Inspirations: Oxygen

In 2005, former CEO of Nestlé Peter Brabeck-Letmathe tried to argue that water was not a human right. It was simply a commodity like anything you might buy in a shop, and had a market value.

By 2013 he had backtracked in his view, following the understandable outcry. 

It's this sort of commercialisation of what most would agree to be a basic human necessity which forms the backdrop to this episode.

We are in deep space, and the essential element here is oxygen. A mining rig on an otherwise lifeless asteroid is owned by a faceless corporation on Earth, and its crew have to pay for their air supply.

There's no safety net. If your stock runs out, you suffocate and die.

The story began life as a request from Steven Moffat to writer Jamie Mathieson for an adventure set in outer space. The showrunner wanted it to highlight just how hostile and deadly space could be. He had been inspired by the recent movie Gravity and the 1995 film Apollo 13.

Mathieson's original idea was of a spaceship graveyard. A group of survivors were being forced to jump from wreck to wreck in search of oxygen and other supplies, hunted all the time by savage crystalline monsters.

They were controlled by a queen who dwelt on a nearby asteroid. She mimicked distress signals to ensnare passing ships. An additional complication was that the survivor group consisted of people from opposing factions in a war. There was also an element of The Thing, in that the monsters could mentally manipulate people, so paranoia was rife amongst the survivors.

The story would have ended with an ethical debate about whether or not they should kill the queen.

It was then decided to ditch the monsters, other than the queen, and simply have space itself the threat, but with the additional danger of zombies - animated human cadavers. These would have some sort of intelligence, however. It was the queen which controlled them. 

The spaceship graveyard was still the setting, and the people encountered by the Doctor and Bill were now simply shipwrecked scavengers.

This time, the episode ended with the Doctor forming a psychic link with the queen to stop it from killing.

Two of the characters were named after family friends of the writer - Darren and his son Ivan, who was a fan of the show. The former became Dahh-Ren, who was originally going to have a multi-eyed spider-like face. Budget restraints reduced this to him simply having blue skin.

As much as Moffat liked the story, he asked Mathieson to pare it down to essentials. He proposed that the zombies be manipulated by their spacesuits. He was worried that they might resemble too closely the skeletons in spacesuits from his own Silence in the Library / Forest of the Dead.

The more zombified look of the cadavers - exposed to the vacuum of space - was retained.

It was Moffat who then suggested that the crew of a mining vessel be forced to purchase their oxygen from the corporation which employed them. This could be withheld if the operation was unprofitable.

An added threat was that the smartsuits could electrocute their owner or anyone they touch.

The suits quite literally become the menace.

"Suits" is slang for business executives and bosses - i.e. the men in suits who run things.

Together Moffat and Mathieson decided on bringing back GUS from the writer's previous story Mummy on the Orient Express, whose origins had been left vague. This would stand for Ganymede Systems.

Mathieson then drew on his own experience of working long hours for bad wages for large corporations.

In the end, the references to GUS would be dropped.

The mining vessel was named Chasm Forge, after the Valley Forge from the 1972 ecological sci-fi movie Silent Running.

Mathieson proposed that the Doctor should be blinded for the second half of the story, after sacrificing his sight to save Bill. He later suggested that the Doctor remain blind at the end of the story - expecting this to be rejected. Moffat decided to incorporate this into the next two scripts.

Nardole's role in Series 10 had only developed late in the day, and he was originally going to be brought into the story after the Doctor and Bill set off without realising he was on the TARDIS.

He didn't feature in the earlier drafts.

At one point the Doctor lies to Nardole about one of the fluid links. He had first used these as an excuse to explore in The Daleks, and they were a feature of other stories such as The Wheel in Space and The Mind Robber.

The Doctor had previously been seen to do a space walk, in a helmet with oxygen but no face visor, in Four to Doomsday, where he claimed to be able to survive this environment for up to 6 minutes.

Next time: monk-y business in the Vatican...

Episode 217: The Mind Robber (3)

Synopsis:

The Doctor and his companions have been ushered into a black void by the Clockwork Soldiers. They hear the whinnying of a horse and Jamie recalls the nightmare he experienced in the TARDIS just before it broke up. They see a unicorn, which charges towards them...

The Doctor urges his companions to concentrate and believe that the animal is not real. Unicorns do not exist. Despite their fears, they accept what he says - and the creature turns into a statue.

The Doctor points out that things only appear real if you believe them to be so.

He states that he admires the mind behind this world and, in his control centre, the Master accepts the compliment.

The Clockwork Soldiers appear once more and so they head off, finding themselves in another forest. They come across a house, but the Redcoat soldier suddenly reappears. Jamie attacks him and the man opens fire - rendering him once more a faceless cardboard cut-out. This time Zoe helps to ensure that he gets his real face back.

They enter the house, but the door leads instead to a set of rocky tunnels, lit by candlelight. They have a choice of four tunnels, and find a large ball of twine. The door is now locked behind them. Recalling the story of Theseus, the Doctor has Jamie tie one end of the twine to the door, and they set off into the maze of passages.

The Master can see their progress on his monitor. They are heading through a circular labyrinth towards a central chamber.

The twine runs out, so the Doctor has Jamie wait where he is whilst he and Zoe scout further ahead. She has worked out their route mathematically.

They find themselves in the central chamber, where the ground is littered with bones. They hear a roar - and see the shadow of a huge horned beast on the opposite wall. It is the Minotaur.

Jamie is about to follow when he is confronted by a Clockwork Soldier. He realises that whoever controls this place can see them through the light in their hats, and so throws his sheepskin waistcoat over its head. The Soldier works it free and pursues him.

The Doctor, meanwhile, convinces Zoe that the Minotaur is not real and so cannot harm them, prompting it to vanish when she accepts what he says.

They head back to find Jamie - finding only his discarded waistcoat. They meet the 18th Century traveller once more. When he begins to tell them his family history, the Doctor realises that he is Lemuel Gulliver, from the novel by Dean Jonathan Swift. He leaves, and the Doctor explains his odd language by telling Zoe that he could only say the words written for him by Swift. The Doctor gives her Jamie's waistcoat to look after, and they move on.

He, meanwhile, has been pursued out of the labyrinth to an area of huge rocks. Knowing that the Soldier will have limited mobility, he begins to climb. It is unable to follow.

He wishes aloud for a rope - and one suddenly drops into view. It has emerged from the window of a medieval style turret atop the rocky crags.

Clambering up, he is surprised to find that it is not a rope at all, but the long hair of a young woman.

She is the Princess Rapunzel, and tells him he can only enter if he is a prince - or a wood-cutter's son. Jamie apologises for being neither, but she relents and gives him admittance. By the time he climbs through the window, she has vanished.

He follows some stairs down to a lower floor, where he finds a chamber full of advanced technology.

A large screen shows images of pages from books, the text being narrated. All round the walls are panels labelled with other book titles. There is also a ticker-tape machine, and when Jamie looks at the print-out he finds that it is describing what is happening at that moment to the Doctor and Zoe.

They have returned to the central chamber, and this time there is a statue - of a robed woman with snakes entwined in her hair.

The Doctor points out to Zoe that, previously, the unicorn had appeared to be alive and then became a statue - so this time the process may be reversed. Sure enough, the snakes begin to writhe.

Jamie reads about this - the ticker-tape machine currently linked to a book about the legends of ancient Greece. The statue is that of Medusa, the Gorgon - a look from whom could turn a man to stone.

She begins to approach the pair, and the Doctor frantically urges Zoe not to look into her eyes. He tries to shield her as Medusa reaches out and touches her face, but she struggles to accept that the creature is only a myth.

She feels compelled to look...

Data:

Written by Peter Ling

Recorded: Friday 5th July 1968 - Lime Grove Studio D

First broadcast: 5.20pm, Saturday 28th September 1968

Ratings: 7.2 million / AI 53

VFX: Jack Kine & Bernard Wilkie

Designer: Evan Hercules

Director: David Maloney

Additional cast: Christine Pirie (Rapunzel), Sue Pulford (Medusa), Richard Ireson (Minotaur)

Critique:

It was Derrick Sherwin who proposed that the mysterious traveller - revealed in this instalment to be Gulliver of Gulliver's Travels - should only speak lines from the novel, written by Irish clergyman Jonathan Swift and first published in 1726. It's from these that the Doctor recognises him.

However, anyone familiar with the book will spot that his dialogue is actually more paraphrase than direct quote at times.

In his original script, Peter Ling described the Master's base as "the Citadel", composed of fairy tale towers and turrets, and set under a starry sky.

Ling had intended for another fictional character to appear in this episode - the master swordsman Zorro. He was created by pulp author Johnston McCulley in 1919, and was best known at the time through screen incarnations - Guy Williams (Lost in Space) on TV, and Tyrone Power in a classic 1940 movie. His inclusion was abandoned due to copyright issues.

Whether this would have been an entirely new incident within the episode, or he was to be the character who would have pursued Jamie outside to the base of the cliff, we don't know. It does look odd that a lone Clockwork Soldier turns up in a labyrinth full of new fictional figures.

Clearance issues also had an impact on dialogue. Right up until the week of rehearsals, attempts were being made to clear the use of part of Walter de la Mare's 1912 poem The Listeners.

It opens:

"Is there anybody there?" said the Traveller,

Unfortunately, the clearance couldn't be obtained.

Filming for this episode took place on Sunday 9th June at Harrison's Rocks - a series of sandstone crags to be found near Groombridge in East Sussex. Of the regular cast only Frazer Hines was required, as this was for the sequence where Jamie is forced to climb a cliff-face after being pursued by one of the Clockwork Soldiers (played by Ian Hines).

Model filming then took place on Monday 10th and Tuesday 11th at Television Centre's puppet theatre, which included the animation of the snakes on the Gorgon's head. Actress Sue Pulford had been expected to attend this session, but in the end it was all achieved through the laborious technique of stop-motion photography (see Trivia below). The model head was the work of John Friedlander, who would go on to create some iconic masks for the programme including that of the original Davros.

Frazer Hines rejoined rehearsals on Monday 1st July after recovering from the chicken pox he had contracted from his nephews.

After two weeks at Television Centre, due to the need for extensive studio space for black and white void sequences, the programme returned to its ancestral home of Lime Grove Studio D.

As we mentioned last time, the opening scenes with the unicorn in the black void were recorded at the end of the previous week's episode - to save on having to reuse the set. A photographic blow-up of pony Goldy as the unicorn was used. (It is clearly a flat hardboard cut-out, though the Doctor states in dialogue that it has become a statue).

A recording break allowed for the repeat of the photo-fit trick, with Philip Ryan once again playing the Redcoat soldier, uncredited. This time it was Hamish Wilson's turn to be transformed into a cardboard cut-out - to have Jamie's features recreated to match those of Hines.

Ian Hines also played the lone Clockwork Soldier in studio, whilst the Minotaur was an uncredited Richard Ireson (See Episode 2). The Minotaur head was from stock and was only seen very briefly due to its static nature - the beast being realised mainly through sound and shadow.

Sue Pulford wore a rigid half-mask, again the work of Friedlander, which matched his animation model.

In his control centre, the Master viewed a map of the labyrinth - a translucent graphic with moving lights behind.

Unfortunately the plan clearly does not match the arithmetic progression of turns which Zoe claims for the maze.

Hines threw his sheepskin waistcoat over the camera lens when Jamie temporarily blinds the Clockwork Soldier. Wendy Padbury would wear it over her catsuit for the remainder of the recording, after the Doctor and Zoe return and find it.

In the high-tech book room - described as the Apparatus Room in the script - the lights were dimmed so that images of pages from novels could be seen on a large circular screen. These were Treasure Island and Little Women. Christine Pirie, playing Rapunzel in the episode, provided the narration for the latter. This set also featured a number of futuristic props, some of which appear in other stories.

His contribution to the series concluded, Peter Bryant would write to Wilson to thank him for helping out, crediting his performance as Jamie as "first-class".

Please take note that Zoe knows what candles are. I'm not going to be setting a test, but this will have some significance for the nature of this story later...

A number of new fictional characters are introduced this week, though they will only appear briefly and two are used merely as one-off threats as the Doctor and Zoe make their way through the subterranean labyrinth. Both derive from Ancient Greek legends, and this is one of the books we see in the Apparatus Room.

The Minotaur is mercifully kept to the shadows, with just a quick glimpse of its less-than-scary face, but the Medusa is particularly effective and provides a very scary cliffhanger. 

It is a very creepy image we are presented with, of the ghostly white statue standing in the darkness, its head and shoulders spot-lit from above. They could have gone for some bouncy rubber snakes in her hair, but instead Maloney opts to use stop-motion animation - a painstaking and time-consuming process, so usually prohibitively expensive. He will employ the technique again in the penultimate episode of The War Games, for the Doctor's message cube. All three of his Season 6 stories have some visual experimentation.

It's something worth considering: could this have worked as a six-parter? You have the whole of literature to play with - characters from novels, plays, fairy tales and mythology, so was there another episode's worth of material they could have employed, to prolong the journey to the Citadel? Possibly, if they had chosen interesting figures. Jamie fighting a duel with Macbeth, or Zoe tangling with the White Witch whilst the Doctor faced Dr. No. It might not necessarily have come across as treading water if handled well.

The imagination may have stretched, but the budget probably couldn't.

If the money had been there, this might have been an option for plugging the gap created by the shortening of The Dominators - but then we would have been deprived of that remarkable opening episode, so we ought to be grateful there wasn't any money available.

Other books we can see in the Apparatus Room include Vanity Fair, Swallows and Amazons, Don Quixote and The Pit and the Pendulum - all specified by Ling in his script. (It's very lucky for the Doctor and his companions that the Edgar Allan Poe work wasn't brought into play against them...).

Jamie, meanwhile, encounters a fairy tale figure - one who just happens to have what he needs to get into the citadel. The Master is clearly intending that they reach him unharmed - or at least that the Doctor will - despite all the hazards they are being forced to confront. (We'll shortly find out that this is all a test by him, specifically on the Doctor whom he needs in one piece).

Oddly, the Doctor claims that he's looking forward to having a nice long chat with Gulliver - even though he knows the man can only speak lines from the book he features in.

Frazer Hines returns to the programme and, no offence to him, but it might have been nice to have let him have a wee holiday and allowed Hamish Wilson a little longer in the role - perhaps with Jamie only getting his face back at the end of the story when the Land of Fiction collapses.

Splitting Jamie up from the others to do some physical stuff, whilst pairing Zoe with the Doctor to do the working out, is something we've seen before and it will be the pattern for much of Season 6.

Trivia:

• The ratings see a big improvement this week, both in terms of audience and the appreciation figure, which gets back above the 50 mark.
• This is the first episode to run under 20 minutes. The next pair will also be of similar duration.
• Harrison's Rocks are now owned by the British Mountaineering Council, and looked after by a team of volunteers. There's an associated campsite, set up as a memorial to a former climbing club member who died on K2. The location will appear in Doctor Who again in 1982, being climbed by the Doctor, Tegan and Nyssa in Castrovalva. 
• Coincidentally, in both stories, the Rocks are pictured with a fairy tale castle on their summit.
• The story of Rapunzel was popularised by the Brothers Grimm in their 1812 collection Children's and Household Tales. A pregnant woman desires rapunzel (a herb) to eat, so her husband steals some from a walled garden. This belongs to a sorceress who catches him. She agrees not to punish him so long as she is given the child as soon as it is born. The baby girl is named after the herb her mother craved. When she is 12 years old, the sorceress locks her away in a tall tower, its only opening being a high window. The only way to get in is when Rapunzel lowers down her very long hair to be used like a rope. There's a lot more to the fairy tale, but this is the relevant part of the story here.
• Medusa was one of three sisters, daughters of the sea god Phorcys and his sister Ceto. She was also known as Gorgo, and was the only one of the trio who was mortal. If a man looked into her eyes, they were turned to stone. Perseus was able to kill her by using the polished inner surface of his shield to view her and so guide his sword. Her image was popular on shields and armour in ancient times as it was said to ward off evil. The best known movie interpretation is the stop-motion creation by Ray Harryhausen for Clash of the Titans (1981). (The 2010 remake offers only an awful CGI version). Hammer's The Gorgon (1964) is well worth seeing. It deals with another of the creatures named Maegera, has an early 20th Century Germany setting, and is interesting in that Christopher Lee plays hero to Peter Cushing's villain. Patrick Troughton is the local Chief of Police. In The Mind Robber, as the Doctor suspects, Ling elects to invert the usual story by having Medusa herself made of stone.
• The Minotaur came into being when King Minos prayed to Poseidon to give him a snow-white bull as a sign of his favour. Instead of sacrificing it to the deity, Minos kept it for himself. An enraged Poseidon then had Minos' wife Pasiphae bewitched into having sex with the bull - an act which produced a child which was half-man, half-bull. We'll return to this myth later, as there's a whole story based around it (The Horns of Nimon) as well as an appearance in The Time Monster.
• Hamish Wilson would go on to become an announcer with Scottish Television, as well as a radio producer with the BBC. Sadly, he was one of the many casualties of the Covid pandemic. He died in March 2020, aged 77.

R is for... Rani (Chandra)

Rani Chandra moved into Bannerman Road, Ealing, to live opposite Sarah Jane Smith and her son Luke. The Chandras took on the house which had once been home to their friend Maria Jackson. A budding journalist, Rani soon became involved in Sarah's adventures - the first of which involved a sinister clown who was terrorising children. This proved to be the personification of an alien entity, brought to Earth on a meteorite fragment.

Initially Sarah was reluctant to involve another young person in her often dangerous struggles against alien incursions, but quickly came to befriend Rani. So too did Luke's friend Clyde Langer, though he had an issue with the fact that her father, Haresh, was their new headmaster. Her mother, Gita, was a florist.

Rani often struggled to keep her parents from finding out about her new life centred across the street - especially as they usually involved the near neighbourhood or the school itself.

The Chandras had previously lived in the seaside town of Danemouth, where a close friend of Rani had been Samuel Lloyd.

Whilst Sarah was away one weekend, Rani found a pendant at the school which gave its wearers the power to control others. She left it in Sarah's attic, but Clyde allowed his estranged father access to the house and he became possessed by it. Rani, Clyde and Luke called upon Maria - now living in the US - to help track him down.

An entity known as the Trickster - part of the Pantheon of Discord - made repeated attempts to destroy the Doctor through Sarah, and one of these involved tricking her into visiting her home village, when she was still a baby and her parents were still alive. Trapped there, the future was altered - but Rani and Clyde were protected from the changes by one of the Trickster's own devices. In the new timeline, Gita had no daughter.

Gita was later abducted by Mrs Wormwood - really a disguised alien Bane. She was working with a Sontaran renegade to free an ancient power. On this occasion, Rani got to meet and work with Brigadier Lethbridge Stewart.

An encounter with a Judoon officer resulted in Rani and Clyde being punished by being confined to Earth. During this incident, Haresh and Gita were actually confronted by the aliens and questioned by them. Rani pretended to refuse to believe them.

Samuel came back into Rani's life when he contacted her from the children's home he was now living in. He told her about strange activity at the local funfair, which was currently shut down. Having fallen out with Sarah - feeling she treated her like a child - Rani decided to go and investigate on her own. Samuel had tricked her into coming, as an orphan alien named Eve was living in the fairground, protected by its caretaker, Harry. Eve sought only people to play with - controlling their minds to force them into riding the attractions. The others traced her and were able to reunite Eve with her mothership - and she left Earth with Harry and Samuel.

In an alternate future, in 2059, an elderly Rani told this story to a young man. She lived alone in Sarah's old house, a virtual recluse.

The young man turned out to be the son of Eve and Samuel, and the future timeline was restored - with Rani now surrounded by grandchildren.

Rani then got to meet the Doctor himself, nearing the end of his tenth incarnation, when the Trickster used a dying man - Peter Dalton - to ensnare Sarah using an engagement ring capable of hypnotising its wearer. Once married, she would feel compelled to give up her activities. Rani, Luke and Clyde were cut off from Sarah at the wedding venue - trapped in a pocket of time out of synch with the rest of the universe. The Doctor arrived to stop the ceremony.

Rani and her friends got to see inside the TARDIS once the Trickster had been defeated.

After a visit to a haunted house, Rani then encountered the Slitheen and their cousins the Blathereen.

Just before Luke went off to university, he began suffering from nightmares. Soon Rani and the others became part of these dreams. Rani found herself anchoring a TV news broadcast.

After another meeting with Androvax - who had previously escaped from Judoon custody - Rani met the Doctor again, this time in his eleventh incarnation. She had gone with the others to a UNIT base in Snowdonia to attend the Doctor's funeral service. This was all a ploy by a corrupt UNIT officer, in league with the vulture-like Shansheeth, to steal the TARDIS. On this occasion, Rani also got to meet the Doctor's former companion Jo, and her grandson Santiago.

Soon after, Rani and Clyde woke to find themselves apparently the only people left on Earth. They encountered a pair of giant robots who were searching for something. They then came across one other person - a schoolboy named Gavin. It transpired that he was an alien prince, and the robots had been sent to take him home to ascend the throne of his world. After everyone was returned, Sarah told them both that they had not been taken away from Earth due to the Judoon grounding them.

Whilst banned from leaving Earth, Rani could travel in time. A quest from a mysterious shopkeeper sent her to Tudor England, where she found herself a lady-in-waiting to the doomed Lady Jane Grey who had just been crowned Queen of England.

She and Clyde were then duped into changing their allegiance away from Sarah to a new alien-fighter named Ruby. It turned out that she had incapacitated Sarah in order to feed off her, and was an alien herself, recently escaped from a space capsule.

Sarah came to adopt another child - a girl named Sky who had originally been created by an alien race as a weapon of mass destruction.

Clyde then became cursed by an ancient alien artefact, which caused everyone to turn against him - including his own mother and Rani.

Rani and Clyde went undercover as journalists, writing for an over-60's lifestyle magazine, in order to investigate a computer company run by Joseph Serf. They discovered that his miraculous new laptop - the Serfboard - had nothing special about it at all. Serf had actually been killed in an accident and his business manager was using alien slave labour to create a hologram of him - one with hypnotic powers to fool people into thinking the technology was better than it was.

The aliens - Skullions - were freed and taken back home, with the business manager their captive.

As they grew older, Rani and Clyde would come to have romantic feelings towards each other.

Played by Anjli Mohindra, Souad Faress (Older Rani)

Appearances: SJA 2.2 The Day of the Clown (2008) - SJA 5.3 The Man Who Never Was (2011)

• The Chandra family were brought into The Sarah Jane Adventures after the actress playing Maria - Yasmin Paige - decided to leave and concentrate on her education.
• Unlike Luke, and Sarah herself, all of Rani's encounters with the Doctor took place in The Sarah Jane Adventures. She hadn't yet arrived on Bannerman Road during the events of The Stolen Earth.
• Had the series continued, more would have been made of the blossoming romance between Rani and Clyde - nicknamed "Clani" as a couple.
• In spin-off material, the older Rani does become a journalist, and still gets involved with aliens.
• Mohindra later appeared in the Doctor Who story Nikola Tesla's Night Of Terror, under heavy prosthetics as the Skithra Queen.
• She also provided the voice of the Mechonoid leader in the animated Daleks serial, part of the "Time Lord Victorious" multimedia event. 
• In 2025 she married Sacha Dhawan, who played the Master opposite Jodie Whittaker's Doctor.

R is for... Rani

A ruthless and amoral Time Lady scientist. She was the same age as the Doctor, so presumably attended the Academy with him.

She left Gallifrey in disgrace after a genetically engineered mouse - part of one of her experiments - bit the Lord President of the High Council.

She eventually found her way to the planet Miasimia Goria, becoming its ruler.

In order to increase productivity amongst its workers, she tampered with their brain chemistry and removed the need for sleep. This had the unfortunate side effect of making them aggressive and unruly. Seeking a compatible humanoid species from which she could extract a chemical to counter this and so calm the populace, she decided on Earth. Its many conflicts could be used to mask her activities.

During Britain's industrial revolution, she set up a base in the northern town of Killingworth - posing as the elderly owner of a bath house serving the local miners.

Once inside, the men were tranquilised with gas and the chemical extracted. The only outward sign was a red mark on the neck - and an increased level of violence and aggression. The area had previously been blighted by Luddite activity, where workers destroyed machinery in the fear that it would take their jobs away from them.

Those who bore the red mark could be killed by her remotely.

The TARDIS was drawn off course to land here - the work of the Master, who sought to interfere with Earth history by disrupting industrial progress.

The Rani found herself caught in the middle of their long-running feud. 

The Master stole the quantity of brain fluid she had already gathered in order to force her into helping him destroy the Doctor. He also helped himself to some chemically impregnated worms which she employed to mentally control people.

The Doctor traced energy signals to the bath house and discovered the Rani's TARDIS there, disguised as a large cabinet.

Posing as a miner, he was gassed and the Rani discovered who he was when she examined his brain.

Later, his companion Peri went into a local wood to find plants for a herbal remedy - unaware that the Rani had planted landmines which transformed their victims into trees.

She was saved by the Doctor, though he almost met the same fate after being captured by miners under the Master's control.

The Rani and Master tried to trap the Doctor in a collapsing mine tunnel. When they tried to leave in her TARDIS, they discovered that the Doctor had sabotaged it. It was sent hurtling forward in time. An embryo T-Rex, kept as a specimen in her ship, began to rapidly grow as centrifugal forces trapped them against the walls...

Some time later, the Rani began working on the planet Lakertya - first enslaving its indolent inhabitants. Their leader, Beyus, and his daughter Sarn were forced to work for her. The Rani was assisted in these activities by the giant bat-like Tetraps, led by Urak.

She had identified an asteroid which orbited the planet as being composed of Strange Matter, which is incredibly dense.

A missile was aimed at this, but she needed a substance strong enough to mount in its warhead - loyhargil. At the same time, she created a huge brain and began kidnapping scientists from across time and space. They would be harnessed to the brain - increasing its intelligence to the point that it would give her the formula for loyhargil. The explosion of the asteroid would not only destroy the planet, but set in motion an elaborate process whereby chronons would form - particles of time. A shell of these would form around Lakertya's remains, and the brain would expand to fill it - becoming a Time Manipulator. The Rani could then use this to interfere in the evolutionary processes of any given planet.

The final scientist she sought, needed to repair her laboratory, was the Doctor. She caused the TARDIS to crashland on the planet, with the fortuitous side-effect of triggering his sixth regeneration. She was able to exploit his post-regeneration trauma - which included amnesia - to get him to work for her. To aid this deception, she impersonated his companion Mel.

The Doctor soon recovered his memories and began to fight against her, aided by a young Lakertyan named Ikona. After being captured, the Doctor's erratic mind almost destroyed the Rani's plan as it confused those already joined with the brain. She was able to get the loyhargil in the end, however.

Eventually, Beyus took a stand against her by sacrificing his life to blow up her base, after the Doctor had meddled with the missile launch sequence - causing it to miss the asteroid.

Urak discovered that the Rani had intended to abandon him and his people when the missile was fired, and so they broke into her TARDIS - now in the form of a low metallic pyramid - and captured her. They planned to take her back to their home planet.

The Rani survived the Time War and the subsequent destruction of the Time Lords by the Master, and soon embarked on a long-term plan to re-establish her race. She arrived on Earth and posed as Mrs Flood - neighbour to the Doctor's companion Ruby Sunday in London's Notting Hill district.

Later, she then moved in next door to his next companion, Belinda Chandra.

She began following them through time and space using a Gallifreyan Time Ring. Seemingly unable to get the TARDIS to land back in London on 24th May 2025, the Doctor used a device he called the Vindicator to take readings at various locations, and these would help guide the ship to the intended date. The Rani then captured these readings herself as part of her ultimate plan. 

After being jettisoned into space during the Interstellar Song Contest, the Rani regenerated. However, this proved to be a bi-generation. 

Mrs Flood remained, whilst a new, younger-looking Rani emerged.

Their relationship was not one of equals, however, as the Mrs Flood incarnation was very much subservient to her new persona.

The Rani travelled to a remote rural area of Bavaria in 1865 and abducted a baby, who was actually the reincarnation of Desiderium - the god of wishes. She turned the child's mother into flower petals, and his father and siblings into animals, using a chemical mouth spray.

Mrs Flood had earlier released from prison a young man named Conrad Clark, who was an enemy of UNIT and the Doctor. He held extreme right-wing views, and wished to see a society which adhered only to his ideology. This world was brought into being as an alternate time-line by the Rani, who used Desiderium to create it.

His world, however, was one specifically designed to collapse under the weight of doubt. When enough people challenged this new reality, the Earth would become inverted - releasing the Underverse.

The Rani was based in the Bone Palace - a huge skeletal structure which straddled London like a spider. She employed Droneguard robots as security, and her equipment was operated by cyborg humanoids who were physically integrated into the systems. There was no sign of her still having a TARDIS.

The Doctor and Belinda had been captured, their memories tampered with so that they would initially believe themselves part of this timeline. The Rani also obtained the Vindicator, which would be used to locate someone within the Underverse - Omega.

The doubt of a Time Lord would be the breaking point for Conrad's world, an event which would trigger the final phase of the Rani's plan. The final destruction of the Earth was repeated each night, until the Doctor was made ready. Once he regained his memories, he warned the Rani that Omega was now a mad god - one whom she would be unable to control. The Time Lords had been rendered sterile after the Master's actions on Gallifrey, and the Rani wanted Omega's pure DNA to help reconstitute the race. On this occasion, the Rani insisted that she never hated the Doctor. In the past she had merely exploited him, or acted against him at the Master's instigation and to prevent him meddling in her work.

The Doctor's warnings proved to be true and, on being released, Omega - now a giant skeletal figure - devoured the Rani. Mrs Flood escaped using the Time Ring, whilst the Doctor used the Vindicator to force Omega back into the Underverse.

Played by Kate O'Mara, Anita Dobson, Archie Panjabi. 

Appearances: Mark of the Rani (1985), Time and the Rani (1987), The Church on Ruby Road (2023), The Legend of Ruby Sunday / The Empire of Death (2024), The Robot Revolution - The Reality War (2025).

• The Rani was created by husband and wife team Pip & Jane Baker. Pip claimed that he had been speaking with a scientist at a party, who pointed out that human beings were simply collections of chemicals - which gave him the idea for a thoroughly amoral scientist.
• Rani means "princess" or "queen" on the Indian subcontinent - the wife of a Raja. It derives from the Sanskrit word rajni.
• The Rani was also employed as the chief villain in the EastEnders / Doctor Who crossover special for Children in Need in 1993 - "Dimensions in Time". In this she was once again played by Kate O'Mara, and the Rani had gained a companion - Cyrian, played by Samuel West (named because JNT had hoped to interest Sir Ian McKellen in the role). The Rani's TARDIS was this time disguised as the Queen Vic pub.
• O'Mara's screen appearances, such as her role in Dynasty, were mainly to fund her theatrical enterprises, specifically works by Shakespeare. 
• She featured in two Hammer Horrors - The Vampire Lovers and Horror of Frankenstein. It was this work which prevented her from taking on the role of Petra Williams in Inferno.
• She was married twice: to Jeremy Young (An Unearthly Child / Mission to the Unknown) and then to Richard Willis (Full Circle). Ian Cullen (Ixta - The Aztecs) was the biological father to one of her children.
• Anita Dobson had already left EastEnders before "Dimensions in Time" was made. She came to fame in the soap playing Angie Watts, landlady of the Queen Vic and wife of "Dirty Den" (Leslie Grantham - Resurrection of the Daleks). She returned for a cameo in the programme's 40th anniversary episode - an hallucination experienced by her daughter.
• She also has a singing career, appearing in a number of stage musicals and had a No.4 hit in the UK in 1986 singing Anyone Can Fall In Love, which was set to the EastEnders theme tune.
• Since 2000, she has been married to Queen's Brian May.
• Archie Panjabi had roles in the British movies East Is East and Bend It Like Beckham, and was later nominated for a number of awards for her performance in the CBS series The Good Wife, which ran from 2009 - 2015.
• Since 2005, nearly every female villain has been rumoured to be the Rani. Steven Moffat teased fans during the filming of Dark Water by having Michelle Gomez declare herself on location at St Paul's to be a Random Access Neural Integrator - or RANI for short. Her real identity was added in dubbing later.
• Scots actress Siobhan Redmond has also played the Rani, on audio.

R is for... Range, Mr

Mr Range was chief science officer on a colony ship which crash-landed on the planet Frontios. This vessel carried survivors from the dying Earth.

Some ten years after the crash, the planet began to be bombarded on a daily basis by meteorites. There were many casualties, and Range took on the additional role of chief medical officer - helping to manage the makeshift infirmary with his daughter Norna. She had been born soon after they arrived here, and her mother was now dead.

Range began to take note of a number of deaths which were unaccountable, keeping this information secret even from his leader, Plantagenet, and Chief of Staff Brazen. The latter was aware of these incidents however, and was keeping the information secret so as not to cause panic. Their society was already fragile, and the slightest spark could trigger anarchy.

Range spoke up for the Doctor after he had helped him tend the injured, and later joined him in an exploration of a cave system beneath the colony - something which Brazen also knew about but suppressed, since he had witnessed the old leader, Captain Revere, apparently swallowed up by the ground here. When the Doctor's companion Turlough suffered a nervous breakdown in the tunnels - the result of contact with creatures named Tractators which his people knew as a race memory - Range helped him back to the surface. Despite being attacked himself by one of the creatures, he went back down when he learned that Norna was in danger there.

Brazen died rescuing Plantagenet from the creatures, but the Doctor rendered them harmless after separating them from their leader, the Gravis. Range was left with his daughter to help Plantagenet re-establish the colony, now safe from the bombardments which had been caused by the Tractators.

Played by William Lucas. Appearances: Frontios (1984)

• Lucas, who died in 2016, had starred as Dr Gordon in the TV series The Adventures of Black Beauty in the early 1970's - a role he returned to in The New Adventures of Black Beauty twenty years later.
• He featured prominently in two science fiction films in 1956 - X the Unknown and The Strange World of Planet X. 1967 saw him appear with Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing in Night of the Big Heat. He was Inspector Lestrade to Cushing's Sherlock Holmes on TV the following year.
• He made two appearances in The Avengers, including the Terry Nation episode "Invasion of the Earthmen".
• He also starred in ill-fated soap Eldorado - Verity Lambert's only real failure.
• Lucas was called in to play Range after the tragic death of fellow actor Peter Arne, who was murdered shortly after attending a costume fitting for the role.

DWM Legends: Patrick Troughton

New this week from Doctor Who Magazine is the latest Special Edition - Legends: Patrick Troughton.

The cover says it all really, so I won't bother you with the contents - other than to say I've already got my copy and it is highly recommended. Here's some random pages to hopefully whet your appetite:

TARDIS Log: Origins

An Unearthly Child opens with a policeman checking the gates to a junkyard, run by I M Foreman, at 76 Totter's Lane. Satisfied they're locked, he moves on. However, as the camera moves in, the gates creak open and we approach a Police Public Call Box which sits incongruously amidst the bric-a-brac. It emits a strange hum...

20 years later, Douglas Camfield would criticise this opening sequence, claiming Waris Hussein was mistaken in doing it this way. He was arguing the logic of the scene. The gates are seen to be locked, so how then could they swing open? Who is opening them?

He was a director who was very much into realism, where every shot had to have a logical, narrative purpose - whereas Hussein was simply being practical as well as allowing for some artistic licence. It didn't matter about the gates being locked, or who might have opened them. He was setting up a mystery which had, at its heart, a Police Box, and this was the way he chose to introduce it.

No one person can claim credit for the TARDIS - either as a concept or for its final physical form. Some people can lay claim to certain aspects of it - such as designer Peter Brachacki, who was responsible for the iconic console room.

The story begins with Eric Maschwitz, head of light entertainment at the BBC. He commissioned a report on the feasibility of using science fiction as a basis for TV drama - a piece undertaken by Alice Frick and Donald Bull. Frick was later asked for a follow-up report, which she undertook with John Braybon. They concluded that two types of story merited further attention - those featuring telepaths, and those involving time travel, of which they favoured the latter as a wider range of writers might be interested.

The recommendations would only be put into practice with the arrival in January 1963 of Sydney Newman, as new Head of Drama. He was a keen follower of science fiction, and for ABC had been responsible for four family adventure serials involving space travel. The first was Target Luna, which was followed by the "Pathfinders" series - Pathfinders in Space, Pathfinders to Mars, and Pathfinders to Venus. All revolved around a family of space adventurers, children of a rocket scientist, who undertook interplanetary travels with adult companions. The final serial had also included a shady older man - Harcourt Brown, played by George Coulouris - who frequently placed the others in jeopardy in order to pursue his own scientific obsessions.

One of the first things he noted was a drop-off in viewers on a Saturday evening following the sports compendium Grandstand, before picking up again an hour later with Juke Box Jury. Various drama serials had been used to fill the slot, but Newman wanted a new family-friendly series, aimed especially at children, which might keep the Grandstand audience.

A meeting was held in March, attended by Newman, Frick and Braybon, along with Donald Wilson (Head of Serials) and staff writer Cecil Edwin Webber, known as "Bunny".

Ideas discussed included stories about telepaths and time travel, as the second report had suggested, but also ones involving flying saucers and computers. 

It was the time travel idea which Newman liked the most.

Webber was sent away to develop some character outlines, which included a youngster ("Need a kid to get into trouble") and a pair of young adults who could provide some potential romance, plus an older man with some "character twist". Newman then put together a memo which he passed on to Wilson outlaying the basic premise of the series, with the older man now a mysterious time traveller who was hundreds of years old.

Webber then began work on the opening story, provisionally titled "Nothing At The End Of The Lane", and he suggested that the time machine might be invisible - using electronic inlay techniques to show its entrance - as it was covered in some light resistant material. He also suggested that it disguise itself as an everyday item wherever it went. Another of his ideas was that one of the crew had to remain inside whilst the others went out to explore, in order to anchor it to its location.

Newman dismissed the invisibility notion as he wanted something tangible and visual.

The main character - "Dr Who" - would not be able to steer his ship due to senility, and would be constantly seeking components with which to make repairs.

The time machine itself couldn't be a flying saucer or rocket-like craft as this would be far too big to realise in studio, especially if only going to be seen briefly at the beginning or end of individual storylines. The idea of it disguising itself as an everyday object was agreed upon. It still had to accommodate four people comfortably inside, so the notion of having different dimensions within - bigger on the inside - followed. Objects considered were a Police Box and a workman's hut, and the former was accepted - outlined in May 1963 notes by Webber, before Anthony Coburn came along (who would later lay claim to the idea).

Having the time machine's outward appearance look the same all the time, rather than have it change for every landing site, allowed for a single visual identifier for the programme.

Rex Tucker was brought in to produce the new show, and he brought along former actor and now director Richard Martin to one of the early meetings. Martin came up with the idea that the time machine wasn't a fully physical space, but had some sort of psychological aspect - a mental barrier at its entrance. If you didn't believe in the space within, you simply walked into a normal Police Box. This suggestion wasn't taken up.

Never happy with the assignment, Tucker was allowed to step away from the project and was replaced by Verity Lambert. On her arrival in June she discovered that Webber's draft script - which would have seen the characters reduced to an inch in height and been trapped in a school science lab - had been dropped, and Coburn was now working on an alternative opener - "The Tribe of Gum".

In this, the character Suzanne (who will become Susan) tells her teachers that the time machine was called a Change and Dimensional Selector and Extender.

Despite the story later gaining the title of "100,000 BC", Coburn had it travel back 195,000 years for its encounter with the tribe.

Webber had previously suggested that the time machine and its owner originated in another galaxy in the year 5733, and new Story Editor David Whitaker retained this initially, as there was an idea that it could never travel to any point beyond that year - otherwise the Doctor and Susan would know their own futures.

A draft script from 8th July has the Doctor claim to be 300 years older than Ian, and the time machine responds to verbal commands, spoken by him in an alien language.

It is only in the version dated 12th July that the time machine has been given the name TARDIS - Time And Relative Dimension In Space.

Regarding the exterior, it has been said that an existing Police Box prop was going to be used for the TARDIS, one employed on Dixon of Dock Green, but this proved to be too big to fit into the lifts at Lime Grove Studios - so a smaller one was built specially.

The window surrounds are painted white, and the St John's Ambulance badge can be seen on the right hand door - indicating that the box held First Aid supplies.

On the left hand door is the information panel. Behind this sat the telephone, and the "Pull To Open" instruction refers to this panel, not the whole door.

The info panel and its surround were also white.

In the first version of An Unearthly Child, the Doctor opened the box by shining his pen torch into the lock. This was changed to an ordinary Yale-style key.

Police Public Call Boxes began life as hexagonal cast-iron structures, introduced in Glasgow in 1891. They were red in colour and had a gas lantern on the top. Anyone could use the telephone, which had a direct link to the nearest police control centre.

In 1912, Glasgow began replacing these with rectangular boxes, with an electric light fitting and a telephone which only police officers could now access.

Wooden versions followed in Sunderland in 1923, and in Newcastle in 1925, before spreading to other northern cities including Manchester and Sheffield.

The classic TARDIS version was designed by Gilbert Mackenzie Trench in 1929 and adopted by the Metropolitan Police.

Only one box survives in London, outside Earl's Court tube station, but several can still be seen in Glasgow - though not always painted blue. Some are employed as coffee kiosks.

Generally, only the doors of Metropolitan Police Boxes were wood, the main structure being concrete.

The Glasgow Police Boxes remained red, until a certain TV sci-fi show prompted the police to paint them blue in the 1960's...

As the date for production drew closer - the new series supposed to launch in September - Lambert grew increasingly irritated by the lack of development on the TARDIS interior design. This had been assigned to Brachacki, and in interviews she would claim that he had little interest in the work. It wasn't quite the case, as seen in origins drama An Adventure In Space And Time, that he simply threw it together on a whim from objects on his desk, but a lot of pressure did have to be put on him to come up with the final design. William Hartnell himself was keen to see "his" time machine.

As I've said, the result is iconic, but it isn't exactly as Brachacki had envisioned it, due to budget constraints. £500 had been allocated, and the cost of the TARDIS would actually cause the entire programme to be put at risk...

The first console room set measured 40 feet by 35 feet, taking up the majority of Lime Grove Studio D.

The six-sided central console was built by Shawcraft Models of Uxbridge, and each panel was removable. Brachacki intended for each panel to have handles for this purpose, and he also hoped that microphones could be installed inside these. 

The controls themselves were supposed to be specially moulded to fit the Doctor's hands, but instead various standard switches and buttons were used. The central column was 30 inches in diameter, made of perspex and fitted inside with lights supplied by a firm named Clark-Smith). The column rose and fell initially by use of a car foot-pump.

According to the designer, the column was supposed to rise when the TARDIS first took off, and would then rotate. The column would fall again only on landing. It was supposed to be a form of 3-D navigation system, from which the Doctor could see their location. It was never intended to keep going up and down.

The lights on the console were powered via an electrical cable, which can occasionally be glimpsed.

The studio floor was painted blue, and around the base of the console were set hexagonal metal plates.

Another hexagonal shape was suspended above - supposed to represent the power source.

This would quickly be discarded as it was unwieldy and interfered with the positioning of microphone booms.

The scanner was a TV monitor mounted on a frame which could be wheeled around. Brachacki intended that it should lower itself down from the ceiling when needed.

He wanted to use fibreglass for the walls, but this was too costly so they were made of wood, inset with PVC roundels. These were to have been translucent, and pulse with light when the ship was operated.

Two of the walls were photographic blow-ups - one of drilled holes to match the roundels and one of electronic components. The latter would be replaced for the broadcast version of the opening episode.

The designer had intended that the roundels could be removable to allow various camera angles to be achieved, but this was never taken up.

The doors, which caused so much trouble on the pilot episode, were mounted on a metal frame on another wooden wall. They were operated by stagehands and were difficult to balance, resulting in them swinging open or banging when being closed.

It was originally intended that the exterior would not be seen directly through these doors. They would lead to the reverse of the Police Box doors, held closed with a simple latch.

Walls, doors and console were all painted a pale green, which would appear white on screen.

The set was dressed with various items of furniture and furnishings, including high-backed and canvas-backed chairs, a brass clock, a tall candelabra affair, an eagle lectern, a bird cage, a sculptural group mounted on birds, and a low table. The suggestion was that this eclectic mix arose from the Doctor's travels - but he could equally have obtained them from the junkyard outside or from visits to London antique shops.

As the series commences, there is nothing yet to say that the TARDIS hasn't come directly to Totter's Lane from the Doctor's homeworld...

In terms of the soundscape, this was entirely the work of Brian Hodgson of the BBC's Radiophonic Workshop. Famously, his idea for the TARDIS dematerialisation effect was the notion of the "ripping of the fabric of time" - achieved by drawing his house key along the wires of an exposed piano frame, then slowing down and processing the resulting sound. He had used a similar process for the sound of a ship scraping against rocks on a radio production.

In all, Hodgson came up with 8 items for the TARDIS, under the collective title of "Dr Who - Beyond the Sun", which could act as library pieces for the series.

Next time, we'll look at the very first story, and what we learn of the TARDIS in story terms there...