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…
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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