Doctor Who showrunner, Russell T Davies, has promised that the Rani’s motivations in the Series 15 finale remain fuelled by her interest in science — but that the supernatural elements introduced by Wild Blue Yonder push her further than ever before.
Davies explains:
“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.”
Indeed, the Rani’s not really been seen, in-canon on TV at least, since the Seventh Doctor’s premiere, Time and the Rani, and since then, there’s been a whole Time War, and the destruction of the Time Lords… twice! So yes, things have changed a lot.
Davies continues:
“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… 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 should be interesting to see her trying to marry up traditional science with the supernatural; though there have been such ideas in the programme in the past, they’ve been explained away by science… which is likely what’ll happen here too. The Pantheon of Gods, for instance, includes Sutekh, who is just an alien, albeit a hugely powerful one, who calls himself a god.
Wish World, the first of a two-part finale, airs on Saturday 24th May at 6:50pm on BBC1, and is available to stream from 8am on BBC iPlayer that day and on Disney+.
