Wish World / The Reality War

Chapter the 343rd, features a world and society from wish.

Plot:

Just like a Doctor Who producer in an anniversary year, the Rani wants to bring back Omega. He can apparently help to restart the Time Lord race - the only known surviving Time lords (her two bi-generated selves plus the Doctor) having become sterile following a "genetic explosion". Omega is trapped in a dimension that can only be reached by trapping the Doctor on Earth and then destroying the fabric of reality on that planet, over and over until it wears thin, using the power of doubt. To facilitate this, she travels back to Bavaria in 1865 to collect a baby who is one of the pantheon, the god of wishes. She has freed Conrad Clark from prison (after the events of Lucky Day) and has him wishing an approximation of Earth society into existence, warping reality for humans, and repeatedly replaying the 23rd May 2025. [Just as an aside: the Rani once ridiculed the Master for his plotting of silly, labyrinthine schemes - what a hypocrite!] On this version of the world, the Doctor believes he is John Smith, with a wife called Belinda and a daughter called Poppy. Conrad can't imagine a whole world, so people's experiences are created from their warped memories; this includes Poppy, who looks like the baby of the same name from Space Babies. The world adheres to Conrad's old-fashioned and heteronormative values (women should be wives and mothers rather than have paid work, a man can't find another man beautiful, disabled people are kept out of sight, trans people don't exist). Conrad appears on every TV as a cross between a Cbeebies presenter and God, telling stories of Doctor Who and the Rani. Anyone with doubts about this reality is carted off by the police. There are also giant dinosaur skeletons called Bone Beasts roaming about (don't ask why).

Ruby Sunday knows that something is wrong with the world and doorsteps John Smith, but he doesn't remember her. Smith goes to work at a drastically changed UNIT HQ (UNIT is an insurance company in this reality) where everyone but Shirley and Rose has an office job (Susan Triad is the tea lady). Shirley lives in a urban camp with other disabled people, and Rose isn't around at all. On John Smith's TV, Rogue appears, breaking through Conrad's transmission, and explains something about the falseness of Smith's reality. The resultant doubt gets Smith and Belinda carted off to the Bone Palace, the Rani's lair. The Rani explains her plan, and the Doctor realises who he is. She locks him on a balcony as the collective doubt of the populace tears the world apart. The balcony crumbles and the Doctor is falling to his doom when a portal opens, and Anita pulls him through into the safety of the Time Hotel. The day resets again. Anita explains that she has been searching for the Doctor through time, and found him stuck in the Rani's trap. The day keeps repeating, ending with the destruction of the world, but each time reality is wearing thinner, and soon the Rani will be able to free Omega. Anita opens another Time Hotel door into UNIT HQ and keeps it open; this brings reality to everyone there, and they all realise their true identities. Rose appears. The Doctor has a plan to restore reality, but he's worried that it will mean Poppy, who might be his actual half-Time Lord daughter, will cease to exist. Susan Triad (very rapidly) builds a zero room, which Belinda and Poppy get in. The Rani gets the Bone Beasts to attack UNIT HQ and there's a big battle.

The Doctor confronts both the Ranis at the Bone Palace. They have located Omega and free him; he's become a giant ghoul; Omega eats one Rani, and the other one flees. Ruby uses a UNIT transmat to reach Conrad and the wish god baby. She makes a wish and ends Conrad's world. The Doctor fights off Omega with the vindicator, then rushes to find his TARDIS as the Bone Palace disappears. Everyone returns to UNIT HQ, and opens the zero room. Poppy's still in there with Bel. The Doctor leaves the wish god baby, his power removed by the Doctor wishing for no more wishes, with Carla and Cherry Sunday to look after. He and Belinda plan to travel with Poppy in the TARDIS, but they start to forget her as does everyone else except Ruby. Poppy vanishes. Ruby persuades the Doctor that Poppy should exist, and he knows there's only one way to get her back: to use his regeneration energy to adjust the timeline. He goes off alone in the TARDIS and sees his previous Jodie Whittaker incarnation, who gives him a pep talk then disappears. He forces a regeneration, but doesn't change yet - he floods the TARDIS with the energy streaming out of him, then finds himself in a garden (somehow). He finds Belinda and her daughter Poppy. In this timeline, Poppy is 100% human and is Belinda's child with an ex; she has been wanting to get back to Earth on the 24th May 2025 as Poppy needed looking after. The Doctor says goodbye, then materialises the TARDIS in space near to the star that used to be Joy Almondo, and his regeneration takes place: he changes into a body that looks exactly like Rose Tyler, "Oh hello!".

Context:

I watched both episodes back-to-back from the Blu-ray box set on an evening early in December 2025. I viewed it in this way to see how well, or how not so well, both parts cohered as one story, given the major reworking of the ending that I know about now, but didn't know to quite the same level of detail on first viewing (see the Reaction section below for more on that).

Milestone watch: I've been blogging new and classic Doctor Who stories in random order since 2015, and I'm now approaching the point where I catch up. This story completes a season (new series 15, as I call it) and another Doctor's era. Ncuti Gatwa makes it 14 Doctors whose televisual eras have been completed (Doctors 1-4, 6-15), and 40 out of the 41 seasons completed to date (classic seasons 1-18, 20-26, and new series 1-15). Of the 892 episodes of Doctor Who from An Unearthly Child up to The Reality War, four now remain. There is also at the time of writing a new 5-episode spin-off that has begun broadcasting.

First Time Round:

I first watched Wish World on the BBC iplayer around 10am on Saturday 24th May 2025 (the day which the episode revolves around); I was accompanied, as I was for most of the series, by middle child (boy of 16, 15 at the time). The two of us also watched the second and final part The Reality War together, but not on the TV. We occupied two seats in a full house of people watching the episode in the Duke of York's cinema in Brighton. As for the previous year's finale, there were cinema showings across the UK. I couldn't interest either of the other children, though the eldest - back from university - joined his brother and I for a meal in the next door pub The Joker before the screening, then afterwards went out with mates for the evening rather than watch Doctor Who on the big screen. Once we'd said goodbye to him, the two of us went to the cinema and settled in our seats just as the introduction by Varada Sethu was starting. The crowd, including the two of us, made all the right noises of enjoyment throughout. We gasped in amazement at the surprise appearances (Anita from the Time Hotel! Rose Noble!), and were shrieking in amazement by the time we heard Jodie Whittaker's first line of dialogue. I think most people had lost their voices to amazement by the time Ncuti regenerated into Billie Piper at the end. One audience member still mustered decent projection, though. At the very end, as the lights came up - he had held it in through the full credit sequence and the teaser for The War Between the Land and the Sea - he very loudly and in heartfelt fashion exclaimed "What the f**k?!" to everyone in the cinema, and we all chuckled with understanding at his shellshock.

Reaction:

I obviously have to give my reaction to the version of this story that ended up on screen, but before that I'll briefly cover the version that didn't. For Who's 62nd anniversary, Sunday November 23rd 2025, deleted scenes from Ncuti Gatwa's second season were released online for fan appreciation. Not all the deleted scenes, though. As fans instantly pointed out, the clips package had an omission as big as an elephant in the room. Many of those involved had leaked the nature of The Reality War's original ending, but the production team still seemed to want to pretend it didn't happen. The Doctor and his friends were to have finished up in a club dancing in celebration and happiness (an accidentally uploaded promo picture showed a moment from this scene), watched from afar by the Doctor's granddaughter Susan played by Carole Ann Ford, accompanied by Poppy. Both observers would have then slunk away, with Susan saying to Poppy 'Come on, Mum'! It would have been a wonderful moment. The puzzle remains as to what connective story tissue would have joined that final scene to the earlier narrative. It's hard to tell exactly what's been added later, but I think there may be a hint from paying attention to the presence or absence of Rose Noble. The character appears once reality is reintroduced to UNIT HQ, to be emblematic of people of whom Conrad's narrow worldview can't conceive. The character isn't given enough to do, just as she wasn't in the previous year's finale; but, she's there, alongside the rest of the UNIT gang, helping to rescue Poppy (who might cease to exist). This is the first time that Poppy needs to be rescued after the first threat of non-existence. The second time this happens (this egregious double story beat is no doubt a side-effect of the rewrite), everyone else from the gang is still present at UNIT HQ, but Yasmin Finney obviously wasn't free and Rose is absent.

So, everything up to Poppy's miraculous survival in Susan Triad's zero room was probably material from before the rewrite. Then, perhaps, everyone forgot about Poppy in a similar way to how they do in the final version, but without Ruby as the lone dissenting voice. Poppy wouldn't have vanished, and would instead have met up with Susan for the original ending. This would explain loose ends in the final version; the cameo appearances of Susan earlier in the season, for example, end up going nowhere and linking to nothing, as does the stand-out line from 2024's finale where the Doctor explains that he has a grandchild but no children (as Time Lords tend to do things out of chronological order). A neat little tie-up that we did end up getting is Ruby's awareness of parallel realities because of her experiences in 73 Yards. This is used to good effect in Wish World to explain her distrust of Conrad, then used again in The Reality War as an explanation for why she alone still remembers Poppy. Unfortunately, this creates what for me is the most unfortunate impact of the rewrite. In the - rather wonderful, horror-inflected - scene of Bel and the Doctor passing Poppy's coat between them as it gets smaller and smaller, Ruby sees what is happening, and knows what they've forgotten. Was this scene in the original version? Could have been, but I think probably not. The next sequence can't have been, though: the Doctor arrives at UNIT HQ and - with persuasion from Ruby - goes off to realign the universe to bring Poppy back, with a hint that it will cost his life. The surprise of Jodie Whittaker's cameo, and the scene where the Doctor returns to normality and finds that everything has changed, with Bel always having had a child to whom she has been trying to get back all this time, distract one on first watch from the the devastating truth that the Ncuti Doctor never says goodbye to Ruby.

Millie Gibson might appear instantly that the Christmas special starts in 2026, of course, but the damage is done. Ruby was Gatwa's first and most important companion. She sends him on the mission to save Poppy, but by the end of The Reality War hasn't seen him again, and knows nothing of whether he's been successful or not. His sole goodbye scene is with more recent companion Bel, who - unlike Ruby - was blissfully unaware that anything was wrong before. If he had had the choice, I don't think writer and showrunner Russell T Davies would have structured the story like this. Wish World / The Reality War as a whole is therefore compromised, and doomed always to be seen more as a set of scenes than a story. Luckily, most of its individual scenes are great - imagine if they weren't? - but there will always be the lingering impression whenever one watches it that they don't quite fit together. The story has forced upon it the job of completing a Doctor's era thematically, and instead summarises the last two years of Doctor Who more as a highlights package. Everyone significant returns for at least a brief moment. All the many UNIT regulars are there, as mentioned, including Susan Triad and Mel, who hadn't returned earlier in the season. They are given fun alter egos in Conrad's world as employees of the Unified National Insurance Team. It's great to see Rogue appear on John Smith's TV to alert him to the inconsistencies of his current reality, and to say "I love you"; Ruby's mum and grandmother get to adopt the wish god baby at the end, which is a perfect fit and harks back to Ncuti's very first full story The Church on Ruby Road; best of all for me was the unexpected return of Anita from the time hotel, one of my favourite characters of recent years. The Doctor regenerates in the presence of the Joy star (like Anita, returning from the last Christmas special). Even the Giggle is heard from the story in which Ncuti first made an appearance.

Another regular guest star returning who's featured throughout Ncuti's two seasons is Anita Dobson as Mrs. Flood, one of the Two Ranis (Dobson's exit line doing a gag about The Two Ronnies got a good, groanful reception in the cinema where I first watched the story, though I'm sure a lot of the audience were too young to have got the reference). She's very good value as we've come to expect, and has great screen chemistry and interplay with Archie Panjabi as the lead Rani. Every scene with Panjabi is lifted by her presence, the costume is great and it's great to see her zooming about the sky on her space jet-ski. It's also great to have a brief flashback to Kate O'Mara playing the character, and to have a Mel-Rani face-off . It seems a shame for Panjabi to be killed off, but maybe she could survive being eaten by Omega and return one day. The Omega creature is nicely realised, but it does seem odd to bring him back not looking or acting anything like the character previously did. At least the difference is explained in the script, and it is hard to think what other Gallifreyan MacGuffin could be the Rani's goal. Also unfortunate is Gatwa's stressing of a different syllable when pronouncing Omega's name compared to everyone else in the story (and everyone through Doctor Who's history); but, he's a Time Lord, so can say things however he wants. The larger-than-life villainy on display somewhat overshadows Conrad Clark, but the script makes a virtue of this. Conrad finds some measure of goodness and humanity within himself in wishing his world (as Ruby says, it could have been a lot worse) and he gets a happy ending. There's freaky visual interest provided by the Seekers and the Bone Beasts, as well as a nice action set piece involving the latter when they attack UNIT HQ.

Varada Sethu gets less interesting, and less effective, material here than Millie Gibson: the moment where she runs from her house into the woods of Conrad's world and screams in despair is great. If she has such doubts, though, then the various moments where she seems disproportionately aggressive at the idea of Poppy not being her daughter don't ring true. Sienna-Robyn Mavanga-Phipps as Poppy is astonishingly good, though, and Sethu works well with her. With any time-travel story where history is altered, there is always uncertainty about whether things have been put back as they always should have been at the end, or have changed. Which was the prime timeline? Did Bel always have a daughter, and the initial timeline was the one that was out of whack? Maybe it doesn't matter, but personally I'd like to know one way or the other. Talking of the end, I'll finish by looking at the denouement as it finally ended up, rather than the one in a parallel universe of potential story energy. The accumulation of returning elements already there before the story had to become a regeneration story look difficult to top, but Davies pulls out all the stops such that the last 20 minutes or so achieve an operatically unhinged energy. With everything else seeming to leak, the production team's keeping Jodie Whittaker's appearance secret was a major coup. Every moment and every line of the scene of her and Gatwa is wonderful. She was always a more awkward Doctor when dealing with emotions than Gatwa's take on the Time Lord, and this is addressed in the final exchange where Whittaker feels she should tall Yaz that she loves her, and Gatwa replies "You never do... but she knows". Just when one might think that the surprise level has peaked, Gatwa regenerates into Billie flippin' Piper. As the man in the cinema suggested (see First Time Round section above) the story ends with the consummate WTF moment.

Connectivity:

This is irritating; the connection between Wish World / The Reality War and Redacted could have been the slam dunk that both have surprise appearances by Jodie Whittaker as the Doctor towards the end. Unfortunately, that's only true of Redacted series 1, not series 2. Oh well. Instead, it will have to suffice that both stories feature displaced people living in a makeshift community ruled over by a cruel female villain (the Rani, Honour Bray).

Deeper Thoughts:

Ncuti in summary. In the first month or two of 2025, it didn't feel (at least to me) like the year would see the end of an era. 2024's Christmas special Joy to the World was fresh in my mind, Doctor Who was gearing up for the second season of a bright, young and relatively new Doctor, paired with an intriguing new companion. At that point or thereabouts (the producers of Doctor Who are being a bit cagey about the exact timing), Ncuti Gatwa had already finished filming on the series. As mentioned in the Reaction section above, it's common knowledge that the ending originally planned for The Reality War would have seen some loose ends left to be tied up about the Doctor, his granddaughter and daughter; but, at the end of it, the Doctor would be unregenerated and celebrating with his friends. The next season, which was already at least partially scripted, would have picked up from there. It didn't come to pass: either Disney+ delayed too long in making a decision on whether to coproduce that next season, or they had already made a decision but it wasn't communicated publicly, and the BBC needed time to decide what to do next with Doctor Who. It doesn't really matter why or how, the important thing is that it was too much of a delay for Ncuti Gatwa and, no doubt, for his agent. Put yourself in the agent's place: your client is a hot property, and he's getting offers for movies. As I said on the blog back in 2023 (see the Deeper Thoughts section of the Boom Town post for more details), Gatwa was probably "the most up-and-coming" of any actor on taking up the Doctor role, "young and exciting, and clearly has the potential to move on to greater things". A man in a hurry, in other words (even if he hadn't had an agent pushing him onwards).

Ncuti was clearly up for doing a third year (likely no more than that) if and only if he could go straight into making it after his second season. The delay scuppered that, and so the finale needed to be rewritten and reshot to divest him of the baggage of association with a high-profile role, letting him move on. I can forgive showrunner Russell T Davies's white lies stating that Gatwa's two-year stint was "always the plan": hell hath no fury like a mass of Doctor Who fans scorned, after all; it's not Gatwa's fault the plan changed, and nobody sensible wants him to be hounded by those fans forever more. The pronouncement had some traces of truth, anyway: the plan probably always was for Gatwa to film his regeneration in 2025, but he was almost certainly expected to film another season's worth of episodes first. In that Boom Town post's Deeper Thoughts section, I drew parallels with Gatwa's and David Tennant's profiles when they were cast as the Doctor. It's an intriguing counterfactual to consider what might have happened if Tennant in 2007 had faced a delay before his third season went into production: would his fan love for Doctor Who have made him hang around for an extended period associated with but not playing the role of the Doctor? It's nice to think that fandom would conquer all, but Tennant too was a young actor with bags of promise, and he too would likely have bowed to pressure from his agent. The November 2025 comments from The Rest is Entertainment podcast (amidst an otherwise even-handed reaction to the Disney+ decision) that Gatwa wasn't sufficiently ambassadorial - with the hint that this was because he wasn't sufficiently invested in the hugeness of the role - were therefore a bit unfair. Could anything Ncuti have done in promoting the show have got more people subscribing or watching on Disney+? I doubt it.

I think the situation probably arose simply because the first few Gatwa stories didn't land with a lot of the audience. I didn't mind any of his opening three stories (The Church on Ruby Road, Space Babies and The Devil's Chord), but I nonetheless look back and think they are probably the weakest three stories of any that he did. Even when his first series hit its stride (with 73 Yards and Dot and Bubble, stories that were - for me at least - up there with some of the best that Doctor Who of any era has had to offer) Ncuti Gatwa was barely in it. With hindsight it's easy to suggest it was a bad move to cast someone who couldn't start straight away (Gatwa had commitments to Sex Education, the series that had first brought him to the public notice, that overlapped with the recording dates for those first Who stories made for his era, meaning they had to be 'Doctor lite'). I'm terribly conflicted on this: 73 Yards wouldn't work if the Doctor was in it throughout, and it's marvellous exactly how it is. Did the programme win that battle only to lose the war? People carp about the finale of that first year (I think both parts, The Legend of Ruby Sunday and Empire of Death, are cruelly underrated), but was its quality irrelevant? Had people already given up because the first part of the season featured stories that were either a bit naff, or didn't feature the Doctor, or both? We'll never know for sure. At the end of 2024, Joy to the World came along and was simply joyful (as mentioned above, the character of Anita from that story returning unexpectedly in The Reality War was a glorious high point for me, and I'm sure for others too). No matter how good any story was from then on, though, the series was a lame duck as far as the press was concerned.

If the first season was under-Doctored, the second was overshadowed. From months before its first episode aired, the tsunami of speculation about Doctor Who's future could only ever drown out anything positive about the 2025 run. By that time, those reshoots had been done to change the ending of the final episode, and some details of that had leaked. This was a shame as - despite some issues with script logic in a few of the stories, though nothing bad enough to impact their initial viewing - the series had corkers enough for everyone: if you liked action, there was The Well; if you liked quirkiness, there was Lux; if you liked camp splendour, there was The Interstellar Song Contest. As detailed above, the finale proved to be a bit lumpy and bumpy, with the story equivalent of crunching gear changes happening in a number of places towards the end of the second part. This was probably unavoidable given the behind-the-scenes reworking. I'm still fixated on just how extensive those reshoots were. Behind the scenes footage shows producer Vicki Delow paying tribute to Gatwa as he wrapped on the series. This takes place on the UNIT set, which is hosting a veritable gang show - not just the UNIT regulars who might have been around anyway then for production of The War Between the Land and the Sea, but also Steph De Whalley as Anita and Susan Twist as Susan Triad. That's a lot of people to pay, and they also got Jodie Whittaker in for a day too. Given time, maybe Andrew Pixley will get sufficient access to document the truth for posterity. Or maybe not (there are still details from Christopher Eccleston's turbulent time filming his single season of the show that are tantalisingly unclear over twenty years later). Anyway, I doubt they'd have faked Delow's tribute just for Doctor Who Unleashed. (Side note: Unleashed and its energetic presenter Steffan Powell are a highlight of this era; I hope both show and presenter return when the main show comes back in 2026).

Whatever else one thinks of the creative decisions of showrunner Russell T Davies, one has to concede that he made original choices during his second tenure regarding the use of returning elements from the show's history. If you truly had the Toymaker, Sutekh and the Rani on your returning foes bingo card before the Bad Wolf Studios era of Who began in November 2023, then I salute you. This desire to do something a bit different, though, leaves Gatwa as the only Doctor never to have stories fighting against any of the 'big three' forces of antagonism of the Whoniverse (the Daleks, the Cybermen, the Master) and only the second not to have faced off against the Daleks. David Tennant's 14th Doctor at least got the Children in Need short with a Dalek (and, you know, he'd already played the part and had three full-on Dalek stories first time round). For Paul McGann, though, Skaro's finest only featured as off-camera voices. He only did the one story, though. It would be a shame if this dented Gatwa's legitimacy in anyone's eyes. Ncuti himself covered this in a The One Show interview in July 2025, saying "I never got to fight a Dalek. A Dalek or a Cyberman. I mean, just the crux of Doctor Who", then adding a tease: "So, might do that! Might go fight a Dalek!". He won't, of course. Even if he was serious, his agent wouldn't let him, much as I'd love to sit down on Christmas Day 2026 to a surprise reappearance of Gatwa allying himself with Billie Piper to defeat the dastardly dustbins. What about a few years after that? I suspect that Gatwa is going to be as busy in that time as Matt Smith - who has never returned to Doctor Who despite seeming quite enthusiastic about the idea. So, even if enough time passes to pacify an agent, it seems improbable. Nothing's impossible though, and Gatwa's Doctor clearly has unfinished business with his granddaughter Susan: one day, he could come back - yes, one day...

In Summary:

What the f**k?!

The Interstellar Song Contest

Chapter the 337th, where Graham Norton finally appears in a Doctor Who story (after a couple of previous attempts to gatecrash).

Plot:

[A recent story of the streaming era, so beware of spoilers ahead.] The Doctor and Bel materialise in Harmony Arena, a space station in a protective transparent bubble, in the year 2925. The arena is playing host to the interstellar song contest, presented by Rylan Clark (who's been revied from cryogenic freeze). The TARDIS team stay to watch the show, but soon the Doctor suspects something is wrong. Behind the scenes, one of the broadcasting crew Wynn from the planet Hellia is in cahoots with a terrorist from the same planet, Kid, and they have taken over. The audience in the arena including the Doctor are all ejected into space. They are still contained in the bubble, but frozen. The Doctor almost succumbs to freezing, but at the last second a vision of his granddaughter Susan inspires him to propel himself back. He meets up with Mike and Gary Gabbastone who help him hack into the arena's systems. Kid plans to use a delta wave to kill all the trillions of people watching as revenge against the corporation that sponsors the contest, who ravaged the planet Hellia for crops to make their product. The Doctor defeats Kid using a hard light hologram of himself. He is uncharacteristically rough with Kid, using the hologram to repeatedly hurt him. Kid and Wynn are arrested and taken away, and the Doctor, Mike and Gary work together to bring back and revive all the ladies and gentlemen floating in space. In a historic exhibit about the contest, a hologram of Graham Norton tells the Doctor and Bel that the Earth was destroyed on May 24th 2025. They have all the vindicator readings they need to travel back to that date; when they arrive, the TARDIS doors open and there is an explosion. Meanwhile, one of the last people to be revived is Mrs. Flood. She turns out to be an old enemy of the Doctor's, the Rani, and has been in the cold of space too long. She bi-generates, becoming two Ranis.

Context:

The Blu-ray box set of the ever-so slightly misnamed Doctor Who Season Two was delivered through my letterbox in late August 2025. This was not the William Hartnell nor even the David Tennant season two, but instead the second - and presumably final - series of Ncuti Gatwa's Doctor that was broadcast earlier in 2025. Since the blog started in 2015, whenever a new box set of recently-aired episodes arrived I would take the opportunity to use a random factor in deciding whether I would blog a story from the set, and which one if so. As this may be my last chance to do such a thing (for a while at least), I couldn't pass it up. There remained three stories from 2025 left un-blogged, The Well, the Interstellar Song Contest and two-part finale Wish World / The Reality War. I therefore rolled a d4, the first three numbered sides representing each of those three stories in turn, the fourth meaning no story would be blogged at this time. It came up as a two. I therefore skipped the earlier episodes and watched the sixth story on the set first, on my own one evening in late August.

Milestone watch: I've been blogging new and classic Doctor Who stories in random order since 2015, and I'm now approaching the point where I catch up. Beyond the six stories now completed from the 2025 series, the tally stands at 12 Doctors' televisual eras completed (Doctors 1-4, 6-9 and 11-14), and 38 out of the 41 seasons completed to date (classic seasons 1-18, 20-26, and new series 1, 2, and 4-14). Of the 892 episodes of Doctor Who from An Unearthly Child up to The Reality War, 10 now remain.

First Time Round:

Through the previous five Saturdays of the 2025 run, my viewing was generally getting earlier and earlier. Episodes became available at 8am in the UK, but I like to sleep in a bit at weekends, so I never watched one quite that early. The Interstellar Song Contest was probably the one I watched soonest after it landed. At approximately 9.15am on the day it became available on the BBC iplayer (the 17th May 2025), Scott - fan friend mentioned a few times before on the blog - commented to our fan WhatsApp group warning the rest of us that we shouldn't go online until we'd watched the story as there would be spoilers everywhere. I viewed it as soon as I could get the middle child (boy of 16, 15 at the time, and the biggest Doctor Who fan in the house after me) settled in front of the living room TV with me.

Reaction:

Just as in his first term as showrunner, Russell T Davies seems to have a structure for each season of his second era. Each corresponding one of the eight episodes of 2024 and 2025 have similar shapes: the first two stories of both are relatively lightweight introductory tales, the first set out in space, the second in Earth's past. Those second episodes both feature a new villain from the Big Bad band that is the Pantheon of Discord, a taster for the two-part finales that will feature a returning villain from Doctor Who's history that has become a member of said group of titanic nasties. Third is a futuristic actioner with lots of hardware; the fourth stories are Doctor-lite, contemporary Earth stories centred around Ruby Sunday and featuring UNIT (teeing that organisation up for a return appearance in the two-part finale too). The fifth story is the thoughtful one, leaving the sixth - the last before that big finale - to be the camp one. Rogue filled this space in 2024, and in 2025 The Interstellar Song Contest manages to out-camp Rogue (no mean feat). The Doctor even uses the word to describe one moment during the action (using a confetti cannon to fly through space back to safety) - one of a few moments where the story comes as close as it can to a wink at the camera. In a way, though, this is misdirection. In the same way as long ago in 2005 episode Bad Wolf, the audience is presented with a high-concept idea (extreme futuristic versions of contemporary game shows in that instance) to disguise a twist involving the return of a classic Who enemy.

The 2025 high-concept idea ("Die Hard meets Eurovision" was the brief according to writer Juno Dawson) has us looking one way, when from another direction we're suddenly surprised by the return not just of a classic Who enemy, but a classic Who ally as well. Unlike in 2005, the surprises were not blown in the Coming Soon trailer the previous week either. These significant revelations from the season's arc plot (see Deeper Thoughts section for more on them) don't come at the expense of the story of the week. As well as being camp, The Interstellar Song Contest is pacey and fun. After several stories fumbling the motivations of their 'toxic' male villains, Kid is given a solid, straightforward rationale for his actions, and Freddie Fox brings the character to life excellently. Unlike with Alan Budd and Conrad Clark, the audience can legitimately feel sympathy for Kid's cause even though they don't agree with the murderous plans he makes in its name. The scene near the end of the Doctor ('ice' put in his heart by his time in the cold of space) torturing Kid shows the Doctor as the more toxic of the two males involved. It's a nice counterpoint tonally to the rest of the piece, a bit of grit in the oyster. The only issue is that it doesn't feel resolved; the Doctor doesn't face any consequences and barely even reflects. This is one of a few loose ends. The company that destroyed Hellia presumably faces no comeuppance, and the planet's unfair reputation remains in place. With the antagonists still alive at the end and all that unfinished business, there is potential for Kid and accomplice Wynn to return (if Doctor Who starts up again sometime soon).

Another good aspect of the season-wide plot shown here is Bel's character arc; this story sees her fully embrace the companion role, with her "Oh, we're so staying" at the start when she realises where she is, and the early scenes of her enjoying the contest. Again, this feels unresolved by the end of this story and the season: the trajectory feels like it's leading to a choice of whether to stay home once she gets there, or continue travelling with the Doctor; that's not what transpires (although it may have been part of the original plan before Ncuti decided to leave). All these loose ends are forgotten as the end blows everything away (somewhat literally) and moves on to the next thing. Does it make any sense, though? With the vindicator readings, the TARDIS is finally able to travel back to the 24th of May 2025, but when it reaches there, there's an explosion. This is the destruction of the planet caused by the Rani, evidence of which has been scattered through previous episodes. In the finale, though, we find that the Doctor is a part of the Rani's plans; his doubt contributes to the gradual destruction of the planet seen in the following episodes. So, how could it have happened before the TARDIS took him to Earth? This is more an issue arising from Wish World and The Reality War than the story that preceded them, though, so it might just need to be chalked up to 'timey-wimey' and put to the back of our minds when looking at The Interstellar Song Contest.

Even though it briefly features and leads in to Time Lord friends and foes and their universe-scale machinations, The Interstellar Song Contest's strength is in showcasing ordinary people / aliens. The story isn't really like Die Hard; in that movie the hero is operating alone, trapped in the enclosed area where the action's taking place. Here it's a slightly different trope: the plucky band of misfits who seem totally out-gunned, but who come together to win the day. Each one of these is written and performed well: the married couple having a realistic row, Mike and Gary (played by Kadiff Kirwan and Charlie Condou) turn out to have the tech skills and nursing skills to help the Doctor; the singer harbouring a secret and her manager (Miriam-Teak Lee and Akemnji Ndifornyen); the director behind the scenes (Kiruna Stamell). Then there are a couple of people gamely playing themselves, Rylan Clark and Graham Norton. Production values are consistently good: design, CGI and physical effects and prosthetics combine to make an expansive and diverse set of aliens in a consistent, believable world. Composer Murray Gold rises to the challenge of creating some Eurovision-like songs as well as his usual incidental music. There are some great lines in the script ("You'd need to be some sort of insane genius." "Hello. I'm the Doctor."). It all adds up to a very enjoyable experience.

Connectivity:

Both The Interstellar Song Contest and The Two Doctors include an appearance from a 1960s companion, appearing in the series again for the first time since The Five Doctors in 1983 (Susan, Jamie). Both feature female villains that first appeared in the Colin Baker era of Doctor Who (the Rani, Chessene).

Deeper Thoughts:

Never overlook the obvious. Unless you're busy. Sometime in 2005 before the first run of the new, returned Doctor Who was complete, there was an article or maybe a released synopsis that described eleventh episode of that year Boom Town. It said that it would involve the Doctor running into a woman from his past, or words to that effect. Immediately, a lot of the fan community speculated that it was the Rani, or Susan, or Romana (in that order of perceived likelihood). Needless to say, everyone that speculated wildly was then equally wildly disappointed when it turned out to be Annette Badland returning as Margaret Blaine, a character seen a few weeks earlier in Aliens of London / World War Three. Thereafter, various hints or non-hints caused similar bouts of speculation to occasionally break out. The trailer running ahead of Peter Capladi's second season finished with a brief clip from The Woman Who Lived: Maisie Williams's character unmasks, an astonished Doctor says "You!", and she replies "What took you so long, old man?". There was a short period of fevered imaginings about who Williams could be playing. The perceived order of likelihood this time was Susan, Romana, the Rani, mainly based on the actor's age. The disappointment was the same, and for the same reason: it turned out just to be a recurring character from that particular season, not the return of some longer-term character from the show's history. Over the years, it wasn't even necessary for any particular event to spur on the speculation, Every year from 2005, someone somewhere - probably multiple someones in many places - were fervently expecting the return of the Rani, or Susan, or Romana.

For every fan speculating there was a least another folding their arms and telling that first fan that they were mistaken. The Rani, to pick one example, was never coming back according to this second group. I have to admit I leant more towards their way of thinking. One reason for this was the Rani as a character doesn't have much definition beyond 'villainous female Time Lord'. Any individuality came from the performance Kate O' Mara gave in the two stories she appeared in as the Rani in the late 1980s. The creators of the character Pip and Jane Baker had put down on the page that she was amoral rather than evil. She was only interested in science and saw humans as experimental fodder, but she wouldn't harm a human if it didn't advance her studies. O' Mara didn't play her like that, though, she played her (impeccably) as a hissable panto villain. It didn't seem worth bringing the character back unless you could bring the actor back too. O' Mara, though, wasn't really doing television acting once the show was back (she only has two imdb credits post-2005). She then passed away in 2014. The same year, the Master was returned to Doctor Who regenerated into a woman. So, the female Time Lord panto villain gap was filled. What would be the point after that in bringing back the Rani? Of course, the fun of the character's return in Ncuti Gatwa's era is that there is no real point. The speculators had been assuming every female villain in the show was going to turn out to be the Rani for nearly 20 years, it would be far too obvious for the mysterious Mrs. Flood to turn out to be the Rani. The arms-folded naysayers like myself, though, had been so consistently proved right about the character's non-return, over and again for nearly twenty years, that it flipped things and the most obvious reveal turned out to be the most surprising.

Susan then returns in the self-same episode. Russell T Davies had put a reference to Susan in The Devil's Chord in Gatwa's first season. The Doctor telling Ruby that he has a granddaughter was the most explicit reference to the character in decades. Later in the year, there were hints and speculations by the characters that the mysterious woman whose face the Doctor and Ruby keep seeing across the universe was Susan. That character's name was Susan, and she was even played by an actor called Susan. It was far too obvious that she would turn out to be the real, actual Susan. And she wasn't; it was too soon for everybody's guard to be down such that the obvious return would still be surprising. Davies waited until the next season when everyone had forgotten, and then brought her back. Not in a big finale, just in the middle of the penultimate story of the year that everyone might have assumed was all about Space Eurovision. The series has pulled similar switcheroos before. For example, in 1980s story Remembrance of the Daleks, there is a character that looks and sounds a lot like Davros who turns out not to be Davros. Davros then returns anyway, but not where a viewer might have expected. Writer of that story Ben Aaronovitch originally only had the first twist; he realised during rewriting that the audience would feel shortchanged, and included Davros after all. Davies has done the same, but over the course of a season rather than a story. Where can the show go from here (assuming it comes back)? There's still Romana, of course, but I can't see any particular reason to bring her back (time travelling companion whom the Doctor fancies has been done with River Song). I was wrong about the Rani, though, so what do I know? 

In Summary:

Camp and fun, just like Eurovision, but pacier and with added Doctor Who continuity: what's not to like?

Time and the Rani

Chapter The 231st, when Doctor Who reaches the Emulator orchestra hit sample era.

Plot:

The Rani has allied herself with some giant and not that quiet bat people, the Tetraps, and with them has enslaved the locals on the planet Lakertya, set up a laboratory there and installed a giant brain. This may already sound like a bizarre plan, but you ain't heard nothing yet! She plans to blow up an asteroid orbiting the planet that is composed of strange matter; this will turn the planet and brain into a time manipulator apparently. She has abducted various geniuses from across time and space, and linked them up to the brain to work on the chemical formula for a detonator for the asteroid. One of the geniuses she has left a space for is the Doctor. She causes his TARDIS to crash land on Lakertya, which brings about the Doctor's regeneration. She and a Tetrap bundle the new Doctor out of the TARDIS, leaving Mel unconscious lying on the control room floor. Before the Rani links the Doctor into the brain circuit, she drugs him to induce temporary amnesia, and pretends to be Mel (wearing a wig and dressing in the same costume); this is so he will unwittingly help fix her broken lab equipment. Mel befriends a Lakertyan rebel Ikona, avoids the Tetraps and the Rani's explosive bubble traps, and breaks into the lab while the Rani is elsewhere. At first, neither she nor the Doctor trust that the other is who they say they are. Persuaded at last, the Doctor plays along with the returning Rani for a while to try to get information on her plans, but she sees through this and connects him to the brain circuit.

The Doctor's eccentricities impact the collective genius brain, so the Rani disconnects him, and Mel traps her. It's too late, though, as the formula for detonating the asteroid has been found. The Rani escapes, sets the countdown to missile launch, and goes off towards her TARDIS to escape the planet. The Doctor and Mel remove the explosive anklets that the Rani has put on the Lakertyans to keep them in line, and place them round the giant brain. The Doctor sabotages equipment in the laboratory to jam the countdown. He confronts the Rani before she escapes and bluffs that the Lakertyans are waiting to attack. She activates the anklets, destroying the brain and causing the countdown to resume. Unfortunately, this kills Beyus the leader of the Lakertyans, who stayed to guard the brain. As there was a delay, the missile sails past the asteroid and the planet is safe. The Rani escapes in her TARDIS but the Tetraps, having learned that she was going to abandon them on the planet as it was destroyed, have broken in, and capture her to take her back to their home planet. The Doctor assures Mel that his new persona will grow on her; they say goodbye to the Lakertyans and resume their travels in space and time.

Context:

I didn't make an attempt to interest any of the family in a story with such a poor reputation (see First Time Round for more details of the regard in which Time and the Rani is generally held), so watched an episode every couple of nights on my own over a week in May 2022 from the Blu-ray disc in the Collection box-set. I watched the standard versions as transmitted* rather than the alternative extended episodes on another disc in the set. I then spent a couple of weeks not writing up my notes into a blog post; no particular reason for this, just a lot going on in the house at the moment. I have, for example, had to watch all seven episodes of Stranger Things 4 volume 1 twice over with my ST-enamoured middle child (boy of 12), and that takes up a lot of time, believe me. 

* The beginning credits of part 4 as transmitted had an early version of the title sequence where the Doctor's face is less visible, half faded into the starfield background; it is not reproduced on the Blu-ray. At the time, as a teenager overthinking it, I believed this was deliberate to tie in with the narrative, showing the Doctor is under threat in the story (as he's plugged into the Rani's brain drain circuit). It was, of course, just a mistake. 

First Time Round:

Time and the Rani is a very unpopular story. In the few whole series polls run by Doctor Who Magazine over the years, and in various other polls online that one could find with a google, it's consistently in the bottom 10, usually the bottom three. At the time it first went out, though, it didn't feel that way to me. This is very different to the other classic series story that regularly languishes at or near the bottom of polls, also coincidentally an introductory story for a new Doctor, The Twin Dilemma. The reaction of people I came into contact with first time round to Colin Baker's debut was in keeping with its reputation now (see the blog post here for the full gory details); Time and the Rani at the time felt like an exciting new start. I remember watching the first episode and enjoying a lot of it - it's always fun seeing a new Doctor in action (unless the script has him strangling his friend). A clear memory of the broadcast of the second episode is that I - having just started my final GCSE year at high school in September 1987 - was at a careers and education fair, in the masonic hall in Worthing - during the day, and made my own way home, excited to press record on the video to tape the next episode and see how they resolved the cliffhanger. I didn't think it was perfect by any means, and as the season progressed I thought later stories improved on Time and the Rani; but, I can honestly say that first time round I liked it, over-the-top camp in technicolour, risible dialogue and all.

Reaction:

I said above that this story felt like a brand new start, but it is talked about more as the last gasp of the previous era. The writers Pip and Jane Baker had previously written only for Colin Baker, and in the previous year had become the go-to team for putting together scripts for the production team when circumstances meant they were in a last minute rush. The story, so popular wisdom has it, was a hastily rewritten version of what was going to be Colin Baker's swansong, as he'd been offered one more go at the start of the next season to pass the baton on to the next Doctor. Coincidentally, in the gap between watching these episodes and writing up the blog post, I've finished reading Richard Molesworth's excellent recent work of Doctor Who research The John Nathan Turner Production Diary 1979-1990, which puts the commissioning of this story into context and casts some doubt on the popular wisdom. The book is the result of Molesworth's extensive analysis of a mountain of archived paperwork to create an approximation of the production diary of the final decade of Classic Who, and so gives the best illustration of what day-to-day working was like. From this, it's clear that when the scripts for Time and the Rani were commissioned on 22nd December 1986, Colin was already confirmed not to be coming back to do one story (he'd made that very clear several weeks earlier at the start of November). Undoubtedly, story discussions had happened prior to that date, and maybe Nathan-Turner was still hoping that he could tempt his previous leading man back. There were, though, still several months to go before production on the story started, during which time the new script editor Andrew Cartmel arrived to make his mark by encouraging rewrites.

On the whole, I think collectively he and the writers succeeded in making it more of a celebration of the new rather than the old. Apart from the presence of the Rani (who'd only appeared once before) and Sylvester McCoy's predecessor's outfit, which is dispensed with early on, there's no links back to the Baker era. The tone is very different, as one would expect when the script editor of all of Colin's tenure Eric Saward was no longer involved. There's a moment at the end where Donald Pickering's Beyus sacrifices himself a bit pointlessly, staying in the brain chamber until it's safely blown up, so he gets obliterated with it. A common theory is that this would instead have been the Doctor if Colin had come back for these four episodes, and that's what would have caused him to regenerate. I'm not massively convinced of this, though: Beyus dies on his own in a not particularly heroic way, while the main action - including the confrontation with the villain - is happening elsewhere. I think it's more likely that it's just a less effective bit of writing left in the final product. It's not made very clear why Beyus remains at the end to get blown up, as he doesn't actually do anything, then later dialogue seems to suggest he was being overcautious; "He must have been convinced that it was the only way to be certain of saving the rest of us" isn't exactly an endorsement of his actions. It's not the only less effective bit of writing. As in all their stories, Pip and Jane cannot do dialogue that sounds anything like anyone would actually ever say. There's enough to and fro, escape and recapture of characters that if you removed it and tightened up the script you could lose the entire third episode, but this isn't unique to this story by any means: there are very many classic Who four-parters where part three is just marking time. Weighed up against these negatives, though, is a lot of good stuff.

Things that are good about Time and the Rani: the new theme arrangement and title sequence, which uses CG elements for the first time in Who's history; the effects work throughout, particularly the combination of techniques used to create the bubble traps; Keff McCulloch's score, which - even more than Dominic Glynn's work the previous year - embraces the synth pop music of the time and brings a lot of energy, taking the series into its final musical era of the 20th century; the extensive location footage, and the use of models and set dressing elements at the location to create a unique alien world (it's not really correct for the world as outlined in the script, alas, but it is visually interesting); the colourful set design; the Lakertyans look great in terms of both make-up and costume, and the Tetrap design is great too - their long poisonous tongues are yuck, and the visualisation of their four-directional eyesight is also interesting and well done. There's one scene that is particularly strong, a stand-out of the era that never gets much attention: the Doctor and Mel dance around one another, each thinking the other is an imposter, then take each others pulse (the double heartbeat or lack thereof proving that they are or are not a Time Lord). It's lovely, and the relationship between them shown in this short section is so warm compared to the more antagonistic Doctor / companion dynamic of recent years. A lot of the reason for this greater warmth and tactility is new leading man Sylvester McCoy. He delivers a great performance here despite reportedly receiving little to no direction on how to attack the role. Already there is some clowning and some brooding (the proportions of each in the mix would be continually adjusted for the better in his future stories). The clowning should not be dismissed, as it is a vital ingredient to the character, and there are many great moments of physicality, like his Chaplin-esque haring around a corner to a halt bouncing on one foot.

Best of all is Kate O'Mara. Getting her back after a couple of years to play the Rani was a huge coup, as in the interim she'd become mega-famous in a recurring role in US soap Dynasty. It's hard to reconcile what the Pip and Jane Rani scripts tell about who the character is (amoral scientist who does not care about the repercussions of her experiments) and what's actually shown (glam panto villain with an epic lip curl), so my advice is not to try and just go with it. Overshadowed in her first story by having to share the antagonism with Anthony Ainley's Master, this story gives O'Mara space to shine, and I'm glad that the story exists just for that reason. I'm certain that many people think that the central idea of the first couple of episodes to have the Rani impersonate Mel is 100% cringe, but I think it's some kind of twisted genius. Bonnie Langford seemed game to have herself sent up, O'Mara attacks the task with brio, and the script gives her some great moments of switching being panto evil and Mel's ridiculously bouncy positivity within the same scene. Every moment that the Doctor's eccentricity annoys the Rani and she has to suppress it is a joy to watch (at least for me). None of this, or anything else in the story, is deep or dark, but that was all to come; also to come was a better thought-out companion character that wasn't just the one-note sketch of bouncy positivity with which poor Langford was saddled. It's sad that Colin was robbed of his regeneration story, but Sylv got a proper post-regeneration story, complete with all the beats (early confusion, picking a new costume, proving himself to his sceptical companion, defeating a returning villain to show he's still the same Time Lord), and it was just the start of a new phase of Doctor Who that would have its missteps for sure, but overall would get better and better.

Connectivity: 

Both Time and the Rani and The Dominators see at least one member of an invading race accompanied by some monstrous assistants arriving on a peaceful planet (that looks like a quarry) and using some of the populace as a workforce. In both instances, they don't intend to take over the planet long term, but instead are planning to blow something up to use for another purpose, which in both cases will mean the planet is destroyed but only as a means to an end. Dialogue in both stories mentions quarks (though it's referring to the actual sub-atomic particles in Time and the Rani, not some robots that happen to named after them).

Deeper Thoughts:

Joining in / plugging in. My memory has been jogged by the "back to school" associations of Time and the Rani, which like all of Sylvester McCoy's season openers kicked off early in a new academic year, and also by watching Stranger Things and working out that the young cast of high schoolers in the 1980s-set show are fictionally around the same age as me  (Dustin, Mike, Will and Lucas would all now have turned 50 in our present day, assuming none of them get killed by a Demogorgon in series 5); finally and most significantly, my eldest child has started his own GCSE exams (he's halfway through at the time of writing). This has made me reflect on when I was finishing high school and doing my GCSEs (I was part of the first year to do these exams after O-levels were phased out the previous year in the UK). What's markedly different between me and him is how much of a joiner I was in those days. He doesn't dabble in anything extra-curricular, but by the time I was his age I had been part of Worthing Hospital radio for a couple of years, presenting on Saturday afternoons as one of a posse (ugh! - I later briefly had my own show doing 50s and 60s rock and roll on Friday nights) plus doing many ward visits to take dedications, and fund raising, and even weekly committee meetings (I remember they were a bit dull for teenage me, even though I wasn't exactly a raver). I had also recently done public speaking competitions representing the school, and for the whole of my final year I was one a handful of pupils running a young enterprise company, Sox n' Box, that sold socks and boxer shorts with spray-painted slogans and logos on them. I was part of a group who regularly met to play role playing games, like the Stranger Things kids, and I was even writing a novel on the side (it wasn't very good, a sub par Douglas Adams thing). I don't know how I managed to get any schoolwork done, let alone how I managed to pass those exams.

What's interesting is that, despite being a massive Doctor Who fan in those days, I never joined anything related to the programme. The Doctor Who Appreciation Society was affiliated to a network of local groups, and many fans of my age have nostalgic stories of the first time they attended such a group, nervous at meeting fellow fans (who can be a bit scary en masse). I was never brave enough even to investigate if such a group existed nearby (there most likely was one in Brighton, if not Worthing). This also probably explains why I had joined some of those other things; I was essentially dragged along by my schoolfriend Andrew Dancey to hospital radio and to the young enterprise thing. He was presumably worried about turning up alone first time out. He certainly took to the radio thing afterwards, and made it his profession (as did another friend from that time who was also part of Worthing Hospital radio, Duncan Barkes). I was always better as a wingman than a squadron leader, though, so would never have tried to reverse the roles with Andrew or anyone else accompanying me to a Doctor Who group. Most people didn't share quite my level of enthusiasm for the show anyway, though Andrew and others had occasionally watched with me one on the seven whole VHS tapes that constituted my Doctor Who collection at the time. This paucity of entertainment probably explains why I stuck with things like hospital radio rather than duck out once Andrew had got his feet under the table: there wasn't a whole lot else to do in those days of four TV channels, and no world wide web.

This probably explains my eldest's lack of joining. If he wants to interact with his friends, entertain himself by watching a TV series or film, express his own creativity, or play a computer game, he can do all this without leaving his bedroom (if he has his tablet on charge within reach, he doesn't even need to leave the bed). Even for the middle-aged me, TCP/IP and HTML have helped me be more part of Doctor Who fandom than I otherwise would have been, even though I still keep a lot of it at arm's length because of shyness. This makes me less concerned about my son; his generation doesn't need to join in, as they are constantly plugged in. This can definitely be a positive. After a recent Maths paper, he came home still dwelling on one of the final questions, which seemed impossible to solve. In my day, if I was lucky, I might have had a brief chance as we left the exam hall and trooped off home to canvass a friend or two about what they thought about that difficult question about the intersecting circles. My eldest was able to just use his phone and search social media for "Edexcel Maths GCSE paper 1 circles" and find that everyone had hated that question, and some people were already making up memes about it. Like the geniuses wired up to the Rani's giant brain, we're all connected and it's very often a negative experience with a Babel of voices bickering; sometimes, though, the connected masses are greater than the sum of the individuals, and we get something that's an overall good. Loyhargil!

In Summary:

It's not cool, it's not deep, it's not dark, but I like it. So there!

The Mark of the Rani

Chapter The 179th, where someone single-minded and sociopathic inspires riots. Any similarity to peoples alive and impeached is purely coincidental.

Plot:

The Master visits Killingworth in the North East of England sometime early in the 1800s, as he's presumably tracked the Rani there rather than it just being a big coincidence. The Rani is another exiled Time Lord and old acquaintance of the Doctor and the Master, an amoral scientist. As part of an experiment, she is extracting a chemical from the brains of the miners that work in the town leaving them very aggressive. She has been popping back to various violent periods in Earth's history as a cover to harvest this chemical, and this time she's chosen the Luddite riots (though she's overshot by a few years). The Master hijacks the Doctor's TARDIS to bring him and Peri to the same place and time, then disguises himself as a scarecrow in a nearby field to await their arrival, as you do. Once they arrive, the Master swipes the Rani's vial of brain chemical to ensure her cooperation with his schemes, and stirs up some of the locals with Rani-impacted brain chemistry to kill the Doctor, making them think that the Doctor is trying to rob them of their jobs by mechanising the mine. The Master has a shrinking gun and could just shoot the Doctor, but he does not do this.

Their attempt is foiled by George Stephenson, who is working on his locomotive engines in Killingworth. The Master takes hypnotic control of Stephenson's assistant, Luke Ward, and finds out that a meeting is planned with many of the geniuses of the time (Telford, Davy, Faraday and Marc Isambard Brunel amongst them). He decides (on the fly?) it will be good to use the power of these geniuses to take over the planet; this is presumably a big coincidence, but maybe it was what he planned all along - it's not clear. He persuades the Rani that she can help him rule the planet, and they decide to kill the Doctor by laying mines in a nearby dell. Again, the idea of just shooting the Doctor with the powerful shrinking gun doesn't occur to the Master or the Rani. They tempt the Doctor and George Stephenson down to the dell, but it is Luke who steps on a mine and gets turned into a tree. Did I mention that the mines turn the person who steps on them into a tree? Well, they do. The Master and Rani flee in the latter's TARDIS, but the Doctor has sabotaged it so it keeps accelerating, and this starts to wake up the onboard dinosaurs - the Rani keeps lots of Tyrannosaurus Rex embryos in her TARDIS, as you do. The Doctor gives the mine owner the brain fluid vial, having pickpocketed it from the Master earlier, so everyone can be turned back to normal.

Context:

Watched the two episodes separated one a week (the rate at which they originally went out) on two Sundays in January 2021, from the DVD. I was accompanied by all three children (boys of 14 and 11, girl of 8) for the first episode, but they weren't very impressed, I have to tell you, and I watched the second episode on my own a week later. The middle child groaned audibly when Colin Baker's face appeared in the episode one credits. I didn't expect such a reaction, and he's certainly not copying it from me. While I feel there are undoubtedly lots of questionable choices made in his era, I've nonetheless always enjoyed watching Colin's stories, so I don't know from where this antipathy comes and have to assume it's the boy's genuine feeling. It's disappointing, as the middle child is normally very positive about Doctor Who; it also has echoes of certain jaded online fans of a particular vintage who never give Colin the time of day. But who am I to judge? There were definitely 11 year olds losing patience with the show in 1985 too. It's a shame he and his siblings bailed before the second episode as maybe people turning into trees and baby dinosaurs - for all that they made me scratch my head in confusion - might have appealed to them.

First time round:

I watched the first episode on its initial BBC1 broadcast on Saturday 2nd February 1985. I was in the middle of my second term at high school at that point, and I had made a new friend. It was a friendship that didn't endure, and sadly I can't remember my friend's name all these years later; it might have been David or maybe Adam; Paul, possibly. I can picture him, though. I often wish I'd been disciplined enough to keep a diary to help with such things all these years later. Anyway, his family had two season tickets for Brighton and Hove Albion at the historic Goldstone ground, the club's home for almost all of the twentieth century (it's a retail park now; there's a Nando's). Occasionally, this friend would get to take another friend to the football instead of going with his Dad, and sometimes he asked me. It was because I was on my way home from watching Brighton win one-nil against Cardiff City on the 9th February that I missed the second - and very different - episode of the story.

Just over ten years later, on 3rd July 1995, The Mark of the Rani came out on VHS, and I had again made a new friend: the Better Half. We were in the first few months of our relationship, but I had already 'come out' as a Doctor Who fan by then, and shown her some of my burgeoning video collection. Probably not all of it, though, as I didn't want to scare her off completely. On that Monday that the tapes were released, I was off work ill. Such was my enthusiasm to pick up this story (and Time and the Rani, the other story featuring Kate O' Mara's titular villain that came out the same day) that I walked - walked! - the three miles or so from my home to central Worthing and Volume One on Montague Street to buy the tapes, even though I was very poorly. Then I walked back. Six miles walking for The Mark of the Rani and Time and the Rani!!!!! I was an idiot in those days. It took me another two days to recover from this stupid jaunt, during which time I watched both stories. The Better Half came to visit me during that period and realised while nursing this poor pathetic specimen in front of her that she definitely loved me, and would be stuck forever with me and my Doctor Who collection, poor thing. As such, I can't help but have warm feelings for both these stories.

Reaction:

Like that Brighton v. Cardiff football match I went to in February 1985 (see above), The Mark of the Rani is a game of two halves. The writers of the story, Pip and Jane Baker, are infamous in Doctor Who circles for writing florid polysyllabic dialogue and erring on the side of too much camp in characters and scenarios, but even their sternest critics would have to admit, I think, that underneath all that they could plot a tale. The Doctor Who stories that they contributed in 1986 and 1987, and other non-Who examples of their work for the small screen that I can think of, are consistently tight and focussed adventure plots. Nothing too fancy (apart from the verbiage) but nonetheless solid and effective. This is also true of the first part of The Mark of the Rani. Yes, the Master's plot is hopelessly silly, but that's his M.O. and the script has the decency to mock him for it, with the more sensible Rani providing withering looks and asides at his convoluted escapades. The historic setting is a nice change of pace and allows for something that had not, believe it or not, been very common in Doctor Who for decades by 1985: the Doctor meeting a real person from history. The promise of the name dropping done in episode one is that the Doctor and George Stephenson are going to partner together in the final part to defeat the 'Luddites' and the two Time Lords who are manipulating them. In episode two, though, there are elements (magic trees and dinosaurs) that emerge from nowhere, and George Stephenson's only in about three scenes and does nothing.

What the hell happened to Pip and Jane here? I almost wonder if they were in such a rush that they both had to write an episode each in parallel, hoping that they would match up, such is the disjoint between the first and second parts. All the promise of the first half is squandered in the second, which is a great shame. The one very good thing that the Bakers deliver in this story is the Rani herself. The show had never before this point - such was the tunnel vision of the usual patriarchal approach - had a recurring female villain. The Bakers find a new take to differentiate the Rani from the show's other recurring Time Lord foe; she doesn't want to rule the world, she doesn't particularly want to harm the Doctor; she just wants to get on with her work. It's just that her work is amoral and has terrible consequences. This is indeed how the character is for the first episode; but, in the second, that all gets lost and she becomes full-on panto hiss baddie. Kate O' Mara relishes this change in the performance, and it could easily have been made into a more smooth character arc rather than again seeming like an abrupt bump. The issue is the presence of the Master. If the Rani's going to turn fully bonkers super-villain by the end, you don't need him; in the first part, though - where the Rani is an unwilling accomplice, gently sending the Master up - they work well together, and it's very enjoyable. It would have been better to pick a lane and either have the Rani alone with the character arc of going from nasty but at least purposeful experiments through to turning people into trees, or keep both the Rani and the Master working together with a plot that was more in keeping with each's original character.

The story has come in for some criticism over the years for historical inaccuracies. Its difficult to pinpoint exactly when it's supposed to be set, but it isn't quite so bad as has been made out. If Stephenson is working on a locomotive at Killingworth then it must be at least 1814, and it can't be any later than 1829 (the last time that the named visiting geniuses are all alive, Humphry Davy dying in that year). It's probably before 1820 when Faraday completed his apprenticeships with Davy, assuming they have been invited together. Luddite activity mainly happened for a couple of years after 1811, but there were still attacks on machinery happening as late as 1817. It's certainly plausible, at least in terms of the dates, that when Stephenson's workshop was set up it was protected in case of Luddite-style attacks, as mentioned in the dialogue. Of course, Luddite action was mainly against textile machinery not mine workings, and the activity did not take place this far North. Maybe the mine's owner Lord Ravensworth is just paranoid. It's easy, of course, for me to dial up all these facts with the internet at my disposal; the Bakers did not have such a tool. I think, though, that they just wanted a story with Stephenson and Luddites together, despite them not having much to do with one another, and they thought the dates just about lined up, with a bit of artistic licence.

There is a lot to recommend the story, in both episodes. The time and place is very effectively presented, with clever use of the locations (Blists Hill and the Coalport China Museum); there's great  direction from Sarah Hellings, who gets excellent performances from all the cast, particularly regulars Colin Baker and Nicola Bryant as the Doctor and Peri; these two are given good opportunities from the script to be charming and fun occasionally, unlike the sniping and moaning at each other that is all they normally get from stories in this era. The stunt ending for episode one - the Doctor on a runaway gurney - is daft but exciting, and Jonathan Gibbs' score is evocative and interesting throughout. As badly as they join together, the two episodes would combine to be an above average story for the period, if it weren't for the people turning into trees towards the end. In the right place, a spooky tree transformation can work. One of my earliest memories of being utterly terrified by something I saw on TV was someone turning into a tree in a children's drama show. I must have been very young when I saw it, but it left an impression such that it stayed with me and I eventually managed - with help from the internet - to track down what this fragment of disturbed memory was: The Man Who Hated Children, one of the later episodes of series 3 of Shadows, a horror anthology series for kids shown in the ITV regions in the late 1970s. I am not alone in being haunted by this moment for more than forty years, I have found testimonials online from multiple sources who were similarly scarred.

Such was the power of this sequence that I have not attempted to rewatch it to date; it could either be just as scary as I remember, or not nearly as bad, and neither of those options seems that appealing. Crucially, though, it only worked because it was in the right context. Shadows was a supernatural-themed series, rather than the fairly rigorous science-based world of Doctor Who; what makes it worse is that the first episode of The Mark of the Rani leans in to the science even more than usual, making one wonder exactly how - and why - this methodical scientist the Rani has created land mines that turn a person instantly into the tree. The change being instant also makes it risible; in the Shadows episode the transformation is gradual, not done in a second with a puff of naff pyrotechnics. I can't reliably recall how realistic the eventual tree was in the 1970s programme, but some images are burned into my soul: roots growing out of the character's trouser leg, bark appearing on their skin, and finally - when the man had been absorbed, his sad face peeking out of a knot in the trunk. The trees in Mark of the Rani appear to be made of plastic, and are erected in a real wood so they look ridiculous compared to the real trees around them. Plus, in The Man Who Hated Children, the man-tree post transformation does not bend a rubbery branch like an arm to save a damsel in distress. It's as if every contributor from script to final image got it 100% wrong. And don't get me started on the baby dinosaurs...    

Connectivity: 

Both The Mark of the Rani and Revolution of the Daleks feature a female incarnation of a Time Lord and more than one TARDIS.

Deeper Thoughts:

Calling the capitol, calling the capitol... The Mark of the Rani has two villains, and they get punished for their villainy at the end of the story. Sort of. There's not much in the way of due process - the Doctor feeds them to some baby dinosaurs inadvertently after sabotaging their ride - but it's something. We need stories to show us the inspiring myth that bad deeds end up being punished, because most of the time life isn't like that. I write these words on the 19th January 2021, the last day of the 45th president of the United States being in the White House. As ever, I find myself unable to type his name. At the time of writing, doom-scrollers across the world including myself are waiting to see exactly which group of rappers and neo-Nazis he is going to pardon before he leaves. By the time this is published and you're reading it, Joe Biden's inauguration will be in the past, you lucky thing. After that, the proceedings of 45's second impeachment trial will begin in the US senate. I don't hold out much hope that he will be found guilty, but it does look more likely than it ever has before that he might face some consequences for his actions. In 2016 when he won the election, he had already transgressed political and social norms on the campaign trail, and there was every expectation he would continue to do so in power; indeed some people who should know better wanted him to do so, to mix things up a bit.

As with my reaction to the UK's Prime Minister A. Johnson's behaviour, it was a surprise to me how very thin a layer of political and social norms exists between order and chaos. Norms, for instance, like accepting the result of an election you didn’t win. It turns out that you don’t have to do that, and that the long history of such things happening was just out of some misplaced feeling of politeness that egregious populists don’t have to display. Despite not being able to provide any evidence to persuade even partisan Republican courts that there was any widespread voter fraud - courts that must have known how dangerous taking this path was liable to get - the 45th president of USA kept repeating the big lie. He even repeated it in his supposedly placating speech made to the rioters who had broken into the Capitol at that very moment, and were intent on finding and destroying the electoral college votes (and probably much worse actions than that too). He also in that same speech said to the rioters in the Capitol, without qualifying that he was excluding anyone wearing a Camp Auschwitz T-shirt or waving a confederate flag or such, that “We love you” and “You’re very special”. It did not look like he was calling for calm at all.

Several of 45’s tweets after that reiterated the big lie and stirred things up further, precipitating the temporary and then permanent ban of his account on twitter. This, even more than the language used in his speech before his followers stormed the Capitol, seems damning to me. I still don’t think he’ll be found guilty, as he seems to have managed to evade any responsibility for anything he’s done throughout his long life. This unchecked behaviour led to the enablement and maybe even partial normalisation of white supremacy. This is where the abstraction of even something light like Doctor Who does get it right: just like the Master, coming back every time even though he was thought to be completely destroyed the last time, certain evils just won’t go away. I don’t know that the solution is to strengthen those norms; after all, if the heavily codified US procedures underpinned by an unassailable written constitution can’t prevent these things from happening, maybe nothing written down on paper will. The best course of action would seem to be don’t elect populists, and maybe the tide is turning on that, but it could very well turn back again. By the time you read this, you’ll be living in a day of hope, but each day after that will be an unending challenge.

In Summary:

The first episode goes like a Rocket, but - in the words of Radiohead - gravity always wins, and the second episode comes down with a hell of a bump.