MARK OF THE RANI

With Mark of the Rani, we are introduced to two figures who probably inspire more hatred than any other Doctor Who writers who didn't run the show - Pip and Jane Baker. This is, of course, massively outsized - they only wrote three-and-a-half stories across three seasons. But, because one of those turned out to be Colin Baker's final episode, and another was the debut of Sylvester McCoy as the Seventh Doctor, their influence feels outsized. They certain are distinctive writers, full of wacky ideas and a peculiar approach to dialogue. And, of course, all of their episodes are rubbish, and yet they kept getting hired back.

There's a reason for this - they could meet a deadline like nobody's business. In the next season, for complicated reasons, JNT suddenly was unable to use the script for the season finale on a Friday, and needed a new script on Monday morning, including a massive laundry list of things that needed to happen, and were not allowed to see the old script or learn a single detail about it. And they did it. It was dreadful, of course, but damned if they didn't turn in a script that met every qualification.

Still, while that explains their other three produced scripts, that doesn't explain why they got rehired after Mark of the Rani to write an abandoned serial set on Gallifrey. So what about this serial got them immediately on the list of regular writers?

 

At a first glance, it's not obvious. Mark has enough good ideas for a single fun 45-minute episode, then only half-develops any of them, and then stretches that thin material out to an interminable 90 minutes. The dialogue is probably best described as turgid, when not straight-up taking random Shakespeare quotes and warping the poetry out of them:

DOCTOR: Now, perhaps, you'll accept there are more things in heaven and on earth than are ever dreamed of in your barren philosophy.
RANI: And now perhaps you'll accept you face a dilemma.
MASTER: More of an impasse?
DOCTOR: Wrong on both counts. There is no impasse, and the dilemma, Rani, will be solved by you.

A bunch of good actors struggle mightily with Pip & Jane's... eccentric way with words. (Amusingly, their original title for this story was Too Clever By Far.) Still, Mark is built on some good ideas, and you can absolutely see how these elements might have been molded into something worthwhile.

 It opens in the early 19th century in Killingworth, England, where the Doctor and Peri arrive (right away! How novel!) to find the local coal miners are becoming strangely violent. Their attacks on technological equipment gets them dismissed as Luddites by most, but these are men who were previously peaceable. Soon, it turns out that not one but two other renegade Time Lords are meddling about in Earth's history. One, the Master, the Doctor's lifelong foe, who survived being incinerated while the Doctor refused to save him at the end of Planet of Fire by... *checks notes* ... uh, surviving. The other Time Lord is The Rani, a completely amoral biologist experimenting on humans and removing the chemical that lets them sleep, turning them violent, in order to... *checks notes* accomplish something on the planet she rules. Definitely something.

Director Sarah Hellings, shooting primarily at Blists Hills Open Air Museum, crafts a vivid and utterly convincing portrait of the time and place, and gives every scene a great jolt of energy with her staging. Which is a good thing, because the script drags mightily, making the somewhat slow previous two stories seem in comparison like rocketing along in a Moffat-era one-parter. This helps keep it watchable, but Hellings can't solve a story that takes until well into its second episode to build even the slightest bit of tension. 

Yeah, that looks like about how I feel, Peri

This is ultimately the episode where Anthony Ainley's Master bottoms out. Ainley began with a truly frightening take on the character in Logopolis, but his effectiveness was gradually whittled away by constant guest appearances (twice per year when there were 6-7 stories total each year), each worse than the last. These scripts carved away any menace, forcing Ainley to gurn and sneer ever more to try to force some kind of effect out of it. Season 21 had seen a slight uptick, with the fairly solid Planet of Fire giving him some fun material and an effective cameo in the Fifth Doctor's dying hallucinations in Caves of Androzani. But here, the Master spends most of his time shuffling around, telling anyone who will listen that he is incredibly evil and wants to kill the Doctor, even though he doesn't get around to even trying until the end of Episode 1, and barely manages to get the Rani to try for it in Episode 2. This may be the nadir for a character who has had too many low points.

And it makes the Doctor seem less impressive a hero to take so long and struggle so much to defeat so lame a foe. Colin Baker's bluster is fun, but the Doctor's relationship with Peri is back to prickly in ways that spoil some of the offbeat charm. The Doctor-Master relationship by this point is a ridiculous pantomime. With Pertwee and Delgado, they had a sad warmth of former friends who would rather not be enemies and who sometimes have fun with their duels; it was engagingly complex, even if it didn't ultimately go anywhere. Turning the Master into a darker arch-villain worked at first, but by now, it's ludicrous and impossible to take seriously, but also not ridiculous enough to be fun on a camp level.

Which brings us to the story's great redeeming factor, the Rani. Pip & Jane write the Rani as exasperated by the whole thing between the Doctor and the Master, finding both utterly tiresome. For example, when the Master talks about ruling Earth and using it to forge a vast empire, and the Rani notes with mild annoyance that she already rules a planet. Kate O'Mara plays this to the hilt, and she's great fun mocking the two of them. It's a shame, unfortunately, that they really are as rubbish as she thinks, because it ends up being hard to argue with them. But that keeps her engaging.

She also has a fantastic TARDIS interior; it's a gorgeous piece of design that frankly is superior to some of the Doctor's TARDIS interiors.

Late in the story, when Pip & Jane remember that maybe something should actually, like, happen across the 90 minutes instead of characters just explaining and re-explaining their limited motivations to each other and walking around trying to find a plot, the Rani plants a minefield in the forest. These mines don't just explode, however - they turn whoever steps on them into a tree! This element has been much mocked over the years, and the execution has issues I'll get to, but it's a delightful concept and the kind of craziness this premise needs more of. Three Time Lords fighting it out should be chock-full of stuff like mines that explode people into trees.

But, of course, if it had more ideas like that, it would probably botch them similarly. Hellings' staging may have lots of atmosphere and energy, and does build solid tension when Peri walks through the minefield, but it's also clearly (and understandably) rushed, and doesn't establish the geography of the scene effectively, making it difficult to figure out how far away the Time Lords are from the action. More importantly, Pip & Jane don't know how to develop it or pay it off; a man exploding into the tree is neat, but why doesn't the Doctor yell out a warning or something? And when the story is done, they forget all about people turned into trees and go on as though nobody got hurt, really.

Another good but half-baked idea is not only actually using Peri's knowledge of botany for I think the first and only time, but contrasting her with the Rani, an evil biologist. Sadly, nothing comes of this, but it was a nice idea.

And Pip & Jane don't manage to build to anything resembling a classic. The Doctor setting a trap in the Rani's TARDIS, leaving her and the Master careening out of control with a soon-to-be-grown T-Rex is a solid enough conclusion. But it's not a climax or a story, it's a neat idea for the ending that doesn't connect. Nor does the Doctor do anything about the remaining tree mines, or even try to get the trees turned back into people. He just pops off, episode over.

The only thing the Doctor does manage to do in the episode is constantly push Peri's questions off with an "I'll explain later", a quirk that got ruthlessly mocked by Steven Moffat over a decade later in his Comic Relief special Cure of the Fatal Death. It's particularly obnoxious because, most of the time, the explanation would only take a single sentence.

And there's not really anything else to say. It's a nicely-directed nothingburger that drags when it isn't being obnoxious, and wastes a few good ideas. Kate O'Mara does manage moments of real charm, but they're oases in a desert of tedium.

Still, the next story will be written by none other than Robert Holmes, perhaps the greatest writer of Classic Who, coming off of his brilliant Caves of Androzani. And what's more, it's a multi-Doctor story, bringing back Patrick Troughton. If anything in this season would be an assured classic, it's that one.

Right?