“The more I know me, the less I like me.” —The Seventh Doctor
Story
Time Lady/Mad Scientist the Rani forces the TARDIS down on the planet Lakertya, knocking the Doctor and Mel unconscious and, for some reason, triggering the Doctor to regenerate. It turns out some equipment she’s using in her latest experiment has malfunctioned and she doesn’t know how to repair it, and wants to force the Doctor to fix it for her. The new Seventh Doctor at first appears to recover from the regeneration quite well compared to the last few times, but suffers a setback when he refuses to help the Rani and she injects him with a drug that causes amnesia. Soon she has him convinced that she’s Mel and that the equipment to be repaired is the Doctor’s own. Despite the trick, as he learns more about what’s happening on Lakertya the Doctor increasingly disapproves of it, and even while believing it was his own work, he’s not going to cooperate for long (see the quote at the top of the page).
Meanwhile the real Mel has made friends with a Lakertyan names Ikona who wants to get his people to fight the Rani (who is basically holding them all hostage), but they prefer to just cooperate until she’s finished whatever she’s up to, hoping she’ll then simply go away. In fact, the Rani’s scheme will destroy all life on Lakertya unless the Doctor can put a stop to it.
Review
Time and the Rani has a better setup than a resolution. Rather like the Rani’s previous appearance, after a lot of buildup the story just sort of fizzles out in an overly easy ending. There’s a whole list of plot threads that simply come to nothing, or else to a conclusion that seems to have no impact on the story overall.
The story was written (again) by Pip and Jane Baker, making essentially three stories in a row from them. As I talked about last week, part 1 of the previous 2-parter was written by Holmes & Saward, but that’s one half hour episode out of the last 10, and it’s no wonder that by this point it was looking to fans as if the Bakers were poised to become the writers of Dr Who from now on. Actually this was their last contribution to the series.
The Bakers make a start at some science fiction world building that could have been interesting: the planet Lakertya has a benevolent climate with abundant, naturally available food, and as a result the Lakertyans have not “achieved their potential.” Dr Who last visited this idea in Kinda, where the natural abundance of the Kinda planet was presented as an Eden-like paradise. Here we get the dark side of the same thought: freedom from want has cause the Lakertyans to develop into a fundamentally lazy and apathetic society. They’ve never had to work for anything and the few who, like Ikona, want them to be better have an uphill struggle to get the others to actually do anything.
All sorts of good storytelling could result from this setup, but the Bakers use it for almost nothing. Ikona tries to get his people to rebel against the Rani but although it appears like he finally persuades them to do it, the story ends before they actually have to— the toward the end the Rani has explosive ankle bracelets on all the Lakertyans to force their cooperation, and the Doctor figure out how to remove them, but it turns out the explosives are what he uses to destroy the Rani’s equipment, the Lakertyans once freed don’t have to do anything at all.
Worse, the Bakers use this setup in a plot point that is pure nonsense: before using the bracelets, the Rani held the Lakertyans hostage with a globe containing deadly insects, hanging in their “house of leisure.” We’re told that if the Rani opens that globe, there won’t be a Lakertyan left alive, and we’re supposed to believe that it’s because they are so indolent that they can’t get away from this trap. Except that we previously saw them coming and going freely from the leisure center (the Doctor even remarked on the fact) and when the Rani releases just a couple of insects as a demonstration, all the Lakertyans in the center leap to their feet and run away screaming. Tell me please, what’s stopping them from just not going back into that room? Laziness, because it’s their “leisure center?” But laziness would make it easier for them to just stay home, or plop down wherever they ran to. The whole idea is so incoherent, with not attempt to justify it in story, that you can only conclude the real laziness is located somewhere other than Lakertya. (I could go on and on about this: this particular point in this particular story has been a pet peeve of mine ever since I first saw it back in the 80’s.)
Other examples of lazy writing abound in the story. The Rani has landmine-like booby traps set around her headquarters which, when tripped, catch the victim in a sort of forcefield bubble which flies across the landscape and then explodes— except when Mel trips one. It’s a very effective cliffhanger for that episode, but when the next one starts the trap, alone out of several examples before and after, rolls peacefully to a stop and sits there waiting for someone to disarm it and get Mel out. We know that (Peri aside) companions carry get-out-of-deathrap-free cards— but writers should do better than to have them play the card so blatantly.
Then, the story carefully sets up the point that Mel doesn’t know the Doctor has changed his appearance, and he even has his costume-change scene while they’re still separated, so there is no way for her to know who he is, or to believe him when he claims to be the Doctor. Meanwhile the Rani’s impersonating Mel and has convinced the Doctor of the reverse: that Mel is actually the Rani. This sets up a plot that could have been milked for a lot of suspense and drama, pitting Mel and the Doctor against each other, each convinced the other is the villain. Instead when they meet up in episode 2 it takes all of thirty seconds, one mostly comedic scene, for them to work everything out.
Later, the Doctor sets explosives to destroy a piece of the Rani’s equipment and another character makes the heroic sacrifice of staying right there, getting killed in the explosion— for no reason whatsoever. He wasn’t needed to detonate the explosives, the Doctor had arranged that separately. It seems he just stays there so that the other characters can have a mock-dramatic moment about honoring his sacrifice later. Meanwhile even the explosion turns out to have been unneeded, since the few seconds’ delay that cause the Rani’s missile to fail had already happened.
Overall, the Bakers seem to just write a string of things that happen, for no particular reason and having no particular importance to anything that happens afterward, a lot of which look like they could lead to an interesting story, but none of which actually do.
There are some good bits, though: wanting to give the show a new look to go with the new Doctor, John Nathan-Turner brought on board the use of CGI effects for the first time in the series’ history. By modern standards, the opening scene of the TARDIS in flight looks very cartoonish but (I speak from memory) it seemed very impressive at the time. The Rani’s forcefield bubble traps, however poor their use in that one cliffhanger (see above) look very good even by modern standards. Kate O’Mara, playing the Rani, puts in a good performance, especially the very fun Bonnie Langford impression she does when the Rani is impersonating Mel.
And then there’s the new Doctor.
The Seventh Doctor
In the past, every time the lead actor changed, a great deal of thought and planning went into the persona of the new Doctor. This time, because of the abruptness of Colin Baker’s firing (which came after the Trial season aired, meaning the series was around a month away from production on the next season) there was hardly any time for either casting, or for planning what the persona of the new Doctor should be.
Independently, two separate people suggested Sylvester McCoy to JN-T as a good choice for the Seventh Doctor. McCoy was best known for playing physical comedy in children’s “pantomime” stage performances, and at the time was appearing on stage as the Pied Piper. JN-T went around to see the show, and was sold on McCoy as the new Doctor. Upstairs, the BBC Executive/Villain pair of Powell and Grade had experienced a brief flurry of “if we’re stuck with it we should at least pretend to take an interest” during which they contacted Dr Who’s original creators, Sydney Newman and Verity Lambert, for suggestions on revamping the show. One of the suggestions was to persuade Patrick Troughton to return to the role of the Doctor. That was probably always unworkable, but the idea may have had an influence— McCoy was physically similar to Troughton, and early on based his performance partly on Troughton’s.
For his first episode, though, without any indication for where the character was going, McCoy plays the role very comic, and almost completely unlike the way the Seventh Doctor will later develop. Fans call the Seventh “the Dark Doctor” and his most distinctive trait will be that he’s a Machiavellian chessmaster. Often he won’t stumble into an adventure, he’ll deliberately go where he’s heard there’s a problem, and once in the adventure, rather than improvising as he goes along he’ll gradually unveil a master plan he conceived right at the start. Troughton, in his day, played the Doctor as superficially comic and whimsical but with an underlying darkness that showed, almost terrifyingly, when face to face with the bad guys. McCoy took that trait and ran with it. (Matt Smith’s version of the Doctor is surprisingly close to the Seventh in this and several other ways.)
None of this is on view in this first episode: no one had thought of it yet. The Seventh Doctor’s persona is going to develop as writers watch and react to the way Sylvester McCoy plays him— which perhaps, in the long run, is a better way for a TV character to develop.
One trait prominent in this first story that will disappear at once is the Doctor’s new habit of misquoting old sayings and proverbs. He unleashes a constant stream of them throughout the story— “Time and tide melts the snowman,” “A bad workman blames his fools,” and so on. JN-T had thought this might be a trademark of the Seventh Doctor and instructed Pip and Jane to work as many of them into the script as they could. They obliged but in later stories the idea was dropped completely. One very nice line does come out of it. At one point the Rani holds Mel hostage and Ikona wonders why she doesn’t let Mel go. The Doctor answers, “A bird in the hand keeps the Doctor away”— which actually makes perfect sense in context.
The Regeneration
The Doctor’s regeneration itself— well: the Rani is bringing the TARDIS down and we see Mel and the Doctor lying unconscious inside (it was actually Sylvester McCoy in Colin Baker’s costume and wearing a Colin Baker wig). The Rani enters, rolls the Doctor over, and some CGI colors blur his face until it clears and Sylvester McCoy is revealed. Since Mel is completely unharmed when she wakes up, we have to ask what exactly caused the regeneration? Did he fall off the exercise bike? Hit his head on the edge of the console when he fell? “Doctor Who and the Minor Bump of Doom” doesn’t quite sound up to our hero’s normal standard.
At first you might think, well there’s nothing they could have done about it. The sudden firing of the Sixth Doctor was outside the series’ control, and Colin Baker was perfectly reasonable to refuse to come back for a regeneration scene in those circumstances. But there was an alternative. So far as I know, no one ever considered it, but it would have been the courageous choice and probably a better one overall: open the episode with Mel coming into the console room. There’s a warning light or something as the Rani starts her attack. Mel says “Doctor, come look at this!” — and then the Seventh Doctor enters, already in his new costume, Mel already knowing him, because the regeneration happened in an adventure we didn’t see.
We already knew there had to be at least one unseen adventure: last season, the Doctor left the trial in the company of a companion from his future. Presuming he delivered Mel back to her appropriate moment in the timestream, at the very least her first actual meeting with him was still out there. Since Colin Baker’s departure stopped them from covering that, why not let us assume we missed the regeneration as well?
Regeneration has always been such an important turning point in Dr Who that it’s easy to see why it would have taken a lot of nerve to do that. But I’m tend to think it would have been better that way, than what they did— which really doesn’t serve the drama of that turning point any better. At least if it had been offstage, fans could imagine far better endings for the Sixth Doctor.
Behind the Scenes
Replacing Eric Saward as script editor is Andrew Cartmel, at the time still in his twenties, who came in with definite ideas for what he wanted to do with the show. “The Cartmel Master Plan” has entered fan lore describing the brief renaissance the series experienced in its last two seasons. But we’re not quite there yet. I’ve seen contradictory statements in different interviews about whether Cartmel first had to work with a lot of scripts already commissioned under Eric Saward (the usual pattern when the producer or script editor changed in the Classic series) or whether, because of all the turmoil at the time, no scripts were in the pipeline at all. Whichever is the case, the Seventh Doctor’s first season will continue to be dogged by the same kind of flaws that were pervasive through the Sixth Doctor era— more on that as we go through it. But things are going to get better before the end.
Next Week:
“Paradise Towers,” 4 episodes.
