By Roy Mathur, on 2025-08-29, at 01:12:56 to 02:39:08 BST, for Captain Roy's Rusty Rocket Radio Show
I partly excused my delayed start to the revisit of season 24 on social media, thinking the gap between production large and I had to discover the reason why. In fact, it is quite normal for classic Who to run for several months, have several months off, then return each year.
The other reason for delay is that the house is undergoing work and having tradesmen around was stressful enough for an ongoing IBS attack.
I'm back now though, that's what's important, that and only three more seasons and a few films to wrap up the revisit. Fygor! Stoke the Vimana and let us return to 2025 with tidings from 1987!
Notable Cast: Seventh Doctor: Sylvester McCoy; born Percy James Patrick Kent-Smith, almost a monk, worked in the City until discovered by Ken Campbell for The Ken Campbell Roadshow, then theatre and minor TV parts, missed out of the role to Colin Baker, then swooped in the moment he heard there was a vacancy , Companion Mel Bush: Bonnie Langford, The Rani: Kate O'Mara, dual voice of the brain: Peter Tuddenham; The Ark in Space, The Masque of Mandragora, Blake's 7's Zen, Orac, and Slave and Jacki Webb; minor parts including The Worst Witch (1998)
Director: Andrew Morgan; Blake's 7, Knights of God, The Worst Witch
Writer: Pip and Jane Baker
Producer: John Nathan-Turner
Location: BBC Television Centre, Shepherd's Bush, the Rani's cliff lab is at Cloford Quarry, the Tardis lands at Westdown Quarry, plus filming at other locations all in Somerset in 1987
Broadcast: Story 144, serial 1, season 24, following The Ultimate Foe (pod 589), 4 x c. 25, 7--28 Sep 1987
Media: Target novelization by Pip and Jane Baker 1987, VHS 1995, DVD 2010, 2011, 2012, Blu-ray 2021, BBC iPlayer since 1 Nov 2023
The UK no. 1 single was Rick Astley's Never Gonna Give You Up that all the DIHE students danced to unironically at a horrendous Bournemouth nightclub around that time back in 87. I don't know what my fellow students' excuse was, but peer pressure and my signature tipple, vodka and Lucazade, helped me bop to that drivel. Rickrolling came much much later.
The Rani zaps the Tardis out of space to Lakertya, knocking out the Doctor and Mel, where she boards and commands her henchman to take the regenerating Doctor to her laboratory. The Rani, disguised as Mel, tricks the addled Doctor into helping her create a time manipulator. Meanwhile, Mel, narrowly avoiding death by bubble mine and the Rani's bat person henchman, a Tetrap called Urak, and joins Ikona, a resistance fighter.
The Doctor and other geniuses, including Albert Einstein (there's the obvious relativity pun towards the end), have been kidnapped from time to form a linked brain with the intellect to create a lightweight substitute for heavy strange matter, Loyhargil. Loaded into the rocket as a detonator aimed at a strange matter asteroid, it will create a massive explosion. It is the first stage in building the Rani's universe controlling machine; a chronon shell around the planet; a side-effect of which will extinguish all life on the planet.
The Doctor escapes his pod, blows up the giant brain using the explosive anklets used to hold the Lakertyans hostage, and sabotages her rocket which misses the asteroid. The Rani escapes, but finds her herself hanged by the wrists from the ceiling of her own Tardis console room by the Tetraps. They say she will be forced to help them when they return to their home.
The Doctor sends the geniuses to his Tardis and he and Mel say their goodbyes to the Lakertyans.
The new theme music of Ron Grainer's original by Keff McCulloch, replaced Dominic Glynn's. It is more subdued than the Colin Baker era, yet somehow more childish. I liked the thumping heartbeat variation on the theme used as incidental during the final countdown to ratchet up the tension.
The new logo is the same used in the Virgin New Adventures, no surprise as most of the books are about the Seventh Doctor. I have nostalgia for the books carrying me through the Wilderness Years.
The new Doctor's physical clowning and mangled proverbs are too much pantomime for me, though I appreciate his Buster Keaton running skids. Then, blink and you'll miss it, he plays the spoons on the Rani's chest. That seems a bit off. I'm not sure if that is McCoy's off-the-cuff improvisation. She brushes him off dismissively, but continues the scene without interruption. The Rani impersonates Mel very well. The terrible outfit helps, but so does O'Mara getting the bounce, energy, and pitch of Mel creepily on the nose for such a different looking actress. Later, back in her own garb, we see the Rani Indianed up with a nose stud and dangly earrings. And Mel? Mel's screaming is even more pronounced and hammy than usual, though we discover she is a computer expert. Peter Tuddenham and Jacki Webb's synced voiced were affective in making the brain sound clinical and asexual.
There's a delightful Mr Benn scene in the Tardis wardrobe, where the new Doctor tries on various costumes; Napoleon, a Coldstream Guard's bearskin hat, Tom Baker's later burgundy costume, an academic's mortar board and gown, Pertwee's frills, Davison's cricket garb, and Troughton's fur coat (my favourite). He finally settles on an eccentric, though elegant outfit of light jacket, question mark tank top, tweed trousers, dark and white wingtips, and silk accessories; tie, scarf, and hanky as a hatband for his panama. It's a massive improvement on Colin Baker's obscenity.
The natives are yellow and scaly, with great fluffy manes and remind me of Big Bird, but they are later revealed to be reptilian. The Rani's shaggy, shambling Igor, a Tetrap called Urak, is too podgy, like the rest of his kindred, for a big-eared, multi-eyed, venomous tongued, fanged, and winged bat-thing. You'd thought bat-based lifeforms more streamlined, though the same can be said for some humans, whose primate shape is not naturally rotund.
The Doctor cornered and attacked by the awakened from roosting Tetrad bat people, in their sinister dungeon under the Rani's lab, who then eagerly slurp down a sticky sludge from a slurry channel at feeding time qualifies as horror, if not for the brevity of the scene.
The Rani's lab set into the cliff is sciency and impressive, as is the interior with its desk viewscreen, monitors, flashing lights, throbbing brain, and the rocket launcher. The rocket launcher, as part of a doomsday plan, is somewhat reminiscent of Star Trek Generations' Doctor Soran's designs. I liked the Rani's sci-fi pyramid of a Tardis too.
The bubble mines are nasty and effectively executed effects. The entrapping bubble, the swirling, the escalating blare, the screaming of the victim, and the final explosion is suprisingly upsetting.
The alien beehive prop is also nicely made. It's like a disco ball enclosed in rusty spikes; both disco and goth. I love it!
The bulky bulbous blasters with underslung barrels are cool and alien, not simply earthy shooters with greeblies. That is at least until they start firing a stream of sparks like a sparkler, which isn't at all intimidating, unlike the bubble-mines.
The central plot concerning the weapon is convoluted. It takes too long to discover exactly what the evil machinations are and so feels a little rushed towards the end. Then, the Doctor liberates yet another world, from the scheming Rani's plans, and it all ends in the usual Bond-like explosive denouement. Still, not bad for a new Doctor's first adventure.
Colin Baker was fired at the end of The Ultimate Foe, then offered, but refused to do a final four-parter unless it was a full season. Last week I said I didn't know if his face appeared in the next story, but it sort of does because after being bonked unconscious, he is turned over in the midst of regeneration. In fact, it is Sylvester McCoy playing Colin Baker in a blonde curly wig, who then regenerates into dark haired Seven, i.e. McCoy without the wig.
This is the last time we see the Rani until New Who, except for the Dimensions in Time Children in Need special in 1993 (30 year DW anniversary).
Twenty-year old Andrew Cartmel replaced departing script editor Eric Saward and immediately conflicted with old hands, Pip and Jane Baker, because he wanted a much wilder story. He later admitted he should have been more politic and bided his time as he recruited writers he liked. That begs the question of why call the role script editor, when it is clearly much more important than that? Whatever the case, I remember him best not as a Who script editor, but as the author of Cat's Cradle: Warhead, a Doctor Who Virgin New Adventures book I enjoyed (book 6).