Doctor Who Week: "The Mark of the Rani" (1985)

The Doctor (Colin Baker) and his companion, Peri (Nicola Bryant) arrive in the small village of Killingworth  at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution in England, and soon learn that two renegade Time Lords are already there making mischief: the Master (Anthony Ainley) and the beautiful but dangerous The Rani (Kate O’Mara).

Unlike the Master, however -- whose strategies are based on his desire to dominate other life forms -- The Rani is on a mission of mercy...of sorts.  

To save the people of a planet she rules, she requires a chemical compound found only in human brains.  

Without this chemical, however, humans cannot rest, and quickly go insane, or psychotic.  The Doctor learns that the Rani has been draining humans for centuries, during the Trojan War, the Dark Ages, the American War of Independence, and now, finally in the Luddite Rebellion.

The Doctor must save the humans, and also foil the Master’s secret plan to accelerate Earth’s technological development.…

The long, steep decline in quality of 1980s Doctor Who continues unabated from the Peter Davison Era to the Colin Baker Era. 

In terms of this decline, I’m not referring to the lead performances (or any of the performances, really…) but rather the series’ ever-more cheap visual palette, and the series writers’ jaw-dropping inability to dramatize a tale in anything approaching coherent fashion.  

Both trends reach their nadir in the dreadful Sylvester McCoy Era, a span in which the serials are, in my opinion, virtually unwatchable. 

Colin Baker remains a controversial Doctor, to this day, though I rather enjoy his performances in the role.  His patchwork jacket is atrocious, of course, but the actor nonetheless seems intent on reminding us of a crucial idea that had been lost by the Davison Era: The Doctor is an alien, and is not going to respond to crises like a typical human would. 

We saw this concept play out a bit in Hartnell’s era, and also some during Tom Baker’s tenure.  Traveling 180 degrees away from Davison’s underplaying, Baker made the Doctor big, broad, pompous, arrogant, and sometimes downright inhuman. 

This approach also applied to his fashion sense, it’s true.

But I very much like the idea of the Doctor as an alien whose motives and responses aren't always transparent, or conventionally "human." He isn't always going to be a "thoughtful friend" or "chum" to those he travels with.  This doesn't mean that he doesn't love them.  Only that.he comes from a different culture, a different background, and a different set of expectations in terms of civility and the social graces.

Frankly, I have never understood fully the energetic animosity towards Colin Baker’s regeneration.  I chalk it up to the fact that many fans were set in their ways by the time it occurred.  Fans didn’t want to see an alien Doctor who might prove unpredictable…and choke a companion, for instance, in a fit of post-regeneration rage.  They didn’t want surprises.   They wanted the same-old, same-old, and were sorry not to get it. 

Still, Baker’s portrayal of the Doctor is memorable, and could have been fantastic given better stories, better sets, better monsters, and better direction.  I would make the same argument about McCoy’s Doctor. These actors aren’t to blame for the rottenness of their tenures.  The shoddiness of the storytelling and the shoddiness of the production are the culprits.  Watching serials of this era, I long for the black-and-white days of Hartnell and Troughton.  

Somehow, the monsters looked so much better 1963 - 1969 than they do circa 1983 - 1989...

“The Mark of the Rani,” however, is one of the better Colin Baker Era serials.  It introduces a fascinating (and sexy...) new Time Lord character in Kate O’Mara’s the Rani.  In fact, she is a sort of three dimensional version of the Master character.  She may do evil, but she doesn’t do it (at least in this serial...) for evil’s sake.  She’s a bit more nuanced than that, and so is a welcome addition to Gallifreyan ranks. In some ways she is like the Doctor, but has simply selected another race (rather than humans...) to defend.

The Master, by this time in Who history, had also, frankly, become a troublesome or over-exposed character.  How many times has the Doctor foiled his plans?  How many times has he crafted a new strategy and knowingly attracted the Doctor to those plans, only to lose again?  

The Master is the universe's greatest moustache-twirling masochist, that's for sure.

The writers' over-reliance on the character of the Master, and his utterly cartoon-like nature make the character yet a further drag on the series' creativity during this span.  And again, I must stress that I'm not slagging the actor, Anthony Ainley, only the dramatic use to which the character was put.

The Rani, however, is a good antagonist, and I also enjoy the old-fashioned cliff-hangers of this particular serial.  The Doctor gets strapped to a mine car and almost pushed down a shaft at one point, and the staging of the incident is amusing in a Perils of Pauline kind of way. 

The story is a good one too in that it attempts to explain outbreaks of violence and madness throughout human history.  

Of course, I’m not sure how the Luddites would feel if they  were to witness their portrayal here as psychotic lunatics.  The Revolution, which occurred in the 1810s, was all about the fact that people were losing their livelihoods to automation, and to the advances of “men of science” like George Stephenson (1781 – 1848).   

Those workers had legitimate reasons for worry about the nature of technological "progress," and so to simply write them off as psychotic lunatics is a bit uncharitable.  But Doctor Who doesn't play favorites, either. Apparently, the American Revolution is also the byproduct of this same mental madness, according to "The Mark of the Rani."

But the bottom line is that this is a solid, unassuming serial, with some nice flourishes.  The location shooting (at Ironbridge Gorge) is impressive here, and I also love the weird qualities of the Rani's TARDIS.  The central column boasts a gyroscope, and for some reason, there are jars of dinosaur embryos all over the room.  It's a weird touch in a relatively straight-forward and enjoyable serial.