Rani (Doctor Who)
The Rani is a female extraterrestrial character who features in Doctor Who.
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Biography
The Rani was a Renegade Time Lady, an amoral scientist who will use any means to achieve her ends. The Rani was a contemporary of the Doctor. She was exiled from Gallifrey when genetically altered mice that she created devoured the President of Gallifrey's cat, before attacking the President himself.
The Rani visited Earth at various points in its history to extract chemicals from the brains of select human specimens. Because the chemicals in question enabled the human brain to sleep, and because the absence of these chemicals made her victims as violent and uncontrollable as those from her previous experiments, the Rani deliberately chose periods of social unrest to visit, using the violence to conceal her presence and its consequences. She visited the Trojan War, the Dark Ages, the American Revolutionary War, and finally the Luddite riots in the village of Killingworth during the early 19th century where she used the local bath house as her base, posing as the old woman in charge of the premises. (Episode: The Mark of the Rani)
The Rani was first encountered as a renegade by the Sixth Doctor in England just prior to the Industrial Revolution, where she posed as a healer. However, she was actually extracting brain fluids from local miners that they needed for sleep, causing them to become dangerously aggressive. Her experiments were ruined by the Doctor and the Master, the latter of which stole her collected brain fluid. The Doctor defeated them both by tampering with the Rani's TARDIS, trapping both the Master and the Rani inside, and sending them to the edge of the universe. They were also forced to deal with a rapidly-maturing Tyrannosaur accidentally released from the Rani's storage.
After escaping the dinosaur and the Master, the Rani gathered members of the Tetrap race as servitors, then proceeded to the planet Lakertya. Setting up a base there and subjugating the local population, the Rani began capturing great geniuses from across time and combining their intellects to create a giant brain. With that brain, the Rani planned to revert the universe to a primordial state, examining it and reshaping it as she wished. However, her plans were disrupted after she crashlanded the newly-regenerated and highly confused Seventh Doctor on Lakertya, and tried to enlist his help. Despite her attempts to deceive him, the Doctor rallied the Lakertyans against her and destroyed the giant brain. The Rani fled in her TARDIS, but she was captured by the Tetraps, who decided to put her to their own uses. (Episode: TV: Time and the Rani)
Overview
Personality and attributes
The Rani was an amoral, scientific genius who was a contemporary of both the Doctor and the Master.
According to the Rani, she had developed a contempt for the Time Lords that began long before she was ever exiled from Gallifrey. (Episode: Time and the Rani)
She saw humans as being little more than base carnivores and had no issues with experimenting on such creatures as she them the way mankind saw sheep and other animals. (Episode: The Mark of the Rani) Her past was said to be littered with the mutilated results of her unethical experiments. (Episode: Time and the Rani)
Powers and abilities
Unlike the Doctor's TARDIS, the Rani's TARDIS has a fully functional chameleon circuit, and can still disguise itself wherever it lands. It can also be opened with the Doctor's TARDIS key. (Episode: Mark of the Rani)
Rather than use hypnotism, the Rani was known to had impregnated worm parasites that took over the bodies of a host and turned them into her slaves. Once taken over, the hosts eyes flickered with a blue colour briefly as a sign of the parasites taking control over the body. (Episode: The Mark of the Rani) She once created a genetically engineered time brain that consisted of the minds of the greatest geniuses across time and space. The amalgamated brain provided calculations and simulations for its creator. (Episode: Time and the Rani)
Notes
- The Rani was portrayed by actor Kate O'Mara where she featured in the Doctor Who universe.
- In the non-canon for-charity special Dimensions in Time, the Rani attempted to capture the first seven Doctors and a number of their companions within a time anomaly centered around a small section of London (the region of the series Eastenders, specifically). However, she was defeated.
- In 2012, then-executive producer and showrunner Steven Moffat said, "People always ask me, 'Do you want to bring back the Rani?' No one knows who the Rani is. They all know who the Master is, they know Daleks, they probably know who Davros is, but they don't know who the Rani is, so there's no point in bringing her back."
In other media
Novels
- In Doctor Who: State of Change (1994), the Rani appeared in the Virgin Missing Adventures spin-off novel written by Christopher Bulis. The Master came to escape the Rani's TARDIS by splitting the console room from the rest of her TARDIS, leaving the Rani adrift in a space-time bubble until she encounters a benign entity that creates a distorted pocket reality where the Egyptians possess 20th-century technology due to their access to the databanks of a duplicate of the Doctor's TARDIS console. The Rani tries her hand at political machinations in this reality before the intervention of the Doctor breaks her control over the entity, at which point she escapes in her repaired TARDIS.
- In Doctor Who: Divided Loyalties (1999), the Rani appeared in the Past Doctor Adventure novel written by Gary Russell. The events of the book depicted a dream sequence where the Rani was one of a group of promising young Time Lords called the Deca which included many future renegades, including the Doctor, the War Chief, the Meddling Monk and the Master. Mortimus once tried to ask Ushas out, but was so harshly rejected that he came to believe that she was not interested in dating at all. As a result, he was, to Magnus's amusement, oblivious to the affair which later developed between Magnus and Ushas.
Comics
- In Doctor Who: The Legacy of Gallifrey, the Rani was referenced in the setting of the Doctor Who Magazine published by Marvel Comics and written by Gary Russell. According to the Scrolls of Gallifrey, it gave her true name as simply Rani as unlike the Doctor and the Master, who had already acquired their nicknames at the Academy, she was an exceptionally successful and a well-behaved student. It was said that she was the most skilled student of her group of friends and that she belonged to the Patrex Chapter. At the Academy, she was "good at everything", but at chemistry especially.
Audio dramas
- In Doctor Who: The Rani Elite (2014), the Rani featured in the setting of the Big Finish Productions audio drama written by Justin Richards where she was voiced by actress Siobhan Redmond.
- In Doctor Who: The Rani Reaps the Whirlwind, the Rani featured in the BBV Productions audio drama written by Pip and Jane Baker as part of the The Rani series. When the Tetraps faced a food shortage crisis, Urak managed to have the Rani put on trial. When she was given the death sentence, Urak bargained with her to solve the food shortage or her sentence would commence, giving her two humans and two alien prisoners as test subjects for the experiments that would solving the crisis. The Rani, however, teamed up with her four "guinea pigs" and managed to escape the planet. Each then went their separate ways, with the Rani swearing to teach Urak a lesson and retrieve her TARDIS from him.
Other
- In Doctor Who: A Brief History of Time Lords, the Rani was mentioned in the reference book published by BBC Books and written by Steve Tribe. According to it, the original name of the Rani on Gallifrey was Ushas. Like all Time Lords, Ushas was taken from her family at the age of eight for the selection process in the Drylands. Staring into the Untempered Schism as part of a Time Lord initiation rite, Ushas was reported by one Time Lord historian to have been driven mad by what she saw in the Schism.
Appearances
- Doctor Who:
External Links
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