son, making for rousing storytelling but rather anticlimactic narratives. Pip and Jane Baker, established British TV writers penning their first of several Doctor Who tales, introduce a complication to the usual pas de deux in “The Mark of the Rani” (Story Production Code 6X), adding the Rani (Kate O’Mara), an amoral, exiled Time Lord, into the mix with their two episode, ninety-minute story, turning the typically double-sided affair into a Time Lord triangle. She doesn’t like either of them one bit, and the feeling is mutual all the way around.
A brilliant chemist, the Rani sets up shop in a Victorian mining town during the tumult of the Luddite riots, draining a brain fluid from miners who think they are going for a bath after a long shift; the chemical activates the brain’s sleep centers, and without it the victims turn into rambunctious, hyperactive louts whose behavior can be attributed to the machine-mashing Luddites, allowing her scheme to go unnoticed. (Her need for the chemical is off-handedly attributed to a planet she rules, where her biological tinkering with the inhabitants has prevented them from sleeping.) The setting, filmed partly on location at the Ironbridge Gorge Museum Trust in Shropshire, plays to the BBC’s talent for clothing extras in period costume, and the sheer number of sartorially accurate people director Sarah Hellings has running around the streets and mineworks of Ironbridge’s preserved Victorian town in the opening minutes sells the reality of the time and place wonderfully, as well as if not better than any of Doctor Who‘s other “historical” stories.
If we’re in Earth’s past and the Master (Anthony Ainley) is involved, then odds remain good that he’s seeking, in Peri’s words, to “pervert history” in order to bend the planet to his will. An assemblage of geniuses, gathering at the behest of George Stephenson, one of the main sparks of the incipient Industrial Revolution, provides the Master with the opportunity to shape the course of events on Earth to create “the platform for the most devastating power in the universe,” answering only to him. The regenerating elephant in the room, the little matter of the Master’s seeming demise in “Planet of Fire,” is brushed past with a quick quip: “I’m indestructible. The whole universe knows that.” And, as ever with the Master, he cannot simply enact his plan, instead drawing the Doctor’s TARDIS off-course so that he might get his revenge on his nemesis as well. As events transpire, revenge may be a dish best served cold, but the Master keeps dropping it on the way to the table.
The Sixth Doctor and Peri thus appear on the scene, with Peri already dressed for a trip to Kew Gardens in the same era, the Master’s efforts changing only the physical, rather than temporal, location of the TARDIS’ landing spot. Before long they intervene in an attack by the Rani’s victims on a cart transporting machinery to George Stephenson (Gawn Grainger). The assailants all have a garish red circular mark on their neck from the Rani’s experiment, the eponymous Mark of the Rani, which draws the Doctor’s interest keenly. They set into town to meet Stephenson, with the Doctor eventually figuring out that the bath house is at the center of it all. So he decides to scruffy himself up and take a dip…
He falls into the Rani’s trap of course, being gassed like many a miner afore him, waking up bound to a table in her laboratory. She fails to initially recognize him, despite seemingly sensing his presence when he rode into town on a cart earlier, but they quickly reacquaint once she detects his two hearts. The Master has already made his presence known to the Rani, taking from her the precious vial of sleep fluid she has laboriously procured and her tin of green maggots used to bio-chemically control her servants, shown in a loving close up only script editor Eric Saward could love, and soon it’s old Gallifreyan home week.
The Master orders Peri to wheel the Doctor out of the bath house to witness his TARDIS being hurled down a mine shaft, a threat that seems ominous but theoretically should not inconvenience the near-impervious time machine in the least—though given John Nathan-Turner’s continual abuse of the blue box, one never really knows. Less sanguine, however, is the Doctor’s own peril as Luddites hurl the trolley he is bound to towards the same deep shaft, a fine moment of tension for the first episode cliffhanger. The Doctor is saved in the proverbial nick of time by Stephenson himself, who delights in the alien metal used to bind him to the stretcher before they, along with Peri, escape.
The Master and the Rani agree on an alliance of convenience, with the Master promising her an endless supply of humans to experiment on in exchange for her assistance in creating more of the mind control maggots that will give him more effective power over the planet’s populace than his own hypnotic abilities. She sets a trap for the Doctor, placing a dressing screen in front of her TARDIS that explodes with mustard gas when he moves it, but the handy gas masks left on the corpses of the servants she dispatched as an encumbrance allow for an easy escape. In a further interestingly convenient twist, the Doctor’s TARDIS key opens the Rani’s TARDIS, and he takes the opportunity to tinker with the controls, another example, as she worries, of the “dilettante Doctor” proving an inconvenience.
At no point, though, do either the Master or the Rani ever come close to achieving their aims, and the majority of the second episode revolves around them plotting to stop the Doctor from stopping them from getting started. George Stephenson never once encounters the Master, and the other geniuses he summoned (Faraday, Telford, and Davy) serve as mere off-screen plot points. Indeed, if the action in “The Mark of the Rani” seems somewhat superfluous, despite the loving care and inventive camerawork Hellings devotes to the Doctor careening down a hill and being chased by Luddites, to say nothing of the numerous gunshots, fistfights, and arboreal explosions, that’s because, frankly, it is.
Not much actually happens in the Bakers’ narrative; even the climactic scenes of Stephenson’s mind controlled assistant, Luke (Gary Cody) and several Luddites being turned into animate trees by the Rani’s vegetable transformation mines (yes, really) only serve to extend the run-time, the Doctor’s victorious outcome and the Master’s craven escape being foreordained the moment he foils the Rani’s tree trap and grabs the Master’s Tissue Compression Eliminator. The audience’s interest derives from the verbal interplay of the Time Lords, the endless bon mots and witty asides thrown like so many daggers between the Doctor, the Master, and the Rani. One could happily watch Colin Baker, Anthony Ainley, and Kate O’Mara trade jibes for the entirety of the story. (On the strength of this story alone, My Dinner with the Rani would make for a compelling feature film…)
The Bakers take pains to put the Doctor’s beliefs to the test, with the Master and the Rani delighting when he must choose between saving Peri and a group of Luddites wandering into the mined Redfern Dell or letting the perfidious pair of Time Lords go. In the event, he threatens violence, credibly enough for the renegades, to force the Rani to lead Peri out of the minefield, and then leaves them under Peri’s watch to attempt to draw the rioters, who seek to do him harm, away from the Dell. It’s not in any way a subtle challenge to the Doctor’s core beliefs, but after several stories where the Doctor hasn’t seemed to stand for much of anything, a very basic reaffirmation of the Sixth Doctor’s “Doctor-ness” comes across as refreshing. One wonders if the impetus for this rather baldly-put proclamation of faith comes from the Bakers, with their “outsider” take on the series, or from producer John Nathan-Turner and Eric Saward realizing their edgy, erratic vision of the Doctor comes across as garishly as his coat.
Inevitably, the Master and the Rani trick Peri into letting her guard down, but rather than simply leaving the scene, the Master decides to make a last stand, hoping to ambush the Doctor when he comes to check on Peri. The ensuing attack misses the Doctor but hits a support beam in the mine where the Rani’s TARDIS waits. A quick escape sees the Master and the Rani trapped in her sabotaged time machine, and when it dematerializes, it hurtles at incredible speed “beyond most galaxies,” where they will have trouble finding sufficient technological development to repair it until, oh, at least Season Twenty-Three for the Master and Season Twenty-Four for the Rani. In a final Saward-ian coda, the Tyrannosaurus Rex embryos the Rani keeps in her TARDIS for, well, reasons, have begun to grow due to “time slippage” caused by the Doctor’s tinkering, setting them up for an off-screen encounter with several hungry dinosaurs.
All that remains is for the Doctor and Peri to leave before too many questions get asked, with Stephenson having helpfully retrieved the Doctor’s TARDIS from depths of the mine pit. Again, the Bakers seem to have a grasp on how Doctor Who works, though perhaps they express it somewhat more directly than the audience is used to, through the character of Lord Ravensworth (Terence Alexander), Stephenson’s benefactor:
Peri: Well, haven’t you any questions?
Lord Ravensworth: Would there be any point?
The Sixth Doctor: Not much.
Off they disappear, with the Master and the Rani foiled, the course of Earth’s history preserved, and only three people turned into trees, their permanently leafy fates left as an exercise for the viewer. It’s all a bit breezy and insubstantial, but not entirely unfulfilling at the same time.
With the Rani, the Bakers add an intriguing new figure to Doctor Who‘s ever growing lore, made more compelling by the immediate sense of history between her, the Doctor, and the Master that the script creates. Even the throw-away detail of the cause of her exile from Gallifrey—an experiment that caused mice to grow in size and hunger that resulted in the Lord President’s cat being eaten—provides a keen insight into the Rani’s mindset, as flippant as the narrative tidbit might be. Kate O’Mara fully inhabits the role, meeting the demands of the technobabble and random switch throwing on her TARDIS console while still retaining a hauteur that suggests the Rani’s unshakable sense of superiority. Unlike the Master, though, she knows when she’s beaten and shows no compunction about running away to scheme another day. The Rani must needs be larger-than-life, but there’s an air of nuance to the character, both in the scripting and in O’Mara’s acting, that elevates her beyond a one-note antagonist.
Which is not to cast aspersions on our favorite single-minded villain, the Master, who picks up his scheming right where it left off on lava-strewn Sarn, the minor matter of having been incinerated notwithstanding. Anthony Ainley continues to embody this renegade Time Lord with the same dogged determination to finally get one over on the Doctor, and like Charlie Brown with the football, there’s an odd desire on the part of the audience to see him succeed, just once, maybe, as reward for his persistence. That’s not on the cards, however, and Ainley gamely presses on, undeterred by the character’s eternal underdog status.
Peri’s characterization continues to develop, and the Bakers give Nicola Bryant a decent script, having Peri drive action and carry scenes in several sequences. The teen, whose Americanness draws focus several times—which always comes as a shock since it has been quite underdeveloped as a character trait since her arrival on the scene—shows a practical bent, trying to refocus the Doctor on the important bits of the plot, like recovering the TARDIS, that viewers themselves tend to wonder about. Too, Peri gains a sudden knowledge of herbs and practical remedies to restore sleep to the Rani’s victims, in order to place her, with Luke, in the trapped Redfern Dell, but also rounding out the character just a bit further. The rapport between Bryant and Colin Baker seems genuine at this point, the bristliness between the characters (and actors) in the first few post-regeneration stories turned into an in-joke rather than a running concern. And while her Victorian dress, with all the associated petticoats, might make for difficult maneuvering amidst the (living) trees and stony mineworks that predominate this story, it’s a far more practical costume than her usual garb.
As for Colin Baker, he has settled into the role with some speed, the Bakers’ script providing the Doctor a very clear and direct set of beliefs, as noted previously. The character returns to its scientific roots, last seen with any regularity during the Third Doctor’s run, thanks to several interactions between him and George Stephenson as they tinker with what the story suggests will become Stephenson’s Rocket (though that early locomotive is more typically credited to Stephenson’s son). With some reluctance, the Doctor refrains from offering too much help, keeping true to his non-interventionist ethos. More pointedly, Baker’s Sixth Doctor, more than any other than possibly Troughton’s Second or Pertwee’s Third Doctor, keeps up his end of the banter with Ainley’s Master and O’Mara’s Rani; it would be hard to imagine Davison’s Fifth Doctor or Hartnell’s First Doctor slinging quips like Baker does in this story, a fine bit of differentiation for this regeneration other than the fuzzy belief system and general uneven behavior that previously stood in for his overall image.
In essence, then, “The Mark of the Rani” succeeds at capturing the timeless feel of Doctor Who far better than any mindless trotting out of prior plot points both obvious and obscure, as has frequently been the case for the past several seasons under Nathan-Turner and Saward’s aegis, and most pointedly in such recent outings as “Attack of the Cybermen” or “Resurrection of the Daleks.” The Bakers, while not skimping on the action, recognize that it’s a necessary connective tissue between the moments where the Doctor does what the Doctor does best: talk. And talk he does, matched up against two foes who specialize in verbal legerdemain themselves in the Master and the Rani. Though many a loose narrative thread remains by the end of “The Mark of the Rani,” they are minor quibbles for a story that just works despite nothing much actually happening.
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Post 145 of the Doctor Who Project