Latest news with #KateOMara
Gizmodo
23-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Gizmodo
A Brief Guide to the Rani, the Diva Time Lady Villainess of ‘Doctor Who'
The current era of Doctor Who has tried to shy away from resurrecting some of the series' biggest bads for the 15th Doctor to face off against—but that's not to say it has been devoid of classic villains. As we barrel towards the finale of the show's latest season, we've been given another in the form of the Rani, a brief but brilliant icon of '80s Who. Who Is the Rani? An amoral Time Lord scientist, the Rani, portrayed by Kate O'Mara, appeared in just two classic Doctor Who storylines in the 1980s: 'Mark of the Rani,' where she teamed up with the Master to face off against the Sixth Doctor, and 'Time and the Rani,' Sylvester McCoy's debut storyline as the Seventh Doctor, responsible for his prior incarnation's regeneration as she takes over an alien world in an attempt to manipulate evolution across the cosmos. O'Mara would appear onscreen once more as the Rani during the 1993 special Dimensions in Time, both a celebration for the then-cancelled show's 30th anniversary and a charity drive for Children in Need that saw Doctor Who cross over with the long-running British soap EastEnders, and the Rani trap multiple incarnations of the Doctor and several of their companions in a time loop in Walford, for inexplicable reasons. Little is known about the Rani beyond her on-screen appearances. She was given a similar background and status as a foil to the Doctor as the Master: a sinister mirror that felt kinship with the Doctor for their shared status as renegades of Time Lord society, as well as contemporaries who studied at the Pyrdonian Academy on Gallifrey together in their youths. But while the Doctor fled their people in rebellion, the Rani was exiled from Gallifrey for engaging in radical experimentation as part of her obsession with science and evolution. An obsession she was willing to do anything for, at any cost. Unlike many classic Who villains, the Rani has a limited life in spinoff media, even more so than her already limited TV outings. O'Mara portrayed the Rani once more in the questionably licensed 2000 audio drama The Rani Reaps the Whirlwind, set after the events of 'Time and the Rani,' and was set to reprise the role for Big Finish before her death in 2014. Instead, the Rani returned in a new incarnation for two Sixth Doctor audio stories, played by Siobhan Redmond—and was seemingly never to be heard of again until this year's season of Doctor Who revealed that Anita Dobson's mysterious 'Mrs. Flood' character is in fact the latest incarnation of the Rani… before she herself promptly regenerated into another new incarnation played by Archie Panjabi. Camp and the Rani The Rani has perhaps an oversized imprint on Doctor Who fandom despite her extremely limited number of appearances. This is largely down to O'Mara's performance as the character. While the Rani herself is absolutely dastardly, and Doctor Who itself never treats her as anything less than serious (even if her schemes are inevitably foiled), O'Mara played her as big and brash, vamping about the place in glamorous outfits as she snarls and shouts and cackles, woe betide any fool who gets in her way. A lot of classic Doctor Who has taken on a camp appreciation in recent years, but if that appreciation could be distilled into the embodiment of a single character, the Rani is exactly that. It's that camp status as an obscure, yet loved favorite that also has led the Rani to take on a different kind of life in modern Doctor Who before her appearance last weekend. After the series' return in 2005 made clear just how quickly it was willing to bring back monsters and antagonists from the classic era of the show, the Rani became a catch-all speculatory guess whenever the series presented a mysterious woman to its audience. The running joke was known not just among fans, but the creative team as well, who would jokingly acknowledge that she was always the first guess for any potential returning identity. That is, until modern Who's second showrunner, Steven Moffat, tried to clamp down on it. 'People always ask me, 'Do you want to bring back the Rani?' No one knows who the Rani is,' Moffat said to SFX magazine in 2012. 'They all know who the Master is, they know Daleks, they probably know who Davros is, but they don't know who the Rani is, so there's no point in bringing her back. If there's a line it's probably somewhere there.' Perhaps that was where the Rani fit best: known enough to be loved, not known enough to actually make her way back to TV… until 2025, that is. What Bringing the Rani Back Means for Doctor Who Aside from the end of a very long joke, the Rani's awaited return simultaneously means a lot and very little. On the one hand, showrunner Russell T Davies has made it clear that while the Rani is a known name, her character is minor enough that the show can essentially do whatever it wants with Panjabi and Dobson's iteration of the Rani, so whatever schemes they get up to in the final two episodes of this season, they don't necessarily have to align with the kinds of things we've seen the Rani doing in the past. But at the same time, the Rani is very interesting for another reason beyond being herself: she is the first Time Lord to return since Gallifrey's second sundering in contemporary Doctor Who continuity. The Time Lords were seemingly wiped out prior to the show's 2005 return in an almighty war with the Daleks, only to be saved from that fate during the events of Doctor Who's 50th anniversary and following series, which saw Gallifrey isolated but returned to existence once more. During the climax of the 2020 season of Doctor Who, it was revealed that the Master had razed the returned Gallifrey and harvested the bodies of the Time Lords as a new army of Cybermen called the CyberMasters, only for those to be seemingly wiped out for good during the events of 'The Power of the Doctor.' With the Doctor once again the 'last' of the Time Lords, just how the Rani escaped not one, but two cataclysms on Gallifrey remains to be seen—as does whether or not her return could mean that the series is on the verge of restoring Gallifrey for a third time. Time will tell, and so will Time Ladies!
Gizmodo
21-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Gizmodo
Russell T Davies Reveals Why Now Was the Time for ‘Doctor Who' to Resurrect the Rani
One of the many, many things that happened on the latest episode of Doctor Who was that the show finally lifted the lid on what two years of teasing who Mrs. Flood was leading towards. Turns out, it was exactly what many Doctor Who fans had, jokingly or otherwise, guessed immediately. In some ways, according to showrunner Russell T Davies, that was the point. 'The Interstellar Song Contest' climaxed with the reveal that Mrs. Flood was, in fact, the latest incarnation of the Rani, the renegade Time Lady scientist originally played by the late, great Kate O'Mara across two classic Doctor Who serials, 'Mark of the Rani' and 'Time and the Rani,' and the absurd 1993 anniversary special/charity drive Dimensions in Time. Very quickly after that she become the second-latest, as a mortally wounded Flood prepared to regenerate, only to bi-generate just like the 14th and 15th Doctors had, revealing a new Rani, played by Archie Panjabi. The Rani, aside from being something of a camp icon thanks to the winning combination of an immaculate 1980s fashion sense and O'Mara's delectably scenery-devouring performance, has become something of a running joke in the era of modern Doctor Who, with fans immediately joking that the second a mysterious female character comes up, she must be the Rani. The Master's wife in season three? The Rani. River Song? The Rani. Missy? The Rani. That woman from 'End of Time' who may or may not be the Doctor's mother? No, clearly the Rani! Mrs. Flood was no exception to that joking theory, it's just that this time it was decided to pay it off. 'Whenever you introduce any woman into any role on Doctor Who, half the internet seems to conject that she's the Rani,' Davies recently told the BBC. 'Sometimes, you just have to go with it.' For Davies, it was also an opportunity to play with a character who is both, almost paradoxically, a returning legacy character (something this current era of Doctor Who has largely stayed away from playing with outside of last year's Sutekh return), and also one who could essentially be brand new to a less-familiar audience. 'I think she's great in two ways. She's a famous classic villain if you know her. At the same time, she's not up there with the Master, the Cybermen, or the Daleks, she's just a little bit more niche,' Davies continued. 'That's good. That allows her to become a new character for the newer audience, she's not weighted down in continuity.' As to why not making her actually a new character—after all, the Time Lords are no stranger to Getting Better after seemingly being wiped out forever—well, Davies thought about that too. But for Davies, finally invoking the Rani meant an opportunity to have those less-familiar viewers check out her prior appearances. 'It's one of those things where you think we could have just made a new Time Lord and cast Archie Panjabi. That would have been wonderful. That would have been great,' Davies concluded. 'But, naming her the Rani leads us into this conversation about the character. It leads some children to BBC iPlayer, where they'll discover some great old stories with Colin Baker and Sylvester McCoy.' We'll learn just how different this new Rani is–these new Ranis are, rather—when Doctor Who begins its two-part finale this weekend.
BBC News
19-05-2025
- Entertainment
- BBC News
The Return of The Rani
The Doctor is a Time Lord from the planet Gallifrey. Over the last 60 years he has met many other Time Lords on his adventures, some good, some not so good – like the Rani. As the Doctor once again finds himself facing the Rani, BBC Archives is looking back to the previous times the Doctor has encountered her, and the woman behind this ingenious, misguided Time Lord. "The Rani is a genius. Shame I can't stand her." The Doctor (1985) The Doctor first encountered the Rani on screen in 1985 when she teamed up with the Master to disrupt the Industrial Revolution in 19th Century Tyneside. This plot outline simply describes her as 'a renegade Time Lady', but she proves to be more than that – a brilliant scientist who only cares for her experiments and not for the chaos they cause. As well as her genius for science, the Rani is also a master of disguise. In The Mark of The Rani she is first seen on screen as an elderly woman. This was probably not what viewers would associate with the actor chosen to portray the Rani, Kate O'Mara, who was more famous for playing the glamourous Caress in Dynasty. It is this talent for disguise that the Rani uses when she faced the Doctor again in the 1987 story Time and the Rani. However this time she pretends to be the Doctor's companion Mel. In 1999 Kate O'Mara described how she found imitating Bonnie Langford's character her most challenging role, as well as her fondness for the Rani. "If only the Rani could have redirected her incredible talents for good" The Doctor (1987) Kate O'Mara would play the Rani once more on screen in 1993. In a light-hearted special Doctor Who story for Children in Need, the Rani's dastardly plot to rid the universe of the Doctor brought her to Earth, and to Albert Square. Fortunately Pudsey wasn't part of her plans. The Rani, with her TARDIS disguised as The Queen Vic pub, creates a 30 year time loop, trapping four incarnations of the Doctor and his companions alongside several of the EastEnders residents. But the Doctor managed to defeat the Rani's plan and she was last seen tumbling into the time vortex, entangled in her own trap. Kate O'Mara remained fond of her time in Doctor Who and of playing the Rani. In 2012, when appearing on Radio Wales, she was asked if she'd like to return to the series and explained how the juxtaposition of her as the Rani and Matt Smith as the Doctor 'would be a great confrontation'. Sadly Kate O'Mara died in 2014, and never got the chance to realise her dream to return to Doctor Who. But as the Rani returns, with this new incarnation played by Archie Panjabi , the fearless, intelligent and ruthless character Kate created will continue to have life, even if the Doctor manages once again to thwart the Rani's plans.
