Who is the Rani?

*Some spoilers for the latest season of Doctor Who, but no spoilers for the finale*

Long before the Master regenerated into Missy, the Rani was the epitome of a renegade Time Lady. I feel like TJ and I have been complaining a lot about the Master being overdone. Finally, we’ve been rewarded with a different rogue from Gallifrey. The Rani has returned! 

She only appeared in two television stories of classic Doctor Who, but she made her mark (literally and figuratively). While sometimes seen as a female version of the Master, she’s unique in her role in the mythos of Doctor Who, even in comparison to the other two major renegade Gallifreyan enemies (the Master and the Monk). The Master was the stereotypical evil James Bond version (becoming more and more bananas with each regeneration) and the Monk was more mischievous, messing with the timeline for his own fun. In contrast, the Rani was more calculating and indifferent to life forms she considered inferior (which basically included everyone else, including the Doctor and the Master).

As a scientist, it’s like the Rani’s schemes were an attempt to assert order into a disorderly universe. If the world is chaos, she wanted to turn it into order. Imagine if Sheldon Cooper were a time lady and wanted to impose his bathroom schedule over all of time and space. That’s the Rani. In one instance, she wanted to harvest human hormones to control the Miasimia Gorians. Another time she wanted to basically explode a supernova to remake the “errors” in the universe. Even her schemes in modern Doctor Who seems to be largely about control.

Like the Master, the Rani was an expert at deception and disguise. She flew under the radar in the 19th century on Earth by disguising herself as an old woman. Later, with the help of amnesia drugs and post-regeneration confusion, she later disguised herself as Mel Bush to manipulate the Doctor into helping her. And there’s no telling how long she hid on Earth as an average human before Sutekh’s attack on time and space. As Mrs. Flood demonstrated, the Rani knows how to blend in wherever she goes.

Now I just need to watch the season finale and maybe learn how the Rani survived the Master’s decimation of Gallifrey. If the Master has shown us anything, it’s that a renegade time lord can always survive… if the story calls for it.