Doctor Who/Recap/S22/E03 The Mark of the Rani



"The Master: Ah, but you've not been informed of my purpose here. The Rani: Oh, I know why you're here. To destroy the Doctor. You've never had any other. It obsesses you, to the exclusion of all else. The Master: You underestimate me. Certainly I want to destroy him, see him suffer, but that is just an exquisite first step. I have a greater concept, one that will encompass the whole human race!

The Rani: You're unbalanced. No wonder the Doctor always outwits you."

"What's he up to now? It'll be something devious and overcomplicated. He'd get dizzy if he tried to walk in a straight line."

- The Rani, about the Master

This episode was NOT brought to you by the tourism boards of Gallifrey or Miasimia Goria

We open with a bunch of grubby miners from Oop North, going to the bathhouse after a long day's work. The old woman who runs the place herds them into a room - where poison gas suddenly comes up from the floor and knocks them all unconscious. Meanwhile, the Sixth Doctor and Peri are in the TARDIS, which is being pulled off course by a "time distortion". Both Colin Baker and Nicola Bryant massacre American accents as the Doctor establishes that the only person who could pull the TARDIS off course like that is a Time Lord (or a Dalek, but we're pretty sure it's a Time Lord). Back in the bathhouse, two gas-masked mooks carry the unconscious miners into another room, mysterious red marks appearing on their necks. In a serial called "The Mark of the Rani". Hmmmm, can't imagine what those are.

The Doctor and Peri land in what we'll learn is Industrial Revolution-era Killingsworth, and set off to track the time distortion. The miners from the bathhouse have apparently been brainwashed into homoerotic behavior and small-child kicking, which is an improvement on Peri's dialogue. She makes a valiant effort to convince us that she's A) intelligent, with her specialty in botany and B) insightful, talking about extinction and the effect of technology on the environment, but despite her hideous dress covering up her two best assets, it's not working. Her obliviousness extends to the Doctor, who notices there are no birds, but completely fails to notice the blatantly-moving scarecrow Peri points out. Those of us who have seen a Master episode know random disguises are his hat, so clearly, we've got at least one renegade Time Lord hanging about.

The brainwashed miners come upon a piece of equipment being hauled into town, and attack it, though not before the Doctor and Peri have witnessed them - and the strange mark on their necks. The equipment belongs to George Stephenson, the famous engineer who built England's first railway line. And just in case anyone was ambivalent about what significance the scarecrow Peri pointed out might have had, the next shot is of the scarecrow spying on the Doctor and Peri, hopping a fence to follow them, and letting out a very distinctive chuckle. Oh, it's definitely the Master - he's stalking his favorite enemy.

The mysterious woman who runs the bathhouse hijacks a local kid to do her bidding (and unfortunately, her accent leads to Colin Baker on the DVD commentary asking "what part of Jamaica" she's from), and a close-up reveals that the makeup people totally forgot about half of the prosthetic Kate O'Mara wears in the rest of her scenes. The Doctor and Peri ride by on their way to see Lord Ravensworth (the local landowner), and his timey-wimey detector goes haywire when it's pointed at the bathhouse and the rapidly-becoming-obvious woman who runs it. Detects a Time Lord, you say? And there's a mysterious woman lurking about, experimenting on people and generally being very suspicious? No, couldn't be a certain fellow renegade classmate of yours who's got this Thing for experimentation and a serious lack of morals. Six is not one of the more observant of Doctors.

More workers (we're just going to start calling them Luddites, because that's supposedly what she's turning them into) show up at the Rani's the mysterious woman's bathhouse. She follows them in, and the Master, brushing straw from his clothes, spies on her for a bit, then goes back to stalking his other ex. There is much blah-blahing from the Doctor and Peri trying to bluff their way into a meeting held by Stephenson (which will be attended by a number of other historical geniuses and men of learning), but they eventually get in to see Lord Ravensworth - who, despite not being a historical genius, has to do something in this plot to justify Terence Alexander's casting. The Doctor and Peri bicker and the Master continues to be the most blatant stalker in history, and a bunch of Luddites mistake the Master (with his thing for black velvet and big vocabulary and anachronistic gadget that looks like a vibrator ) for one of the geniuses attending the meeting, but he sends them after the one in the "yellow trousers and a vulgarly-colored coat".

They corner the Doctor by what appears to be a simple mineshaft, but when one of the Luddites falls in, suddenly transforms into something resembling the Bottomless Pit of the Underworld. Peri screams and throws rocks at the Luddites, but the Doctor is saved by a timely gunshot from Lord Ravensworth, who's actually kind of Badass, and really not at all pleased with gatecrashers to his meeting. He and the Doctor establish that the personality changes in the Luddites are only among the men, and the Rani the mysterious woman in the bathhouse obliges by showing us her experimentation on two new subjects, with a close-up on a device attached to the neck area - the source of those marks popping up in the dead Luddites.

And thankfully, the Master decides to pay the Rani a visit, establishing who the villains are and letting me free from pretending the woman in the bathhouse is anyone other than the Rani. He interrupts her, she dispenses with the disguise, and within five seconds, they're bickering like an old married couple. We get some lovely exposition about how brilliant the Rani is, how she's been exiled from Gallifrey for experimenting on the Lord President's cat, and the fact that she really, really kind of ships Doctor/Master. She tells them, in essence, to get a room, and he tries to sweet-talk her into teaming up with him, and when the niceties don't work, outright blackmails her by stealing the only vial of brain fluid she's got (she needs the fluid for her aliens on the planet she rules). The brain fluid becomes the MacGuffin invoked every time the Rani has to do something completely counter to her established amoral, rational, and scientific nature.

The Master and the Rani continue their labyrinthine, overcomplicated plan. They utilize tree mines (because the Rani has clearly read the Evil Overlord List and knows mines are the sneakily evil way to go), evil laughs done in counterpoint, and the ever-popular "distract the dumb American with your weapon of choice and knock her out" ploy, but the Master's stupid obsession with trying to kill the Doctor overrides the Rani's common sense. His pride gets them trapped in her TARDIS, which has been futzed-with by the Doctor to send them to the end of the universe with a rapidly-growing T-Rex embryo (because everything's cooler with dinosaurs). The Rani is not pleased, and gives the Master a kick to the nuts for his trouble, but unfortunately, is still stuck with him in a runaway TARDIS. At the end of the day, she's just not very good at her job.

Tropes
"Master: Come, come, the whole universe knows I'm indestructible! Rani: Is that so?"
 * And I Must Scream: tree-ification by the Rani's land mines. Say what you like about the basic concept or the realisation of it, the thought of being trapped conscious and immobile in tree form for a potentially very long time must be one of the scariest ideas in the show's history.
 * Not only that, the remaining mines are still out there (as far as we know), waiting for other unsuspecting folk to activate them.
 * The Baroness: The Rani
 * Big Bad Duumvirate: If the Master weren't so obsessed with one-upping the Doctor and the Rani were more willing to cut her losses, they might actually be dangerous.
 * Can't Argue with Elves: And one should not try to out-plot or out-lecture Time Lords.
 * Even Evil Has Standards: The Master expresses a rare bit of remorse when gets transformed into a tree. The Rani, on the other hand, seems to find it quite amusing.
 * Everyone Went to School Together: The Doctor's graduating class is not only comprised of him, the Master and the Rani, but pretty much every other Time Lord of the Expanded Universe that ISN'T Romana.
 * Failed a Spot Check: Seriously, Doctor—get your eyes checked.
 * Green Aesop
 * Groin Attack: The Rani's Crowning Moment of Awesome.
 * Hell-Bent for Leather: Check out the Rani's trousers.
 * Historical Domain Character: Stephenson. The first real historical personality to appear in the series since the various Dodge City figures in "The Gunfighters", and the last until the twenty-first century show started doing it at least once per season.
 * Ham-to-Ham Combat: A three way example, between Colin Baker, Anthony Ainley, and Kate O'Mara.
 * Jerkass crossed with Large Ham: Definitely a Time Lord thing, if you've seen "The Five Doctors" or the Trial of a Time Lord arc.
 * Kick the Dog: The Rani, even more than the Master, who's usually a walking, talking example of this trope. Poor dog. Poor presidential cat. Poor millers. Poor guy that got turned into a tree. Poor Peri.
 * This being Six, the Doctor gets a few in, too.
 * The Masochism Tango: Both Peri and the Doctor and the Master and the Rani seem to be dancing to this trope. One wonders why Peri puts up with all the verbal abuse and why the Rani just doesn't whack the Master upside the head with a crowbar and go find another planet with brain-fluid producing subjects.
 * The Master: Is back somehow.
 * Master of Disguise: An Evil Time Lord thing. The Rani's old-woman outfit does use prosthetics, though, which makes it better than the Master's random scarecrow outfit.
 * And the Rani's disguise makes sense. She's undercover and probably doesn't want any Time Lords/Time Agents/other aliens spotting her and recognising her. Why oh why, in the name of sanity, was the Master lurking in a field dressed as a scarecrow? It's starting to look like his entire evil career is just an excuse for a bit of dressing up. If only they'd had LARPing and Cosplay on Gallifrey, perhaps his life would have taken a more positive direction.
 * No Biochemical Barriers: The Rani is harvesting the chemical from human brains that lets humans sleep to treat the aliens she has been tinkering with who have lost the ability to sleep.
 * Oop North: Complete with trouble at t'mill.
 * The Right of a Superior Species: The Rani compares the exploitation of lesser series with stepping on ants.
 * Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness: Another Evil Time Lord thing. We're well aware of the Master's penchant for abusing the thesaurus, but the Rani gets in on the act, too. Of course, this episode was written by Pip and Jane Baker.
 * Maybe just a Time Lord thing in general - the Doctor does this a lot too.
 * Shipper on Deck: You just know that the Rani ships the Doctor and The Master. She wants the two of them to go get a room and just leave her to her experiments.
 * Stalking Is Love: The Master has been reading the Twilight books it seems, as he decides to randomly stalk the Doctor around. He doesn't even seem to have a plan in this story. In fact his "plan" for lack of a better word seems to be - 1) Dress up as a scarecrow, stand in a field and stalk the Doctor 2) Prove that he has one-upped the Doctor and 3) PROFIT!
 * This Is Sparta: "The Mark!... of the Rani!"
 * Title Drop: See above. The Master does it every other scene.
 * Unexplained Recovery: The Master, conspicuously failing to explain how he managed to escape certain death the last time we saw him. This came about from the script editor's desire to avoid a Voodoo Shark explanation of the Master's survival.


 * Unwitting Pawn:
 * What Do You Mean It Wasn't Made on Drugs?: So...the Rani is using weird brain insects to extract chemicals from homoerotic miners which drives them mad and makes them want to smash things, while the Master stands about in a field dressed as a scarecrow FOR NO REASON just on the off chance the Doctor shows up (how long was he in that field?) and then teams up with the Rani for future universe-domination and kill the Doctor using mines that turn people into trees. Peri is nearly turned into a tree, but as she's needed for Fan Service, she is saved from this Fate Worse Than Death by someone who's already been turned into a tree. And then the Master gets kicked in the nuts by the Rani for being a git, and the two of them get crushed by a T-Rex that's just...there for some reason, and sent off on an enforced intergalactic road trip. WHAT. THE. HELL.
 * Xanatos Speed Chess:
 * The X of Y