What's Wrong With... Time and the Rani

Time and the Rani is what Doctor Who would have looked like had JNT not had the influence of a Script Editor to keep him in check.

Andrew Cartmel is the credited Script Editor, but the story was already well advanced by the time he started and he has very much distanced himself from it. JNT had gone ahead and commissioned Pip & Jane Baker for another story, being a "safe pair of hands" (or two pairs of hands, rather) and could be trusted to get on with things whilst Cartmel got settled in. Bringing back an old enemy, played by a big US soap star, was an obvious way to get a new season launched.

We were also being given the debut of a new Doctor, someone well known to children's TV audiences.

On paper, it should have been a big success, but even the president of the biggest fan club felt compelled to go to the media slating it. What went wrong?

First of all, there's the absence of Colin Baker to participate in a satisfying regeneration scene. The Doctor appears to have simply fallen off his exercise bike after the Rani shot at the TARDIS. We see her with a relatively small gun, so how on earth did that weapon manage to target a TARDIS?

Later we'll see that she hasn't got any sort of navigation / targeting device on her Strange Matter rocket. It's the key to her entire scheme, yet it's stuck in a fixed trajectory and will miss the asteroid if it isn't launched at a precise time. Why have a gun that can target a small moving object precisely, and not a vital rocket aimed at a big hunk of rock in a supposedly stable orbit?

If the asteroid is as dense as is claimed, it ought to have drawn the rocket towards it anyway so there's no way it could miss. Also, Lakertya ought to be orbiting it, rather than the other way round.

Efforts are made to obscure McCoy's features when the Doctor is turned onto his back, but it just doesn't work.

As to the cause of the regeneration, the novelisation blames "tremendous buffeting" due to the gun.

McCoy's first couple of episodes are far from promising. He might have appeared with the National Theatre, but his acting is appalling in his first few scenes with Kate O'Mara, and the pratfalls are embarrassing.

O'Mara having to dress up and act like Bonnie Langford for two episodes is another embarrassment.

At what point did the Rani know she was going to impersonate Mel? If it was always the plan, why leave the real one lying in the TARDIS, free to get away, when she took the Doctor?

The Rani is watching Sarn run away, during which she bumps into Mel - yet a short time later she's surprised to learn that Mel is on the loose.

And at what point did she and Mel meet in order for her to know what she looked, acted and sounded like? There can only be a missing story somewhere - except Mel doesn't recognise the Rani...

The Rani's plan is to create a Time Manipulator which will alter history throughout the universe, back through time and not just henceforward. That would mean that all the genii she has collected to help her big brain with its calculations might never have been born - creating a temporal paradox.

One of the people she abducts is Einstein. Not only is this a bit of a cliché, but he was no fan of quantum physics so surely his mental input would either be disruptive as he fiercely disagreed with it, or simply useless as he would have zero talent in this field.

The Rani changes her mind about saving the Lakertyans as a slave labour force - despite the fact that the entire planet is going to be destroyed when her rocket hits the asteroid.

The Doctor gets locked in the Rani's laboratory, yet there's a second door which Mel is able to just walk through.

The Bakers always prided themselves on their research, with Pip often reminding interviewers that his brother was a scientist. But there's some very dodgy science on show here.

The Doctor uses fibre optic cables to bypass the deadly ankle bracelets as though they were electrical wires - even though they don't conduct electricity. (Pretty pointless of the Rani to employ the bracelets when she has her killer insects. All she's done is provide the Doctor with a quantity of explosives).

The Rani wants the rocket to launch at the Lakertyan solstice. A solstice is simply the date on which the sun reached either maximum or minimum declination, giving us on Earth our longest and shortest days. It should have nothing to do with the orbit of an asteroid.