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"The Rani" — previously known as Ushas — was the alias used by a renegade Time Lord. She knew the Doctor and the Master when all three were young, and became an enemy of the former and an unwilling ally of the latter.
Biography
Youth and exile
The Rani was the same age as the Doctor. (TV: Time and the Rani) As a Time Tot, the Rani played hide and seek with the First Doctor, with the Ninth Doctor claiming that his skill at finding her "drove her nuts". (COMIC: Weapons of Past Destruction)
Ushas belonged to the Deca, the same Academy clique as the First Doctor, (PROSE: Divided Loyalties) being their most intelligent member. (AUDIO: The Rani Elite) At the Academy, she specialized in neurochemistry. (PROSE: Time and the Rani) The Doctor was invited to her 94th birthday party (PROSE: The Death of Art) and at the Doctor's graduation, there was an incident involving Ushas and a giant rat. (COMIC: Party Animals)
Ushas was later exiled from Gallifrey after some of her lab mice, as a result of an experiment, grew to enormous size and ate the Lord President's pet cat. They also bit the President himself, triggering a regeneration. (TV: The Mark of the Rani) However, she hijacked the TARDIS delivering her to her planet of exile and became a renegade known as the Rani. (PROSE: Divided Loyalties)
Life as a renegade
The Rani's notoriety in the galaxy made her its second most wanted criminal after the Master. (AUDIO: Requiem for the Rocket Men)
Presence in Earth history
While the Rani certainly did not share the Doctor's fondness for Earth, which she considered a "miserable planet," it was the focus of several of her research projects. At some point, she had visited Earth in the distant past and acquired several tyrannosaur embryos.
When the test subjects on Miasimia Goria, a planet she had enslaved, became violently restless and uncontrollable as a side effect of her experiments on them, 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. (TV: The Mark of the Rani) Around this time, the Rani travelled to Shildon, where she encountered Panda. (PROSE: From Wildthyme with Love)
The Tremas Master and, shortly after, the Sixth Doctor, interrupted her work. The Doctor sabotaged the navigational system of the Rani's TARDIS, trapping the Master and the Rani inside as time spillage caused the tyrannosaur embryos to grow at a dangerous rate. (TV: The Mark of the Rani)
On Terra Nova
The dinosaur grew to such a size that it broke its neck on the ceiling, but the Rani had been left adrift in her TARDIS when the Master escaped from her by detaching the console room from the rest of her TARDIS. Shortly afterwards, from the Doctor's subjective point of view, the Rani was also trapped along with the Sixth Doctor on Terra Nova, which the entity known as Iam had created. She had in the meantime tried and failed to manipulate the political situation existing between the three children of that reality's version of Cleopatra VII. However, she did manage to escape Terra Nova, by using the entity to create a new TARDIS console room to replace the one the Master escaped in. (PROSE: State of Change)
On Tetrapyriarbus and Lakertya
On the planet Tetrapyriarbus, the Rani made the acquaintance of, and decided to employ, the Tetraps, led by Urak. With them, she invaded the peaceful planet Lakertya and put into motion a complex plan. The Rani abducted eleven scientific geniuses from across time and space, including Albert Einstein of Earth. Finally she decided to "collect" the Doctor and attacked his TARDIS, causing the ship to go through turbulence. (TV: Time and the Rani) She bombarded the TARDIS with concentrated beams of a radiation lethal to Time Lords. However, this was unbeknownst to her a result of the Sixth Doctor from the future sending his past self a psychic signal to fly to Lakertya and encounter the radiation in a bid to erase the influence of the Nathemus which had been implanted in his mind by the Valeyard, unknowingly putting him in her cross-hairs. The Doctor was wounded as a result, triggering the regeneration into his seventh incarnation. (AUDIO: The Brink of Death)
The Rani channelled the intellects of the geniuses into a giant artificial brain which she believed could find the secret to manipulating strange matter, the key to making the planet of Lakertya into a Time Manipulator in order to correct what she considered to be errors in the universal timeline. Her first target was to be Earth, where she would prevent the extinction of the dinosaurs, creatures whose full potential she felt had never been truly realised. She considered the death of the native Lakertyans a small price to pay.
She used the artificial brain to find the answer as to how to create a lightweight substitute for strange matter. When it was devised she sent a missile containing the substance aimed at a strange matter asteroid. However, the Doctor destroyed the brain and redirected the missile. Urak betrayed her, leading the Tertraps against her, and they placed her under house arrest in her TARDIS on Tetrapyriarbus. The Rani was 953 years old when these events took place. (TV: Time and the Rani)
After these events occurred, the Tetraps faced a food shortage crisis, while Urak managed to have the Rani put on trial, with the death sentence. She would have to solve the food shortage, otherwise her sentence would commence. Two human and two alien prisoners were to be test subjects for the Rani's experiments in an attempt at solving the crisis. The Rani, however, teamed up with the 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. (AUDIO: The Rani Reaps the Whirlwind)
On Koturia
On the planet of Koturia, the Rani went by the name of Lania. She was genetically modifying pterodactyls in order to take blood and tissue samples of Koturians for the purpose of learning about Phasing. She believed that she could learn of a way to control the outcome of a regeneration by learning how Koturians control their appearance when they Phase. She immersed herself in Koturian culture and became engaged to Jonos, an upper class Koturian. However, their marriage ceremony was crashed by the Sixth Doctor and Peri Brown, the former of whom was invited as an old friend of Jonos's father, Evris Makshi. Although they were too late to stop the physical ceremony, it failed to result in Jonos completing his Phase because both bride and groom have to be in love with one another for for the Imori stone to work and the Rani was only pretending to be in love with Jonos. Although the Rani claimed to be immune to emotion, the Doctor believed she felt some kind of emotional attachment to her work, as she did beg him to not destroy her research by saying "please." (PROSE: Something Borrowed)
A new incarnation
The Rani later regenerated. In her new incarnation she once again encountered the Sixth Doctor and Peri Brown, although she had expected his seventh incarnation. She masqueraded as Professor Baxton at the College of Advanced Galactic Education a foremost authority of Moral Philosophy. The Doctor questioned her about her theories in one of her lectures. She tested the students and used the tests to find suitability for her experiments, some of the students she experimented on were Lizzo and Reev and tried to experiment on Miklev. The students were experts in their fields. She was making a biodigital interface controller. She was using a Sidelian Brain Scanner in her techniques, which was moving memories from one brain to another. The Rani then used Peri in her experiments, due to Miklev was concussed. She also killed her accomplice, the Vice Chancellor. The real Professor Baxton was used as the overseer of the network of the students' brains. She was using the students' minds in order to calculate the minor events she would need, in order to create the massive events she wanted, in effect reverse engineering chaos theory. She hated the Doctor calling her Ushas and reminiscing about The Deca. When the Doctor tricked her she fell down through the floor on the way to her TARDIS, she gloated in her part in the Doctor's next regeneration. (AUDIO: The Rani Elite)
She was sent to Teccaurora Penitentiary, a prison for her misdemeanours. 97 years after her imprisonment, she became the governor of the prison. Using the prison as her base of operations, she used the prisoners to power a time corridor to Miasimia Goria. She took Constance Clarke with her and was appalled at the state the planet was in, but was delighted that Raj Kahnu became a success, the only one of her experiments to work correctly. She showed some emotion when she thought that Kahnu was dead, but was put on trial by her subjects on Miasimia Goria, where the Doctor said he would take her back to Gallifrey. She pleaded with Kahnu to show some compassion in sentencing her, but instead tried to kill him. She escaped in TARDIS survival pod that her previous incarnation had left there. (AUDIO: Planet of the Rani)
Possible fate
Father Kreiner killed the Rani and the clone of the Master and kept their heads as trophies during the events of the Second War in Heaven. (PROSE: Interference - Book One) However, many aspects of the War took place in another timeline due to the Eighth Doctor's intervention, therefore leaving the ultimate fate of the Rani unknown. (PROSE: The Ancestor Cell)
Other realities
In a alternative timeline, the Rani cooperated alongside the Master, the Monk and Drax to try to destroy the world using a DNA recombinator, turning the human race into a gestalt consciousness that could be used as a weapon to conquer the universe. (PROSE: The Quantum Archangel)
In a parallel universe experienced by the Eighth Doctor, he was a young boy reminiscent of Charlie Brown, while the Rani was a psychiatrist who gave him advice for 5 cent. (COMIC: The Glorious Dead)
Appearance
The Rani's first body was slim with tanned skin and big hair that was sometimes curled. She dressed lavishly, wearing boots, tights, and voluminous shirts. (TV: The Mark of the Rani, Time and the Rani)
The second incarnation of the Rani to encounter the Sixth Doctor wore her hair in shoulder-length red curls, and spoke with a Scottish accent. (AUDIO: The Rani Elite)
Personality
The Rani was an evil (or, arguably, simply amoral) scientific genius whose villainy came not from the usual variety of lust for power and suchlike, but from a mindset that treated everything (including morality) as secondary to her research. She was highly intelligent, but extremely arrogant, narcissistic, ruthless, powerful and intensely cruel. She was known to enslave entire worlds in order to have a ready supply of experimental subjects and a place to carry out her experiments uninterrupted. Her major interest was in altering the biochemistry of other species.
While she did appear evil, she found the Master to be truly evil and therefore stupid. She also said that his plans were so overcomplicated that if he walked in a straight line he would get dizzy. What evil she did she felt was necessary to her work. When the Sixth Doctor tried to convince her not to experiment on humans, she called them carnivores and asked if they ever thought of the lesser species when they sunk their teeth into a lamb chop; she had a conscience of some kind, as she was later willing to destroy her test subjects intending to kill the Doctor. (TV: The Mark of the Rani)
The Rani reacted negatively when addressed as "Ushas" by the Doctor, demanding he refrain from calling her by her former name, and dismissed his mentions of Drax, Mortimus, and the Deca. (AUDIO: The Rani Elite)
Behind the scenes
- Kate O'Mara portrayed the Rani in all of her television appearances.
- In August 2012, Steven Moffat stated that "he had no reason to bring back the Rani",[1] thus putting an end to the rumours of her return to the television series.[2]
- Russell T Davies has said that if he had brought back the Rani, he would have cast actress Ruthie Henshall in the role.[3]
- Plans were underway to bring back Kate O'Mara as the Rani for new Big Finish Productions audios, but O'Mara passed away a few weeks before recording. Upon being assured by O'Mara's agent that she'd wished them to continue the project without her, Big Finish cast Siobhan Redmond as a new incarnation of the Rani.[4]
- Redmond had never seen Doctor Who prior to being cast as the Rani, though she familiarised herself with O'Mara's work in the role. Before her in-character photoshoot as the new Rani, she curled her hair as a small homage to O'Mara.[5]
- Redmond's portrayal of the Rani with her own Scottish accent, closely following as it did the premieres of the first Scottish-accented Master and the Twelfth Doctor on televised Doctor Who, led Vortex to comment "Scottish Time Lords are like buses. You wait ages for one to appear, and then suddenly you get three at once!" [5]
Footnotes
- ↑ http://www.digitalspy.co.uk/tv/s7/doctor-who/news/a401680/doctor-who-steven-moffat-rules-out-return-for-villain-the-rani.html
- ↑ http://www.denofgeek.com/tv/19959/dr-who-gillian-anderson-is-the-rani
- ↑ http://www.sfx.co.uk/2012/10/28/russell-t-davies-talks-wizards-vs-aliens/2/
- ↑ http://www.bigfinish.com/news/v/the-new-rani
- ↑ 5.0 5.1 Vortex issue 70