| Production Code: 6X
Something is amiss in the mining village of Killingworth, in the early part of 19th-Century England. Miners are being gassed in the wash-house and transformed into thugs and vandals, attacking men and machinery, being perceived as Luddites by other locals. The Sixth Doctor and Peri Brown witness the phenomenon when they arrive in Killingworth looking for the cause of some sort of time distortion, and he also notices one of the rampaging miners has a strange red mark on his neck. With his usual audacity, The Doctor foists himself upon the local landowner, Lord Ravensworth, who is concerned by the ferocity of the local Luddite attacks, with the most passive of men suddenly turning violent and unpredictable. The answer lies in the local wash-house. The Master has turned up at this key point in human history and forces his way into the presence of the old woman who runs the wash-house: in reality another Time Lord known as The Rani. She is a gifted chemist and is using the set-up of the wash-house to anaesthetise the miners and distill from them the neuro-chemicals that enable sleep. This is what accounts for the red mark on the victims. These chemicals are then synthesised for use back on Miasimia Goria, a planet she rules and which The Master visited, where her other experiments have left the inhabitants without the ability to rest. He persuades her that they need to deal with The Doctor together, but also steals some of the precious brain fluid she collected to ensure her collaboration. It is a rocky partnership, full of half-truths and deceptions. The Master heads off to deal with the Doctor, egging on local miners to attack his enemy and persuading some of them to throw The Doctor’s TARDIS down a mine shaft. The Doctor has meanwhile dressed as a miner and infiltrated the bath-house, where he soon deduces The Rani’s schemes. She entraps him but he still challenges her ethics, prompting her to reveal she has been coming to Earth for centuries to harvest her precious chemicals. After a series of narrow squeaks – during which The Doctor himself almost follows the TARDIS down the mineshaft – The Doctor and Peri escape their captors and return to Lord Ravensworth’s where they meet the inventor George Stephenson. Stephenson has planned a meeting of scientific and engineering geniuses in the village. The Doctor is worried about the wisdom of such a meeting in the current circumstances, but elsewhere The Master is so desperate to see the event take place he uses mind-control over Stephenson’s young aide, Luke Ward, telling him to kill anyone who tries to prevent it. The Master wants to use the finest brains of the Industrial Revolution to help speed up Earth’s development and then use the planet as a powerbase. He strikes a deal with The Rani that she may return to Earth at any time to harvest more brain fluid if she helps him achieve this. While the villains are away, The Doctor returns to the wash-house and dodges the booby traps to find a way into The Rani’s TARDIS. Her control room contains jars of preserved dinosaur embryos. She summons her ship to the old mine workings using a remote control device, with the Doctor still inside. He hides while his adversaries converse, with The Rani confessing to have also laid landmines in nearby Redfern Dell; and when the coast is clear The Doctor slips away to report back to Ravensworth, Stephenson and Luke, whom he sees is behaving strangely. To make herself useful Peri is using her botanical knowledge to make a sleeping draught for the afflicted miners, but her quest for herbs leads her to Redfern Dell. The Doctor gets there in time to save her, but not before Luke accidentally steps on a mine and is turned into a tree. The Doctor then surprises The Master and The Rani, who are lurking at the edge of the Dell, and takes them prisoner with The Master’s own Tissue Compression Eliminator. Peri is given charge of them but The Rani’s deviousness outstrips the Master and she is the one who enables them to escape. The Rani and The Master flee in her TARDIS, but The Doctor has also developed a trick or two: he has sabotaged the navigational system and the ship starts heading out of control. In the destabilised condition, one of the jars containing an embryo tyrannosaurus rex falls to the floor and the creature begins to grow, affected by the time spillage… The Doctor and Peri make an exchange with Ravensworth, who has retrieved the TARDIS and accepts the phial of brian fluid, which he is told to return to the affected miners. Before the eyes of an astonished scientists and his financier, the TARDIS departs…
Analysis by Cuisle There is one obvious complaint all Doctor Who fans make about Mark of The Rani. It is summed up in one word. Trees. We have had all kinds of odd transformations in Doctor Who. But people turned into trees by standing on a landmine was just too much. It was too fantastical. It just too much, and utterly pointless in the main part of the plot. The plot by the Rani to collect neural-chemicals from the Human brain to use in experiments on the planet she now rules, was plausible as far as it went. The effect on the miners she drugged in the bathhouse she ran, disguised as an old woman, was also plausible. Their violent behaviour afterwards made perfect sense. Messing about with the Human brain inevitably has side-effects. The Rani is an underused villain. This and the opening Sylvester McCoy story are her only outings. Why that is, nobody knows. A female Time Lord Renegade, whose experiments upon any lifeform she considers inferior to her – which is just about everything else in the universe is a wonderful foil for The Doctor. And Kate O’Mara plays her malevolence to the full without becoming a pantomime villain. That even The Master is disgusted by her says much about her. What is wonderfully UNDERSTATED is just what happened in the past to make The Doctor and The Rani enemies. Fan speculation has always leaned towards the idea that The Doctor spurned her romantic advances at some point in his youth. It’s a tempting thought. He certainly has no feeling for her now except disgust. Sets for this episode are very impressive. The outdoor scenes were filmed at the Victorian Village at the Ironbridge Gorge Industrial Museum. As usual, an outdoor set gave a feeling of openness and that fact that the village is preserved in something like authentic style helped to achieve the Industrial revolution feel. But the prize for aesthetics goes to The Rani’s TARDIS. It was the first genuinely different TARDIS style we had seen. The Master’s tended to be the same set as The Doctor’s TARDIS with a different colour scheme. But this was a new concept entirely. Very stylish and impressive. It wasn’t a bad story overall, and being only a two parter there was no time for too much wrong footing. But the Tree silliness lets it down badly.
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