“What do you two do in there?”
“Argue, mostly.”
Story
The TARDIS is on the way to visit Kew Gardens in the early nineteenth century when it’s pulled off course to materialize in the mining village of Killingworth in the time of the industrial revolution, and there’s something strange going on: miners are suddenly turning violent and irrational, and though their behavior is being blamed on the Luddite riots of the time it looks more like they’re simply being driven insane. In fact they’re victims of the Rani, another renegade Time Lord, or in this case Time Lady. The Rani is a coldly amoral scientist who’s been extracting brain chemicals from the miners, regarding humans as a lesser species no different from lab rats or guinea pigs. Needing a supply of the brain hormone that promotes sleep, she’s been dropping in on times of war or social unrest throughout history, where the violent side effects of her extraction will go unnoticed.
Also on hand is the Master pursuing schemes of his own. Local engineer George Stephenson (an actual historical figure, a pioneer of early steam power) and his patron are organizing a meeting of the greatest scientists and engineers of the age, and the Master wants to use a mind control technique of the Rani’s invention to take control of them and twist Earth’s history to his own ends. He’s deliberately brought the Doctor to the scene so that he can kill him, and while the Rani has no interest in the Master’s “devious and overcomplicated” schemes, the Master enlists her help by pointing out the Doctor will put a stop to her experiments if she doesn’t stop him first.
Review
With The Mark of the Rani, we “welcome” the husband-and-wife writing team of Pip and Jane Baker, the two worst writers ever to inflict themselves on Classic Doctor Who. I have to qualify that harsh description just a bit. The Bakers did not write the very bottom of the Dr Who pile: disasters like Underworld or the more recent Twin Dilemma came from other writers. But those and other episodes at the very bottom were written by people who wrote much better episodes as well, or only contributed to Dr Who once. Pip and Jane will contribute several more episodes, and in several of DWM’s rate-every-episode polls, every single one of their contributions made the bottom ten worst episodes of the series. Every now and again, one of their stories manages to creep upward briefly in the rankings in one poll, but not for long. Think about it: out of fifty years of episodes, one single writing team occupies almost half of the bottom ten stories ever.
I also have to qualify my description by admitting that Pip and Jane were, apparently, successful and respected writers at the BBC in general. I don’t know what else they worked on (I’ve never had the slightest interest in looking into anything else they wrote) but I suppose it must be possible that it was only Dr Who they were unsuited for.
On the other hand I offer this piece of evidence: like many Dr Who writers of this period, Pip and Jane wrote their own novelizations of their episodes for the Target books series, and in one of their novelizations they include the following sentence: “The Doctor’s feet walked across the console room floor.” I express sincere skepticism that anyone who can write that piece of prose can be a good writer in any circumstance. (It doesn’t say much for the editor who let it get by, either.)
But I’m talking all about the writers. What about the story itself? Mark of the Rani is the best episode Pip and Jane Baker wrote, which is a textbook case of damning with faint praise, but at least it’s something. The Rani herself is a potentially intriguing character and I wouldn’t mind seeing her return in the new series, in the hands of more capable writers. Like the Master, she is a shadow version of the Doctor, but in a completely different way. The Master (to paraphrase a line in the new series) wants to rule the universe while the Doctor only wants to see it; in that way the Rani is more like the Doctor. But she has no particular interest in stopping the Master’s schemes, so long as he stays out of her way, because she mirrors the Doctor’s scientific interests while lacking his compassion and respect for living things. The three of them make a potentially fascinating trio, and the story spends a lot of time with them bickering and bantering at each other in various ways.
Unfortunately the writing fails to realize the potential. Pip and Jane never met a cliche they didn’t like, and for every clever quip the three Time Lords unleash on each other there are a half a dozen lines that either just sit there or else make you actively cringe. On two separate occasions, the Rani kills someone with a device of her own design that leaves a mark on their neck (thus the title of the story) and the Master kneels down beside them and intones, “The mark of the Rani!” On another occasion the Master wants to hypnotize someone and instead of staring into his eyes and saying “I am the Master and you will obey me” — as he’s always done before— he actually pulls out a pocket watch and starts swinging it in front of the guy’s eyes. It’s a small mercy that at least he doesn’t say “You are getting very sleeeepy.”
The story is filled with maybe-interesting ideas that get totally wasted or undermined. The Master supposedly has a scheme to put all the great scientists and engineers of the industrial revolution under mind control but nothing ever comes of it. Do we see these luminaries arriving for the meeting, see them threatened by the Master’s scheme nearly succeeding until the Doctor pulls off an exciting climactic save? (As happened, for example, in The Masque of Mandragora with a similar scheme by the villain.) No— the Master and the Rani wander around trying to kill the Doctor until the episode runs out of time and they leave. The Doctor sabotages the Rani’s TARDIS to fling them far across the universe, putting an end to the scheme— but unfortunately before any kind of drama or tension or, you know, plot could actually happen.
Then there’s the bit about the Rani setting up a mine field with devices that, if stepped on, turn humans into trees. The dialog is trying to say something about her attitude when she answers the Doctor’s horror when the device catches an innocent young man: “Animal matter has been rearranged into vegetable, so what? If anything he’s better off— trees have four times the life span of humans.” But then Peri nearly wanders into the mine field and the new tree actually moves to grab her and stop her from meeting the same fate. Any potential horror we might feel from realizing the unfortunate victim is still conscious and locked immovably into the form of a tree forever is totally ruined by the pure silliness of this man-in-a-rubber-tree-costume waving a branch around, and by the fact that where he manages to grab Peri pretty much means that what he’s really doing is copping a feel.
Then there’s the ending, where due to the Doctor’s sabotage the Master and the Rani are pinned by G-forces against the walls of her TARDIS console room, unable to reach the console to stop from being flung out to the edge of the universe, while another of her experiments— a cloned T-rex— experiences accelerated growth while lying on the console room floor completely unaffected by those same G-forces.
Then there’s the cliffhanger between episodes 1 and 2, in which for the first time in the history of the series they actually cheat in the way the old movie serials used to. Dr Who has presented plenty of easily-resolved cliffhangers before: the villain says “Kill them!” the credits rolls, then the next episode starts with “No wait, I have a better idea.” But they’ve never outright cheated before, as they do here when a man who was not there before stops the Doctor from falling down a mine shaft. Given the way the rest of the episode plays, I’ll lay odds that Pip and Jane wrote it this way because they thought cheating the cliffhanger just like the old movie serials would be a cool thing to do.
I could go on recounting examples of things that irritate me about this episode (there are more), but I’ll stop there. I’ll finish with a positive: the production looks good. By a lucky chance, another show was cancelled after a film crew had been contracted, which meant the crew had to be paid whether they ended up filming anything or not. The BBC asked around if any other show needed a free film crew and JN-T managed to grab them up before anyone else. The result was that, at no additional cost to Dr Who, the show was able to film far more location work than normal, which they did at a “living museum” of an industrial-revolution-era coal mine surrounded by authentic machinery and buildings. The savings in turn allowed the sets they did build to look better than the series often had to live with, so The Mark of the Rani is generally a pleasure to look at on the screen.
Just turn down the volume and try not to think about the story.
Next Week:
“The Two Doctors,” 3 episodes.
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