Miasimia Goria was a quiet planet, an ancient world of bucolic tranquillity… until the Rani arrived with ideas of her own.
She planned to create a race of new gods… gods that she could keep on her leash, but those plans went horribly wrong.
Now, she languishes in the high security of Teccaurora Penitentiary, consigned there by her arch enemy and old student colleague, the Doctor.
But the Rani, always resourceful, ever calculating, knows things about the Doctor’s past that he would rather forget. She wants revenge, even if it takes a hundred years… and then she has other unfinished business.
The ruins of Miasimia Goria await…
PLANET OF THE RANI
The second release in the late 2015 Colin Baker trilogy, Marc Platt’s “Planet of the Rani” is largely a disappointment. It takes a number of interesting images and wastes them on a flat plot and a miscast villain, marking an unfortunate return to poor form for the monthly range.
The Rani reminds me a lot of the Valeyard, in that they are both characters that sound quite interesting on paper but rapidly devolve into generic nonsense once put on screen. The concept of the Rani, an amoral scientist who conducts bizarre biological experiments without any regard for consequence, is interesting, and a brilliant Time Lord scientist should make a good recurring nemesis for the Doctor. I enjoyed her debut story, “The Mark of the Rani,” quite a bit – she’s just trying to experiment on humans, and the Doctor and the Master keep turning up and interrupting her. The problem comes in her next story, when she’s trying to construct a giant brain to conquer the universe. Then, in the last Big Finish Rani story, “The Rani Elite,” she’s… trying to construct a giant brain, again. At least here she’s not trying to conquer or destroy the universe, but most of the plot of “Planet of the Rani,” as the title implies, involves the Rani trying to regain control of her adopted home Miasimia Goria. Why do these “villain” stories always involve conquering something? And why don’t they involve better characterization?
That’s the real problem here – the characters are all so flat. This is Constance’s first journey in the TARDIS, and she gets a lot to do – she’s separated from the Doctor after the first episode and spends most of the story as the Rani’s de facto companion. That’s potentially interesting material, but we don’t learn anything about her in the process. Sure, she’s military, and has the corresponding attitude, but what motivates her? What is she getting out of her travels with the Doctor? Okay, so her husband went missing – well we’re not going to learn anything about that on Miasimia Goria, so can we please learn something else? Fortunately, Platt does flesh out the relationship between the Doctor and the Rani a bit: we learned how the Doctor foolishly developed a dangerous microbe while at the Academy and how the Rani didn’t care about the potential consequences of using it. But even this revelation seems to come out of nowhere, and the story doesn’t spend enough time on the moral implications of the Doctor developing the “ablative” in the first place.
And then there’s the biggest problem: Siobhan Redmond is terribly miscast as the Rani. The only time in four episodes that she is convincing is in the moment of emotional attachment to her lost “son” – beyond that, her readings are consistently flat and tonally mismatched. Part of this is down to the writing and direction: she’s clearly playing up the “amoral scientist” angle, but Platt’s script is full of stereotypical villain dialogue that would be perfect for Kate O’Mara’s portrayal. I don’t usually harp on casting decisions because Big Finish almost always gets it right, but this is a bad mistake that needs to be rectified.
There are some interesting images scattered throughout, as one would expect from a Marc Platt script. The stone forest is particularly imaginative, for example. Furthermore, the first episode featuring the Rani’s prison break is considerably more exciting than the rest of the story. So it’s not all bad. But this is yet another main range story that isn’t good enough, and I still don’t know why this is happening. It took 15 years for Big Finish to get around to the Rani, and both efforts have been subpar.
Mediocre.
4/10