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Anthony Ainley as
The
Master |
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 Of all the monsters and villains within Doctor Who it is the non-humanoid that are remembered the most. The most famous of course are the Cybermen and the Daleks. However, it is not only these villains that The Doctor has become involved with. During The Doctor's travels he has also encountered many human adversaries who have, for one reason or another, tried to carry out some event which The Doctor has been compelled to try and prevent. These have included characters not only from Earth but from The Doctor's home planet as well.
Despite being a generally peaceful race whose overall view is not to interfere with the lives and cultures of others there have been many Time Lords who needed to be fought. These renegade and disillusioned Time Lords have included: The Meddling Monk, the War Chief, Omega, Morbius, Borusa and The Rani, many of these being The Doctor's old classmates at the Academy while another was once his favourite teacher. However, it is the renegade Time Lord known as The Master who seemed to end up pitting himself against The Doctor the most.
There have been eleven different actors who have played The Master. On television, The Master has been portrayed by Roger Delgado (1971 - 1973) followed by: Peter Pratt in 1976, Geoffrey Beevers in 1981, Anthony Ainley (1981 - 1989), Eric Roberts in the 1996 TV movie ("Doctor Who: The Movie"), Sir Derek Jacobi and John Simm in 2007, and then Michelle Gomez debuted as the first female Master in 2014. There have even been two actors who have portrayed The Master in exclusively audio adventures, with Alex MacQueen assuming the role in 2012 while James Dreyfuss appeared as a younger version of The Master (dating from a point where the two Time Lords had just left Gallifrey) starting in 2017. Sacha Dhawan debuted as the first non-white incarnation of The Master in 2020..
The idea of having a recurring character for The Doctor to be pitted against is similar to many other fictional programmes. The Master can be likened to The Face in Adam Adamant Lives!; The Joker, Penguin and The Riddler in Batman; Blofield in the James Bond films and even Q in Star Trek The Next Generation. In 1971 the idea for The Master was not completely new. Some of his character traits can easily been seen in the Meddling Monk and more so in the War Chief. His personality can also been seen in later Doctor Who characters, mostly the Back Guardian and even, though in a much smaller way, The Rani.
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Roger Delgado
(1971 - 1973) |
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Despite mostly playing the villain in the many films, television and stage plays, Roger Delgado - the first actor to portray The Master - was in real life the kindest and gentlest of men. During filming on location he would on numerous occasions be cheered rather than booed at by onlookers. It is reported that children loved him and that he once said 'I love playing The Master. He is the man fans love to hate'. He was a very popular member of the cast and it was partly because of his sudden death, in a car accident, that triggered the break up of those involved in the Third Doctor's era.
As revealed in the spin-off media, The Master was originally a close friend of The Doctor's while the two of them were at school, at which point he was known as 'Koschei' and was a member of the Deca, the ten greatest Time Lords of their year, whose members included The Doctor, Ushas (The Rani), Magnus (The War Chief) and Mortimus (The Meddling Monk). According to The Doctor, when Time Lords reach the age of eight they are taken to a tear in reality that allows them to see into the Time Vortex; some are inspired, some run (The Doctor claims he was one of these), and some are driven mad. If The Master's memory is accurate - having actually died more than once, combined with accumulated post-regenerative stress, the reliability of his memory is suspect at best - when he looked into the Vortex, he first began to hear the persistent sound of drums, allegedly calling him to war with the Universe. However, regardless of the truth about the drums, The Master's entire existence was undeniably, irrevocably changed thanks to a mistake The Doctor made as a child; when the young Koschei was nearly drowned by a school bully called Torvic, The Doctor struck Torvic in the head with a rock and killed him ("Master"). The two boys burned Torvic's body to conceal their crime so that they could fulfil their dreams of leaving Gallifrey in the future, but, unable to cope with his guilt, the boy who would become The Doctor agreed to allow the Eternal, Death, to take his pain away when she came to visit him that night, little suspecting that she would erase his memory of committing the crime and transfer it to Koschei instead. It was the innocent victim who suffered the guilt and self-loathing of the crime which his friend had committed, driving him further and further from the person he might have been, condemning him to a lifetime of loneliness, hatred and despair as The Master.
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The Dark Path
(David A. McIntee) |
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For a time, at least, Koschei managed to control whatever guilt and rage he might feel over this implanted memory, eventually leaving Gallifrey to explore the wider universe just like The Doctor. Not only did he acquire a companion of his own, in the form of a young woman named Allia from the 28th century, but he even did some good in his travel, even if he was more willing to resort to more violent methods than those The Doctor might use in a crisis, such as killing men in self-defence while The Doctor would seek merely to disarm and keep the other out of the way until he had a better understanding of the situation. These travels eventually came to an end when he met the Second Doctor during the events of "The Dark Path", while investigating a device known as the Darkheart - created by the beings who would evolve into the Chronovores - that was capable of changing history to the extent of reshaping the evolution of entire planets. During his investigation, after meeting the Second Doctor and learning that they were each curious about the Adjudicator group investigating the Darkheart, Koschie accidentally killed Allia while fighting with a group of Adjudicators in the Darkheart control room. Attempting to master the power of the Darkheart to change history and save her, Koschei allied himself with the Adjudicators to gain access to the Darkheart's controls, destroying the planet Terrileptus as a demonstration, only to learn that Allia was a Time Lord who'd been sent by the High Council to spy on him when The Doctor confronted him in the company of Allia after she'd regenerated. Stricken with rage at the discovery that his companion had lied to him and he'd just destroyed a planet for no real reason, this discovery gave Death all the hold she needed to take control of Koschei for good. He attempted to use the power of the Darkheart to rewrite history to suit his own designs, vowing that even The Doctor would come to call him 'Master' after hypnotising Victoria to shoot herself if The Doctor tried to stop him, but the unexpected intervention of Jamie allowed The Doctor to sabotage the Darkheart before it could be used as Koschei had given Victoria no instructions to shoot herself if Jamie tried to interfere, leaving Koschei to be sucked into the orbit of a black hole that served as the Darkheart's power source.
As a result of this experience, Koschei wasted most of his lives trying to get out of the black hole's orbit via his TARDIS, and by the time he had escaped, his ship suffered serious damage. Crash-landing on a distant planet known only as 'Destination', Koschei, now proclaiming himself 'The Master' on a full-time basis, adopted the identity of 'the Inventor', provoking war between the humanoid colonists and the planet's native lizard-like population, hoping to escalate their technological development to the point where he could repair his ship ("The Destination War"). The Master believed that he had another chance to escape when the First Doctor arrived on Destination, The Master manipulating The Doctor's companions Ian and Barbara to help him gain access to the TARDIS - clearly unaware or unconcerned about the potential temporal paradox of this style of attack - but the two teachers were able to overpower The Master and bring the ship back to The Doctor using the Fast Return Switch ("The Edge of Destruction"), The Doctor leaving The Master trapped inside the depleted remains of his TARDIS. Exactly what happened to The Master after this is unknown, but he only returned to The Doctor's life after the had been exiled to Earth in a new incarnation ("The War Games" and "Spearhead From Space") and most of The Master's lives had been exhausted.
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| Terror of the Autons |
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The first television story The Master appeared in was the 1971 story "Terror of the Autons", leaving his TARDIS as it materialised as a blue removal van at a circus, having decided to destroy Earth by bringing the Nestene Consciousness back to the planet. It is the use of his TCE - the Tissue Compression Eliminator, a weapon that turned the target into a doll-sized version of themselves - on a radio technician in the control room at the top of an aerial mast and a warning from another Time Lord which first alerts The Doctor to The Master's presence on Earth. It is not initially obvious as to why The Master is out to get The Doctor in particular, particularly when The Doctor's current exile meant that The Master could go virtually anywhere else and be sure that The Doctor wouldn't interfere with his schemes, but this may be attributed to both his status as Death's Champion - in opposition to The Doctor's roles as the Champion of Time and Life - and his own twisted fascination with his friend-turned-foe.
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| The Dæmons |
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Despite their conflicting moralities, there are many similarities between The Master and The Doctor. They both attended the Time Lord academy at the same time, grew frustrated and disillusioned with Time Lord society, both stole a TARDIS so as to roam the universe and they are both equal intellectually. But here the similarities end. Whereas The Doctor uses his time travelling abilities for good The Master is only interested in causing chaos and disruption. The Doctor hates guns and any other forms of violence whereas The Master gains great satisfaction in using his TCE - and, in the modern series, his laser screwdriver - just for the fun of it. The Doctor uses his hypnotic powers (When he used them at all) to prevent confrontations, release the suffering of others, and acquire vital information, whereas The Master uses his powers to dominate the will of those who unfortunately become involved with him. In their initial on-screen meeting in the Third Doctor's era, both men demonstrated a certain elegant charisma that made it easy for them to win the support of others through nothing more than the force of their personalities, but while The Doctor retained this charm under many circumstances except when in direct danger, The Master more than once shifted his attitude to show a ruthless, sociopathic side to his nature. As time went on, their interaction with others changed as they assumed new incarnations, with The Doctor varying between youthful charm and elderly directness while The Master just became increasingly sadistic, later 'allies' won through bribery, hypnosis and threats rather than more subtle deception.
Not only are The Doctor and The Master different, but their choice of TARDISes also vary significantly. While The Doctor's ship suffers from various faults that require him to carry out repairs between landings, The Master's TARDIS is not only fully functioning, including the Chameleon Circuit, but it is even a later model, much to the annoyance of The Doctor when he finds out (Although part of this initial annoyance stemmed from the fact that this meant that The Doctor couldn't just steal components from The Master's TARDIS to repair his own and thus escape his current exile). Also, while The Doctor often treats his TARDIS as his oldest friend - a trait that the TARDIS has often reciprocated, such as its attempts to save him from the Faction Paradox biodata virus ("The Ancestor Cell") or its interaction with The Doctor when it was temporarily transferred into a human form ("The Doctor's Wife") -, The Master's relationship with his TARDIS has never displayed any signs that he sees it as anything more than a mere machine, to the extent that he has been shown using two different TARDISes at least once in the series, allowing one TARDIS to be destroyed while he escaped in another, with no sign that he had any particular interest in one over the other even after one plan saw him trapped in his TARDIS's telepathic circuits for decades until he was able to restore his body ("And You Will Obey Me"). Despite The Master's more distant relationship with his ship, his link to his TARDIS has had an effect on it, with Mel noting when she was trapped in The Master's TARDIS for a time that its very atmosphere felt more oppressive than The Doctor's ship even when The Master didn't know she was there ("The Quantum Archangel").
One of the most obvious differences between The Doctor and The Master lies in their attitude towards death, with The Doctor accepting that he will eventually die - often stating that death is what gives life purpose when confronting foes such as vampires ("The Eight Doctors") - despite his ability to regenerate, while The Master is constantly driven to survive, his later ruthlessness thus being explained by his increased desire to escape death. This plays a particularly important part in many of his actions as The Master is unable to regenerate in the 'normal' way, having used up all of his available regenerations due to being trapped in a black hole by the Second Doctor ("The Dark Path") prior to him becoming a regular adversary of his old friend. He was eventually left in a crippled state during an out-of-sequence encounter with the Eighth Doctor ("Legacy of the Daleks"), that saw The Doctor's granddaughter Susan destroy his equipment when he tried to abduct her as a hostage after a failed attempt to use abandoned Dalek technology ("The Dalek Invasion of Earth"), the resulting explosion leaving The Master with serious injuries while Susan fled in his TARDIS (Although his injuries were made worse when he was attacked by his own future self as part of another plan ("The Two Masters")). Several of The Master's schemes since this attack focused on restoring or reinforcing his own life, with his degenerated incarnation seeking a new body while later Masters sought more secure methods of immortality, corrupting external sources of power or taking energy from others for himself.
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Peter Pratt
(1976) |
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He remains one of The Doctor's most persistent and dedicated of enemies and has become the most enduring of The Doctor's foes. Even though he has been outwitted and trapped by The Doctor many times he is a survivor. He has been arrested and imprisoned by UNIT, banished by Rassilon, seemingly vaporised in a volcano on the planet Sarn, trapped in The Rani's TARDIS as it spins out of control, trapped in the Matrix, facing off against an army of Chronovores, reverted to savagery on the dying Cheetah planet, cornered by murderous genetically engineered jackals, and even falling into the Eye of Harmony, and even allowing himself to die to hurt The Doctor.
Throughout his lives, while occasionally distracted by more immediate concerns, The Master's ultimate aim was to rule and gain power in any way possible, but this was generally tempered by his complicated relationship with The Doctor. Initially, their earlier post-Gallifrey interaction seemed to be a more straightforward rivalry, with The Master often expressing a certain affection for The Doctor and his current allies and resorting to 'evil' merely because it was the most expedient way to get what he wanted. This time frame, in many ways, marked the 'friendliest' period of their time as enemies, The Master once offering The Doctor the opportunity to rule the universe beside him as he sought to acquire an ancient weapon - although The Doctor rejected the offer as he just wanted to see the universe rather than rule it - ("Colony in Space"), and on another occasion working with UNIT - along with the First Doctor's old companions Barbara Wright and Ian Chesterton - directly to help them stop an invasion from an alternate Earth in The Doctor's absence (Albeit because the invaders had stolen his TARDIS and tortured his other self to the brink of death, The Master actually killing his other self out of mercy) ("The Face of the Enemy"). Due to the many alien invasions and plots he instigated and assisted in he became a very sought after fugitive to be hunted down by UNIT and even by the CIA. He derived perverse enjoyment from these events and especially the subsequent confrontations with The Doctor, most likely because they were so evenly matched. Despite this, The Doctor's consistent compassion towards his adversary when faced with a situation that could result in The Master's permanent defeat - such as when he requested that The Master be freed by Kronos ("The Time Monster"), or his evident grief when The Master appeared to have been killed by an exploding spaceship ("Last of the Gaderene") - was never fully reciprocated, their encounters always featuring The Master making some effort to kill The Doctor (Although he once infiltrated UNIT HQ on Christmas during their mutual exile simply to talk to The Doctor, only planting bombs in the base because it was 'expected' of him). As time went on, however, The Doctor's continued defeats of The Master's schemes pushed his old friend ever closer to the brink, as shown most keenly when The Master attempted to blackmail the universe when it faced annihilation after his latest attack on The Doctor saw him unintentionally sabotage a plan to save the universe from entropy ("Logopolis"); in prior encounters where The Master's plans had turned against him and unleashed a greater threat he had willingly worked with The Doctor to stop the consequences when he realised what he had done ("Terror of the Autons" and "Harvest of Time").
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Geoffrey Beevers
(1981) |
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The Master's degenerating ability to maintain a more even relationship with The Doctor has also been shown in his interaction with The Doctor's companions. In his first post-Gallifrey meeting with The Doctor, Koschei subtly manipulated Victoria Waterfield to use her as a hostage against The Doctor by playing on her father's death at the hands of the Daleks ("The Dark Path"), with his manipulations and abuse becoming more blatant after he became The Master. In his first confrontation with the Third Doctor, The Master hypnotised The Doctor's new assistant Jo Grant to deliver a bomb to UNIT in an attempt to kill The Doctor ("Terror of the Autons"), although Jo redeemed herself in their final encounter when she informed The Master that she could now withstand his hypnotic attacks and was able to prove it much to his annoyance ("Frontier in Space"). With this precedent set, other companions had varying challenges when facing The Master. While Leela helped The Doctor trap The Master with the aid of an android version of himself when they initially met during a new Krall invasion ("Trail of the White Worm" and "The
Oseidon Adventure"), The Master subsequently nearly brainwashed Leela to believe that she was his assassin, 'the Evil One', to attack The Doctor with her lethal Janus thorns before The Doctor was able to break her conditioning ("The Evil One"). After he assumed a new body, The Master trapped The Doctor's oldest current companion Adric in his TARDIS and forced him to trick The Doctor into an elaborate trap ("Castrolvalva"), while also killing Tegan Jovanka's Aunt Vanessa just because she was there, even as other companion Nyssa was deeply affected by The Master's new appearance as he stole her father's body for his own ("Logopolis"). While Peri found herself confused and disorientated into believing Kamelion - while under The Master's control - was her stepfather, she soon demonstrated a sense of will that was even able to disrupt The Master's control of Kamelion ("Planet of Fire"), although Melanie Bush was forced to witness an old schoolfriend fall under his influence as part of a more elaborate plan that she was powerless to stop ("The Quantum Archangel"). While Ace was merely his pawn in their first encounter ("Survival"), a later confrontation saw her manage to actually kill The Master, although he was able to regenerate thanks to new nanites supplied by the Tzun ("First Frontier"). In what appeared to be The Master's final stand, Dr Grace Holloway and Chang Lee were nothing but pawns in his attempt to use the TARDIS to destroy Earth. During an earlier/later encounter between the Tremas Master and the Eleventh Doctor, The Master allied himself with future ex-companion Adam Mitchell, manipulating Adam's bitter grudge against The Doctor into a near-insane hatred that drove Adam to almost destroy the universe ("Prisoners of Time"). After his resurrection The Master's schemes continued to escalate, as Martha Jones was forced to walk an Earth under The Master's control for a year while the immortal Captain Jack Harkness was repeatedly tortured to death merely for the fun of it ("The Sound of Drums/Last of the Time Lords"), and The Master's new female incarnation, 'Missy', even arranged for The Doctor to acquire his newest companion of Clara Oswald to ensure that she could manipulate him by attacking Clara ("The Bells of Saint John", "Dark Water/Death in Heaven").
While The Master's twisted thoughts on The Doctor's companions are an obvious example of his degenerating attitude, shifting from grudging respect to an almost racist dismissal of them as inferior humans, even a casual assessment of his relationships with others makes it clear that he has become increasingly brutal as time went on. When initially introduced, The Master was a cultured foe who sought power because he genuinely seemed to believe that he was best-qualified to use it ("The Dark Path" and "Colony in Space") and often showed some respect for others, such as saving Edwina McCrimmon when he didn't have to ("Harvest of Time"). The Master was also good at subterfuge and impersonations. He has been seen as a telephone repair man, a scientist, an art collector, and even as a vicar! He also used disguises to evade being captured and this included not only disguising himself but others as well so as to fool his hunters into believing that he had been caught or killed when in fact it is somebody else instead while he makes his getaway, as most notably seen when he escaped prison after The Doctor destroyed the Sea Devils' headquarters during The Master's attempted alliance with them.
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Anthony Ainley
(1981 - 1989) |
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Despite his crippled appearance, the disfigured Master often continued his predecessor's efforts at deception to win allies, manipulating their desire for power and sometimes presenting himself as more vulnerable than he really was, although he still used his hypnotic abilities to reinforce this impression. During this time, he even implemented his most elaborate plan to attack The Doctor, using a conceptual bomb and a randomly-chosen human whose denial of the TARDIS's existence would erase it from reality and thus undo all of The Doctor's travels ("The Light at the End"). Once he acquired a new body ("The Keeper of Traken"), The Master appeared eager to use his new lease on life to carry out increasingly elaborate and twisted schemes based primarily around ensuring The Doctor's death, with his old desire for power often coming second in favour of defeating The Doctor or ensuring his survival. One particularly elaborate plan saw him aid renegade ex-companion Adam Mitchell - a companion who would only travel with The Doctor in The Master's personal future - in a plan to abduct The Doctor's companions just so that he could use the eleven Doctors' TARDISes to trigger a temporal explosion that would destroy history ("Prisoners of Time"). While The Master had never truly trusted any of his past 'allies', where he once took time to cultivate such relationships and trick others into aiding him ("The Sea Devils" and "The Time Monster") and seemed to have a certain respect for The Doctor's UNIT colleagues, later Masters have often resorted to threats to gain allies in the short-term ("The
Mark of The Rani"), casually twisted others to act as his pawns through threats and hypnosis rather than careful manipulation. He was particularly known for using elaborate face-masks during the Fifth Doctor's era - once even assuming a disguise simply because he felt like it rather than for any practical purpose while attempting to control the power of the ancient race known as the Xeraphim on ancient Earth ("Time-Flight") -, with most of his other 'disguises' simply featuring him assuming a new identity while remaining relatively unaltered physically unless he suspected that he might encounter The Doctor. His duplicitous nature reached such an extent that even his own timeline was no longer 'safe' from him in his later incarnations, with The Master that emerged from the Eye of Harmony so twisted that he even attacked his own past self as part of a larger plan ("The Two Masters"), even if he justified his actions to the past Master as actually preserving his history by ensuring that his past self received the injuries he remembered sustaining himself.
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| Time-Flight |
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While trapped in his crippled state, the degenerated Master manipulated Chancellor Goth of Gallifrey to attain the presidency of the Time Lords so that The Master could take power from the Eye of Harmony itself, despite the fact that the energy released would almost certainly destroy his home planet in the process ("The Deadly Assassin"). While he also sought The Doctor's death in this body, he was continually driven to try and find new means of regaining his old strength, such as attempting a complex plan that would have destroyed the Kraal homeworld to use the resulting energy for his own benefit ("Trail of the White Worm" and "The Oseidon Adventure"). His final and more successful attempt was when he captured and took over the body of Tremas, one of the Consuls of Traken and also the father of The Doctor's companion Nyssa's father, the embers of the Source of Traken keeping his new body energised for as long as he needed it until the fire died out ("The Keeper of Traken"). Following the loss of his regenerations, The Master has made it clear more than once that his desire to obliterate his rival is held far above any other schemes he might have, once blackmailing The Rani when he discovered her active on Earth to help him kill The Doctor rather than simply forcing his way into a role in her pre-existing scheme ("The Mark of The Rani"). However, this desire remained flawed, as he was driven not merely to beat The Doctor, but to show The Doctor that he had outsmarted him, resulting in him often wasting time gloating when he had the upper hand and giving The Doctor time to get the better of him once more. Although The Doctor continued to regard The Master with a degree of pity for what his former friend had become, The Master remained increasingly ruthless, only once expressing his former willingness to ally with The Doctor when the stakes against them reached literally universe-threatening levels (As well as threatening The Master's own life) ("The Quantum Archangel").
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| The Mark of the Rani |
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Despite his cruder methods later in life, his habit of trickery is what distinguishes him as a villain from the Daleks, as while both are irredeemably evil, The Master could be extremely charming thus making him even more dangerous for those unfortunate enough to trust him whereas a Daleks looks and acts untrustworthy from the outset, with The Master regularly assuming disguises to win support - such as Reverend Magister ("The
Dæmons"), Professor Thalscales ("The Time Monster"), the Portreeve ("Castrovalva") or Harold Saxon ("The Sound of Drums/Last of the Time Lords") - while the Daleks have only ever pretended to be anything other than the killers they are due to a lack of power forcing them to feign a willingness to enter an alliance ("The Power of the Daleks" and "Death to the Daleks"). He can also be likened to a mischievous schoolboy as he takes great pride and satisfaction in his macabre practical jokes. These have included bombs rigged with string, a murderous telephone cable and even a deadly plastic armchair ("Terror of the Autons") as well as more sophisticated and twisted weapons such as a bomb that turned the victims into trees ("The Mark of The Rani") or trapping his enemies in a series of temporal fields where Time flowed at a different rate in each area ("The Quantum Archangel"). On several occasions, he even attempted to manipulate various alien adversaries to kill The Doctor for him, his 'allies' in these schemes including the Autons, the Axos, Azal, Sea Devils, Draconians, Ogrons, the Kraal, the Cybermen, the Tzun, and even the Daleks (Although these last were subsequently responsible for putting him on trial for his crimes and - apparently - executing him). However, his most horrific trademark weapon is the many miniaturised corpses that he has left behind from the use of his TCE which compresses the target down into a twisted miniaturised version of themselves. It is therefore fitting that at one point The Master became a victim of his own evil use of this gun, being shrunk down to only a few inches in height while trying to increase its power.
The Master's plans to wreak havoc and disruption have always been on a grand scale. He is not content with just petty crime and he has no interest in money or any other financial gain. The Master always thinks big; to destroy The Doctor's beloved planet Earth by unleashing the evil of Axos upon it ("The Claws of Axos"), or to disrupt the whole universe by instigating an interstellar war between Earth and the Draconian Empire ("Frontier in Space"), are in his scheme of things. Of course he is happy to use smaller events - such as attempting to prevent the signing of the Magna Carta ("The King's Demons") - to add to his ultimate aims especially if The Doctor gets caught up and humiliated along the way.
The Master has appeared in a total of 20 television stories. His most appearances were during the Third Doctor's forced exile on Earth. It was during this time that he found himself captured by UNIT, once being convinced to help UNIT deal with an invasion from an alternate Earth during The Doctor's absence, although he nevertheless attempted to escape once the crisis was at an end. Even though The Master had many attempts to have The Doctor killed The Doctor still took the effort to visit him while The Master was in prison. This could have been because of the fact that during this time The Doctor was himself stuck on Earth and desperate also to travel in his TARDIS again, and was thus hoping that The Master would tell him where his TARDIS was. However, The Master eventually escaped after contacting the Sea Devils, a race of beings who had lived on Earth millennia ago, and escaped from prison after The Doctor had been forced to destroy the Sea Devils' base.
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Legacy of the Daleks
(John Peel) |
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In the series, The Master's departure occurred when The Master vanished from The Doctor's life after a temporary alliance with the Daleks, but he was never forgotten. When he did finally reappear again several years later The Doctor had already undergone his regeneration into the Fourth Doctor. However, The Master's character and appearance had also undergone a complete transformation. Gone was his suave and elegant appearance, and he now resembled a living skeleton rather than anything human. This regeneration was later revealed to have been caused by an out-of-sequence confrontation with the Eighth Doctor and Susan ("Legacy of the Daleks"), who had encountered The Master on Earth years after the Dalek invasion. The Master had attempted to gain control of a matter transmuter, capable of turning any element into any other element, but was driven off Earth by The Doctor and his allies from the remainders of the original Dalek resistance force, although Susan's husband David died in the struggle when he took a shot intended for The Doctor. The Master tried to take Susan as a hostage, but didn't realise she was also a Gallifreyian until she incapacitated him with a telepathic shriek, subsequently leaving him badly burned when she destroyed the matter transmuter with his TCE and left with his TARDIS. Now that The Master had reached the end of his cycle of regenerations he is desperate to stay alive. He was even more obsessed with hatred and out for revenge against his fellow Time Lords and especially The Doctor. To this end, he attempted to gain control of the Eye of Harmony - the power source of all Gallifrey - to use its energy to save himself, despite the potential risks to Gallifrey as a whole if his plan succeeded, but The Doctor thwarted his efforts and succeeded in defeating his old adversary, although The Master was at least partially 'energised' by the confrontation.
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| Castrovalva |
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His strength restored by the energy he had absorbed from the Eye, The Master allied with the Kraals during their second attempted invasion of Earth, discovering an ancient worm that had been hidden on Earth in Derbyshire centuries ago with the power to generate wormholes ("Trail of the White Worm"), creating a wormhole to the Kraal homeworld ("The Oseidon Adventure"). Although the Kraals immediately betrayed The Master, The Doctor and Leela swiftly realised that The Master the Kraals had been working with was actually an android duplicate that The Master had created, with his real intention being to recover a Z-battery that The Doctor had left on Earth during his exile and combine its Z-radiation with Osedion's O-radiation to create ZO-radiation and renew his body. Knowing the dangers of this plan, The Doctor programmed The Master's android duplicate to trap him back in his TARDIS and depart. The renegade Time Lord eventually returned to the television series when he attempted to take control of the Source of Traken, a powerful energy source that was so pure he was forced to remain in his TARDIS when trying to absorb it or be destroyed by the planet itself ("The Keeper of Traken"). Although he failed to take control of the Source, he was able to use its power to impose his mind over the body of Tremas, a Consul of Traken and the father of The Doctor's new companion Nyssa, subsequently attempting a daring plan to take control of the powerful block transfer computations of the planet Logopolis to fully regenerate his body ("Logopolis"). This plan nearly fell apart when The Master and The Doctor learned too late that the Logopolitans had been using their computations to protect the universe from a vast wave of entropy, forcing The Doctor and The Master into a brief alliance to transmit the final computations necessary to preserve the universe, only for The Master to briefly try and blackmail the universe to accept him as their ruler by threatening to let them all be destroyed if they didn't submit to him. This plan was thwarted when The Doctor transmitted the final signal, but it resulted in him falling from the deep space satellite dish that he was using to send the signal when The Master tried to destroy the walkway The Doctor was using, thus causing his fourth regeneration. With his enemy disorientated from the recent regeneration, The Master attempted to set a trap for his nemesis by creating an illusionary city called Castrovalva with the unwilling aid of The Doctor's companion Adric - a skilled mathematician able to understand the block transfer computations - after tricking The Doctor's remaining companions into taking him there in the belief that he needed to recuperate somewhere uncomplicated, but the city was so elaborate that the inhabitants developed free will and turned against The Master, giving the restored Doctor time to escape ("Castrovalva").
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| Planet of Fire |
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Due to The Master's desire to humiliate The Doctor he had great pleasure and satisfaction when asked, by the Time Lords, to rescue The Doctor whose incarnations had become trapped within the Death Zone. However, it is understandable that he was unable to convince the Third Doctor that he was in fact there to help. He fared no better with the Fifth Doctor as well and so ended up assisting the Cybermen. But they too ended up being tricked and slaughtered by The Master's trickery, shortly before he himself was defeated by the Third Doctor and The Brigadier and subsequently banished by Rassilon. Some time after this, he attempted to improve the power of his TCE, but this resulted in him being shrunk and forced to use The Doctor's companion Kamelion - whom The Doctor was subsequently forced to execute after Kamelion was left horrified at the thought of being used against The Doctor again - to travel to the planet Sarn, where the healing fires might be able to restore him to his proper height ("Planet of Fire"). He was thought to have been killed, but escaped to briefly join forces with The Rani as he blackmailed her to help him kill the Sixth Doctor ("Mark of The Rani"), before trying to use The Doctor to defeat The Valeyard, who he regarded as a greater threat than The Doctor; at least with The Doctor he could be sure of having the 'advantage' (Presumably referring to The Doctor's compassion, thus meaning that The Doctor could be 'predicted' or controlled by threatening others, while The Valeyard lacked that particular trait) (The Trial of a Time Lord story "The
Ultimate Foe").
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| Survival |
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After this encounter, The Master's body began to wear down as the Source of Traken became depleted. In an attempt to 'recharge' himself - as well as to strike back at the Chronovores, who he believed were seeking revenge on him for his earlier attempt to control Kronos - The Master attempted to hijack the power of the Lux Aeterna - the cosmic energy underlying the fabric of reality - to become a God, but this only resulted in the temporary creation of the Quantum Archangel, a being that was determined to remake creation to give everyone their perfect reality, regardless of the fact that this would take all meaning out of life. After the Archangel was defeated, The Master used the dregs of the Lux Aeterna to recharge his body, but was later attacked by the Chronovores, although he apparently escaped them under un-revealed circumstances. Subsequently travelling to the planet of the Cheetah People, The Master began to devolve into an animal-like state, and was forced to send the planet-hopping kitlings to Earth to try and lure the Seventh Doctor to the planet to help him. However, The Master eventually succumbed to the cheetah 'infection', regressing to a savage, feral state, but was left behind on the rapidly-dying planet after trying to kill The Doctor.
Somehow escaping the destruction of the planet, but now dying of the Cheetah 'contagion', The Master tried to contact the race known as the Fleshsmiths, who harvested the flesh of others to survive after a terrible catastrophe, hoping that they would be able to create a new body for him. However, the Fleshsmiths imprisoned him and tried to use his TARDIS as a studio set to aid in their schemes to brainwash the planet Blinni-Garr using subliminal messages in television broadcasts. Having managed to escape the Fleshsmiths while The Doctor thwarted their plans, it would appear that The Master apparently found some other way of curing himself from the infection of the Cheetah people, but a subsequent attempt to steal the painting The Scream unintentionally released a psychic weapon of destruction known as the Warp Core, which was contained in the painting, regressing The Master back to his withered appearance and forcing the Seventh Doctor to telepathically fight The Master for control of the Core until the colony where The Scream had been displayed was destroyed, annihilating the Core and leaving The Master with no other option but to run.
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Master
(Joseph Lidster) |
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Some time after this, The Doctor was reunited with this incarnation of The Master when he attempted to make a deal with Death in an attempt to bring his old friend some measure of peace. Under the terms of the deal, Death would relinquish her hold over The Master for ten years, giving him the chance to live the life she took from him, but The Doctor would have to kill him when those ten years were up. As a result, The Master had his memory taken from him and was banished to the town of Perfugium, where he took on the identity of the disfigured Doctor John Smith, making friends and actually attracting romantic interest due to his genuinely good intentions and his air of mystery. On the tenth year of his time in the village, John Smith invited his old friends Inspector Victor Schaeffer and his wife Jacqueline to his house, with Death manifesting herself as John's maid, Jade, to ensure that The Doctor kept his word. Realising that John and Jacqueline genuinely loved each other, The Doctor tried to use this to save The Master, but Victor, driven mad by Death's manipulations, killed Jacqueline, leaving John willing to kill his 'friend'. As Death stopped time to allow John, rather than The Master, the opportunity to decide what to make of his future, she revealed the last secret about Torvic's death - that it was The Doctor rather than The Master who'd killed Torvic - but John forgave The Doctor, understanding that the adult cannot be blamed for the foolish decisions made by a child who failed to comprehend what was being offered. John was left with the choice of killing Victor before he had killed Jacqueline, despite the knowledge that doing so would turn him into The Master once more, and The Doctor was forcibly banished from Perfugium before he could even bid John farewell, much less learn what his old friend would choose in the end.
Whatever the outcome of that confrontation, it would appear that John Smith went on to become The Master once more, as he returned at a later date, having apparently regressed his body back to some form of Tremas's body once again, only to find himself still contaminated by the Cheetah infection. Increasingly desperate to survive, The Master contacted a race known as the The Tzun ("First Frontier"), who were able to provide him with new nanobots that allowed him to regenerate (The new incarnation being apparently based on Basil Rathbone). However, after The Master betrayed the Tzun, setting up a situation where they would be blamed for starting a nuclear war when they wished to take advantage of the crisis to offer a message of peace, he destroyed their ship and left Earth, leaving The Doctor to prevent a Tzun warhead from destroying Earth. However, it would appear that the nanites that gave The Master his new regenerations were unsuccessful or only worked in the short term, as he was next seen having stolen the sacred Loom of Rassilon's Mouse to create a new body for himself ("Happy Endings"). Unfortunately, he chose to conduct his experiments in the same village where The Doctor's companion Benny was getting married, and, with the aid of the former Timewyrm, The Master was captured by UNIT, although he apparently escaped to search for further means to continue his existence.
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Eric Roberts
(1996) |
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In what appeared to be his final confrontation with The Doctor, The Master had himself executed by the Daleks, but transferred his mind into a deathworm, a telepathic creature that allowed people to transfer their minds into other bodies after death. Asking for The Doctor to take his remains back to Gallifrey, The Master caused the TARDIS to land on Earth, intending to take The Doctor's body for himself, but his plan went wrong when The Doctor was shot and taken to hospital, forcing The Master to take the body of a paramedic as a temporary measure. Using this body, The Master opened the TARDIS's link to the Eye of Harmony, intending to use the energy of the Eye to steal The Doctor's remaining five regenerations, while also destroying Earth as it was pulled into the Eye at midnight, when the opposing gravitation forces would be at their weakest. However, aided by new companions Dr Grace Holloway and Chang Lee (Who initially worked with The Master until the truth about him was revealed), The Doctor escaped his old enemy's trap, their confrontation ending with The Master being sucked into the Eye of Harmony in The Doctor's TARDIS.
However, this was not the end of The Master; for some time, the amnesic Doctor spoke with some manifestation of The Master 'hidden' in a secret room of the TARDIS ("Sometime
Never..."), and in "The Gallifrey Chronicles", The Doctor briefly spoke with a disembodied voice from the Eye of Harmony that seems to be The Master, which tricked him into keeping a rift open within the TARDIS until it lured the alien Vore to Earth, although The Doctor countered this by drawing the Vore through the rift. Based on the information proved in the conversation, it would appear that, having been trapped in the anti-matter world, The Master had acquired the same god-like power as Omega, but resents the fact that he cannot use this power in the real world. After Gallifrey was restored, The Master's essence was able to escape the Eye by transferring his essence into a single room of the TARDIS and ejecting it into the vortex, eventually escaping into reality after intercepting a vortex ship. Making his way to the planet Kostlan, a unique world existing in the Time Vortex, The Master became the assistant of the ancient Gallifreyan scientist Artron in an attempt to hijack Artron's work in creating a system of perpetual regeneration to restore his own body ("Ravenous 4 - Day of The Master"). Although The Master was able to create a device that would transfer the energy of the native Kostlani into his own body, and attempted to force Artron to operate it by inflicting a mortal wound on the Eighth Doctor when he came to Kostlan himself, The Master's plan backfired when Artron modified the device to transfer the energy into himself. Retreating to a Time Lord waystation that he used as a resting place, The Master allied with two future incarnations of himself - the incarnation who would fight in the Time War and his first female self - to recover Artron and use his knowledge and power to defeat The Ravenous, a race who essentially ate regeneration energy, currently allied with the Eleven, an incarnation of the Time Lord known to fandom as 'The Collective' as he had a rare mental condition where all of his past selves remained active in his mind.
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Ravenous 4
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Once he had assisted his future selves in saving another version of himself, The Master was expelled back into the Time Vortex with his memories of that encounter wiped, but he was eventually was able to reach Earth and take another body in 1900. Trapped on Earth for the next few decades, The Master survived by transferring himself into new bodies as his old ones wore out while trying to find a means of escape. He was eventually captured by UNIT in the 1980s, but escaped his prison a couple of decades later by hypnotising his guards when they attempted to arrange for him to act as their agent in The Doctor’s absence, allowing him to retrieve his lost TARDIS and escape ("Mastermind"). He eventually sought the secrets of Artron on Parrak, the planet that was supposedly the location of Artron's tomb, but he was killed by The Ravenous when they came to the planet for the same information ("Ravenous 4 - Planet of Dust"). Although now dead, The Master's life was saved by three Time Lords (unknown to him, all other versions of himself), who had acquired Artron's Matrix print on behalf of the Time Lords in exchange for giving this version of themselves a new regeneration cycle, although they were ordered to only give their other self a new count of thirteen lives under the usual rules and limits and didn't disclose their identity to him ("Ravenous 4 - Day of The Master").
Restored to life with a new set of regenerations in a bald incarnation who wore a suit, The Master's earliest recorded act was to return to Earth and pose as a new incarnation of The Doctor, forming an alliance with Elizabeth Klein - a 'local' version of a traitorous ex-companion from an alternate timeline where the Nazis won the Second World War ("Colditz" and "A Thousand Tiny Wings"), The Doctor erasing this alt-Klein after she stole the TARDIS to recreate her own timeline ("Survival of the Fittest" and "The Architects of History") - to fight off various alien invasions drawn to Earth from other dimensions by The Master's use of one of a pair of dimensional Node Stones. With the second stone in The Doctor's possession, The Master hoped that his actions would attract The Doctor's attention and allow him to steal the other stone, allying with an alien race called the Tolians to provide them with power and work with him in further attempts at galactic conquest. This plan failed when the Seventh Doctor convinced the Tolians that The Master would inevitably betray them and he was able to banish them back to their home dimension, although The Master escaped ("UNIT: Dominion"). This attack demonstrated this Master's far greater disregard for the Laws of Time, as he attacked the Seventh Doctor with intent to kill despite having already been responsible for this incarnation's regeneration.
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And You Will Obey Me
(Alan Barnes) |
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Following this, The Master appeared to alternate between working for the Time Lords and pursuing his own agenda, such as searching for the mysterious 'Eminence' with the goal of using it against the Daleks as his own private army. With the Eminence able to turn others into its 'Infinite Warriors' by giving them fragments of itself, The Master attempted to boost its power so that it could possess all of Earth, but the Eighth Doctor was able to counter The Master's plan and the Celestial Intervention Agency erased his attack from history. An attempt to ally with the Daleks in their occupation of Earth backfired when he tried to convert captured Sontarans into new Daleks, culminating in The Doctor stealing his TARDIS and leaving him trapped on Earth during a Dalek-Sontaran war ("Master of the Daleks"), but he eventually managed to escape. This led to The Master's most twisted scheme yet, when he made contact with the ruthless Cult of the Heretic, an order dedicated to the memory of a Time Lord who sought to 'regenerate' the universe due to its perceived sickness, intending to ensure that he played his part in recreating reality the way he saw fit ("The Two Masters"). Continuing his current disregard for the Laws of Time, The Master actually attacked his own past self to prove his allegiance to the Cult’s plan - albeit intending to attack his past self to create the burned incarnation and fake his death rather than actually killing himself - only to be betrayed when the Cult arranged for his past and future self to switch bodies while telling each Master that the other had overpowered them ("The Two Masters"). The Cult’s intent was to transfer the past Master into his future self and then kill the future Master in his past self, creating a complex paradox that would eventually destroy reality and allow them to regenerate the universe using the Heretic's equipment. Although the two Masters unwittingly furthered the Cult's agenda as their subsequent travels destabilised reality due to the paradox ("And You Will Obey Me" and "Vampire of the Mind"), their continued survival prevented the paradox becoming permanent, allowing the Seventh Doctor to realise what had happened when the future-in-past Master tricked The Doctor into helping him confront his past-in-future self. The two Masters initially intended to send the past-in-future Master into the Seventh Doctor's body, but The Doctor convinced them of their role in the current paradox. Returned to their own bodies, The Masters attempted to leave The Doctor to die and hijack the Cult's plans to restore reality the way they wanted, but The Doctor escaped and used The Master's discarded weapons and the Cult's own equipment to restore reality while erasing The Masters' knowledge of the scheme.
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Day of The Master
(John Dorney) |
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Finally accepting the Time Lords' earlier request for him to fight with them in the Time War, The Master regenerated once again, this time assuming the form of a child as he fought alongside The Doctor. Like The Master, The Doctor had now regenerated, with this incarnation being known as the 'War Doctor' ("The Night of The Doctor"), the War Doctor often proclaiming that he wasn't worthy of his usual title in this incarnation as he focused on being the warrior the Time Lords needed to win this conflict. The two made a ruthless team for a while, but eventually The Master's own ego drove him to try and leave The Doctor to die during a dangerous mission, only for interference from one of The Doctor's future companions to instead create a complex temporal paradox that forced The Master to regenerate again ("The Then and the Now"). His new incarnation appearing to be an elderly man, The Master alternated between working with the Time Lords and pursuing his own agenda, such as providing the Time Lords with Artron’s lost Matrix print in exchange for restoring his past self’s ability to regenerate in the first place ("Ravenous 4 - Day of The Master"). In contrast to the War Doctor, who fought on the front lines of the War and still tried to avoid getting innocents caught in the crossfire (although he was willing to let them die if there was no other way and a bigger picture to deal with), the War Master tended to take action from a distance rather than directly put himself at risk. He was also known to be an emotional sadist; on one occasion he materialised next to a young girl on a dying planet and explicitly offered to only save her when he still had time to save the girl’s sister, a short distance away from his TARDIS, just so that he could witness the girl’s emotional turmoil from having to make that choice.
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The War Master: Hearts of Darkness
(David Llewellyn Lisa McMullin) |
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One of the War Master’s most daring plans, involving a complex scheme to basically transfer himself into the Dalek hive-mind, included him switching bodies with the Eighth Doctor so that he could use The Doctor’s reputation to avoid drawing attention to his efforts until it was too late, reasoning that people would accept The Doctor’s desire to help where they might question The Master’s agenda. The Doctor-in-Master was able to track The Master-in-Doctor with resources provided by the Celestial Intervention Agency, allowing The Doctor to interrupt The Master’s transference and take his own body back. The Doctor was thus able to prevent his old foe completing his original scheme, albeit only when a woman who had befriending The Doctor after being abused by The Master sacrificed herself to interrupt the primary transference. On another occasion, the Master actually dared to raid the Time Lord archives to acquire the ‘Anti-Genesis Codes’, detailing a Time Lord plan that would have allowed them to go back and prevent the very origin of the Daleks (abandoned out of an unspoken agreement between the two sides not to affect the origins of the other), The Master using the Codes to go back to early Skaro and take Davros’s place as the creator of the Daleks. Under the alias of Davros’s uncle ‘Sorvad’, The Master was able to create the Daleks under his own control, even going so far as to kill the Fourth Doctor when he arrived on Skaro on his mission to interfere in the creation of the Daleks.
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The War Master
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However, when The Master reached a point where his Dalek army were about to conquer Gallifrey, he was contacted by the Dalek Time Strategist - the last surviving Dalek of the original timeline - and an alternate version of himself, the alternate Master explaining that he had been enlisted as he was better suited to convince his other self of the dangers of his current scheme. Forced to acknowledge that the Daleks would turn on him just as they had turned on Davros in the prime reality, the War Master reached back along his own timeline and convinced his past self not to go through with his plan to acquire the necessary resources to replace Davros in the first place. The War Master that had replaced Davros was erased from history, but the younger one who had been persuaded not to go through with the plan was able to help the alternate Master escape before he was captured by the Daleks. The War Master’s TARDIS lost on an ocean world, the Daleks forced The Master to pose as The Doctor as part of a plan to retrieve the lost ship, intending for him to share the Time Lords’ secrets with them once he had salvaged the ship, but The Master was able to escape and set a new plan in motion. After changing history by saving Cole Jarnish, a pilot of a medical ship, from his historically recorded death ("The Good Master"), The Master manipulated Cole into changing the history of a peaceful farming planet so that they became a race of ruthless conquering cyborgs, instead of dying from collateral damage of the Time War ("The Sky Man").
With Cole desperate to undo the consequences of his mistake, The Master then sought out the Heavenly Paradigm, a source of power capable of rewriting reality itself; his actions had turned Cole into a living temporal paradox, making him a source of temporal energy that could theoretically allow The Master to control the Paradigm and end the Time War at the cost of unmaking Cole from existence ("The Heavenly Paradigm").
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Sir Derek Jacobi
(2007) |
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However, The Master's control of the Paradigm proved incomplete, as he caused both the Daleks and the Time Lords to win battles they had previously lost without realising it, eventually fleeing in fear after he witnessed the Daleks take control of the Cruciform and he realised the power of what he had unleashed. Considering the War to be lost, The Master hid at the end of the universe, using a Chameleon Arch ("Human Nature/The Family of Blood") to turn himself into a human infant where he could hide in safety in a time even the Time Lords had never travelled to. Aging to adulthood in his new human identify of the kindly Professor Yana, the human Master proved to be a caring, compassionate person,
working to save what was left of humanity by sending them on to the fabled 'Utopia Project' ("Utopia"). Aided by the Tenth Doctor, Martha Jones and Captain Jack Harkness, Yana managed to send the remnants of humanity away to safety in a rocket, but Martha unintentionally reminded him of his Time Lord nature when he brought out the watch that served as his Chameleon Arch, her words prompting him to open the watch and restore his original identity. Although he was shot by the Professor's assistant, The Master managed to escape into the TARDIS, regenerating into a new, younger body and setting the ship to dematerialise. The Doctor was only just able to limit The Master’s opportunities for new evil by locking the TARDIS coordinates to prevent The Master from travelling anywhere but the TARDIS's last two destinations.
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John Simm
(2007 -2010) |
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Arriving in the twenty-first century, The Master subsequently took on the identity of Harold Saxon, an up-and-coming politician, setting up an elaborate satellite network to broadcast a subtle subliminal signal that would stop anybody consciously registering that 'Harold Saxon' had no past and no real policies, as well as prevent The Doctor realising that another Time Lord was on Earth. This new incarnation was an even greater 'mirror' to The Doctor than ever before, sharing many common traits with the Tenth Doctor, such as a tendency to babble, a certain enthusiasm about his new body, a habit of acting eccentric at somewhat inappropriate moments, and a varied knowledge and fondness for Earth culture; he was even known to listen to the Scissor Sisters. Manipulating Martha's family to create an elaborate trap for The Doctor (Who escaped to the past by repairing Jack's damaged Vortex Generator), The Master cannibalised the stolen TARDIS - its coordinates locked to prevent him going anywhere but Earth and the end of the universe - to create a Paradox Engine, bringing the future humans who sought Utopia back as the 'Toclafane' - metal spheres with blades who talked in a sing-song voice - to decimate their ancestors, believing that it was his right as a Time Lord to change history and create a new Time Lord empire. Over the course of a year, The Master tortured The Doctor and Jack, forcing them to watch as he decimated the world they had vowed to protect and turned it into the base where he would wage war against the universe.
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A Young Master
(The
Sound of Drums/Last of the Time Lords) |
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Fortunately, The Master continued to make his typical two crucial mistakes when facing The Doctor; he underestimated The Doctor's companions - specifically, Martha Jones, who had escaped using Jack Harkness's vortex generator - and he left The Doctor alive so that he could gloat about his victory, albeit transforming The Doctor into a withered version of himself who could do nothing but watch. Thanks to Martha spreading the story of The Doctor across the world, The Doctor was restored to full health by The Master's own psychic network as the entire population of Earth thought the word 'Doctor' at the same moment. With The Doctor restored and The Master disarmed - his only remaining weapon would blow up Earth and destroy him as well, something The Doctor knew The Master couldn't do - Jack destroyed the Paradox Machine, rewinding time back to the moment it was activated so that nobody but those in the immediate vicinity of the machine remembered the last year. However, The Master was subsequently shot in the chest by his 'companion' Lucy Saxon, refusing to regenerate as the alternative was to be forever imprisoned inside the TARDIS, dying in The Doctor's arms, tauntingly informing The Doctor that he'd won by preventing his old enemy from saving him.
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| The End of Time |
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Once again, however, The Master found a way to cheat death, assembling a 'cult' prior to his ascension to the role of Prime Minister who would resurrect him if something went wrong. Using a ring of The Master's that apparently contained some aspect of his mind, along with biodata acquired from Lucy Saxon, this cult were able to restore The Master to life, but Lucy's attempt to disrupt the 'ritual' resulted in The Master being imperfectly resurrected. As a result, The Master’s restored body was burning through its life energy at an accelerated rate, leaving him looking at least a decade older than he had previously and with a ravenous hunger, to the extent that he was shown eating a raw chicken and may have even resorted to eating humans. Although his condition also granted him the ability to make superhuman leaps and shoot energy bursts from his hands, these actions apparently drained his life energy faster. Even in this weakened condition, however, The Master was given a terrifying chance when he was abducted by billionaire Joshua Naismith to repair an alien healing device capable of healing the population of an entire planet, The Master reprogramming the device to impose his DNA over the human race and turn everyone on Earth into versions of himself. With the drumbeat he heard now amplified, The Masters were able to track the drums to their source... learning, much to their shock, that the source was the Time Lords themselves. In the last days of the Time War, in a desperate attempt to escape destruction, the Time Lords had sent the signal into the mind of The Master in the past in order to create an escape route from the Time Lock surrounding the war, the President of the Time Lords unconcerned about the fact that coming back into the universe would unleash the horrors of the Time War upon creation, believing that it was better for the universe to die with the Time Lords than for it to go on without them. Outraged at having being used by the Time Lords in that manner - particularly after the President rejected him as a disease -, The Master helped The Doctor break the link that had drawn the Time Lords back to the universe, sacrificing himself in a last, vengeful attack upon the Lord President as the Time Lords faded back into the Time War.
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Michelle Gomez
(2014) |
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It was initially unknown what exactly had happened to The Master after this, but it is known that Rassilon survived The Master's attack, although he was apparently forced to regenerate once again. According to one source, The Master escaped Gallifrey in a TARDIS while still suffering from an unstable incarnation, but he eventually found some way to stabilise himself. Meanwhile, The Doctor was able to alter the final outcome of the Time War when the War Doctor, the incarnation who most directly fought in the War, was able to contact his other selves ("The Day of The Doctor"), allowing all of the first thirteen Doctors to collaborate in an elaborate plan to save Gallifrey by trapping it in a single moment in time in a pocket parallel universe. Much later, The Master himself returned in a female incarnation who called herself 'Missy' - short for Mistress' - with this new incarnation referring to The Doctor as her 'boyfriend' ("Deep Breath") in acknowledgement of their warped connection. Using a stolen Gallifreyian Matrix data slice, Missy was able to upload dying minds to the network while upgrading their bodies into Cybermen after convincing their minds to abandon their emotions, concealing the entire operation in contemporary London, the plan essentially granting Missy access to an army of humanity's dead as her upgrades allowed the Cybermen to convert the dead as well as the living. She even reached back across The Doctor's history to put the Eleventh Doctor in touch with Clara Oswald, regarding her as a companion who would form just the right emotional attachment to The Doctor to make him easier for Missy to manipulate. Although she revealed that her true goal was to give control of the Cyber-army to the Twelfth Doctor so that he would be faced with the impossible choice of leading that army across the universe or letting Earth die, The Doctor forsook that power to hand it to Clara's boyfriend Danny Pink, converted into a Cyberman but retaining his humanity thanks to his love of Clara, The Doctor proclaiming that he was not a general or a leader but simply an 'idiot with a box'. With the Cybermen having destroyed themselves on Danny's orders to save the living, The Doctor prepared to kill Missy to prevent Clara from having to do it, but Missy was instead apparently killed by The Brigadier, reanimated by the Cyber-technology and standing by his friend, although Missy managed to escape by configuring her Vortex Manipulator to be activated by the energy of the Cybermens' blasts. Although Missy claimed to be aware of Gallifrey's location after The Doctors hid it away, the coordinates she gave The Doctor revealed no trace of his home planet, leaving the exact circumstances of Missy's return unclear.
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| The Magician's Apprentice/The Witch’s Familiar |
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Despite having faked her death, Missy returned to Earth once again - initially declining to explain her continued survival - freezing all planes in mid-air and setting herself up in a square in Spain to wait for Clara just to attract her attention, going so far as to ask UNIT to arrange for snipers to be positioned around her so that Clara would feel safe enough to attend the meeting. Although she killed two of the UNIT agents around her just to make a point, Missy revealed that she had come here to look for help after she had received The Doctor's apparent final will, still describing The Doctor as a friend despite their last confrontation. Tracking The Doctor to the party that he would attend on his final day, they were also contacted by a mysterious snake-like creature sent by Davros to find The Doctor. While The Doctor confronted Davros, Missy realised that the 'space station' they had been brought to was actually a building on the restored Skaro, but she and Clara were captured and apparently exterminated as part of Davros's attempt to show The Doctor that his compassion was wrong (Although they actually managed to escape using the same method Missy had used to escape her previous death). Missy and Clara attempted to rescue The Doctor by infiltrating the Dalek city through the 'sewers' - really where they kept Daleks who were too injured to operate on their own - Missy lured an active Dalek down so that Clara could use its casing to infiltrate the city through the Dalek 'sewers' - really where they kept Daleks who were too injured to operate on their own - Missy lured an active Dalek down so that Clara could use its casing to infiltrate the city. Meanwhile, Davros tricked The Doctor into triggering his regenerative energy so that the Daleks could absorb power from The Doctor, but The Doctor revealed that he had realised the Daleks' real plan, the energy he released empowering even the Daleks in the sewers to 'rise up' against their intact brethren, causing the Dalek city to turn on itself. Although Missy attempted to trick The Doctor into shooting Clara while she hid in a Dalek casing, The Doctor realised that the Dalek facing him wasn't a conventional Dalek when it asked him to show mercy, ordering Missy to run while he and Clara escaped in the TARDIS. Missy was last shown surrounded by Daleks as the city exploded around her, but, continuing The Master's reputation for survival, she was again able to escape this situation as she has so many others. An additional reason for Missy putting The Doctor and Clara in touch was hinted at after The Doctor rediscovered Gallifrey and uncovered evidence that he and Clara were the prophesised 'hybrid' who would destroy the Time Lords, The Doctor speculating that the two of them were too dangerous to remain together as they pushed the other to various extremes that they would never have considered on their own before he erased his own memory of Clara to protect them ("Heaven Sent/Hell Bent").
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Day of The Master
(John Dorney) |
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While operating away from The Doctor, Missy experienced a range of encounters, including retrieving an independent power source for her TARDIS to permanently cut herself off from the Eye of Harmony, as well as assisting her past selves in regaining the ability to regenerate to ensure her own existence ("Day of The Master"), although she still experienced such failures as a plan to gain a controlling influence on future entrepreneurs being completely erased from history. While spending time in the early 1900s, Missy ran into L. Frank Baum by chance and used him to turn the Land of Fiction into an elaborate trap for The Doctor, but this plan backfired when she trapped the Thirteenth Doctor ("Twice Upon a Time") rather than the Twelfth as intended, culminating in Missy being driven out of the Land and temporary companion Theodore becoming the new Master of the Land ("The Wonderful Doctor of Oz").
On another occasion, Missy's past self attempted to harness the energy of the planet Kiameth to heal his current damaged condition, which unleashed a sentient entropy wave on the universe that threatened to destroy existence ("Masterful"). The previous Master attempted to summon his own past selves to him in order to take their energy to sustain himself, drawing five of his other selves to his current base; a version of him as a child who hadn't even left Gallifrey yet, his decayed body, his stolen human body, the bald incarnation that marked the start of his new regeneration cycle and his immediate predecessor. However, the version of him currently possessing Tremas sent Kamelion in his place, and an attempt to capture The Master that regularly fought UNIT and the Third Doctor caught Jo Grant by accident. Realising what was happening, Missy travelled back and dispersed the other Masters across Kiameth's history in an attempt to encourage them to reform, but the entropy creature eventually killed most of them. With only the decayed Master, the bald Master, the War Master and Missy left, Missy suggested they use her predecessor's equipment to stop the entropy wave, but the War Master was able to negate this entire timeline by poisoning himself and the other Masters, the resulting paradox negating the younger Master's initial plans on Kiameth.
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| Extremis |
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Some time after The Doctor parted company with Clara, followed by a temporary retirement to Delirium with River Song ("The Husbands of River Song"), The Doctor was called upon to oversee Missy's execution after she was captured by an ancient brotherhood. Their planned method of execution would destroy both hearts, sever all three brain stems, and deliver a cellular shock to prevent regeneration, and even after that it was advised that the remains be kept in a quantum vault for a thousand years to confirm that the death was certain. Part of the rules of the executioners required The Doctor to actually carry out the sentence as the only other Time Lord they could find, but when Nardole followed him on the orders of River Song, reminding him how River wouldn't approve of this action, The Doctor was reminded of his true purpose to save rather than kill. Although he expressed doubt as Missy's pleas for mercy and offer to learn to be good, when Missy's last words were to affirm that she considered herself The Doctor's friend, it was revealed that The Doctor had altered the equipment to avoid actually killing her, the executioners fleeing rather than risk The Doctor's wrath. The Doctor and Nardole still conceded to the plan to put her in the vault, The Doctor hoping that time in isolation would give Missy a chance to change, although Missy claimed that she was staying in the vault of her own free will by noting that she once built a gun out of leaves and could have easily broken out if she wanted to.
Officially, The Doctor was meant to keep the Vault sealed ("The Pilot"), but he occasionally entered it to talk with Missy about recent events, as well as providing her with a piano and other creature comforts ("The Caretaker"). When facing an 'invasion' by the mysterious Monks, who took control of planets by convincing the local population that their worlds would be destroyed without The Monks' aid, The Doctor, Nardole, and new companion Bill Potts decided to ask Missy for new information on their enemies ("The Lie of the Land"). Learning of the situation, Missy revealed that she had encountered the creatures before, telling The Doctor that The Monks took power by getting consent from one significant human mind and using that access to create a link to humanity. As a result, Missy's best solution was to kill the human who gave consent, in the form of Bill herself, Missy arguing that this was just her way of being 'good' as her proposal would save Earth, but The Doctor, Bill and Nardole were able to disrupt The Monks' link to humanity without sacrificing Bill. As Missy continued to spend time in the vault, she actually started crying as she reflected on the deaths of her victims, The Doctor deciding to hope that she was genuinely changing rather than believe that it was just part of her plan. When a later trip saw the TARDIS malfunction and return to Earth while leaving The Doctor and Bill trapped on Mars in the Victorian era ("Empress of Mars"), Nardole was forced to ask Missy for help repairing the ship, Missy not only agreeing to the request but appearing genuinely concerned for The Doctor's safety once he was returned. As time went on, The Doctor began giving Missy a degree of freedom, such as allowing her to carry out research and maintenance in the TARDIS, although he kept the controls locked so Missy couldn't use the ship herself ("The Eaters of Light"). In a talk with Bill and Nardole, The Doctor mused that Missy was the only person he'd ever met who was close to being like him, prompting him to decide to 'test' her reformation by letting her take charge in a crisis.
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Missy
(World Enough and Time/The Doctor Falls) |
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The Master
(World Enough and Time/The Doctor Falls) |
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Unfortunately, matters swiftly became complicated when the ship chosen to test Missy was revealed to be a colony ship from Mondas that had become trapped in the event horizon of a black hole and was experiencing time dilation as time flowed faster the further down the ship people went, resulting in Bill being taken to the rear of the ship and trapped for ten years among the polluted city the colonists had built there while The Doctor, Nardole and Missy spent a few minutes determining what was going on ("World Enough and Time/The Doctor Falls"). By the time they reached the lower levels, Bill had been converted into a Cyberman... and, more shockingly, a physician who had been treating Bill was actually The Master's previous incarnation, the younger Master claiming to be concerned about his future. Briefly won over by her past self, Missy captured The Doctor and tied him to a chair on top of a building, The Master explaining that he had crashed into the colony ship and been trapped when his TARDIS was damaged.
The Doctor was able to swiftly turn the tables on The Masters and force them to flee to an upper level with him, Nardole, and the Cyber-converted Bill who had managed to hold on to her humanity, but as Nardole and The Doctor helped the residents of this floor prepare to defend themselves, The Masters decided to leave Missy having instructed The Master to keep a spare dematerialisation circuit on himself so that she could provide one to fix his TARDIS. The Doctor attempted to make a speech to The Masters about his motives for fighting, arguing that he fought for what was right because it was right, decent and kind, but although The Master mockingly noted that he wasn't paying attention, Missy was actually affected by the speech, giving her past self a hug to assure him that she had loved being him and revelling in the sensation of a world burning before she stabbed him in the side. As Missy turned back to help The Doctor, affirming that the wound would give her past self time to return to his ship and regenerate, The Master shot her in the back with the laser screwdriver, refusing to let himself stand with The Doctor and regarding it as appropriate that he die at his own hand, laughing as the elevator descended to the lower levels so that he could depart the colony ship and become Missy as he had before. As the remaining human colonists fled to the upper levels of the ship with Nardole, The Doctor destroyed the current level to eliminate all Cybermen, but although Bill was able to get The Doctor back to the TARDIS before departing as she ascended to a new level of existence, allowing him to eventually regenerate ("Twice Upon a Time"), it was initially unknown if Missy survived The Master's attack.
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Missy - Series 2
(Lisa McMullin, Gemma Arrowsmith, Roy Gill and John Dorney) |
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Based on available evidence, it would appear that Missy was able to regenerate after this attack through use of the Elysium Field, a device that broke a body down into its component atoms and preserved the soul of the user, reprogramming their personality while destroying the body. As a result, despite The Master’s attack having apparently done so much damage that Missy couldn’t regenerate normally, she was able to regenerate into an incarnation who adopted the new name of ‘The Lumiat’, who presented herself as the equivalent of The Valeyard to The Master, being a manifestation of The Master’s goodness just as The Valeyard was a representation of The Doctor’s evil ("The Missy Chronicles: Volume 2 - The Lumiat"). For a time, The Lumiat travelled around undoing some of her past selves’ crimes, even attempting to encourage a younger version of Missy to pursue redemption earlier, but eventually Missy turned on The Lumiat, shooting her future self as The Lumiat attempted to negotiate a truce between two warring factions. Missy then abandoned The Lumiat on an unspecified planet to regenerate, mockingly observing that her next self was unlikely to be ‘good’, which was apparently true based on the next incarnation of The Master to appear.
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| Spyfall |
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Some time after The Doctor had regenerated into the Thirteenth Doctor, assuming a female form for the first time ("The Woman Who Fell to Earth"), The Doctor was called in to investigate mysterious attacks on many of Earth's intelligence agents, spies being disintegrated or shot while on assignment, to the extent that the only 'survivor' had suffered subtle changes to her DNA ("Spyfall"). Determining that all attacked agents were tracking Daniel Barton, who had created an advanced search engine, The Doctor called in 'O', an old contact in the intelligence service with insight into alien interference on Earth, but as she and her companions Graham O'Brien, Ryan Sinclair and Yasmin Khan tracked Barton's connection to events, they discovered that O was actually the latest incarnation of The Master, working with an other-dimensional alien race known as the Kasaavin. When a confrontation with the Kasaavin sent The Doctor back in time to 1834 while her companions were left in the present, The Doctor made contact with Ada Lovelace and Noor Inayat Khan, two women responsible for some of humanity's crucial early insights into developing computers. When The Doctor was able to 'retreat' to Paris in 1943, The Master infiltrated the Nazi party using a psychic perception filter to stop anyone registering his current appearance, but The Doctor arranged for a confrontation with The Master in the Eiffel Tower, where he explained that that Kasaavin and Barton were working with him to basically turn most of the human race into organic databanks for Barton's systems (The Master naturally intending to subvert the plan and betray his 'allies'), with the trips into the past intended to subvert mankind's computers to make the plan more efficient and the spies being eliminated to limit humanity's response. Having stolen The Master's TARDIS after arranging for him to be arrested by the Nazis as a 'double agent', The Doctor was able to leave various 'tweaks' across history to prevent Barton's plan going into action, subsequently revealing The Master's planned betrayal to the Kasaavin so that they would take him away when they returned to their dimension. Although an older incarnation than Missy, the new Master is best compared to a dark version of the Eleventh Doctor, flapping his hands and showing a near-childish enthusiasm for his schemes as he revelled in his victory, as well as coldly informing The Doctor that he takes joy in his work in the same manner as the Eleventh Doctor affirmed that he had rules to stop himself going too far ("A Good Man Goes to War"). During this meeting, The Master revealed that Gallifrey had been attacked since The Doctor's last visit, and when The Doctor returned to Gallifrey to confirm The Master's story, after witnessing the devastated citadel, she unlocked a recorded message where The Master took responsibility for the attack as he claimed that he had uncovered some horrific secret about the foundation of Time Lord society involving the 'Timeless Child', although he declined to share that insight with The Doctor.
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| Ascension of the Cybermen/The Timeless Children |
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After making a series of return visits to Gallifrey on her own to try and understand The Master's actions ("Fugitive of the Judoon"), The Doctor confronted The Master again when an attempt to open a portal in the distant future to save a group of human survivors from the last of the Cybermen instead opened a portal to the devastated Gallifrey, with The Master the last living being on the planet ("Ascension of the Cybermen/The Timeless Children"). Confronting The Doctor, The Master claimed that he had discovered that the Time Lords' ability to regenerate was based on a child who had been found at a rift in reality from an unknown location - and according to The Master, The Doctor was that child, his/her memories erased at irregular intervals, The Master destroying Gallifrey because he couldn't bare the idea that he owed his existence to The Doctor. Believing that he had broken The Doctor, The Master confronted the Cyberman leader Ashad and killed him to absorb the Cyberium, a combination of Cyber-knowledge and tactics, mixing that knowledge with his insights from the Matrix to reanimate the Time Lords he had killed earlier to create an army of Cybermen with the ability to regenerate. However, The Doctor refused to let this knowledge break her, accepting the knowledge of her 'new' pasts and confronting The Master with Ashad's miniaturised corpse, threatening to set off the 'death particle' that Ashad had sealed in his chest compartment to destroy The Master and his new 'Cyber-Masters'. The Master believed that The Doctor wouldn't be able to set this weapon off, but she was spared having to do so when one of her human allies took the death particle from her and set it off himself to let the others escape.
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| The Power of The Doctor |
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Once again, The Master was able to escape this apparent certain death, now accompanied by a group of Cyber-Masters; he even claimed to have absorbed the Cyberium into himself to help him devise his new plan. Forming a temporary alliance with the Daleks and the Cyber-Masters with the agreed goal of destroying Earth and The Doctor, The Master took on the identity of Rasputin in 1916 and set up a complex plan where he created an artificial planetoid capable of channelling enormous amounts of energy. Using technology stolen from Gallifrey, The Master used this energy to force a regeneration on The Doctor that turned her into a duplicate of The Master himself, The Doctor/Master vowing to corrupt and destroy everything the true Doctor stood for, starting with watching as the Daleks destroyed Earth by triggering a series of volcanic eruptions and the Cybermen converted UNIT into new Cybermen. The Doctor/Master declared his intention to keep Yasmin Khan as his companion just to force her to watch him destroy The Doctor’s reputation, but Yaz forced him out of the TARDIS, leaving the Doctor/Master on a barren asteroid, before she was contacted by an interactive hologram created by The Doctor in anticipation of a great threat. Using implants that allowed the hologram to communicate with not only Yaz, but also past companions Tegan and Ace, the holographic Doctor helped Tegan and Ace deal with the Cybermen and the Daleks respectively while Yaz worked with The Doctor’s recent ally Vinder ("Flux") to force The Doctor/Master back into the equipment The Master had used to force the regeneration in the first place. Having tricked the Cyber-Masters into shooting each other using the hologram, Yaz was able to channel the energy of the Cyber-Masters’ subsequent regenerations back into The Master’s equipment to undo the forced regeneration and restore The Doctor to normal. Although The Doctor returned to the artificial planetoid to destroy it after using it to freeze the volcanoes triggered by the Daleks, The Master was able to divert the subsequent energy release so that it struck The Doctor in the process, proclaiming that if he couldn’t be The Doctor neither could she. The Doctor was able to return to the TARDIS and later regenerate in safety, but The Master was last seen on the artificial planetoid as it collapsed, his TARDIS wired into the system in a manner that made it unlikely he would be able to use it to escape. According to later reports, he was able to escape this threat regardless, but was subsequently defeated in a game by The Doctor’s old adversary The Toymaker ("The Celestial Toymaker"), who imprisoned The Master’s essence in a gold tooth ("The Giggle"). After The Toymaker was defeated and banished by the Fourteenth Doctor and the Fifteenth Doctor, the gold tooth was shown to have remained, with an unknown person picking it up.
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