Saturday, 22 April 2023

Mark Of The Rani: Ranking - 200

  Mark Of The Rani

(Season 22, Dr 6 with Peri, 2-9/2/1985, producer: John Nathan-Turner, script editor: Eric Saward, director: Sarah Hellings) 

'I cannae understand what all these strangely dressed people are doing duhn are way, especially thu one whose dressed like a scarecrow. They havenae sense to dress appropriately. I mean, have they neva hoord of the industrial revolution, man? And I've got all these weird feelings since they came that I wanna kill soomeone. Maybe it's those troosers. Maybe it's the elocution coach they've given us for this episode. Or maybe I just need to chug annuvver bevvy of Tobys?' 

Ranking: 200




 


 The only 6th Doctor historical is a story where he meets engineer George Stephenson in the days before he started work on his son’s locomotives, with a script that at different times moves like a Rocket, has all the atmosphere and mystery of the Orient Express but in a couple of places quacks like a Mallard and runs off the rails. A mixed bag then, which is particularly hard to review. You see, in context it’s a bit of an upswing: they’ve finally worked out how to write for this bolshie know-it-all Doctor and have toned him down to the point where he’s beginning to work. The historical setting really brings out the best in him, allowing him to swan around pontificating and name-dropping and knowing what will happen thanks to the set time in fashion and basically acting as a know-it-all fan round historical figures he loves, while chiding Peri for not being in awe at them or him. The industrial revolution setting is a great one, a perfect theme for the series with its debate of whether progress is good or bad if it leaves so many people behind and only (at first) helps the rich few (a theme that weaves in and out of Who across all eras) and it’s amazing to think the Doctor had never set foot in this era before. Other stories paint the Doctor as something of a big-headed twonk but in this story he’s just passionate – and impatient. The location filming in the Blast Hills and Ironbridge museums in the Midlands is gorgeous too, with their meticulously maintained period buildings (as long as the camera didn’t look too far which is why so many of the shots are a bit odd and shot from the floor), even if I still find it weird that people should want to pay to go round them during their two weeks a year holidays to go round the very places that created the idea of them slaving away 9-5 in the other fifty  (amazing really that the modern series hasn’t been back). The attention to detail, from the millions of accurately clothed extras marching across the screen to the antique houses to the industry, is second to none. It looks beautiful this story, with a scope that few others share and looks ‘right’ in a way the cheap rubber monsters and fake claustrophobic sets of most of the rest of the 6th Doctor era don’t. Ironically for a story that has real industrial smog in its veins, this story feels like a breath of fresh air. It’s only when you watch it out of context as just another standalone Dr Who story that you realise that what people are doing and what they’re saying are both incredibly daft.


Your first hint that something is not quite reet comes with the milling extras: impeccably dressed they may be but those decidedly naff Northern working class accents and the decidedly un-Northern people speaking in them are more like bad children’s telly than high art – and what they’re saying is no better than the way they’re saying it (they must think we’re a right bunch of Tobys to swallow that guff, guvnor!)Your next growing sense of unease comes with the shadowy figure dressed as a scarecrow overseeing events from a safe distance. It’s clearly meant to be a daring atmospheric shot, designed to give you a sense of chills and foreboding like ‘The Watcher’ in ‘Logopolis’ and given the setting, of a key time in Britain’s past that hasn’t been finalised yet, it ought to work even better than some dude dressed in white on the side of a motorway, but it doesn’t. It just looks like Anthony Ainley taking time off from being The Master to cosplay Worzel Gummidge. And then just to top it off the British glamour icon of the 1980s, pin-up Kate O’Mara, turns up dressed as an old crone washer-woman in a disguise that fools no one and then takes the plot over, ostensibly playing dispassionate timelord scientist The Rani (who clearly learned her attitude to experiments from Joseph Mengele) but really proclaiming in quotes in the sorts of ways colourful characters always do in long-running series that have got a bit tired and unlikely shortly before they’re taken off the air. That’s the real ‘mark of the Rani’, a story that has so much going for it you want to go round to Michael Grade’s face and rub his face in it with how good and daring and new Dr Who could still be in its 22nd year – even though a part of you secretly agrees with him.



The thing is, nothing stays still in this story about evolution long enough for us to a get a handle on. Sometimes the location filming is used brilliantly – at other times we’re stuck in a coshed with nothing happening. Sometimes it feels as if we’ve really stepped back in time – and at others this is all too clearly being made on the cheap, with the same paltry extras moping past the camera and the same tired sets back in the studio. Sometimes the acting is top notch – at other times its rushed and un-focussed. At some times the special effects are great – and at other times Colin Baker’s tied to a trolley in absolutely no danger and sometimes we’re looking at the crummiest stupidest looking rubber tree you’ve ever seen. Sometimes the dialogue, written by scifi newcomers but TV old-timers Pip ‘n’ Jane Baker who’d befriended producer John Nathan-Turner and who prided themselves on being professionals who could write anything for anyone to deadlines at a tight speed (but who asked for a historical, because they’d done that sort of thing before), really takes off. Sure they’re the whipping boys for many fans who find some of their later stories wanting (looking at you ‘Time and The Rani’) and whose dialogue never ever sounds like the sort of things actual people say ever, but they get the 6th Doctor’s pomposity and the fact it’s covering up a colossally sensitive ego better than most and the ongoing timelord feud between the Doctor, Master and Rani (which you can well believe has been going on since their academy days on Gallifrey centuries back) is fun – at first. They’re the only writers who’ve remembered that Peri is actually meant to be a smart sassy student who knows about plants than the Doctor, rather than a stereotype bimbo to fall into trouble. The plot shows promise too: the idea of bringing some of the smartest brains of their era to feed off them has been done in Dr Who before, but as that was in the unfinished ‘Shada’ it’s safe to say Pip ‘n’ Jane never saw it and at least think they’ve come up with something new – setting this story at a time that shaped so much of the West’s future (not just Britain’s, as it gave us a headstart in technology in the days of empire and conquest) shows that they’ve been doing a lot more thinking than, say, Peter Grimwade did with The Master disrupting the signing of The Magna Carta in ‘The King’s Demons’. But the story also never really uses that promise: we never really get to know these characters (even Stevenson is a walking talking cliché nothing like the history books), the industrial revolution setting is loosely attached with a theme of ‘survival of the fittest’ rather than fully underlined and by the end of ninety minutes of people spouting dialogue at each other and bickering rather than talking the breath of fresh air we started with has turned to industrial slime. There are other Who stories around that waste even more potential than this one (‘Kerblam!’ for one) but ‘Mark’ is particularly frustrating because it comes right in the middle of a season that largely has the opposite problem, of too many recycled ideas that are doomed to failure despite some very clever attempts to get them out of trouble and make them sing (well, some of the time). Dr Who has got into a rut, like the railway trolleys we see on rails down the mines, so the moment it leaves the tracks and starts free-wheeling with ideas we’ve never seen before ought to seem better than this.     



You see, the plot has genuine promise, inspired by a rather dramatic friend of the Bakers’ who came round one day to pour out their frustrations at how distant their scientist husband was acting. ‘He just treats me like a bunch of chemicals and nothing more!’ she wailed, which set a few writing cogs off whirring. The plot  about stealing the special chemical featured in Humans that allows them to sleep, so that the Rani can go home on the (sadly unseen) very Pip ‘n’ Jane Bakerly named planet Miamismia Goria and use it on her own subjugated people. She’s already tried it on some unsuspecting creatures, including a baby T Rex she happens to keep in a jar in her Tardis for some reason, but they’re just not cutting it: she needs Human beings and, preferably, really clever ones. Of course there has to be a side effect and everyone the Rani tries (and rejects) ends up super-aggressive. For once we have a baddie that isn’t bad so much as reckless: to The Rani all humanity is a bunch of chemicals and all their achievements mean nothing to her. We’ve had it in so many Dr Who stories, this debate about whether scientific progress is ever worth some of the costs it causes to the people it touches – see ‘The Lazarus Experiment’ for another obvious go – but having it set here, at a time of such great change that made some people better off by mass-producing things that make our lives easier and yet for some people it ruined their livelihoods and made them absolutely miserable and poverty-stricken, is the perfect background to this discussion. The Rani really isn’t that different to the distant mill-owners content to take the money from the new machines that are making their products more cost effective, with the discarded Humans left to fend for themselves in the same way as the luddites that have been laid off in favour of robots (indeed, this story hits you even harder watching it back at a time of AI than it did at the time, when it was seen as a vague comment on robots in car manufacturing plants). Note also the use of mustard gas, first used by German soldiers in the First World War: more evidence of people being treated as a bunch of chemicals where the bigger picture in the long term (of victory in war) outweighs the people it harms in the small term (and curse you, Doctor, for simply opening the door and infecting everyone nearby without even a warning!) Humans might have adapted Earth to create an artificial world that keeps them protected from the elements, making giant leaps towards that with the industrial revolution funnily enough, but it’s still survival of the fittest in the natural and thanks to her timelord gifts and scientific knowhow the Rani is top of the food chain (the word ‘Rani’ means ‘Queen’ in Indian after all, which is why it was such a natural name for one of the leads in ‘The Sarah Jane Adventures’ – and why so many of us old-timers were expecting a twist that never came). Even George Stevenson, hailed in his day as one of the greatest minds England ever produced, is merely prey to the Rani. Odd how the idea of a food chain is so integral to the brief 6th Doctor run, with several other stories picking up on it (especially the next story ‘The Two Doctors’). Had the BBC canteen started a vegetarian option that year or something? Oh and its either very clever or a quite coincidence that both this story’s baddies wear ‘leather’, literally wearing an animal…



The trouble is there’s trouble down t’pit of the plot, with holes big enough to ride a full grown T Rex down and signs that, speedy and adaptable as the bakers might be, they really don’t understand scifi. It’s not that Pip ‘n’ Jane are bad writers necessarily (the way that fans often say – they wrote some of the best ‘choose your own adventures’ for the shoert lived Dr Who line) so much as they’re bad TV writers: you can get away with ripe and overstilted dialogue in books where we’re usually inside people’s heads anyway for the most part, but on TV. With everyone speaking like that? Not a chance. This is also a story where people talk the whole time, over and over, with nothing much happening: even the luddite revolution mostly happens off-screen. Often in this story you feel like the Doctor, tied down and stuck listening to people bicker and wishing you could change the channel. They had no idea how to write for a budget as low as Dr Whos, casually writing in things that couldn’t ever work, such as trees coming to life and location settings with full working railways that would have been impossible to find relatively close to London (although you could argue that’s more a fault of the script editor, who really should have kept a better eye on them). The pair last watched Dr Who was Hartnell was the Doctor and you can tell, with the slow speed, history setting and big historical character, although they never quite grasped that early Who was all about the joys of exploration  as nobody in this story really finds out anything or explores. By the time the inevitable cuts were made a lot of the reason for the story in the first place got lost and other parts of the plot contradict others.



Take George Stevenson, who really wasn’t much like the character we see in the story. Why bother to change it, when the truth is so much more interesting? (We’re close to ‘Nikola Tesla’ ideas of taking sides in this story, when really the truth is a muddle and Stevenson caused as much harm as good). Why on Earth (or indeed Miamismia Goria) should humans create one particular chemical that no other creature does? Half this script is trying to make out that we’re just another mammal and nothing special, so it seems odd that this plot point should be that we are special in this way and only this way. Why does taking someone’s chemicals cause the to develop big red marks, like the sort normally caused by scurvy (and feared by pirates)? Why does the Rani need to subjugate her people in such a strange way by making them sleep rather than, say, creating a chemical gas attack that will work on them too? The script is quite a cerebral one so I’m not surprised the writers throw in a few more visual ideas to brighten up the story, but how did they end up with a landmine that turns people into trees? (And very unconvincing rubber trees at that?) It’s as if they think trees are part of this idea of ‘survival of the fittest’ when we’re not in competition with them over resources at all (in a very basic sense trees and humans are partners, coexisting happily by giving the other what it wants, with oxygen and carbon dioxide – see ‘In The Forest Of The  Night’ for a really dumb take on this). Sleep is a natural thing that Humans do every day, so why not just kidnap one and feed off them for the rest of their life? (heck take me – I sleep more than anyone). Why not start taking chemicals from Humans at a different point in time – in the past caveman days when the chemicals were purer, or the future when there are a lot more of us (on planets a lot nearer to the rani to boot, if Dr Who stories set in the following few centuries are anything to go by): The Rani seems to have ended up at the Industrial revolution by chance, even though as far as she’s concerned (and based on an admittedly rather contradictory understanding of timelord dating in other stories) it’s in her past and Earth’s late 20th century is parallel with her time. Sure her Tardis is a time machine, but why did she put in this year, sometime in the early 1800s, the dating is never specific and there are thirty years’ worth of luddite riots to choose from – and some of it is just plain wrong, such as the ages of the famous characters and the titles they’re addressed by, which they won’t have for decades yet!)The Rani doesn’t even try her experiment on someone sleeping: given her rather basic understanding of human chemistry it would be a surprise if she knows that Humans even do sleep. Everyone always picks on Pip and Jane though and this isn’t the worst Who script by any means: full marks to the writers for doing enough research to find out that Stevenson’s home town had the very Dr Whoish name ‘Killingsworth’ and then setting the story there (it’s near Newcastle if you couldn’t tell from the accents – and why should you? They’re awful!) for getting most of the period details yet, for one good line (the Doctor’s comment that if The master turned into a tree he’d be a laburnum, i.e. poisonous!) and for doing just enough scientific research to have a basic understanding of chemistry and how sleep hormones work (even if it’s still a bit wonky, for there is no one chemical we know of that helps us sleep but lots: or maybe they know something we don’t?)  



Of course there are other things that go wrong outside their control. Talking of errors in  chemistry, an even bigger issue is that The Master’s here when the script has nothing for him to do and for once he’s not the ‘master’ mind behind the plot but pretty much an onlooker whispering in The Rani’s ear ‘go on, get the Doctor, you know you want to!’ He wasn’t in the original script but was added at the request of script editor Eric Saward, who hated the character but was under orders to use him somewhere this season and couldn’t find any other stories that were suitable (John Nathan-Turner wanted him to be a recurring character and put Anthony Ainley on a retainer, with it stated in his contract that he made himself available for at least one story a year). With The Rani already having all the best lines The Master has nothing to do except be the Rani’s lackey, interspersed with the odd bit of gloating when The Doctor’s in trouble. It’s sad to see a character who was once the most feared in Dr Who lore – to the extent that he held the entire universe to ransom and made the Doctor regenerate a mere four years earlier in ‘Logopolis’ – reduced to the status of Muttley the giggling dog in ‘Wacky Races’. He’s lost all of his sharpness and cunning, apparently much of his intelligence too and his knack for disguise has never been worse (his scarecrow outfit being even worse and more pointless than dressing up as the oriental Khalid in ‘Timeflight’ or Sir Gilles Estram in ‘The King’s Demons’, because he’s the one who deliberately made the Tardis crash here and wants to gloat in the Doctor’s face). Even his feared tissue compression eliminator seems to have been given an upgrade he can’t turn off, disintegrating people rather than shrinking them (which is far less scary). You can tell that Eric hates this character and I suspect many of the lines laughing at him are by him rather than Pip ‘n’ Jane: ‘He’d get dizzy walking in a straight line!’ is the funniest, ‘No wonder the Doctor gets the better of you all the time!’ the most hurtful. As for the charm The Master used to have, nowadays he only uses it to be obsequies to The Rani. Which is just pitiful. For all her talents she hasn’t done half the things he’s done in his lifetime (could it be that The Rani came along and saved him from certain burning in his last appearance in ‘Planet Of Fire’, which the Doctor – again probably in Eric’s tongue - genuinely thinks it’s impossible to escape from? If so they’ve given up working together by the next time we see either of them).



What you think about this story really depends on how you feel about the arch villain The Rani (because boy is she arch!) Kate O’Mara owns every scene she’s in, which is a good thing when she’s squaring up to this bright and colourful Doctor but less so when she’s talking to The Master or Peri or bossing Humans around. What works are the moments when she’s at her most callous, treating this whole adventure like a science project, a cross between The Master’s thirst for revenge and The Meddling Monk’s, well, meddling. The fact that she couldn’t care less that she causes an entire thirty year revolt, thanks to driving her experiments mad with rage, makes her scary and unstoppable: there’s no point appealing to her better nature because she hasn’t got one, yet neither is she an unstable genius who can be pushed over the edge with a word or a look: if anything she’s too stable, especially compared to The Master, rationalising her plans every step of the way. There are some fun little nuggets of backstory too, such as the story that she got expelled from the academy back on Gallifrey for transforming her pet mice into giant monsters that ate the president’s cat and took a bite out of his leg when he tried to stop her! (Interesting that tinelords also have mice, very Douglas Adams in fact). A character that starts out as being really interesting and different to all the other megalomaniacs, played by O’Mara with just the right amount of barely concealed rage, soon becomes just like every other dictator/tyrant, though, until by the time of her next two appearances (‘Time and The Rani’ and ‘Dimensions I Time’, horrors both for different reasons) she’s a caricature, marked by the curse of being a generic baddy in a science fiction show rather than a living breathing character. It’s hard to put your finger on where exactly the change comes: is it when she stops to bicker with the Doctor? Her endless bickering with The Master? Her taunting of Peri, which practically comes with a moustache twirl? Her penchant for tying everyone up and then lecturing them about her plans? Kate’s gradual realisation that her lines are easier to learn if she declaims them like she’s on stage rather than speaks them normally? Either way I can see both why a lot of fans love this character for her sassiness and the fact we had a female timelord who was  more than just an apprentice (Romana) or a drip (Rodan) – and those who consider her an OTT caricature that belong in a TV cartoon ‘Batman’ or ‘The Avengers’ rather than a series that tries, at least some of the time, to take itself seriously and remain vaguely realistic, like Dr Who.



Similarly I’m torn as to whether having the industrial revolution – one of the single most important periods in history – end up a mere backdrop for a timelord school reunion for three people who clearly don’t like each other is an utter waste of time or the perfect thing to do with this setting (after all to Humans this time period and the stakes in it, the switch from agriculture to industry, changed everything – but to a timelord its nothing). It’s entertaining, at first, as if Pip and Jane had been handed tapes of ‘The Three Doctors’ and ‘The Five Doctors’ without quite knowing what was going on and figured timelords always act like families at a reunion that want to kill each other after too long in each other’s company (rather than what it really is, each regeneration finding themselves a ghost that no longer exists in the future with some of their favourite characteristics and quirks dropped by a new regeneration that wants to move on from them). You really get the sense that the trio are continuing a feud that started off screen and has lasted so many centuries that nobody can quite remember why they’re fighting any more. After all, they all have more similarities than they let on, being brilliant protégé students who rebelled for different reasons. In the black velvet corner The Master is the school bully who wanted to exploit the masses and come back to take over the school who defies authority because he thinks he’s better than those in power and wants power himself. He’s secretly very sensitive to what other people think of him and it feels as if most of his series are about trying to earn people’s fear, because he’s tries getting their respect and failed at both. Over in the lurid pink corner with hands on hip stands The Rani, less of a megalomaniac and more curious than naughty, someone who left Gallifrey for scientific reasons because she sees the other worlds out there as her experiment to meddle with and who couldn’t care less what other people think of her. And over in the lurid yellow trousers The Doctor has the manner of a head boy who quit the school on principle but still believes everyone should follow the rules even away from Gallifrey, who wants to save the universe – partly so he can lecture others about it and ‘become’ the teacher you sense. He says he doesn’t care what people think of him and that he’s doing it all for the universe’s good, but we’ve followed him for too many adventures by now to believe this for more than the façade it clearly is. The Doctor wants respect, The Master secretly wants love and The Rani just wants to find out what happens if she tinkers with her experiments, each one in this story following their own agendas (with poor Peri along for the ride). That’s a sitcom right there, three egotists with different moral standards and different needs for attention and respect trapped in a Tardis console room (and one of the best things in this story is the care that’s given over to recreating three different Tardis interiors that reflect each of them: the Doctor’s is as messy as he is, The Master’s jet black and cold and The Rani pink and girly yet also streamlined and logical). Unfortunately they’re not trapped (well, only the Doctor) and the bickering goes  on too long. There’s a moment when The Rani tells the other two ‘oh stop squabbling and get on with it’. Never has a truer word been said – and if even the characters are getting fed up with it then what about the audience? Like the decision to make the 6th Doctor and Peri’s friendship toxic after his regeneration it’s a neat idea at trying to shake up the perceived cosiness of the series and create some ‘drama’ that soon becomes tiresome and actually slows the plot down while they argue over nothing.  There are at least some very fun lines (even though the second best is actually a Colin Baker ad lib, about seeing Peri with his ‘Peri-phal vision’!), with three very strong characters all vying for the limelight (even if The Master plainly comes off worse), but these scenes go on far too long, the fate of the Earth ignored for several minutes over and over while they continue their feud. And if even the goody and the baddies don’t seem to care about the fate of the Earth why should we?



It’s a problem too, that it feels like a far more interesting story is going on just out of earshot. We hear about the nation’s most brilliant minds meeting up but we only really get to see Stevenson – and then not nearly enough of him at that (after the build-up the Doctor gives him it sounds as if he’s going to be a really fascinating enigmatic brilliant charismatic man but we only see him enough for him to be gruff and brusque, as befits a gentlemen making a vague acquaintance in this age). The Rani is more concerned about subjugating her own people and keeping them her slaves than anything to do with the Humans, but we never get to see them or her planet (is that lurid pink too?) The luddite revolution, one of the key moments in human history as the working classes stood up and said ‘enough!’ amounts to a few awkward extras throwing things. There’s no sense of their genuine outrage and injustice even before The Rani comes along and maxes their emotions to a hundred. There’s a really good debate to be had here, about whether each of us sitting at home watching would choose to go back to the pre-revolution days, when we toiled in the fields for long hours but fed ourselves and lived simpler natural lives outside, rather than the post-revolution days when we’re toiling inside tiny cramped little boxes, working hard to earn money to spend on the things made by our fellow workers in their cramped little boxes. Especially when Peri raises the point that all the hedgerows they’re passing are long gone by her time, along with half the insects, precisely because of the industrial age. You should be asked to pick a side, to question whether you’re cheering the luddites on or whether you couldn’t in all honesty give up your sofa and TV and it’s not an easy argument to solve (we’re back in ‘Genesis Of the Daleks’ mode: if you had the right to press a button and erase the industrial revolution from history would you do it? Should you do it? And should anyone have the right to decide something that affects so many?) Instead this ends up a story about three people shouting at each other where nothing much ever seems to happen.



Poor Peri is specially forgotten this story, despite looking as if she was going to be the driving force of it at first. I love that the writers have actually looked at her character notes instead of just treating her as a generic companion and given her a passion and knowledge of flowers that trumps even The Doctor’s. Peri is clearly on the side of the luddites (without ever quite saying it) and you can feel her passion for the environment, the other characters in this story all oblivious to the knock-on effect the industries are causing. After that, though, she barely gets a word in edgeways. She’s groped, exploded, tied up, insulted and ignored. If I was her I’d just go back to the Tardis and stay there! It’s particularly sad because this story could have been a really big dramatic moment. There she is, face to face with The Master for the first time since ‘Planet Of Fire;’, the man who killed her step-dad and uprooted her entire life. She should be terrified, or angry, or given that its Peri at least bitterly sarcastic, siding with The Doctor or even The Rani in taunting him after he ‘lost’ the last time she stood up to him. Instead they just awkwardly nod at each other like ‘hiya, not seen you for a while’. Thereafter Peri is mostly called on to sulk, which is a real waste of Nicola Bryant’s acting abilities. Typical, they finally get The Doctor right then forget how to write for the companion! The other actors dimply don’t get enough to do, especially Gawn Grainger whose too young to play George Stevenson and doesn’t appear till episode two anyway (in real life he’s married to Zoe Wannamaker, Cassandra in ‘The End Of the World’ and ‘New Earth’ – now there’s an image for you!)



Overall, then, ‘Mark Of The Rani’ is a mess. Not in a ‘this was never going to work they never should have tried it’ way because there are lots of little parts here that do: the location filming, the acting (some of it), the idea are all sound and well worth trying. Not in a ‘nobody cares about this’ way either – everyone is giving their all, including the much-maligned writers actually who, by their own admission, aren’t natural science-fiction writers but who have a go and don’t fall into as many of the traps of science gobbledegook and cliché of other writers (if only because they’re busy saving them all for the sequel!) Not even in a ‘the budget is low and everyone is stressed’ kind of a way. If anything this story got luckier than any other, certainly of the decade:  one of those accountancy errors that a huge corporation like the BBC have every so often meant that there was a mistake and a location film crew was available after a programme was cancelled and they weren’t: JNT bid for it and won it, with double the location filming originally intended. And even then the shoot was unusually sunny for an outside Dr Who shoot so they even ended up with extra time on their hands (luckily the writers were on location and speedily re-wrote some of the scenes planned for the TV studio). The result is that ‘Mark Of The Rani’ is one of the few stories of the 1980s to ever come in on time and on budget. No, the problem is that inexperienced writers wrote a script that was then handed to an inexperienced director (Sarah Hellings, who’d ever done ‘Blue Peter’) and asked to make an adult drama, with both producer and script editor looking the other way. No one is in full charge of this ship and even though everyone is trying to steer their part well enough there are just too many mines in a story like this to fall into and they keep going off!  There are just too many mistakes here and there, some of them obvious ones, that drag everything else down: the scene of the ‘terrifying’ dog that’s meant to lunge at Colin Baker and Nicola Bryant (but was really a sweetie who kept coming over for cuddles and treats), the cliff-hanger that isn’t really a cliffhanger at all but a cheat, those awful unlistenable accents and occasional wooden acting from the extras, the much mocked scene where a local named Luke gets turned into a very fake looking tree (as you do) and puts a hand out to stop Peri walking into danger which looks to all the world as if he’s groping her tits, definitely one of the weirdest scenes of any Dr Who story (and boy are there a lot of competitors for that accolade). All that in a story that had such promise: the real reason ‘mark’ always does so badly in fan polls is more the fact that we were promised luddite rebellions and trains and geniuses and other worlds and ended up looking at a rubber tree and three people shouting non-stop for what seems like hours. There are good parts here if you hunt for them though: the wistful melancholia of the 6th Doctor reflecting on time passing (like many a school reunion), the environmental themes (so subtle if you come to this after the Chris Chibnall era!), that sense of a world in flux where anything can happen. It’s just a shame that this story was made at a time when Dr Who was in flux too, where everything is a compromise between the producer and script editor who are really beginning to hate each other’s guts and where the writers are caught in the middle, trying to do their best despite being Atlantean fish people out of water and a lead actor that everyone likes working with but nobody trusts enough to listen to. The end result is an uneasy mix of erudite drama with quotes from Shakespeare and poet Thomas Campbell that don’t really fit (and are clearly there to impress rather than inform), over-ripe dialogue (‘fortuitous would be a more appropriate epithet’) that goes over everyone’s heads (the working title – and I’m not making this up – is ‘Too Clever By Far’. Figures!) and bad children’s telly that talks down to us all, often switching between the two quicker than an industrial fan. Dr Who has suddenly become a 9-5 job and is in trouble and sliding down t’pit fast an though we’re far from the bottom (there are too many good ideas on offer here) we’re heading the wrong way fast.



POSITIVES + The plot motivation that propels this story is something I can really appreciate: sleep deprivation. It’s an idea The Bakwers had already researched after their standalone drama ’The Expert’, which is a bit like an episode of ‘Doomwatch’, with the pharmaceutical industry researching the perfect sleeping potion and the fuss when it was discovered they’d cut up millions of goats to make enough solution for one person for one night’s sleep. The Rani is a master chemist (does that make The Master a Rani chemist?!) but by accident caused the people on her adopted home world Miamismia Goria to lose the ability to go to sleep, harvesting brain fluid from the most intelligent people of the day. Retracting the brain fluid causes these locals to go a bit mad though and turns them into angry luddites who destroy machinery. Finally, an explanation for why I can’t work even basic technology properly that I can understand: a rogue timelord has sucked out my brain and left me unable to cope with it. Which also explains away my sleep problems. My life all makes sense now. Thanks Doctor! 



NEGATIVES - This story only has one cliffhanger so it had better be a good one. Sadly it’s one of the biggest cheats in the series. The Doctor is in great danger on a trolley (originally a penny farthing bicycle, before Colin Baker pleaded with them to change it) heading down t’mineshaft, the one bit of visual action the whole story. It could have been really special: there are mindwarped extras baying for The Doctor’s blood and he’s hurting out of control towards certain doom! Except it comes across more like bad children’s telly as Peri accidentally sends him the wrong way, the extras look about as terrifying as, well, vegetarian botany students and the start of episode two reveals that The Doctor was in no real danger at all: Stevenson has placed a plank of wood over the shaft that we can’t see (but the Doctor can – so why is he screaming?) When the Doctor claims in ‘The End Of Time’ about the ‘Worst. Escape. Ever!’ as he’s bumped down some stairs you can only think that he’s forgotten this one, which is even worse (both from his point of view and the viewers’). Even after that monstrosity is over there’s the sight of formerly serious dramatic actor Colin Baker hanging from a metal chain over a bottomless well gurning while he gets lightly tapped with spades by supposedly furious extras who look as if they’re waiting politely for an autograph and Nicola Bryant, who deserved to be one of our leading dramatic actors, throws some clearly polystyrene rocks at them to get them to stop. Everyone is trying hard but this was never going to work in a month of Sabbaths. Sigh, bring me a Toby somebody I cannae take much more of this…



BEST QUOTE: The Rani to The Master: ‘You and the Doctor are a well-matched pair of pests. You bring nothing but trouble!’



PREQUELS/SEQUELS: 
‘The Rani Elite’ (2014) is Big Finish’s take on the character and pits her against the 6th Doctor again in a story by Justin Richards that’s number #194 in the main range. It’s a strong story let down by the fact that Kate O’Mara isn’t in it – though Siobhan Redman does a good job as a similar but different regeneration this is one of those parts that no one else was ever going to be able to match. The Doctor has taken Peri to the College of Advanced Galactic Education (officially to collect an honorary degree but mostly to show off) and it’s named CAGE for a good reason: it’s a trap, but not for the Doctor. Instead The Rani is back to her old ways trying to capture the brainpower of the galaxy’s best and brightest. Good job these poor patients have a Doctor there to help them, but given the Rani has quite a headstart on him it’s not that easy. Not the best Big Finish story around but it’s decent, atmospheric and original if a bit slow and perfunctory at times.


‘Planet Of The Rani’ (2015) is the sequel, number #205 in Big Finish’s main range and more interesting if only because we finally get to see (well, hear but you know what I mean) Miamismia Goria. It’s both a sort of prequel to ‘mark’, underlying how the Rani came to the planet in the first place and started messing about with the natives’ genetic code, and a sort of sequel with the 6th Doctor pursuing her and seeing her places in intergalactic prison for a hundred years some time after the story’s end. Needles to say, she’s really cross with him when she gets out! What sounds like a really simple adventure actually isn’t (well, it is by Marc Platt after all – see ‘Ghost Light’) with the prisoners testing a new machine that uses their precognitive abilities, so everyone seems to know exactly what’s going to happen except for the Doctor. There’s also a tachyon portal and a loopback time field, which the Rani uses on her release to nip back in time and become the governor, turning tables by sentencing The Doctor! All good fun and Siobhan is much more comfortable playing The Rani by this point.  


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