The Mark of the Rani Part Two

The one where people are turned into trees...

Not many people can say their life was saved by George Stephenson, but the Doctor certainly can thanks to the timely intervention of the northern inventor (played by Gawn Grainger, husband of Zoe Wanamaker, don'tcha know?). It's endearing how distracted Stephenson is by the metal alloy used to shackle the Doctor to the trolley, to the point where he forgets to release him!

It's great to have a real historical figure in Doctor Who again. When was the last time a real person from Earth history appeared in the programme? I reckon you'd have to go right back to the 1960s (perhaps even the Hartnell era?), if you overlook the appearance of King John in The King's Demons, who wasn't really King John at all. I might be wrong, but it's certainly been a while.

The Master continues to think on his feet and adapt to the ever-changing situation. Anthony Ainley might not have imbued his Master with the same charm and depth as Roger Delgado, but you can't deny he revelled in playing the part. Look at the way he walks, for instance. There's quite a long shot of him skulking around the pit yard and he moves across the screen with the stealth of a cat, maintaining an even balance as he picks his way from corner to corner. This Master's feline streak would come to a climax in the classic series' final story, Survival.

Interestingly, this Master has lost his ability to hypnotise his victims with his eyes, now having to use a pendant to captivate Luke Ward (perhaps the Master lost this physical ability when he stole someone else's body, thus somebody else's eyes?). "Luke, I want you to swallow this very special sweetmeat," the Master says, pushing a poisoned maggot into his mouth in order to gain control of his mind. The innuendo here is overwhelming, so I just won't go there...

It's a shame Luke's turned bad, but it does give Gary Cady more to do in this episode. At 6ft 2in, Cady has a striking presence with his model good looks and, let's be honest, he's well-packaged all over. He's not the greatest actor in the world, but he looks the part, and the relationship between him and Stephenson is quite sweet. Bad Luke is on a mission to stop anyone who tries to cancel the meeting of geniuses, because the Master has big plans for them. He believes that harnessing the intellectual powers of "twenty men of genius" will turn Earth into an unstoppable power base from which to conquer the universe, but surely harnessing the powers of even greater geniuses from another time, with access to even greater resources, would be better? Maybe this is where the Rani gets her idea from in Time and the Rani?

As he wanders around the village like a clown searching for a kids' party, the Doctor is set upon again by angry miners, who this time try and flatten him with a swinging log. He escapes the attempt on his life, but seems so unconcerned by these sustained efforts to kill him. That wouldn't be so bad if he weren't endangering the life of his friend Peri at the same time. This Doctor struggles to take the right things seriously, such as when he gets distracted by Stephenson's proto-Rocket, when, as Peri points out, there are far more important fish to fry, such as the presence of two meddling Time Lords and the fact the TARDIS has been lobbed down t'pit!

In the bath-house, the Doctor tampers with the screen left behind by the Rani, which is beautifully decorated with a reproduction of Turner's painting of an erupting Mount Vesuvius. Little does he know that the Rani has booby-trapped the screen to spew toxic mustard gas when tampered with. There's an awful lot of coughing and spluttering until the two can get gas masks on, but the truth is that even this amount of exposure to mustard gas would be far more serious than made out. If left untreated, within 24 hours Peri and the Doctor should be suffering from skin irritation, chemical burns, conjunctivitis and liquid in the lungs. It's a particularly nasty booby-trap for the Rani to set, to be honest.

The screen is removed to reveal an unassuming dark blue cabinet (what is it supposed to be?) which the Doctor opens using his own TARDIS's key. How can the key to one TARDIS open another? I'll overlook this, because there's much greater marvels to enjoy, namely the interior of the Rani's TARDIS. It's beautiful! Designer Paul Trerise has come up with something unique, but which also shows signs of familiarity. It keeps a subtle roundel design but ditches the clinical white of the Doctor's ship in favour of a fusion of brittle grey and soft pink, reflecting the Rani's scientific resolve as well as her femininity (the latter's not strictly necessary, but this is 1985).

The Rani even has her own mini museum, a menagerie of prehistoric embryos which she seems to be experimenting on. These baby dinos will become important later on, but for the moment form just part of a beautiful vision for this interior. The console is wonderful too (even if it does seem to lack functionality), and that time rotor, designed like a gyroscope in perpetual motion, is even cleverer than what Peter Brachacki came up with in 1963. And to top it all, there's a giant light hanging above the console, reminiscent of the short-lived ceiling piece seen in the Doctor's TARDIS in An Unearthly Child. Even the entrance into the Rani's TARDIS harks back to that of the Doctor's secondary control room as seen in Season 14. Paul Trerise played a blinder here.

The Rani has also ditched her old hag disguise in favour of a full-on space bitch outfit, complete with tight leather trousers and heels. Kate O'Mara looks stunning, and delivers every sardonic quip and withering put-down with elan (I love it when the Rani's had enough of the Master's scheming and snipes: "You'll never learn, will you? Give me the brain fluid, I'm off!").

Back at Ravensworth's place, something remarkable happens. The men of Killingworth are still unable to sleep due to the Rani's experiments, and continue to cause mayhem and violence everywhere they go. In an effort to calm them and provide the rest they need, Peri suggests she could concoct a natural sleeping draft using local herbs. Writers Pip and Jane Baker continue to write Peri as a proper character, and have remembered that she is a botany student, with knowledge of plants and herbs, and how they might best be used. It's an empowering moment for a companion who was too often reduced to mere eye candy, and her identification of valerian as the herb she needs is lovely.

Served less well is "celebrity historical figure" George Stephenson, who's sadly underwritten and serves very little purpose indeed. Grainger does his best with what's given him, but Stephenson is very much kept away from the active plot, which is a shame because he could easily be the one helping Peri with the valerian (Stephenson was a keen gardener all his life). Very little is made of Stephenson's world-changing inventions (this is the antithesis of the Chris Chibnall treatment of historical geniuses), and no effort is made to portray him truthfully. For instance, it's never made clear when The Mark of the Rani is set, but it's certainly before 1829, the year the Rocket debuted. In the 1820s Stephenson was on his second marriage, after having lost his first wife to tuberculosis, as well as one of his two children. It wouldn't take much for the Bakers to add in some background characterisation for Stephenson, reflecting these circumstances. As it is, the inclusion of George Stephenson and his proto-Rocket feels like a massive wasted opportunity. You feel as if it's going somewhere, but it literally runs out of steam.

When proceedings turn to Redfern Dell, where the Rani and the Master have planted some rather ingenious (and ridiculous) land mines, the story's charm begins to wear thin. When stepped on, the land mines transform the victim into a tree, one of the strangest methods of dispatch ever seen in Doctor Who! The effect when this happens is quite good, with the victim disappearing in a flurry of leaves and emerging as a prop tree, but you can't escape the fundamental silliness of it all. When Luke the tree grabs Peri with a bendy branch, it descends into farce, topped off by the Doctor shouting: "Don't move, Peri! The tree won't hurt you!"

Setting aside the silliness of the tree mines for one moment, it's a shame the consequences of what these gadgets do aren't fully addressed. OK, it's refreshing to see the Doctor appalled by the Rani's callous comment that Luke will get to live longer as a tree rather than a man ("Animal matter has been metamorphosed into vegetable matter. So what?"), but if you think about it, it's a truly horrible fate. I presume Luke the tree is fully sentient and aware of his new condition, as will the angry villagers who are transformed later in the story. Wouldn't it have been better for the Doctor to try and think of a way to reverse the effect, or at least lessen the horror of Luke's new life somehow? If this was the new series there'd be a coda where the Doctor and Peri revisit Luke the tree in the dell and lay flowers, or pay tribute in some way. As it is, the poor guy's just left alone, a sentient tree with bendy branches. He'll still be there decades later, just a little bigger and bushier perhaps. And nobody really cares (his father Jack will be missing him when he's cured).

The scene where the Doctor's trussed up and carried along on a giant skewer, like Han Solo nobbled by the Ewoks, is deeply silly. After his bearers are turned into trees, the Doctor's left suspended between their branches like a very gay windchime, and has to avoid falling onto a land mine and being transformed into a tree himself (probably a crab apple). It's all pretty unflattering for poor Colin Baker.

Earlier in the episode we saw the Doctor tinkering with the Rani's console (oo-er missus!). He was apparently fiddling with the navigational and velocity controls, resulting in the TARDIS hurtling out of control at top speed towards the outer fringes of the universe. The Master and the Rani are propelled against the walls of the tumbling TARDIS, and when one of the rather sweet-looking dinosaur embryos breaks free of its precarious jar and starts to grow in size, their fates seem sealed. We don't get to see a full-size Tyrannosaurus Rex in the Rani's TARDIS, and neither do we get to see how these two renegades inevitably get out of this precarious pickle, but it's an amusingly weird denouement for the scheming swindlers.

Quickies:

• It says much about the Rani that she seems to quite like mute servant Josh in part 1, but is more than happy to heartlessly murder him in part 2 without a second thought. Callous queen.
• For a time, Peri believes the Doctor's whizzed off in the Rani's TARDIS and left her behind (spending the rest of her days "prancing around in these ridiculous skirts"), but when he returns he's puzzled why she might think he'd abandoned her. Think about it, Doctor. You've treated this poor girl pretty abominably since you regenerated, she never knows what to expect from you, or where she stands. Of course she could believe you'd abandoned her! Even if he has mellowed somewhat since his regeneration, the fact Peri does think he's capable of leaving her speaks volumes about how safe she feels, and how much she trusts him. These two have a deeply flawed relationship.
• At one point the Master suggests killing both the Doctor and George Stephenson ("two birds with one stone"), and the Rani enquires as to how that would threaten the Doctor. How indeed, and this is never revisited properly, but why does the Master suddenly want to kill one of the 20 "men of genius" he's so keen on using? He truly is a psychopath!
• All the business of the Doctor threatening the Master and the Rani with the tissue compression eliminator is ill-considered, because surely neither villain would believe he'd actually use it on them? They could easily get away unscathed, and especially when the Doctor leaves the TCE in the hands of Peri. She may be more disposed to using the device, but she's also one of the most pathetic of the Doctor's companions, and would be easily overpowered by one or both Time Lord supervillains.
• There's more deliciously camp dialogue for Ainley to deliver when the Master describes the Doctor as a "crack-brained freak" and the Rani as an "intellectual microbe"! There's also some light shed on Time Lord anatomy when the Rani knees the Master in the balls!
• Pip and Jane Baker hit the nail on the head when they have Ravensworth ask what the Doctor and Peri do inside the police box. "Argue, mainly," says the Doctor, in a curiously self-aware moment. It's so odd that the rocky relationship between this Doctor and companion was wholly intentional, to the point where even the characters recognise they don't get on. Why these two travelling companions stay together is baffling, although I will concede that there's been a much calmer, more enjoyable repartee between them under the Bakers.
• The Doctor and Peri depart without even saying goodbye, but what about the alien tech left behind at the bath-house - the control panel and the sliding wall?
• It's suggested that the restless villagers can be cured simply by handing the Rani's phial of brain fluid back to Lord Ravensworth and calling it a sedative. How on earth can a tiny amount of refined brain fluid (let's assume it's adenosine) be consumed as an oral sedative? It's lazy nonsense writing, a cheap line to wriggle out of the greater predicament.

I really enjoyed The Mark of the Rani, particularly part 1. It's directed beautifully by Sarah Hellings (a woman's touch!), looks stunning (particularly the Rani's TARDIS) and Peri is well catered for (despite the awful frock). The Rani is a great new creation, and while the Master doesn't need to be in the story at all, the amount of ribbing the character gets through the Rani's mocking put-downs is worth his admission! It's not perfect - the bendy trees are silly, and Stephenson is utterly wasted - but it's the most I've enjoyed the Sixth Doctor so far, and more the direction I'd like to see the series go in.

First broadcast: February 9th, 1985

Steve's Scoreboard
The Good: Paul Trerise's design for the Rani's TARDIS.
The Bad: Tree bombs.
Overall score for episode: ★★★★★★★☆☆☆ (story average: 7.5 out of 10)

Word repetition: 5

NEXT TIME: The Two Doctors...

My reviews of this story's other episodes: Part One

Find out birth/death dates, career information, and facts and trivia about this story's cast and crew at the Doctor Who Cast & Crew site.

The Mark of the Rani is available on BBC DVD. Find it on Amazon - https://www.amazon.co.uk/Doctor-Who-Mark-Rani-DVD/dp/B01GWDWA7Y