50th Masterversary - Part 1: Classic Doctor Who

Part One: Classic DW | Part Two: New Who | Part Three: Big Finish  | Part Four: Fanworks

Intro

Second of January 1971: Doctor Who: Terror of the Autons. That's 50 years today since the first appearance of the Master in Doctor Who. If the TV show planned to mark the glorious occasion at all, lockdown 2020 nuked their plans - they just about squeezed out yesterday's New Year's Day episode in time to get it under the wire. (They introduced a brand new incarnation of the Master, played by Sacha Dhawan, last New Year.)

 

Big Finish is all over it, though, with an audio Master-fest, Masterful, starring as many of the incarnations as they could scrape together (minus audio-Dreyfus, for reasons). Even the skittish John Simm got on board for this, adding his weight to a growing and welcome trend at Big Finish over the past few years. The Master was scarce at Big Finish for a very long time, first because they didn't have the rights to use the character then later because they're not a character to be used lightly - they'll totally steal the whole show if you give them so much as a line, let alone making them the big bad of the story.

 

As with many of the Big Finish lines, the Master has now gone critical over there. They're everywhere, from some long-overdue revisits by Mark Gatiss' AU incarnation to a growing range of solo spin-offs starring first Sir Derek Jacobi, then Michelle Gomez. Geoff Beevers, who's been plugging away on audio longer and more consistently than any of them, is the gift that keeps on giving - a while back he got to write and perform his own Short Trips title, I Am The Master, whch was evilly awesome. Somehow, finally, BF secured enough rights to the 1996 telemovie to be able to invite Eric Roberts aboard - he's got his own upcoming solo release, Master! Alex MacQueen, whose appearances remain scarce but oh-so-welcome, gets another outing in the anniversary special, and Jon Culshaw does scary things with his voice to bring us the incarnations whose actors have long since passed.

 

1971-1996

 

In 1971, Doctor Who introduced the Master - played by the late Roger Delgado - as an equal and opposite for Jon Pertwee's Doctor. A fellow Time Lord, another renegade. A foil. The phrase 'Moriarty to his Holmes' gets chucked around a lot, but it's not particularly accurate IMO. More like they're two sides of the same coin or, in the Doctor's case, "there, if I don't tread carefully, go I." The offscreen friendship between the actors gave instant chemistry between the Doctor and the Master, who spent as much time bantering and cheerfully one-upping as they did actually destroying/saving the planet. They're as much old school-chums as adversaries, and their dispute is a long way from being personal enough, or having sufficient baggage, to apply the word 'enemies'.

 

Their story rambled on over several long serials with the suave, courteous Master coming up with increasingly unwise plans to grab a bit of power, and the Third Doctor outwitting him with a roll of the eyes. (Curses! Foiled again! Reset.) It was going somewhere darker. The intention was to have the Master redeem himself at the last and die taking the Doctor's side. They never got to tell that story. Roger Delgado died in a car crash in the summer of 1973. The change to the TV show was profound - you can see Pertwee's heart and joy go out of it in the subsequent stories. He left the role the following year, handing over to Tom Baker in June '74. 

 

That's where I came in. 1974, me, newborn minifan. Doctor Who was part of my life before I can even remember - very likely I was parked in front of it from birth as my parents watched - but give or take a glimpse in what must've been a rerun of Tom Baker's The Deadly Assassin (Peter Pratt), I didn't meet the Master until 1981. Geoff Beevers briefly played the malevolent and murderous cadaver-incarnation who'd appeared in The Deadly Assassin. He handed over to the late Anthony Ainley, who was happy to allow the role of the Master to become career-defining. He got to kill Tom Baker almost immediately - so far, the only time the Master's "killed" the Doctor. By and large, they don't want the Doctor dead, or even to force their regeneration. There's a fondness or co-dependency in the relationship that started before Ainley came along - started with the personal camaraderie between Pertwee and Delgado - and persists to the present day, even when the Master (and, arguably, the Doctor) is long over the sanity horizon and into a much darker place.

 

Ainley would've loved that, I think. He always wanted to show that darkness in the character, but the BBC at the time was being shaped by the pucker-mouthed primness of the shrill, "Dear BBC, Yours, Disgusted" people who shrieked self-importantly every time there was a spot of blood, any notable violence, any Church-of-England-defined blasphemy or sin, etc. (I wonder what 2071 will make of today's self-involved armchair-crusaders with their effortless "me too" cyber-armies, and of how the Beeb rose to the challenge?) Darkness neutered, Ainley went crazy with the camp and the seductive, purring and smiling his way through several glorious outings through the Peter Davison (Fifth Doctor), Colin Baker (Sixth) and Sylvester McCoy (Seventh) eras. In his final story, Survival - in what turned out to be the last gasp for Classic DW on the BBC - Ainley did get to play it darker.

 

I was deeply and permanently influenced by the Ainley!Master and the handful of other villain/anti-hero archetypes who were around on my telly at the time. They were always the highlight of my TV experience, even though they often showed up only once per season, and that's broadly true even now. I'm drawn to these characters for their own drama, and for the sharp-relief viewpoint they offer on the nominal hero/protagonist/starring character of a piece. I say this quite a lot, because it's true: I imprinted on the Master at at tender age!

 

Ainley genuinely loved playing the Master, and it shows, even when he's working with mid-80's material so bad that the scenery ought to be melting in embarrassment - so bad that other actors in the scene look visibly wretched about it all. Ainley saved it by going all-out camp: the black-clad, goatee-sporting archetypal opposite to the Fifth Doctor's knight-in-white-cricket-gear hero. Darkness to the Doctor's Light... almost. It doesn't work without nuances, and it never could've. With Three-Delgado, it manifested as petulance and smugness in the Doctor, frustration in the Master, who at that point genuinely wanted to co-rule the universe with the Doctor rather than fight him. With Tom Baker, Ainley was a horrifying spectre - one of the bodysnatcher incarnations, out of regenerations and looking for any way to prolong his own existence. The Master became a true arch-enemy during the Fourth Doctor era, then something more complicated and less predictable during Peter Davison's time as the Fifth Doctor. There's a lot of clowning and fun capers, but watched with a cynical eye, those episodes are not the Doctor's finest white-hat hours. He hit some major grey-areas. That too carries over to the present day.

 

I'd paid close attention to all of this, and the modest developments in the print media and early audio that filled 'the Wilderness Years'. The 1996 TV Movie/failed pilot thingy killed off one incarnation of the Master - likely meant to be the Ainley one - in the opening scene, only to see him rise again in a newly-snatched body with added decaying gross, as the new body can't take it. By all accounts, Eric Roberts didn't mean to play it at all camp, just large. Um. Oops? (The script didn't help. I mean, actual onscreen bondage with Paul McGann's pretty, woobie Eighth Doctor. Actually wanting to take the Doctor's actual body.) Roberts is much more self-contained in his new audio role at Big Finish, which launched in one of the Diary of River Song episodes and continued in the final episode of Ravenous. I imagine he'll do great, dryly wicked things now he's got his 'own show' at Big Finish.

Part One: Classic DW | Part Two: New Who | Part Three: Big Finish  | Part Four: Fanworks

50th Masterversary - Part 2: New Doctor Who

Part One: Classic DW | Part Two: New Who | Part Three: Big Finish  | Part Four: Fanworks

2005-2021

It didn't really occur to me that the Master might transition over to New Who. Not sure why, but I took the whole "the Doctor is the last of his people" concept as a given rather than eyeing the showrunner with suspicion about it, even with the fairly obvious prompt of, "you are not alone". So I was suckered when we got to the Derek Jacobi reveal in season 3's Utopia (up to the first glimpse of his pocket watch, anyway, when a penny dropped). And then, before there's time to process that reveal, before Jacobi even has time to enjoy himself, the Master turned into John Simm. BLIMEY. You wait years, then two come along and steal the rest of the season.

Dark, dangerous, predatory, sociopathic, crudely misogynistic, powerful, and shockingly funny: John Simm's Master (and his effect on the Doctor) basically had everything that the more risque fanfic and the more character-invested fans had been quietly speculating about during the nineties and early noughties, as DW fandom moved out of an overly-precious "no hugging, no kissing, no smut, definitely no gay here whatsoever, and never any hanky-panky aboard the TARDIS" era of scholarly nerding into something more fluid and character-driven. (Seriously, the fuss when Paul McGann snogged someone in 1996...) Then there was that 2003 official BBC outlier, Scream of the Shalka, which was also Jacobi-as-Master, only he was a robot that time, and randomly cohabiting with the Doctor. (We're reliably informed that the writer responsible didn't spot the big rainbow elephant in that room until it was pointed out to him, at which point he embraced it with glee.)

As a foil for David Tennant's modern Tenth Doctor, Simm's Master was sexy, traumatised, tortured, contemporary, youthful, and obsessed. With the Doctor. Fair enough, they're the only two known survivors of their entire species, but the situation pretty much went downhill from there. Simm's Master eventually fulfilled the character's thwarted early destiny in The End of Time, sacrificing himself (though, as it turned out, not perishing) and saving the Doctor. He was very much over it when we met him again in the Twelfth Doctor two-parter World Enough and Time/The Doctor Falls, falling back on cruelty, contempt, and self-preservation.

His successor, Michelle Gomez's Missy, went to the other extreme, motivated by, "I need my friend back." Stalking the Doctor for an entire season and across two bodies before he met her in season 8's Dark Water, hand-picking him a companion and making sure they stayed together, Missy overtly flirted with the Doctor, referring to him as her boyfriend - while at the same time denying the sexualised/romantic nature of their modus operandi to focus firmly on the issue of their damaged friendship. To the companion of the moment, who sarcastically says 'it must be love': "Oh, don't be disgusting. We're Time Lords, not animals. Try, nano-brain, to rise above the reproductive frenzy of your noisy little food chain, and contemplate friendship. A friendship older than your civilisation and infinitely more complex." She kissed Twelve with tongue the first time they met face to face, though, before placing his hand on her chest and leaving him so stunned he didn't figure out she was a Time Lord from her double heartbeat. The audience is left to make of this what they will, as was the habit of the showrunner of the day.

Although Simm's Master playfully articulated some of the old slash vibe and wore the rest as screaming subtext, it's left to Missy - the character's first female incarnation that we know of - to articulate the twisted closeness of the Doctor-Master relationship in any detail. And she does it often, albeit often with sarcasm, snideness, and silly, possessive coquetry. Missy, of all of them, is the Master pulling the Doctor's pigtails. Totally unimpressed with the collateral damage of her methods - Missy kills for squees and giggles, and for effect, rather than in service to any great masterplan - Peter Capaldi's Twelfth Doctor is nonetheless enchanted by the possibility of regaining Missy's friendship; a relationship in any meaningful sense with the only other person in the universe who's "remotely like him". In the end, after much two-way angst, Twelve gives Missy a chance to redeem herself on his terms, she tries, and they both pay the ultimate price.

Because New Who is fundamentally evil, neither the current Doctor (Jodie Whittaker) nor the current Master (Sacha Dhawan) have an accurate picture of how that ultimate sacrifice actually went down for the other. It neatly lifts the characters and their relationship out of the maze of complexity loaded on it by the previous showrunner, who favoured monumental intricacy over basic, building-block storytelling. Still, it leaves many questions for the characters, and for those of us viewers who were holding our breaths waiting for another shoe to drop. As of 2020's closing story, The Timeless Children, the Doctor and the Master are furious with one another, disgusted, traumatised, and both prepared to stoop about as low as we've ever seen them go to get the upper hand in battle. It's become a vicious fight, with both their season 12 encounters showing the universe at stake. In Roger Delgado's day, fifty years back, it was maybe a civilisation or a planet.

Sacha Dhawan's Master is as tormented and unhappy as his immediate predecessors. That woobie element has become very much a part of the character in the modern era, as has the humour, the batshit Doctor-obsession, and the glorious contemporary snark, but the show makes no excuses for him (or the Doctor, come to that). He's dark, bitter, damaged, childish, brilliant, and very, very dangerous. Dealing with him, Thirteen is bloody dangerous herself, showing none of the compassion or hard-to-justify tolerance that her predecessors showed towards their respective incarnations of the Master. David Tennant's Doctor wanted to save John Simm's Master by forgiving him. Peter Capaldi's Doctor wanted to redeem Missy and regain their friendship by rediscovering what made them so alike. Thirteen is cold and angry and giving no quarter.

The underlying story, as always, is how similar they are. How easily the Doctor could become the Master - and far worse - if they ever let go of their personal code. The Master would love to see that happen. Even as the 2020 season threw a bombshell into the origins of the Doctor, it preserved her backstory with the Master in amber - genius, rebellious school friends who both left Gallifrey to become renegades and outlaws, but whose paths irrevocably diverged. The Doctor wants to see the universe, the Master wants to rule it (or destroy it). Nothing changes, but everything has.

It's been a hell of a ride. I want fifty more years.

Part One: Classic DW | Part Two: New Who | Part Three: Big Finish  | Part Four: Fanworks