Warning: contains spoilers for Doctor Who episode “The Interstellar Song Contest” The first thing you need to know about post-credits villain reveal at the end of “The Interstellar Song Contest” is that it’s hilarious. When Mrs Flood stepped out of that cryogenic chamber and was revealed to be the Rani, you had one of two reactions. Either “Who?” or a groan that shook the light fittings. Let’s go back a bit. It’s Never the Rani Season six, Matt Smith’s second season as the Eleventh Doctor. From “The Impossible Astronaut” onwards, Amy keeps seeing a mysterious woman with an eyepatch and big shoulder pads. “Is that the Rani?” fans whispered to each other, referencing Kate O’Mara’s renegade Time Lady character from Classic Who. It wasn’t, it was someone called “Madame Kovarian”. A few years later, the Doctor and Clara are manoeuvred into meeting each other by a mysterious “woman in a shop”, and soon the Twelfth Doctor and Clara’s adventures are trailed by a campy yet domineering woman manipulating them across time. “Could Moffat by bringing the Rani back for real?” fan asked one another. “She really does seem like his type…” But no, it was the Master, regenerated into an evil Mary Poppins (still Moffat’s type). Flash forward again, the Thirteenth Doctor runs into some Judoon chasing an alien fugitive on Earth. A Time Lady who has used a chameleon arch to wipe her memory and appear human. She wears red. She has a chain with the initial “R” on it, could it be… could it really be…? It turns out to be an as-yet-unseen previous incarnation of the Doctor. Flash forward again, everywhere the Fifteenth Doctor goes, the same face keeps turning up, the same old lady, over and over again, following them through time… This time it’s Sutekh. Join our mailing list Get the best of Den of Geek delivered right to your inbox! I mean, the truth is, nobody ever really expects it to be the Rani, and her chances of coming back diminished still further with the introduction of Michelle Gomez’s Missy, allow the Master to pull double duty for male and female evil Time Lords. The Rani is a third tier villain at best, a camp joke with only two TV stories to her name (Three if you could the despised and discarded “Dimensions in Time” Children in Need special), neither of them turning up in anyone’s all-time favourites list. Those stories are “The Mark of the Rani”, a two-parter historical where she teams up with the Master, and “Time and the Rani”, Sylvester McCoy’s introductory story. And yet, if you watch those stories, you will see that (without wanting to anger any homicidal goatee aficionados), she is potentially the most dangerous Evil Time Lord the Doctor’s faced yet. More Than a “Female Master” The big difference becomes obvious when you watch “The Mark of the Rani” and see her working alongside the Master. Because let’s be honest, the Master’s never really wanted to conquer the universe. Like Missy says to Clara in “The Magician’s Apprentice”, for the Doctor and the Master, trying to kill each other is just their version of texting. Creating grand, over-elaborate schemes for universal domination is simply the Master’s love language. When the Master’s arch nemesis is found by the Time Lords, stripped of his ability to travel and marooned on a primitive little planet well out of the way of galactic civilisation, does the Master use this as an opportunity to finally take over the rest of the Galaxy without interference? No, he rushes straight to planet Earth and starts tugging on the Doctor’s pigtails. In “The Mark of the Rani”, his and the Rani’s priorities are clear. While the Master spends the whole time obsessing over the most fitting way to kill the Doctor, the Rani rolls her eyes and gets on with the actual work of trying to conquer the universe. When she runs into the Doctor again in “Time and the Rani”, she quickly captures and takes advantage of a discombobulated post-regeneration Doctor so she can use his genius to finish her plan. But while the Master would get an absolute kick out of having the Doctor as his puppet, the Rani spends her time irritated and impatient with the whole thing. So, if she’s been following the Doctor around time and space for a while, we can trust that this is about more than vengeance. The Master might go through Time and Space, building a virtual afterlife to create a Cyberman army to give the Doctor as a present while screaming “Notice me!”, but that is not the Rani’s style. With the titles of the final two-parter, “Wish World” and “The Reality War”, we can safely guess that the destruction of planet Earth is merely a byproduct on the way to conquering reality itself. But there is an added twist in the tale… A Rani and The Rani Our first real clue to the identity of the Rani is when she starts regenerating. But this is not just any regeneration. Whatever happened to make the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Doctor’s “bi-regenerate” in “The Giggle”, it seems to have had wider repercussions, because as the Rani regenerates she splits into two. Now what’s interesting here is that normally in any multi-incarnation Time Lord encounter, there is an established dynamic. Namely, bickering. Put Missy and the Master, or any two given Doctors in a room and they will be immediately start sniping at each other in an attempt to assert dominance. That and maybe flirting a bit. But when the Rani bi-regenerates, it’s different. The Time Lady formerly known as Mrs Flood is identified as “a” Rani, and is happily subservient to the newly created “definite article”, played by The Good Wife‘s Archie Panjabi. Why is that? Is this bi-regeneration process different somehow? Or is the Rani simply so organised that she already has an agreed inter-incarnation hierarchy agreed with herself? We’ll have to wait until “Wish World” and “The Reality War” to find out…