10 Smartest Doctor Who Characters

Another school friend of the Doctor and Master, the Rani was a neurochemist. From an educational perspective, the Rani is vastly more intelligent than her academy peers. First appearing in the 1985’s Mark of the Rani and returning in 1987’s Time and the Rani, as a character, Rani is severely lacking in reappearances on the main show.

The Rani, like the Master is an evil scientific genius, but with a different reasoning to the Doctor’s arch nemesis. Whilst, the Master’s villainy can come from a need for power or pure evil, the Rani sees everything as secondary to her research. She would happily kill or experiment on another in order to find the results she is seeking.

Rani ruled over a planet called Miasimia Goria, where she experiments on its inhabitants to heighten their awareness, however this did not go as she may have wished. The reason we first meet Rani on screen is as she tried to extract a chemical which produced sleep from human brains to help tame the restless and aggressive Miasimia Gorian’s.

The Rani is the sort of character who isn’t exactly evil in the typical sense, and through her brilliance has the potential to be so much better. On an academic intelligence level, the Rani has to be one of the smartest Time Lords to graduate the Academy.