The Master (Doctor Who)

Template:Doctorwhocharacter The Master is a supporting fictional character in the British science fiction television series Doctor Who. He is a renegade Time Lord who is the greatest individual enemy of the Doctor. He should not be confused with the Master of the Land of Fiction, who appeared in the Second Doctor serial, The Mind Robber.

History within the show

Origins

The producers conceived the Master as a recurring villain, a "Professor Moriarty to the Doctor's Sherlock Holmes". He first appeared in Terror of the Autons (1971). The Master's title was deliberately chosen by producer Barry Letts and script editor Terrance Dicks as evocative of supervillain names in fiction, but primarily because, like the Doctor, it was a title conferred by an academic degree.

Barry Letts had one man in mind for the role: Roger Delgado. Delgado had a long history of screen villainy and had already made three attempts to break into the series. He had worked previously with Barry Letts and was also a good friend of Jon Pertwee.

A would-be universal conqueror, the Master's stated goal is to control the universe (in The Deadly Assassin his ambitions were described as becoming "the master of all matter."), with a secondary objective of eliminating the Doctor. His most distinctive ability is that of hypnotising people by fixing them with an intense stare, often accompanied by his catchphrase, "I am the Master, and you will obey me."

Unlike the Doctor, the Master's TARDIS has a functioning chameleon circuit, allowing it to change its external appearance to better fit in with its environment. When he uses it, the Master's favoured weapon is his Tissue Compression Eliminator, which reduced its targets to doll-size, usually killing them in the process. The Master also has a fondness for disguise, and sometimes operated under aliases which are variations on his title, such as "Colonel Masters" (in Terror of the Autons), the Reverend Mr. Magister (in The Dæmons) and Professor Thascales (in The Time Monster, Thascales being greek for Master).

In the three seasons following Terror of the Autons, the Master (as played by Delgado) appeared in eight out of the fifteen serials. Indeed, in his first season the Master was involved in every adventure of the Doctor's, always getting away at the last minute before he was finally captured in The Dæmons. Delgado's portrayal of the Master was as a suave, charming and somewhat sociopathic individual, able to be polite and murderous at almost the same time.

Delgado's last on-screen appearance as the Master was in Frontier in Space, his final scene being the confusion outside the TARDIS with him shooting the Doctor, perhaps accidentally, then disappearing with the panicking Ogrons. Delgado wanted the Master to make one more appearance, in a story titled The Final Game (also planned as the Third Doctor's last story), in which the character would be killed off, with an ambiguity as to whether he had in fact died to save the Doctor. Tragically, before that serial could even be scripted, Delgado was killed in a car accident in Turkey on June 18 1973, while on his way to shoot footage for the French comedy The Bell of Tibet. The story was replaced by Planet of the Spiders (1974).

Quest for new life

File:MasterIncarnations.png

The major incarnations of the Master. Left to right: Roger Delgado, Peter Pratt, Anthony Ainley, Eric Roberts.

With Delgado's death, the Master disappeared from the series for several years. In his next appearance, in The Deadly Assassin (1976), the Master appeared as an emaciated, decaying wreck (played by Peter Pratt under heavy make-up). Although Time Lords have the potential to postpone death by completely renewing their bodies, the ability can only be used twelve times. The Master had used up all twelve of his regenerations, and was nearing the end of his thirteenth and final life. It is not clear if the Master had any regenerations between the Delgado incarnation and the Pratt one, or which incarnation the Delgado Master was.

Given the severity of his situation, this Master was much darker than Delgado's version. No longer considering his clashes with the Doctor a game, his goal was survival at all costs, manipulating people from behind the scenes. He attempted to seize control of the Eye of Harmony, the nucleus of a black hole kept on the Time Lords' home planet of Gallifrey, in an attempt to give himself a new cycle of regenerations. After being defeated by the Doctor, the Master disappeared from the series once more.

File:GBeeversMaster.jpg

Geoffrey Beevers as the Master (from The Keeper of Traken).

In 1981, the Master became a recurring villain again. In The Keeper of Traken, the Master (Geoffrey Beevers under different heavy make-up) briefly gained control of another ancient power source, using it to transplant himself into the body of a Trakenite named Tremas (the father of Nyssa), overwriting Tremas's original mind in the process. Now played by Anthony Ainley, the Master appeared on and off for the rest of the series. Apart from his regular goals, extending his life — preferably with a new set of regenerations — was an extra prize he was determined to get.

In many of his appearances opposite the Fifth Doctor, the Master showed his penchant for disguise once again, on one occasion operating under a disguise for no clear plot reason. The character's association with playful pseudonyms also continued both within the series and in its publicity: when the production team wished to hide the Master's involvement in a story, they credited the character under an anagrammatic alias such as "Neil Toynay" (Tony Ainley) or "James Stoker" (Master's Joke).

Ainley's portrayal was closer to Delgado's, but his Master's tendency to burst out into peals of malicious laughter was criticised by some fans as being too over-the-top. However, this was more a function of the scripts and direction that Ainley received than of his own interpretation of the character. Visitors to the recording of the story Planet of Fire recall Ainley giving a serious, understated performance in an initial take only to be overruled and asked to go more "over the top" for the final one. Like the villanous Davros, the Ainley Master also showed a knack for returning from death or eternal imprisonment, although how precisely he survived those seemingly final fates was never explained.

Some fans consider the Ainley Master's final appearance, in Survival, as what Ainley had originally meant him to be: a vicious character with a penchant for black humour and subtle malice, mocking with laughter the tears of the Seventh Doctor's companion Ace at the passing of her new friend Kara.As He so aptly put it.."My Dear Dr..You have been nieve"

Life after death

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Gordon Tipple, in his short-lived role as the Master

The Master also appeared in the 1996 Doctor Who television movie that starred Paul McGann as the Eighth Doctor. In the prologue, the Master's current body (played for mere seconds in the final edit by Gordon Tipple) was exterminated by the Daleks. The reason for this action is not explained in the film, nor the reason why the Daleks would grant the Master's request that the Doctor retrieve his remains and return them to Gallifrey. In the Virgin New Adventures novel Lungbarrow by Marc Platt, the Doctor is given this task by the High Council of Time Lords. It is not indicated whether Tipple is playing Ainley's incarnation of the Master, although there is a physical resemblance..

The Master, however, managed to survive (through means unexplained in the finished film), his consciousness embodied in the form of a small, snake-like, amorphous entity. This entity escaped the TARDIS after either a chance malfunction or a trick of the Master's forced the vessel to crash land on Earth in 1999.

The novelisation of the film by Gary Russell posits that the modifications and alterations that the Master has made to his body over the years in attempts to extend his lifespan had allowed this continued existence, and the implication is that the "morphant" creature is actually another lifeform that the Master's consciousness possesses. This interpretation was made explicit in the first of the Eighth Doctor Adventures novels, The Eight Doctors by Terrance Dicks and also used in the Doctor Who Magazine comic strip story The Fallen (DWM #273-#276). In The Fallen, it was revealed that the morphant was a shape-shifting animal native to Skaro.

The morphant form was unsustainable and required a human host, and it possessed the body of Bruce, a paramedic (played by Eric Roberts). However, Bruce's body was also unsustainable and began to slowly degenerate. The Master once again attempted to access the Eye of Harmony (this time by means of a link in the Doctor's TARDIS) to steal the Doctor's remaining regenerations, but was sucked into the Eye and apparently destroyed. Roberts' Master was easily the most flamboyantly (critics use the word "campy") evil of all the Masters, to the extent of dressing in ceremonial Time Lord robes. To date, he is the only Time Lord to speak with an American accent.

The future

The Master did not reappear in the first two series of the 2005 Doctor Who revival; furthermore, in The End of the World the Ninth Doctor claimed that all the other Time Lords had been destroyed in a Time War — that he "would know", in his head, if any remained. In the 2005 Doctor Who Confidential episode "The Dark Side", current executive producer and head writer Russell T. Davies said that he thinks the Master may return, though it would take a writer who can do it properly.

In the character's absence from the screen, press speculation has run rampant about his potential to return. Tom Baker has suggested that he should be cast as the Master, as a tip of the hat to the old series. Rumours of the character's return during the 2006 series of Doctor Who proved unfounded, though they have resurfaced once again for the 2007 series: The Sun has reported that John Simm is in talks to play the character. A later interview with The Independent on Sunday seems to confirm Simm's casting; in an interview broadcast on BBC 6Music on February 13 2007, Simm refused to confirm or deny the story. The BBC has also remained quiet on the issue. On Saturday 24 February, during an interview on Soccer AM, Simm's Life on Mars co-stars appeared to confirm accidentally that Simm was filming on Doctor Who. A further report from The Sun claims that actor Michael Sheen is also in the running to play the character, but again neither the BBC nor Sheen have said anything confirming or denying this.

Other appearances

This section concerns the appearances of the Master in various spin-offs, which are of unclear canonicity and may not take place in the same continuity.

The Master has also been featured in spin-offs of the series, most notably David A. McIntee's "Master trilogy" of novels comprising The Dark Path and First Frontier in the Virgin Publishing lines and The Face of the Enemy for BBC Books, and the Doctor Who audio dramas produced by Big Finish Productions, in which Geoffrey Beevers has reprised the role.

Doctor Who Annual 2006

An article in the Doctor Who Annual 2006, describing the Time War and written by Doctor Who writer and producer Russell T. Davies, stated that Time Lord President Romana tried to make peace with the Daleks through something known as the "Act of Master Restitution". While this is not elaborated on, the Act may be how the Master came to be put on trial by the Daleks at the start of the 1996 television movie.

Novels

The Master's past with the Doctor was explored somewhat in The Dark Path, which revealed that his name prior to taking the alias of the Master was Koschei. He turned evil and became the Master after he discovered that his companion and lover, Ailla, was an undercover agent of the Celestial Intervention Agency sent to spy on him.

During the course of the novel, Ailla had been shot and killed. Not knowing she was a Time Lord and that she would simply regenerate, Koschei completed a time-based weapon in an attempt to bring her back and the weapon was used to destroy the planet Teriliptus and its inhabitants. When Ailla turned up alive, the knowledge that he had destroyed a planet for nothing, coupled with the revelation of Ailla's betrayal, proved too much. Koschei resolved to bring his own order to the universe at the expense of free will and becoming its Master. Trapped in a black hole at the end of the novel, Koschei used up all of his regenerations trying to escape from it, establishing that the Delgado Master was his thirteenth and final incarnation had he not been able to artificially prolong his life.

The Face of the Enemy centred around the regular Delgado Master, but included a cameo from a Koschei from an alternate timeline (originally featured in Inferno) who never became the Master. This version of Koschei was still a loyal Time Lord who became stranded on Earth after an alien attack. He was subsequently captured and forced to work for the fascist rulers of this Earth, who kept him alive, in agony, using life support systems. When the Master, crossing over from the other universe, learned of this, he ended his counterpart's life in a show of compassion.

The reason the Master was so emaciated when he appeared in The Deadly Assassin was explored in John Peel's novel Legacy of the Daleks, in which he attempted to capture the Doctor's granddaughter Susan Foreman, but was badly burned when she attacked him in self-defence and took possession of his TARDIS. After Susan escaped, the dying Master was eventually found by Chancellor Goth on the planet Tersurus, which led directly into the events of The Deadly Assassin.

First Frontier showed the Master (apparently the Anthony Ainley version) finally acquiring a new body, who according to McIntee is based on the cinema persona of Basil Rathbone. This incarnation reappeared in Happy Endings by Paul Cornell, Virgin Publishing's celebratory fiftieth Virgin New Adventures novel. After the broadcast of the television movie, some fans suggested that this was the incarnation briefly played by Gordon Tipple in the prologue, although this is contradicted by the Eighth Doctor Adventure The Eight Doctors by Terrance Dicks, which shows the Master in his Cheetah-infected Ainley persona in the lead-up to the television movie.

The short story Stop The Pigeon, and the Past Doctor Adventure Prime Time, both by Robert Perry and Mike Tucker and probably set before First Frontier, featured the Ainley Master looking for a cure for the Cheetah virus.

Gallifrey and the Time Lords were destroyed in the Eighth Doctor Adventures novel The Ancestor Cell, but in The Adventuress of Henrietta Street a mysterious stranger wearing a rosette appeared who could have been the Master, somehow surviving the cataclysm. Gallifrey's destruction here is not related to its subsequent destruction just prior to the new series (see Time Lord - Recent history). In Lance Parkin's The Gallifrey Chronicles, a surviving Time Lord named Marnal appears, and it is implied in dialogue that he may have been the Master's father. In the same novel, the Doctor talks with a malign entity within the TARDIS's Eye of Harmony, which could have been the Roberts Master, throwing the true identity of the Man with the Rosette into doubt. However, the entity within the Eye refers to itself as an "echo", thus leaving scope for the real Master to be elsewhere. (In his Doctor Who chronology book AHistory, Parkin confirms that he intended the Man with the Rosette to be the Master, even it was not explicitly stated.)

The Master is seen to escape the Eye of Harmony in the short story Forgotten by Joseph Lidster, published in Short Trips: The Centenarian. The story ends with him left in 1906 in possession of a human male's body.

Another version of the Master appeared in The Infinity Doctors (also by Parkin), where he was known as the Magistrate and was, once again, the Doctor's friend, although when this takes place in continuity (or if it really takes place in an alternate reality) is unclear. Parkin, however has stated that the novel can fit into continuity and that its incarnation of the Master is based on Richard E. Grant.

During the Faction Paradox arc that ran through the Eighth Doctor Adventures, a character known as the War King was featured which was implied to be a future incarnation of the Master. The character is also referenced in The Book of the War, published by Mad Norwegian Press when the Faction Paradox stories spun-off into their own continuity.

Comic strips

The Master returned in a new body and guise, that of a street preacher, in the previously mentioned Doctor Who Magazine comic strip story The Fallen, although the Doctor did not recognise him. The Master revealed himself a few stories later, in The Glorious Dead (DWM #287-#296). The Master had survived the events of the television movie by encountering a cosmic being named Esterath in the time vortex. Esterath controlled the Glory, the focal point of the Omniversal spectrum which underlies all existence. The Master's scheme to take control of the Glory failed, and he was banished to parts unknown (see Kroton).

This incarnation of the Master resembled a middle-aged black human. (No Time Lord in the television series was ever played by a black actor, although a black Time Lord appeared in the spin-off novel The Shadows of Avalon by Paul Cornell, and Time Lord founder Rassilon was portrayed in several audio plays by black actor Don Warrington.)

In Character Assassin (DWM #311), the Delgado Master visited the Land of Fiction and stole part of the technology behind it, wiping out several nineteenth century fictional villains as he went.

Audio plays

The Master appeared in the Big Finish Productions audio play, Dust Breeding, where Geoffrey Beevers reprised the role. The story reveals that, at some point after Survival, The Master's Trakenite body was damaged and he became a walking corpse again, using the alias Mr Seta, another anagram of Master.

In the later Master, it was revealed that while the Seventh Doctor was Time's Champion, the Master was Death's. This was a result of an incident in their youth, where the Doctor gave his childhood friend over to Death (personified as a woman) rather than become its slave himself, creating the Master. The Master forgives the Doctor for this, understanding that he did not foresee the consequences, but the end of the play implies that the Master will once again become Death's servant.

Another out-of-continuity Master is heard in the Big Finish audio play Sympathy for the Devil, voiced by "Sam Kisgart" (an anagram of Mark Gatiss). In this alternate version of events, the Third Doctor did not arrive for his exile on Earth until 1997 and the Master had been trapped on the planet while a series of extraterrestrial disasters occurred over the decades without the Doctor's help to stop them.

Others

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Animated Master in Scream of the Shalka

The Master was also played by Jonathan Pryce in the Comic Relief skit Doctor Who and the Curse of Fatal Death.

In 2003, an android version of the character (resembling the Delgado Master and voiced by Derek Jacobi) appeared in the animated webcast, Scream of the Shalka. While this last Master is not part of official continuity, he has also appeared, with the "Shalka Doctor" (Richard E. Grant in the webcast), in a follow-up short story by Cavan Scott and Mark Wright, The Feast of the Stone. This Master was created by the Doctor and was apparently once again his friend — albeit a slightly sinister one. Exactly why the Doctor created an android duplicate of the Master was not revealed, but it is suggested that the Doctor somehow extended the Master's own life by doing so. The android was also able to pilot the Doctor's TARDIS, but was physically unable to leave the ship, perhaps as a safeguard. It could also be switched off.

Further appearances

Audio dramas

• The Killing Stone (BBV Audio, read by Richard Franklin)

Other

• Who Killed Kennedy (Virgin)
• Destiny of the Doctors (Computer game; played by Ainley)

External links

• "The Feast of the Stone" - short story featuring the Shalka Master on the BBCi website.
• The Canon Keeper's Guide to Doctor Who — "The Master's Travels" - a speculative chronology of the Master's appearances in television, novels and audio plays (scroll down)
• International Hero Profiles - a profile of the Master and his various identities