By Roy Mathur, on 2025-03-17, at 23:22:32 to 23:59:25 GMT, for Captain Roy's Rusty Rocket Radio Show
I'll explain why briefly in the next pod.
Notable Cast: Sixth Doctor: Colin Baker, Peri Brown: Nicola Bryant, The Master: Anthony Ainley, Kate O'Mara (Rani: Time and the Rani, Dimensions in Time, Hammer Horror's The Vampire Lovers and The Horror of Frankenstein, Alexis in Dynasty, Howard's Way)
Director: Sarah Hellings (Howard's Way, Grange Hill, Lovejoy)
Writer: Pip and Jane Baker (The Trial of a Time Lord 9--12, 14, Time and the Rani, plus novelizations, Make Your Own Adventure With Doctor Who: Race Against Time, BBC children's Sci-Fi Watt on Earth, BBV audio The Rani Reaps the Whirlwind)
Producer: John Nathan-Turner
Location: BBC Television Centre, Shepherd's Bush, Granville Park (Granville Colliery Spoil Heaps), Blists Hill Victorian Town, Coalport China Museum in Shropshire, and Park Wood, Ruislip in 1984
Broadcast: Story 139, season 22, serial 3, following Attack of the Vengeance on Varos (pods 567), 2 x c. 45 min, 17:20 Sat 2--9 Feb 1985
Media: Target novelization by the Bakers 1986, VHS 1995, DVD 2006 and 2011, Blu-ray 2022, BBC iPlayer since 1 November 2023
I Want to Know What Love Is by Foreigner is still the UK no. 1.
Guardian headline: "PM rules out pit compromise" (Thatcher hammering the miners, as in Vengeance on Varos, again seems relevant culturally. Even moreso for a story set in a 19th century pit village).
The Doctor and Peri are dragged off-course by an alien force.
A cart driver is attacked by riotous machinery destroying miners, whose behaviour suddenly turns violent after being gassed in a suspicious old lady's bathhouse.
The Doctor and Peri encounter a creepy and surprisingly effective scarecrow, help the attacked cart driver, who mentions George Stephenson. The Doctor is suddenly interested and asks for a lift.
The Master (presumably previously disguised as the scarecrow) arrives in Killingworth and sets the madmen onto the Doctor. After narrowly avoiding murder and death from plunging down a mineshaft, the Doctor meets Lord Ravensworth hosting a meeting of geniuses and starts to delve into the mystery of the savage men.
The Master discovers that the bathhouse woman is a fellow exiled Time Lord; the evil, but brilliant Rani, whose speciality is biological manipulation. She is extracting a substance from mens' brains for use on a distant world she has conquered. The side effect is that it makes men into berserkers. She also uses some of the men as her personal slaves, who she controls by making them swallow one of her mind-control maggots. Those under her control have a spot on their neck (the mark of the Rani). He convinces her to join him in his master plan to use the brilliance of the geniuses as a launchpad to conquer the universe.
Aboard the Rani's Tardis, the Doctor finds Tyrannosaurus Rex embryos stored in jars in her console room. He eavesdrops the Rani's seeding of Redfern Dell with landmines, where Peri is gathering medicinal herbs to treat the miners. At the dell, the Doctor captures the Rani and Master, but not in time to save Luke, who was helping Peri, stepping on a mine and turning into a tree. The Luke-tree, however, saves Peri.
The Rani and Master escape in the Rani's Tardis, only to find it sabotaged by the Doctor. Sudden acceleration glues them to the side of her console room as they await in terror at the prospect of being eaten alive by the growing T-rex babies.
The Doctor tells Ravensworth to administer the extracted brain fluid back into the miners, gleefully inspires Stephenson to call his invention the "rocket", then the astonished pair watch as the Tardis dematerialises.
At least the Doctor's hideous cat brooch is gone... only to be replaced by and even worse, big, blobby, dark cat brooch. See Trivia.
As a teenage brown person at the time, I remember being bemused by a white woman calling herself the "Rani". By the mid-80s it seemed absurd and rather oldschool Carry On racist, though it somewhat suited her domineering imperious nature.
NE England is comically grim and dirty.
Followers', of the apocryphal Net Ludd, hatred of industrial machinery, I'm sure would not have extended to attacking a primitive horse and cart.
Having lived in Newcastle, I found some of the actors' attempts at the Northumbrian accent fluctuated wildly.
It takes too long for the Rani to whip off her rubber mask, though it's pretty obvious the bathhouse woman is up to no good.
There's not so much subtext as text, with an older, dominant, leather-clad woman controlling a bunch of muscular submissive men, particularly pretty boy Josh.
Regarding the Master's endless scheming, at one point the Rani has a delightful line of dialogue. She says, "It'll be something devious and overcomplicated. He'd get dizzy if he tried to walk in a straight line.
The Rani's TARDIS is sophisticated, scientific, and sinister, as befits her character. There's the subdued, but classy dark decor, the stylish looping and rotating metal mobile at the centre of the console, and the utterly horrifying glass jars containing embryonic T-rexs. I was reminded of the lab in Aliens a year later.
The creature design of the T-rex embryos and the growing effect isn't bad. The baby dinos are glistening, organic, and satisfyingly replete with fangs and claws.
Luke stepping of one of the Rani's diabolical biological landmines and exploding into a tree then, as a tree, saving Peri, should be a poignant scene, but it comes off as Goodies slapstick. It isn't helped by the ludicrous foam rubber creature design; a big tree-ish tube encompassing the suit actor with one arm/branch extended.
Ainley keeps getting his lines wrong; mispronouncing "apposite" as "appasite" and "impasse" as "empasse"; the latter Baker sarcastically parrots. The gaffs don't seem deliberate and I'd hate to cast aspersions as this was before the internet, when it was quite easy to mispronounce words. I was a very broad reader, with a large vocabulary, and without online audio pronunciation guides, and also being slightly dyslexic, I would frequently get words wrong, so I sympathise with Ainley.
It is always fascinating meeting other rogue Time Lords. However, to blame aliens for rough northern miner Luddites acting like demented football hooligans, while painting the industrialists as lovely chaps is a bit too much revisionist history. The sci-fi is silly rather than exciting, however, while this isn't one I'd re-revisit, the story is passable.
The story is set, though not filmed, in the real town of Killingworth, north of Newcastle upon Tyne. The Killingworth Colliery existed and was owned by Lord Ravensworth, a peer and Tory MP, who also employed George Stephenson.
Referring to my copy of Howe, walker, and Stammer's Handbook, Colin Baker says, "The most painful stunt was the one in The Mark of the Rani, where I dangling on a chain...I got one of my fingers caught...In fact, it's still bent...That was... irritating." (Interview at a convention in Texas in 1985).
I had not noticed, or had completely forgotten until I searched the internet, that the cat brooches frequently changed because Baker fans would send him new ones. (Have I mentioned this before? Oh, who cares).