“The Mark Of The Rani’ by Pip and Jane Baker
“If allowed to flourish, the poisonous epidemic could reduce humankind to a harrowing role that would give a dung beetle superior status . . .”
ATTENTION: Some micro-spoilers ahead. This book is 34-years old! We don’t normally go for non-missing episode Target Novelisations, but 35 years after the TV story aired our love for The Mark Of The Rani has only grown. The televised version was directed by Sarah Hellings and produced by John Nathan-Turner. From the opening scenes — the music — to The Rani’s lab and TARDIS, the town — the program still looks and sounds great. Now, we all wish there were more sixth Doctor seasons, and with the passing of Pip Baker in April, I wanted more, more, more of this ye olde coal colliery called Killingworth and the triple Time Lord threat the Bakers constructed within.
Appreciation For Pip and Jane Baker
The DVD documentary segments of the Pip and Jane unit talking about the stories they wrote for the show are adorable. They had such great style and I’d totally cook some popcorn for a documentary on them. Like. I’m sure many writers bounce stuff off their partners, but Pip and Jane were a team who understood Colin Baker’s (no relation) arrogant portrayal of the Doctor splendidly. If you're wondering if the novelisation has that magnific P and J vocabulary extending to the omniscient voice of a third-person narrator, the answer is yes, yes yes!
Judger of the Book by its Cover
Guilty. Cover. Art. Masterpiece. An Andrew Skilleter sizzler. You’d hang a giant print of this at home. I like to think it contains some latent images. The mining apparatus looks like the Doctor’s TARDIS. The disguised Rani almost appears to be holding a crow. The face. Her slate grey wardrobe of a TARDIS swirling through frosty shades of pink with the 80s neon logo looking its lilac best. Exquisite!
Chapters of the Bakers
M.O.T.R. is only one-hundred and thirty-five pages, broken into twenty chapters, making this a beaut when you’re in a stop & go mood. Chapter names sound as if they’d be strong breakout Who stories on their own. House Of Evil, Death Fall, Enter The Rani, Triumph Of The Master, The Final Question.. oh. And we get a very sweet prologue and an epilogue. I’m sure Big Finish Audio could create four new spinoff worlds just from page 5.
“As the clip-clop of the horse’s hoofs began, the ragged scarecrow, exuding a pernicious aura of evil, climbed the stile to follow the dray.”
The Scarecrow, the Crone and the Wardrobe
Until she’s unmasked, she’s known in the story as the old crone. You get a nice layout of all the things characters are doing in Killingworth. The marked madmen get a little more vicious in the book. The Rani, a renegade Time Lord neurochemist experimenting on humans under cover of the Luddite riots, tangles with “The prince of darkness”, who enters the story disguised as a scarecrow and reveals himself to be a chauvinist bully who hates dogs. We get to read her internal contempt for his blundering ways often throughout along with choice unsolicited psychiatric advice (he’s a nutter). But he’s brought some gear too: Some sort of TARDIS disruptor, a micro-torch, magnetic door-bolt opener, the TCE, which presumably was set to completely disappear vics rather than “shrink” this time, so no evidence. We never see his TARDIS (The Rani’s is radder anyway), but we get the masterfully braggadocious explanation of how he escaped from “Planet of Fire”.
Wicked Cool Surprises that weren't on the TV version
Peri’s internal voice tells us what part of America she’s from
When the Doctor avoids a hot coal shower in ninja-like fashion, the prose does a nicer job of letting us know it was actually a sort of martial-art special technique that he learned on another planet (similar to Venusian aikido, but for peripheral vision)
There’s a bit more rumination on the painting which the Rani’s boobytrapped laboratory divider screen is based off
The “Tha’s” and “Nays” of the (time period) colliery town hit the page in all their full glory (love watching the TV version with subtitles). The Ward family, the dinosaur embryos, historical figures... whether you’re 14, 41 or 104, Earthling or Miasimia Gorian, “The Mark Of The Rani” by Pip and Jane surely has some joy for ye.