Monday 7 September 1987

Time and the Rani

An Even Bigger Eyeroll

The Second Coming, Episode 8
Sunday 15 June 2025

Another classic 80s villain makes her first reappearance on Doctor Who this week. But what will four serious teenage fanboys make of the fact that she has decided to dress up as Bonnie Langford?

Notes and links

In Dynasty, Kate O’Mara’s character Caress Morrell is the younger sister of Joan Collins’s Alexis Colby. She was in 19 episodes of Dynasty in 1986.

Mel’s delightfully overplayed line in The Reality War comes in just before the Rani beams into UNIT HQ: “She’s ruthless. Worse than ruthless. She’s indifferent to any pain or morality or humanity. The whole universe is just an experiment to her.”

Bonnie Langford’s interview with Benjamin Cook in Doctor Who Magazine appears in Issue 595 from October 2023. Here she is talking about her performance as Mel in the 1980s: “I read Russell’s scripts and thought, ahh, glorious! It is glorious, isn’t it?” says Bonnie. “I just feel really personally grateful, and delighted, and lucky to be able to revisit something that I didn’t necessarily think I did very well before.” Did she really not? “I just thought, oh God, I was really awful in it back in the day. I tried too hard.”

Bondfinger’s short series of commentaries on some of Kate O’Mara’s television performances can be found here.

Just a few days before the broadcast of The Reality War (and the recording of this episode), Russell T Davies posted on Instagram an introduction to the Rani and an explanation of the elements of her character he thought it was important to bring back.

Flight Through Entirety discussed Time and the Rani in Episode 116: Terrified of Tinsel.

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And more

You can find links to all of the podcasts we’re involved in on our podcasts page. But here’s where we’re up to right now.

This week, we released another episode of our Star Trek commentary podcast, Untitled Star Trek Project, featuring Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford, who watched a top-tier episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation — Tapestry. There will be a new episode released next Friday.