Ahead of the seventh and penultimate episode of Doctor Who Season Two Wish World, Russell T Davies described his take on the Rani (Archie Panjabi).

“She’s one of the Doctor’s enemies. 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.”

Part of the Rani’s plans include the presence of the Pantheon of Gods which entered the universe when the Fourteenth Doctor spread a line of salt in front of the not-things at the edge of the universe in Wild Blue Yonder.

“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. She’s a true scientist with a very open mind. True scientists have open imaginations. Saying, ‘yes we can go to the moon,’ ‘yes we can travel in time,’ ‘yes, there’s anti-gravity.'”

I’m going to take quick notice that Davies didn’t say, “anti-mavity” and move on to his description of the Rani’s amoral nature.

“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’s a huge extravaganza.”

So, how does Mrs Flood (Anita Dobson) fit in?

“What you get now is the two Ranis working together. Mrs Flood is still calling herself Mrs Flood. As viewers saw at the end of episode six, it’s a fantastically servile relationship where she sort of becomes the Igor to the Rani’s Frankenstein.”

Anita Dobson described her take on Mrs Flood on The One Show May 19.

“For me, and this is just my take on it, she’s an enabler. She likes to know where the power is and she’ll help and enable them but she won’t get in the line of fire.”

Written by Russell T Davies and directed by Alex Sanjiv Pillai, the 44-minute Wish World transmits on Saturday 24 May at 8am on BBC iPlayer and 6:50pm on BBC One in the UK. Those outside of the UK can stream Wish World on Disney+ where available simultaneously starting at 3am ET/12am PT.

Directly after the BBC One broadcast, Steffan Powell goes behind the scenes of Wish World in Doctor Who: Unleashed on BBC Three and on the official YouTube channel where available at 7:35pm.