Time and the Rani
A post about a season of Doctor Who that was about the TV show Doctor Who telling stories about Doctor Who.
The Rani, a character who arrived in the 1980s during Doctor Who’s most notoriously lacking periods creatively, is one of the series’ worst villains. It doesn’t make sense why; brought in as a clear feminine analogue for the iconicAnthony Ainley interpretation of the Doctor’s archnemesis, The Master, The Rani was another rogue Time Lord with vague ideas of conquest.
An amoral biochemist who saw the Universe as a lab for her experiments, The Rani in theory could have been a different kind of Doctor Who villain with a bit more subtlety and shading. Instead, she was another pantomime villain with outsized ambitions and absolutely atrocious dialogue whose characterization across both canon serials Mark of the Rani and Time and the Rani felt like a personification of the show’s lack of creative drive. By the time the Rani landed in the Tardis, the show had gotten more violent, less fun, and felt like an off-brand Who knockoff. Like something from the Blake’s 7 universe.
Perhaps it’s fitting, then, that the character of the Rani has been the focal point of this past season, where everything has felt a bit off. A bit not quite Doctor Who.
To be clear, I’m not one of these internet commenters who feels that Ncuti Gatwa has “ruined” Doctor Who. Quite far from it - he has mostly delighted as the face of the franchise while showrunner Russell T. Baker has come back for his first time since leading the show to its triumphant return to television in 2005.
Whereas Jodie Whitaker’s cheeriness in the role often felt disingenuous, like a children’s show host who can’t possibly have been that excited to spend 10 hours a day under hot studio lights, Gatwa’s run has been marked by a genuine feeling of joy in the role.
If I were to criticize his run at all, it has at times crossed the line of sentiment into mawkishness. But the number one job of the actor playing The Doctor has been to sell us on the idea that a ridiculous villain like a God of Light who has transmorphed into a live action cartoon is not only real, but frightening, a true threat.
In the 1960s and 1970s, especially, when the show’s budget often meant robots made out of cardboard and monsters made out of green rubber foam, it’s a particular skill that very few actors can pull off. For another example, watch William Shatner as Captain James Kirk fighting The Gorn, a stuntman in a man-lizard costume, whose wildly broad swings have no threat of connecting.
The point is not that we believe in the Gorn as a threat - we can’t possibly - but that Shatner’s Kirk does wholeheartedly.
The past few years of Doctor Who have faced a very vocal criticism from a broad section of the fanbase. While it’s tempting to just chalking it up to the usual social media CHUDS, sniping at diversity out of a sense of nativism, the truth is that the problem run deeper than that, and touches a wider spectrum of longtime Doctor Who fans than perhaps is suspected.
Since its inception, Doctor Who had been of its time in the sense that, as a show that attempted to appeal to children, it was aware of the broader pop culture universe it inhabited - the Doctor and his granddaughter Susan watch the Beatles on Top of the Pops in the first episode which takes place in the then-contemporaneous year of 1963.
And clearly, the Daleks were a stand-in for the Nazis, created for an audience for whom the London Blitz was a very recent memory.
Culturally, however, The Doctor was a character very much from a British literary tradition that centered the British Empire at the center of time and space. A universe in which British colonialism of other worlds is not only desirable, but the natural outcome of a prosperous and just society.
A world where soldiers don’t swear, where an adventuring member of nobility can impose a “correct” morality on backwards savages while singlehandedly conquering evil. And with the help of his attractive young (platonic) ladyfriend and sometimes her attractive young (platonic) guy friend.
In a world that has changed, and changed again - a world in which the “backwards” people that the European colonial powers “civilized” have come to seek refuge in those European countries from the worlds that the Great Expansions earlier centuries wrought.
In that world, there was something comforting about even the revived series which took those old British colonial heroics and updated them for the 21st century. To now move onto a Doctor who is openly queer and black is a shock to the system for fans, especially those who are already wary of Disney, the BBC’s “woke” partner in production for the past couple of years.
This is, to be clear, a good thing. Nothing gold can stay, as Robert Frost once wrote, and to keep The Doctor as just another Brave Heroic British Colonial Authority Figure is to condemn it to an imaginitive dead end.
And yet, this season has felt creatively adrift. Certainly, there’s a tightness to the storytelling, with RTD once again producing stories that stand on their own while also propelling an overall arc forward, dropping hints in a mystery that is guaranteed to pay off by the season’s finale.
And yet. That’s a bag of tricks we’ve come to expect from the show since it came back.
Towards the end of Tom Baker’s legendary run as the star of Doctor Who, one of the recurring themes that carried over into Peter Davidson’s turn were entropy and recursion. The definition of “recursion” is “the process a procedure goes through when one of the steps of the procedure involves invoking the procedure itself”
Entropy is defined as “lack of order or predictability; gradual decline into disorder.”
Both these words can explain both the story being told onscreen as intended by the writers as well as the direction of the show - straight up its own ass.
The overall theme of Doctor Who in its twentieth anniversary year since RTD came back as the showrunner, has been storytelling in general and the ways in which the TV show Doctor Who tells stories in particular. It’s certainly not a new trick for a show that literally took place in an Agatha Christie story, or that brought Vincent van Gogh into our present so that he could see that his artwork wasn’t in vain.
But this has been different. In an episode where a cartoon character steps off the screen and into the real world, the Doctor is thrown into a pocket universe in which he is a character in a TV show called Doctor Who, and brought face-to-face with three of his biggest fans.
RTD also brings the show’s biggest trolls into the show in the form of Conrad, a villainous Alex Jones-type vlogger who seduces former Doctor companion Ruby Sunday into helping him publiclydiscrediting UNIT, a sometimes top-secret military task force that is also known around the world and is international but also decisively British and for whom the Doctor served as scientific advisor in the 1970s when he was stranded on Earth after the Time Lords punished him by forcing the BBC to cut the program’s budget.
The above sentence mocks the show’s portrayal of UNIT, but is also one of the self-contradictory things that I love about the show. And I’ve really come around on Ruby Sunday and her godawful name, maybe one of the most godawful names in the entirety of literature, but while she sometimes felt as a mix of former Doctor companions Rose Tyler and Amy Pond The Impossible Child, as the show found its rhythm last season so did she.
And so as this last episode felt like it slipped further and further off-model, Ruby Sunday felt ironically like the key fixture that kept it from slipping off into Blake’s 7 land.
In the finale, The Reality War, there are scraps of story that make sense from the perspective of the long-running series. The Rani is up to her usual Rani shenanigans, only instead of the kind of clever plan that a Time Lady scientist with questionable morals would come up with, she plans to release Omega, the Mad First Time Lord, into the world for reasons.
And in order to do that, she has to Kidnap a baby who is the God of Wishes, and she has Conrad read the story of Doctor Who to it on television so that it can create a universe that is parallel - but only slightly! - to our own to release Omega into.
Omega was an engineer who accrued the ability to turn matter into antimatter, and gained such power that the Doctor’s first three incarnations had to team up to defeat him, and then almost destroyed the fifth Doctor from the inside.
Yet, when he emerges, he comes in the form of a CGI skeletal mummy, something that wouldn’t be out of place in Tom Cruise’s The Mummy, or Brandon Fraser’s The Mummy, or that spinoff starring The Rock. The Skeleton of Omega then eats the Rani, who also escapes in another form in a running “bigeneration” gag that is too dumb to detail here.
There’s something in the DNA of Doctor Who that wants a faceoff of two legendarily evil Time Lord scientists with the Doctor, armed only with his wits, caught in between.
Consider also, that this situation with the Rani is another echo of an RTD storyline, in which The Master - the show’s incarnation of evil personified - returns and the Doctor is so overcome to no longer be the last of the Time Lords that he does everything in his power to save, even to redeem The Master.
But there’s just no space in the 50 minute runtime of this show squeeze the Doctor’s moral quandries in, so instead he stands by and watches Omega eat the Rani while the Rani also runs away.
At the end of the Fourth Doctor’s ‘Key of Time’ season-long arc, the Doctor has found all six pieces of chunky plastic that form the titular Key. It’s an incredibly powerful item that can shape space and time into whatever form the possessor wishes. The Doctor and the Time Lady Romana (who is still out there in E Space, a pocket universe, very long story) have been tasked by the White Guardian to assemble the Key and deliver it to him so that Evil can’t control the Key and end life as we know it.
However, the Doctor reasons out that the White Guardian is actually the Black Guardian, and deciding that no being in existence should ever be allowed to own the Key, he disperses it back through time and space. No violence. Just a strict application of a moral and ethical perspective backed by logic and a bit of eccentric hamboning by Tom Baker which is why we love him.
Ncuti Gatwa’s Doctor, on the other hand, remembers that a very powerful instrument/weapon has been placed behind him and he picks it up and blasts Omega out of existence. Making us wonderi, if he had the power to destroy Omega, why are we invested in this battle at all.
Instead we get twenty minutes of sentiment about the Doctor’s “daughter” who isn’t his real daughter because Time Lords are sterile (!) but also she’s always been his companion Belinda’s daughter. Everything from this point forward feels like it takes place in a dream - an entire sequence with the Doctor reuniting with Belinda is shot like a Hallmark movie of the week and is so out-of-place with the rest of the series that I genuinely thought it would end up a dream sequence.
There’s also some of the worst dialogue in the history of the series - and that is quite a history - about how children are made out of wishes and dreams. For a season so focused on storytelling that there’s literally an episode about an African barbershop that is also a story-powered spaceship, the show seemed so intent on rushing towards a heartjerker of a happy ending that it lost track of the positives that Gatwa - breaking out into tears in every previous episode and literally hugging every character who ambled into UNIT in this one - brought to his interpretation of the Doctor while also remembering that the Doctor is an embodiment of everything that Britain wants to feel proud of in herself and her peoples.
Sorry this went WAAAAAAY longer than I’d intended. My thoughts and feelings got away from me.