The Rani

Ushas, later known as The Rani, was a renegade Time Lady. Knowing both of them in youth, she grew into a rival to The Master and opponent to The Doctor.

Youth and Exile
The Rani was the same age as The Doctor. (DW: Time and the Rani) On the planet Gallifrey, at the Academy, she belonged to a clique of six young people who called themselves the Deca. Apart from the Doctor, her other future enemy Koschei (later The Master) belonged to this group. (PDA: Divided Loyalties)


 * A past relationship between The Rani and The Doctor was hinted at, but never elaborated upon.

Unlike the other members of The Deca, she did not chose to leave Gallifrey but was exiled from the planet after some of her lab mice, as a result of an experiment, grew to enormous size and ate the President's pet cat. (DW: The Mark of the Rani)

Presence in Earth history
While the Rani certainly did not share the Doctor's fondness for Earth (she referred to it as a "miserable planet") it has been the focus of several of her research projects.

When the test subjects on Miasimia Goria, a planet she had enslaved, became violently restless and uncontrollable as a side affect of her experiments on them, The Rani visited Earth at various points in its history to extract chemicals from the brains of select Human specimens. Because the chemicals in question enabled the human brain to sleep, and because the absence of these chemicals made her victims as violent and uncontrollable as those from her previous experiments, The Rani deliberately chose periods of social unrest to visit, using the violence to conceal her presence and its consequences. She visited the Trojan War, the Dark Ages, the American War for Independence, and finally the Luddite riots in the village of Killingworth during the early 19th century.

Prior to this arrival she had visited Earth in the late Cretaceous and acquired several Tyrannosaur embryos. (DW: Mark of the Rani)


 * The Rani's comments concerning the unrealised full potential of the dinosaurs are curious given the existence of the Silurian civilisation on the planet at around the same time. She may have been obliquely alluding to averting the fall of the Silurians. Then again, as a biochemist she may simply not have been that familiar with social sciences such as history and just wasn't aware of the Silurians' existence. This seems unlikely, however, given her apparent visits to the Cretaceous to gather specimens.

The Master and, shortly after, the Doctor interrupted her work. The Doctor sabotaged the navigational system of the Rani's TARDIS, trapping the Master and the Rani inside as time spillage caused the Tyrannosaur embryos to grow at a dangerous rate. (DW: The Mark of the Rani).

On Terra Nova
Shortly afterwards, from the Doctor's subjective point of view, The Rani was also trapped along with The Doctor on the alternate Earth of Terra Nova which the entity known as Iam had created. She had in the meantime tried and failed to manipulate the political situation existing between the three children of that reality's version of Cleopatra ("State of Change")

On Tetrapyriarbus and Lakertya
On the planet Tetrapyriarbus, made the acquaintance of, and decided to employ the Tetraps, led by Urak. With them, she invaded the peaceful planet Lakertya and put into motion a complex plan. The Rani abducted eleven scientific geniuses from across time and space, including Albert Einstein of Earth. Finally, she decided to "collect" The Doctor and attacked his TARDIS, causing the ship to go through turbulence and hit his head, triggering a regeneration into his Seventh Incarnation. (DW: Time and the Rani)


 * ''Conflicting account suggest the Doctor did not actually regenerate strictly because of the Rani's attack on The Doctor's TARDIS.

The Rani channeled the intellects of the geniuses a giant artifical brain which she believed could find the secret to manipulating strange matter in order to make the planet of Lakertya Time Manipulator in order to correct what she considered to be errors in the universal timeline. Her first target was to be Earth, where she would prevent the extinction of the dinosaurs, creatures whose full potential she felt had never been truly realised. She considered the death of the native Lakertyans a small price to pay. The Doctor, though, defeated her and the Tetraps turned against her and imprisoned her on their home planet. (DW: Time and the Rani). The Rani did manage with the help of the very persons upon whom the Tetraps instructed her to experiment (BBV: The Rani Reaps the Whirlwind)


 * The Doctor has stated repeatedly that no Time Lords other than himself, survived the Last Great Time War, a statement later partially false with the appearance of Professor Yana. The fate of The Rani seems somewhat uncertain, though the Doctor believes her dead, along the rest of the Time Lord race.

Possibly apocryphal adventures
One account claims that she saved a young man named Cyrian from Cybermen on the planet DV Acrol 8. (DWA: Rescue) With Cyrian, she later captured The Doctor's first and second incarnations. Despite his fourth incarnation attempting to warn them of danger, the Rani managed to lure the Doctor's other selves (as well as his companions) into a temporal trap in order to include them in her menagerie of creatures. She hoped to shortly complete her collection of genetic samples and brain prints of every creature in the universe. With the help of the Doctor's time brain, she hoped to gain access to and control of every individual mind in the cosmos. (DW: Dimensions in Time)

Personality
An evil scientific genius whose villainy comes not from the usual variety of lust for power and suchlike, but from a mindset that treats everything (including morality) as secondary to her research; she has been known to enslave entire worlds in order to have a ready supply of experimental subjects and a place to carry out her experiments uninterrupted. Her major interest is in tinkering with the biochemistry of other species. The Doctor claimed that The Rani hates children, It is not known if this was meant literally or if it was just a figure of speech. (DW: Dimensions in Time)

Behind the Scenes
Kate O'Mara has, to date, portrayed The Rani in all of her television appearances as well as her single (to date) audio appearance.

Most fans do not consider the events of Dimensions in Time to have actually occurred in canon.

Fan speculation has linked The Rani (along with others candidates, including Lucy Saxon and Harriet Jones) as the mysterious woman plucking The Master's ring from his funeral pyre at the end of Last of the Time Lords. However, this remains only a fan theory. Russell T Davies has referred to the hand as 'the hand of the rani' but has expressed that it will not play an important part in Series 4.

It is a possibility that The Rani will reappear as one of the villains Davis was planning to bring back eventually stating "It is great to have a female villain as it is something that you don't see that often. It would be nice for the Doctor to face a female villain in the future. Maybe even another Time Lord!"

Some think the Rani could appear in the 2008 Christmas special. In the trail for the episode, the words "THE RETURN" appear before showing a clip of a woman in a red dress that would appear to be evil. It later turns out that "THE RETURN" is referring to the Cybermen. But is it?