Doctor Who Showrunner Russell T Davies Talks The Season Finale

Why did you decide to bring back the Rani?

She’s a classic enemy of the Doctor. Whenever you introduce any woman into any role on Doctor Who, half the internet seems to conject that she’s the Rani. Sometimes, you just have to go with it. 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. That’s good. That allows her to become a new character for the newer audience, she’s not weighted down in continuity. We don’t spend a long time discussing exactly what she was doing in The Mark of The Rani (1985). She’s fairly continuity free.

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. 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.

For viewers who might not be familiar with the Rani, what can you tell us about their history with the Doctor?

She’s one of the Doctor’s enemies. She’s a bit more interesting than simply being all evil because she was a scientist that was always more amoral than immoral. She’d do anything for science. In this story, we discover she’s on her greatest experiment yet on a vast scale. Plus, she’s coming back into a universe that’s completely changed. There are no Time Lords. The Doctor thinks he’s the last. That gives her a much bigger arena to play in. She’s rarely operated on such a cosmic scale before, and this gives us a chance to scale her up.

She was played in the old days by Kate O’Mara who was a fine actor, a really fine actor. She was very famous in her day. She left Britain and became part of the Dynasty empire, she played Joan Collins’ sister, Caress.

She also very openly and honestly did a lot of television in order to earn money for her own company to put Shakespeare on stage. She was a wonderful woman, and I wish I had known her. We dedicated the readthrough of this episode to Kate O’Mara.

How was it to write for the Rani?

Enormous fun, because I think it’s a great character. I love Kate O’Mara’s portrayal. But at the same time, it’s kind of blank. You can put her into whole new areas. As I said before, she’s now in a universe she’s never been in before.

In the past, she was a Renegade Time Lord. Now, she’s the only Time Lady in existence. So that ups the stakes for everyone. It was enormous fun. And once we knew we had Archie, that was a very big playground that opened up to us.

How did Archie playing the role come about?

It was an immediate offer. I think our director Alex (Pillai) had worked with her before. Also, one of our producers, Phil Collinson, had worked with her before on a BBC One series called Sea of Souls, just before she went to America and did The Good Wife. It’s always very helpful when you can approach an agent, but also approach the actor with a text saying ‘hello’ at the same time.

She was just delightful. It was an immediate “yes.” We’re so lucky that she was free. She lives in America now and has such a lot of work over there, but fortunately our dates fitted. It was a very exciting day when she said “yes.” It was the only offer we made.

What can fans expect from the two-part finale?

The Rani is famously a scientist, and now she’s a scientist walking into a world where a Pantheon of Gods has been awoken, which is magic in the air. She simply finds it fascinating. To her, it’s a different form of science, she’s not there to reject it. She’s a true scientist with a very open mind. True scientists have open imaginations. Saying, “yes we can go to the moon,” “yes we can travel in time,” “yes, there’s anti-gravity.”

The problem with her experiments and her ideas is that she doesn’t care how many lives she loses along the way. We’ll see her running experiments on a massive scale. The very first scene of the two-part finale will really take people by surprise as to what she’s up to. And from then on, it never stops. It’s a huge extravaganza.

Will Mrs Flood still be involved?

What you get now is the two Ranis working together. Mrs Flood is still calling herself Mrs Flood. As viewers saw at the end of episode six, it’s a fantastically servile relationship where she sort of becomes the Igor to the Rani’s Frankenstein. I can tell you, those two loved working together so much. It was beyond words. They had such a laugh together. I don’t think we have any interviews or behind the scenes footage of them separately because they never left each other’s side. They got on so well. It’s a delightful partnership. It’s really fun, and very powerful. The Doctor is immediately up against two enemies instead of one.

Everyone is coming back for the finale. We’ve got Ruby (Millie Gibson), Kate Lethbridge-Stewart (Jemma Redgrave), Colonel Ibrahim (Alexander Devrient), Shirley (Ruth Madeley) back, and also Mel (Bonnie Langford) is back. Conrad (Jonah Hauer-King) is back too. The last we saw of Conrad he had been imprisoned, but the prison governor turned out to be Mrs Flood and she was unlocking him from his prison cell. He’s now part of this big coalition of evil against the Doctor.