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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

Since about 2008, I've severely limited the number of fanfics I start writing. I still get plotbunnies from the media I consume, sometimes to Biblical-plague proportions, but I know my limits. I can't do everything I want to do, and I've learned that if I try, I end up unable to do anything I want to do. Sometimes, that's really disheartening. Often, it's frustrating.  As much as I love my long and involved stories, the fact that they take me so long to work on limits me to a narrow perspective on the canon for years at a time; I can't afford to step outside that headspace in case I'm unable to get back in. So, I beat new bunnies off with a stick and try not to think about the wasted opportunities, or how, in my early writing days between the ages of, say, 14 and 24, I'd have given up a body part for the opportunity to grab the kind of solid, workable inspiration that I'm now actively trying to dodge. Ideas are a gift, and a distillation of my love for the canon, of a lifetime of learning, and I hate wasting them.

I've never paid much attention to the length of my works, other than to meet a challenge or zine editor's specified wordcount. 10,000 words seems about right for a character study or an ep/scene reaction. 50,000 to 70,000 for a romance in which the participants are reasonably good at communicating to begin with. 90,000-150,000 and upwards if they really aren't, if the characters need establishing before they get together, or if they start out loathing one another.

I can only work with blocks of about 4000 words at a time without my brain giving out, so that's how I've worked for the past ten years or so - long stories, chaptered as near to 4000 words at a time as I can manage. My writing is better for it, I'm sure. It brings structure to a piece even when I don't have one in mind. It helps to set the pace and let the reader know what to expect - important with a publicly-posted WIP.

This week, I've let myself try something new, telling a story in as few words as I can get away with. It's something I stumbled across by accident when writing Antithesis, in which flashback scenes to the distant past, the early relationship of the Doctor and the Master, came out second-person POV, and somewhat out of sequence. After some initial 'WTF?', I eventually identified why my brain had gone down that road: to avoid using either of the characters' given names prior to the point where they don their Time Lordy asshats and big collars and proclaim themselves The Doctor and The Master.

I'm not a wild fan of the expanded universe and subsequent fanon that names them as youths on Gallifrey/has them use those names in the present in the sense of ongoing pet names. On the other hand, many potential readers are comfortably familiar with the Deca backstory and with the shorthand of "Theta" (yes, I know Theta Sigma is canon, at least as a familiar name) and "Koschei". Using alternative names would be jarring. I couldn't see a way of using those familiar labels without the pet-name-ishness colouring what I wrote - softening it with a layer of intimacy and ease that I didn't intend to include. In fact, it's an intimacy being eroded - even mourned - during the entirety of those flashback scenes. It's long, long gone in the present-day scenes, and I think one of them might resort to violence if the other tried anything as intimate as using a private name. So, they remain nameless in my long-ago flashbacks, and using second-person POV lets me dodge a lot of awkward linguistic gymnastics whenever they share a scene. (Every now and then, I also left it deliberately unclear which of them was which, something I couldn't easily have done in third-person at the same time as making them, for a fair whack of the backstory, opposite genders).

Writing that flashback material, I learned that second person - something I'd never really seen the use for, before, other than as reader-insert fun - can be incredibly economical with words, without losing the ability to pack an emotional punch when needed. I'd never realised that it can work as well as a stream-of-consciousness thing as it does as measured, "this is you and you are here" narrative. The downside is that the reader needs to be comfortable going with it; the very word on the page, "You, " is confrontational, and risks breaking the suspension of disbelief. On the other hand, it can be powerful if the reader is comfortable, if they do go along with it. Toss in an unreliable narrator (or two - alien asshats recommended) and there's a lot of scope for emotive characterisation, and for sketching out epic-scale events without a massive infodump.

Setting out this week to write something self-indulgently smutty that wouldn't end up being very long, something in short enough chunks that I can read it back and edit properly even on a bad brain-day, I've surprised myself by writing something extremely short. Like, way shorter than I meant to. It's not finished yet, and I'm a bit squirmy that AO3 calls each tiny bit a "chapter", but I'm learning a lot and having fun. For some reason, the second-person thing really suits the Thirteenth Doctor - the immediacy and vibrancy of her, I guess. It's a confident voice, and the Doctor is (usually, outwardly, verbally) confident.

It's the first time in too long that I've just taken the plunge when I got a niggling plotbunny, trusting myself not to be distracted from my older WIPs. It feels really good - like a breath of fresh air.

I wasn't sure that Big Finish were actively trying to kill and/or bankrupt me. I mean, there was Dark Eyes, and the War Master, then they roped in Michelle Gomez and Neve McIntosh, and I thought it probably wasn't personal that they were making me breathless with squee while sneakily reaming out my wallet. Then they announced Eight and the Master in Ravenous, then River with multi-Masters, then the next-time teaser at the end of Master of Callous, then they did another set of Doctor-Donna, and now...





NOW I'm damned sure. The Masters. The Eleven. Liv and Helen. Eight. All on one cover.  If it's possible to die of squee, to expire of sheer, personalised fanservice or from voice-talent overload, this one'll do it.

I could probably be expected to do "Rumbelle" here, but the fact is I've been so busy writing about Belle and Rumple since 2012 that I never actually got around to being a consumer of Once Upon a Time fandom's fannish output. My handful of fave fics from early on are either spectacularly jossed - not that this diminishes them, but it does mean they need a bit of context to understand - or were abandoned mid-flow. So, I'll go with Doctor Who for this challenge instead. Specifically the Doctor and the Master. "/" optional. It's a fandom sub-genre that I've watched evolve for as long as I've been in fandom, yet only recently dipped my own writerly toe into. Only recently stopped and thought much about. I love these two alien assholes and their ancient, unhealthy relationship. I've found very few fanworks that hit the spot for me with the Doctor/Master pairing, and even fewer of those are completed fanfics. I used that misfortune to narrow down my potential handful to a list of just three recs for today's Snowflake Challenge.

( Fanvid: Stand with me by Margarita Life )

( Fanfic: Doctor Who Season For by Ariastar )

( Fanfic: Lapidary by Savaial )