Rani (Doctor Who)

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Doctor Who character
The Rani
Affiliated with	None
Race	Time Lord
Home planet	Gallifrey
Home era	Gallifrey era
First appearance	The Mark of the Rani
Last appearance	Time and the Rani
Portrayed by	Kate O'Mara

The Rani is a fictional character in the British science fiction television series Doctor Who. She was played by Kate O'Mara.

The Rani is a renegade Time Lady, an evil scientific genius whose villainy comes not from the usual variety of lust for power and suchlike, but from a mindset that treats everything (including morality) as secondary to her research; she has been known to enslave entire planets such as Miasimia Goria in order to have a ready supply of experimental subjects and a place to carry out her experiments uninterrupted. Her major interest is in tinkering with other species' biochemistry — she was exiled from Gallifrey after some of her lab mice, as a result of an experiment, grew to enormous size and ate the President's pet cat. A past relationship between the Rani and the Doctor is hinted at, but never elaborated upon. It is established they are the same age.

The Rani was created in an attempt to give the Doctor another recurring foe like the Master, but eventually only appeared in two serials, The Mark of the Rani and Time and the Rani, before Doctor Who went off the air in 1989. The Rani also appeared as the principal villain in Dimensions in Time, the Doctor Who charity special created for Children in Need.

In her initial appearance, the Rani had removed the need for sleep from the alien subjects on Miasimia Goria and the planet had collapsed into chaos, as without sleep the aliens turned violent. To restore order and continue her experiments, she began stealing the chemical that allows sleep from human brains, carrying this out in violent periods of Earth's history so her experiment's after-effects would go unnoticed. When carrying this out during the Luddite rebellion, her operation was co-opted into the Master's attempt at hijacking the Industrial Revolution and killing the Sixth Doctor, and as a result her operation was thwarted.

[edit] Other appearances

The Rani appears in the Virgin Missing Adventures spin-off novel State of Change by Christopher Bulis. Here, the Master escaped the Rani's TARDIS in The Mark Of The Rani by splitting the console room from the rest of it, leaving the Rani adrift in a space-time bubble until she encountered a benign entity that created a distorted pocket reality where the Romans possessed 20th century technology. The Rani tried her hand at political machinations in this reality before the intervention of the Doctor, at which point she escaped in her repaired TARDIS.

Pip and Jane Baker wrote her as the lead in the BBV audio drama The Rani Reaps the Whirlwind, following on from Time And The Rani, and also wrote her as the villain in a Choose Your Own Adventure-style children's game book entitled Race Against Time.

The Past Doctor Adventure Divided Loyalties, by Gary Russell, states that the Rani was one of a group of promising young Time Lords called "the Deca" which included many future renegades, including the Doctor and the Master. The novel also gives her given name (or at least its first syllables) as Ushas (a reference to the Vedic goddess of that name). As with all spin-off media, the canonicity of this information is debatable.

In The End of the World the Ninth Doctor stated that his homeworld had been destroyed and that he was the last of the Time Lords. Whether the Rani was killed along with the rest has not been specifically established.

In August 2006, the tabloid newspaper The Sun reported that the Rani would return in the 2007 series, played by Footballer's Wives actress Zöe Lucker.^[1] However, this was subsequently denied by the BBC.^[2]

[edit] References

1. ^ Robinson, Colin. "Evil Zoe takes on Dr Who", The Sun, 2006-08-03. Retrieved on 2006-08-03.
2. ^ Kilkelly, Daniel and Wilkes, Neil. "No 'Doctor Who' role for Lucker", Digital Spy, 2006-08-04. Retrieved on 2006-08-04.