Monday, July 1, 2013

Doctor Who 50th Anniversary: Time and The Rani





Doctor Who:

Time and The Rani

By Pip and Jane Baker



“I don't believe it. A time manipulator. This monstrosity will give you the ability to change the order of creation.”



The TARDIS is under attack and bombarded with lasers being shot from The Rani. The TARDIS crash lands on Lakertya and as a result from that crash The Doctor is injured enough to cause him to regenerate.   The Rani enters the crashed TARDIS and takes the newly regenerated Doctor back to her base to help her with a project of hers.  The Doctor regains conscious and is alert that he is in the company of  The Rani when one of her Tetraps shoots him with a net gun and stuns him.  The Rani gives The Doctor a shot that will induce amnesia and disguises as Mel to get The Doctor to help her with her project.





Meanwhile Mel is wandering Lakertya and causes the death of one of the Lakerishans.  Ikona doesn’t rust Mel and blames her for his friends death.  After much confusion and the pair saving one another Mel and Ikona decide to try and save The Doctor from The Rani’s base of operations.   Once there Mel does not recognize The Doctor and he thinks Mel is The Rani.   Once the two realize that they are who they say they are prepared to stop The Rani from making a Time Manipulator and to mold creation as she sees fit.





I don’t know who has a worst debut story Colin Baker with The Twin Dilemma or Sylvester McCoy’s Time and The Rani.  They are both pretty bad stories with lots of stuff that makes you shake your head and cover your eyes in disgust.  It is pretty close but Time and The Rani is pretty bad and the story is hard to watch because Mel is constantly screaming her lungs out.   I mean all four episodes she screams and screams and doesn’t stop.  God she is awful and The Doctor should have left her on Lakertya.




I really hate this regeneration.  Seeing Sylvester McCoy in a blonde wig and having the blurred and swirly face just doesn’t work.  It would have been better if The Rani had found The Doctor already regenerated without the shoddy effects.  That would have been better and the fans would have accepted that.  It just leaves a bad taste in my mouth considering how Colin Baker was dumped and then having this sham of a regeneration.





The story is pretty weak with The Rani kidnapping genius’s from the past to be part of a giant brain to help make a calculation for a rocket to hit an asteroid with strange matter. Boring.  If she is so smart she could have figured it out herself but thinking of using The Doctor to help she must have been having a bad day if she thought that would work.




 Unfortunately the Sylvester McCoy era does not start on a high note as we are treated to a lack luster story that is filled mainly with escape and get caught and an insant amount of Mel screaming to cause blood to pour out of your ears.  Whoever thought of making The Doctor miss say quotes should be punished for making that decision as that was way over used in the story and became extremely annoying and not funny at all during McCoy’s first season.   A bad debut story and a poor start to a bad first season for Sylvester McCoy.  Luckily for us his second and third season where head and shoulders above this one.

Grade D –

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