What's Wrong With... The Mark of the Rani

Too many Time Lords, that's one of the things.... Instead of getting her own introductory story all to herself, the Master gets shoehorned into what is really a very simple and straightforward plot by the Rani. She's out to harvest chemicals from the human brain which will pacify the people of the planet she has taken over. She has tampered with their neural chemistry so that they need to sleep less, and so can work more. This has led to them becoming overly stimulated physically and emotionally, however. 

She picks times of great upheaval so that no-one will notice that her victims are acting very aggressively.

In this instance she picks the period of English history known as the Luddite Riots - and there we have a couple of problems.

The first is that there were lots of nice big wars going on around this time - the biggest being the Napoleonic Wars but there were dozens of other conflicts all across the globe in the first quarter of the 19th Century to pick from.

Secondly, the Luddite Riots were primarily aimed at the manufacturing industries, especially cotton - a violent reaction by some workers to the threat to their jobs from automation. They occurred roughly between 1811 - 1816. Killingworth is very much a coal mining district, producing the key raw material needed to fuel the mill towns such as "Cottonopolis" - Manchester. There's no evidence of any manufacturing going on here. Automation had very little impact on jobs in the mining industry, which is why it remained labour intensive up to its decline.

The riots had peaked by 1813, and George Stephenson did not produce his first locomotive until the following year. (We see what looks like The Rocket, but that was actually built by his son Robert in 1829).

If the Rani needs brain chemicals to subdue an entire planet's population, surely it will take her decades to harvest enough fluid using the occasional customer of a village bath-house.

Going undercover at a hospital in a war zone would have been far more efficient for her needs.

We first see the Master standing in a field disguised as a scarecrow. Why? 

Did he somehow know that the Doctor's TARDIS was going to arrive there in the next few minutes, or has he been hanging around there for hours (or days / weeks) on the off-chance his arch enemy might show up?

Even if we allow for the fact that he deliberately caused the TARDIS to go off course, how did he know that the Doctor was heading for somewhere in this general time zone anyway?

(Kew Gardens did not open to the general public until 1840 by the way, well after the events depicted here).

What, exactly, is the Master's plan here anyway? It appears to be another attempt to meddle in Earth history by interfering with the Industrial Revolution which, considering it has been going on for a while by this stage, is surely "small time villainy" once again on his part.

How exactly does he intend to interfere, if he only finds out about the Rani's mind-controlling maggots after he has already come here? Was he going to hypnotise all the visitors to Ravensworth's conference individually? Was his plan to assassinate them? If so, then just about all their inventions would have been developed by their rivals / relatives / assistants anyway, sooner or later.

Back to disguises: no-one knows the Rani here, so why does she feel the need to wear a mask to run the bathhouse?

And is the Doctor putting some dirt on his face really enough to confuse the Rani? She's seen him enter the village on the back of a cart only a short time ago, but doesn't recognise it's him in the bathhouse until she's about to drain off his brain fluid.

It's a small place so she ought to spot strangers straight away, and this guy has just gone right past her holding a loudly bleeping electronic device.

When the volcano trap ignites, why do they not simply run out of the door? We know it's not locked because he opens it to let the gas out.

In the same way we questioned why a Time Lord would pause to name the type of weapon that's about to shoot him dead, instead of running away or punching his attacker, why does the Doctor feel the need to reel off the multi-syllable name of the chemical that is about to poison him and his companion?

It's mustard gas (which would have been quicker to say if he really does insist on Peri knowing what's about to kill her), so donning gas masks wouldn't stop them getting blistered skin.

And why does this basic gas trap need a TARDIS to power it?

There's some dreadful dialogue as well, such as the Rani's "You and the Doctor are a well matched pair of pests". One's a mass murderer and the other stands for everything which she doesn't, yet she can only describe them as "pests".

The Bakers are infamous for using ten words, the more elaborate the better, where simpler, more straightforward, language would do - e.g. "Fortuitous would be a more apposite epithet". It's all very well helping the kids expand their vocabulary, though I don't know how many went into school the next week saying this instead of "'Lucky' would be a better word".

At one point Peri says "You suspect another motive?". When does she ever speak like this? She would say "You think (s)he's up to something?".

Why does the Master think that shoving the Doctor's TARDIS down a pit will destroy it?

How can a Time Lord be fooled into thinking that the Rani has invented a scanner that can somehow show thoughts instead of real images when any old TARDIS has this function built-in anyway - like when the Doctor used such a device to show Zoe a summer repeat of The Evil of the Daleks?

Even the moronic Moroks had tech that could do this.

Why does the Master use one of the scarce maggots to hypnotise Luke, when he could just have done this himself and saved the beastie for another time? 

Why does Peri have to set out and concoct a herbal remedy? Does Killingworth not have any doctors?

We can't put it off any longer, but the plastic tree needs to be talked about. It's one of the worst effects in the history of the series. The pair which hold the Doctor up are just as bad. Note how the rope tying him has modern sticky tape on it and plastic tips.

The Rani emerges from her ship with only a couple of mines, yet later the dell is supposed to be littered with them. (And does the Doctor go back and deactivate them all after? Doesn't look like it).

Still, could be a lot worse. They could have had the Rani breathing on people and turning them into plants. That would have been really stupid...