Time and the Rani: Well, that's Just Embarrassing

 Hello!

The Sixth Doctor's regeneration was rather unorthodox - his actor (Colin Baker) got fired by the BBC and was understandably too insulted to return and film a regeneration scene. The original version of the episode had the Sixth Doctor throughout, and he regenerated at the end, after getting caught in an explosion. As Baker refused to return, they had Six regenerate at the beginning - so the episode is just the Seventh Doctor's first adventure. There is an audio story about the events leading up to the regeneration, fittingly called "The Last Adventure". I am not going to review The Last Adventure, as I haven't listened to it; however, from what I've heard, it's very good. Time and  the Rani, on the other hand, is juvenile, with simplistic plotting, contradictory characterisation and over-used jokes.

As they couldn't get Colin Baker to return, Sylvester McCoy played the part of the dying Sixth Doctor, making him the first actor to play multiple incarnations of the Doctor.

The Last Adventure

The Last Adventure was the Sixth Doctor's...last adventure. It was composed of four different stories,  at intervals throughout the Sixth Doctor's life. The antagonist was a Time Lord called the Valeyard - the Valeyard appeared in Baker's final televised season, The Trial of a Time Lord. The Valeyard is purportedly a future incarnation of the Doctor, between his twelfth and his final incarnations, an amalgamation of his worst traits. He's out of regenerations; the future Doctor, determined to never die, started trying to find ways to break the 12-regeneration limit. The final part of The Last Adventure, The Brink of Death, was the actual regeneration episode. It starts with the Valeyard winning - he switches bodies with the Doctor, leaving the Doctor trapped in the Matrix (Time Lord afterlife), which is where the Valeyard was previously trapped. The Valeyard's plan is to replace every Time Lord in existence with himself - that's every Time Lord, living and dead. Including Rassilon, the first President, giving him the opportunity to shape Gallifrey's history, and presumably stop the Time Lords from instituting the 12-regeneration limit. Ultimately, a future version of the Sixth Doctor, facing erasure from the Matrix, sends his past self a telepathic message urging him to fly to the Lakertyan system - initially, the past Doctor rejected the idea of going to the Lakertyan system because there was radiation deadly to Time Lords in the area. This time round, the Doctor obliges his future self and travels to that system, intentionally exposing himself to the lethal radiation energy to induce a regeneration, preventing the Valeyard from stealing his body and foiling his plot. It's also key because the radiation is not lethal to humans - so the Doctor's companion would not be hurt.

Time and the Rani

Time and the Rani is the Seventh Doctor's introductory episode. There is a companion who travelled with the Seventh Doctor for almost all of his tenure, who is very well-known. She's clever, brave and gifted with a rebellious streak almost as grand as the Doctor's. She once beat up a Dalek with a baseball bat - her name is Dorothea 'Ace' McShane. Melanie Bush is not Ace; she is the Doctor's companion at the end of the Sixth Doctor's life and the start of the Seventh's. She is shrill and screamy and, bluntly, practically useless, though admittedly brave. No hate to the actress, though - she does an excellent job, it's the way they wrote the character that's the problem. The actress eventually actually left because she was tired of the character being useless.

Time and the Rani begins with the TARDIS crash-landing and the Doctor regenerating. The Rani, another renegade Time Lord, enters the TARDIS and kidnaps the Doctor. When the Doctor comes to, he's in the Rani's laboratory; he recognises her immediately. She incapacitates him and doses him with an amnesiac so that she can pose as Mel. The real Mel wanders around and gets discovered by a Lakertyan - a member of the dominant species of the planet. He's stunningly rude to her at first, but warms to her. She makes her way into the laboratory and meets the Doctor for the first time since his regeneration. Naturally, given the Doctor's change of appearance and his amnesia, neither recognise each other, leading to the best scene of the entire serial. Once they've recognised each other, Mel is forced to leave, as the Rani has returned to the laboratory. The Rani realises he knows the truth and imprisons him; a Lakertyan, Beyus, frees him at the beginning of the third episode. He escapes, stealing a valuable piece of equipment in the process. Mel gets captured. A ransom is organised - exchange Mel in return for the equipment; however, it's a fake-out, and the Rani fobs the Doctor off with a hologram. The Doctor then gets captured as well and plugged into a machine in the laboratory. The Rani's plot is to use the combined intelligence of many super-geniuses to turn the planet into a device capable of manipulating time - sort of like the Time Stone in the MCU. The combined super-intelligence takes the form of a giant brain. The Doctor gives the brain a headache with his malapropisms and is swiftly unplugged. The Doctor and Mel escape the laboratory, while Beyus uses some bombs to blow up the brain, at the cost of his own life. In the original draft, this sacrifice would have been the Sixth Doctor's, I suppose. The Doctor and Mel depart, while the Rani gets taken captive by her servants, called the Tetraps.

Farewell no. 6...

Hello no.7!

Overall, to be blunt, I would not call Time and the Rani a good serial. While there are good moments, such as the Doctor and Mel reuniting in the second episode, it's mostly quite dull. The plot just...plods along until something significant happens (which isn't often), accompanied by flat characterisation, repetitive jokes and special effects dodgier than a year-old pizza. The only characters with any depth are the Doctor and the Rani, and charitably Mel - and even the Rani's a stereotypical "I'm going to destroy everything, just because!" villain. The special effects aren't particularly good; for instance, there's a sequence where the Rani punishes Lakertyans by releasing killer insects on them. The insects take the form of glowing dots. Black and white special effects look better by comparison - case in point, the destruction of Mondas and the Doctor's regeneration in The Tenth Planet. The plot...in addition to being dull, it's somewhat random. The brain is only introduced in the third episode. When the Doctor gets plugged in, the music swells...and the viewer's left wondering what the significance of the brain is, or why the Doctor being plugged in is so catastrophically bad. The Rani's entire logic for needing the Doctor is because he's a Time Lord - except she is as well! She doesn't need the Doctor's genius to figure out the answer, because she is herself a Time Lord. Or a Time Lady. That is sort of addressed - the leader of the Tetraps suggests she go into the box and he monitor the brain. She doesn't trust him though - so why not have Beyus, who she does trust, monitor the situation? It's not like she has to stay in there until the brain's finished its calculations - it works fine after the Doctor's unplugged. Which, now I think about it, makes her insistence on using the Doctor even stranger - why not grab a genius from any civilisation that's discovered time travel? Go to the right era, practically everyone has time travel. Also, two of the geniuses captured were Louis Pasteur, inventor of the process of pasteurisation, and Hypatia, philosopher and mathematician. Why did the Rani need a biologist and a mathematician to solve a question which was ultimately about physics and chemistry? This is not explained. 

I also feel like the Rani's motives are slightly out-of-character. In her debut episode, The Mark of the Rani, she was experimenting to find a way to remove the necessity of sleep and make people docile, as a means of controlling the population of the planet she had taken over. Here, she wants to reshape the course of creation - it's a bit more grandiose than in her previous serial, and clashes with the fact that last time she essentially just wanted to find a way to control rebellious citizens. On the other hand, though, she does display villainous pragmatism here; the Lakertyans are kept docile and non-rebellious through one simple measure. That measure is giving them such comfortable, pleasant lives that it would never occur to them to even consider her a tyrant, let alone rebel against her. It's a pretty effective way of controlling the populace, and an admittedly clever way of having the Doctor fight the Rani with limited allies. However, this is undermined by how quickly the Rani resorts to punishing them when the Doctor escapes - a villain so quick to punish doesn't seem like she'd have the patience or mercy required to provide the environmental stimuli necessary to prevent revolution in the first place.

Another thing is the serial's idea of comedy - have Sylvester McCoy mangle famous sayings. This does not work, as the joke collapses of exhaustion by the end of the second episode. The main problem with it is the fact that the Doctor spewing malapropisms could have worked...if it weren't the only type of comedy the serial relied on. Sylvester McCoy is a genuinely talented comedian, and he does successfully make the malapropism joke funny, even a couple of times after it's expired; a good example of this is when he uses the malapropisms to drive the super-brain insane, prompting the Rani to go insane with fury. So, with the right decisions, the serial could have been legitimately funny - just as Robot was funny. Indeed, that's kind of a running theme here - between Sylvester McCoy, Bonnie Langford (Mel), and Kate O'Mara (the Rani), as well as some of the Lakertyans, there were genuinely talented actors. The Rani has the potential to be an interesting villain - she contrasts with the Doctor (hero) and the Master (super-villain), being a mad scientist, inspired to figure out how the universe works, no matter how unethical the methods used. Additionally, her method of quelling rebellions is legitimately clever, especially as it limits the Doctor's allies. The serial could have been great.

All in all, tragically, it wasn't great. Overall, I'd give Time and the Rani 4/10. Watch it if you're really curious about Doctor Who's lowest point.

Random observations:

-Towards the end of The Last Adventure, the Sixth Doctor reflects back on all his companions, including Peri; even though he could be quite toxic towards her, it's nice to see that he did care for her, deep down.

-The Twin Dilemma and Time and the Rani are actually quite sad - the quality of the show is noticeably low at that point. It's kind of like watching someone you know and love fade until they're not really the person you knew...believe me, I know what that's like.

-There's a moment where the Doctor says that he figured out the secret of time travel a long time ago. It raises more questions - why does the Rani not have that knowledge? She was at the Academy with him - in fact, a plot point of the serial revolves around the fact that they're the same age.

-I will say that the bit where the Rani deceives the Doctor with a holographic Mel is quite good - I've watched Time and the Rani twice, and been fooled both times.

-One thing I do love about Time and the Rani is the Seventh Doctor's ruthless mockery of his previous incarnation's fashion sense. It's well deserved.

-Funnily enough, this was one of the Doctor's smoothest regenerations - other than coordination problems and momentary confusion, he was fine. The amnesia doesn't count, as that was induced by the Rani.

-The new theme tune and credits are definitely good - they are one of the highlights of the serial. The credits are the highlights - depressing, really.

-The twins from The Twin Dilemma don't get recruited, despite canonically being cleverer than Time Lords - maybe it was a school night for them. This isn't a genuine plot-hole, I'm just picking the serial to pieces because it's fun.

-Regeneration count - exposure to deadly radiation, followed by severe concussion (Sixth to Seventh Doctor). 6 of 12 regenerations remaining (half-way point!)