“Who the heck are
you? Well?”
“I am usually
referred to as the Master.”
“Oh, is that so?”
“Universally.”
Imagine the dilemma. You
have a weekly science fiction show beloved of children all across the country,
now going into its eighth season. You realise it’s something special, because
it’s solved the fundamental problem of longevity – every now and again, you can
completely change the lead actor. Added to that, it’s about a benevolent alien,
with all of time and space as his playground.
Except…
Except now he
hasn’t. The hangover from the previous
production team means your alien wanderer is now stuck on Earth, in the 1970s
(or 80s, depending on your dating protocol). Surrounded by the kind of people
he’s always fought against – the military. You’ve shot a lot of possible bolts
trying to make the audience accept the set-up: changed the actor; gone to
colour (for the handful of viewers in 1971 who could see it); given him an
atypical companion, a scientist…which never quite
worked. But now you’ve painted yourself into a corner.
If the Doctor, whose
previous unique selling point was his ability to go anywhere in time and space,
now simply can’t move from 1970s Earth, then you have a problem. Every story,
essentially, is a refinement of the ‘base under siege’ idea, and you have to
ship this week’s alien monstrosity in for him to do battle with, or accept that
the stories you’re going to be able to tell will always be that little bit less
fantastic than what has gone before. Either way, you’re looking at a ratings
loser and a slow decline.
Unless…
What you need is a
reason. A person, not a species, someone with whom the Doctor can match wits at
every level – physically, technologically, and intellectually. You need someone
with the Doctor’s inner steel – and his sense of whimsy – but allied to an
entirely opposite worldview. Someone who can challenge the Doctor not only on
an intellectual level but a philosophical one, who can say “Oh, you believe in
justice and liberty and self-determination…how quaint…” and then go about the
business of destroying the world with a smile. You need the Anti-Doctor.
If you have the
Anti-Doctor, he can reach out into the universe of time and space for you (off-screen
and without spending the budget), and give you a reason to have this or that
invading species. And he can play the game himself, focusing the series into
that clash of worldviews, and making the viewer wonder whether in fact the
Doctor has it right after all. And suddenly, you’re not looking at a ratings
slump at all. You’re looking at an idea that can run and run – the Anti-Doctor
would have all the Doctor’s abilities, including the power of regeneration –
creating a seminal villain for the show, who could stand by the likes of Daleks
and Cybermen, and even stand above them, the antithesis of our hero
personified.
Delgado Eyes
When Roger Delgado steps
out of the horsebox, less than a minute into Season Eight opener, The Terror of
the Autons, he is already practically perfect. His first scene takes barely a
minute, but everything is there – a combination of Robert Holmes and Terrance
Dicks at their most inventive sets up the family fun of a circus in the 70s for
about 40 seconds and then – there’s a wheezing, groaning sound that we all
know. It’s the Tardis! Has the Doctor got it working? Are we all about to go
off on intergalactic adventures again?
But no. It’s not our Tardis. It’s a trailer of some sort,
materialising out of thin air. It must be another
Time Lord! Fans begin to hyperventilate at that point, knowing from The War
Games that the Time Lords can defeat and curtail even our incorrigible meddler.
A tall, dark, saturnine man in immaculate black clothing jumps out, looks
about, as if for lower life-forms to kick, and stands surveying his new planet.
He is challenged by the circus owner, and describes himself as “the Master” –
so very opposite to our fearless Doctor, such grandeur, such presumption to
rule. He reveals he has knowledge that “Rossini” the circus owner has been
hiding – his real name - and when challenged again…there they are. The Delgado eyes. Fans in 2014 make a big deal
about incoming Doctor Peter Capaldi’s intense stare, but back in 1971,
Delgado’s Master had eyes of ice and emptiness, and the camera showed the utter
lack of fellow feeling in the hearts of this new Time Lord. Within moments,
Rossini’s resistance is quelled, and with a snap of his black-gloved fingers,
the Master has arrived and tamed his first human slave.
As a season opening
scene, and as a way of instantly establishing the nature of the villain, Terror
of the Autons has rarely, if ever, been bettered. Barely a minute, and the
Master became a legend. The Doctor had a new “best enemy”.
From that very first
story, too, the Delgado Master began fulfilling the storytelling promise of the
idea – instigating invasions, weaving cunning plans, casually calling up to
exchange pleasantries and then execute the Doctor by remote control telephone
flex…as you do…
The influence of the
original Master is keenly felt in the difference between the two Pertwee Auton
stories. In Spearhead, the autons are creepily utilitarian, masked as everyday
objects – shop window dummies - and then scare the bejeesus out of a generation
of children (and undoubtedly some adults) by jerking to life and gunning people
down. Delgado’s Master brings flair, deception and undeniable gall to the whole
fantastic plastic concept – dressing them up in blazers and boaters with
enormous comedy heads, and sending them on a PR tour, handing out deadly
plastic daffodils (a comment on this very contained Master’s view of
flower-children, maybe? Or a satire on the public love of anything for free, no
matter how pointless or tatty? Either way, you get your metaphorical
moneysworth). He also brings authoritarian malice, played out with more than a
tough of grand guignol – devil dolls
and suffocating chairs as a repayment for disobedience. And of course, there’s
all the hypnotism and the mastery of disguise. By the end of the story, the
audience is left in no doubt about two things – the Master is here to stay, and
on any planet where he is, nothing can be guaranteed to be what it seems.
The Master as Emil Keller
Take famous scientists,
for example. The very next story, The Mind of Evil, has the Master masquerading
as a humanitarian scientist, in an attempt to rid the human mind of its
criminal and aggressive impulses. If you’d done that story without the Master in it, either you’d have had to set up complex
backstory for some deranged human scientist (and anyone who watched The
Underwater Menace could tell you badly wrong that could go), or you’d have to make the alien mind parasite a far
more interesting thing than it is here. But with the Master – with Delgado’s
Master – at the core of the piece, you can skip it and simply be mesmerised by
the ingenuity and gall of it all, while focusing on the real-world questions
raised by the science fiction. When John Simm’s Master became Prime Minister
and allied with killer aliens, there was a thrill in the audience because he
was so overtly front and centre, so very very visible. But Delgado pioneered
the act with his Professor Emil Keller – respected humanitarian scientist on
the one hand, and pusher of the world towards political Armageddon on the
other. What’s more, the key to the Delgado Master comes very much to the fore
here – the plots may be absolutely barking mad, but the performance never is.
The Delgado Master always made whatever he was doing look effortless and
comfortable, and so he sold even the barmiest of plots and gave you a shiver.
Behind all the alien shenanigans, you watch The Mind of Evil and you wonder –
what if there really was someone like
that? Someone devoid of pity and convinced their way was right? How much would
we let them get away with? Manipulating our minds? Manipulating our politics?
Delgado’s Master makes you believe, and he makes you think.
In The Claws of Axos,
the Master seems to be having fun rather
than being actively diabolical, watching the parable of greed play itself out
as the “primitive” humans allow themselves to be sucked in by the beautiful
gold-skinned salespeople of Axos, and get a serious case of “buyer beware” as a
result. To some extent, while both the parable and the action are rather good
fun and a compelling watch, Delgado’s Master is almost wasted in watching it,
and escapes at the end almost as an afterthought. In just his third story – although
his third consecutive story – we see
the danger of having the Master there, especially in a story with other aliens.
Holmes and Dicks had pitched the balance right in Terror of the Autons, and in
The Mind of Evil, Don Houghton used him to excellent effect to explore the
questions of the script for the viewer. In Axos, Martin and Baker appear not to
know what to do with him, or indeed why he’s there at all, and the potential of
Delgado’s Master goes largely to waste, in an unfortunate precursor of stories
that have dogged the show ever since.
By Colony In Space,
we begin to wonder if this whole “Master” idea might not have been oversold in
the first place, as he is rather relegated to the role of “Plot Device Number
2” in a story mostly concerned with corporate imperialism, with a dash of moral
debate about Weapons of Mass Destruction thrown in at the end. That said,
Delgado wrings some fine villainy from what he is given, and really pioneers a
trick that he – and most future Masters – will use time and again: the moment
of breathless excitement when he first appears on screen pretending to be
someone else, in this case an Adjudicator from Earth. But just when you think
Colony In Space is all a bit ho-hum with a stupid claw-handed robot, it
delivers one of the landmark scenes between Delgado’s Master and Pertwee’s
Doctor. The fundamental philosophical opposition in which the Doctor and the
Master exist is given expression in the battle of words over what should happen
to the Doomsday Weapon. While there has been verbal sparring between them
before, it’s in Colony In Space that this philosophical difference is really
set in stone, opening up a world of backstory and showing exactly why these two renegades from a race of
watchers will always be at loggerheads. Indeed, the crux of the difference,
expressed when the Master says: "One must rule or serve. That is the basic
law of life. Why do you hesitate? Surely it's not loyalty to the Time Lords,
who exiled you to one insignificant planet?" and the Doctor replies:
"You'll never understand. I want to see the universe, not to rule
it," is resurrected in the John Simm Master stories, when the Doctor begs
him to simply see the universe, without having to own it or destroy it. Delgado
and Pertwee play it dead straight, pitching the back-and-white opposition of
their roles and showing a friendship that could have been magnificent, and why
it turned to never-ending enmity.
The Master
twinkling in The Daemons
And for those who
found the Third Doctor’s only Season Eight off-world adventure rather bleak and
remote, and even wondered whether the Master had been such a good idea after
all, The Daemons ended the season on as strong and high a note as Terror of the
Autons had struck to open it. Here is the Delgado Master in his element,
pretending to be, of all things, a pillar of virtue and a power in the
community, while using “the occult” to awaken ancient aliens. There’s plenty of
the Master’s steel here – less suffocation by armchair, more hard stares and
disintegration by gargoyle, but Delgado here plays the role for all it’s worth,
revelling not only in the politics of parish councils and tight communities
crumbling at a whisper of suspicion, but also in the emotional scope he adds to
the Master – it’s a side of the character we’ve seen before, but the Master as
a nimble liar, telling people either what they want to hear or what they don’t,
whichever advances his plans, is a trait that’s never been better shown than by
the Delgado incarnation, and arguably never better within that incarnation than
here. It is of course particularly appropriate in a story about science versus faith
(or at least superstition), which sees the most evil man in the universe posing
as a quiet country vicar – while Azal may look
like the Devil, it’s actually the Master who’s the serpent in this particular
Eden, playing the locals for fools with just an occasional glint in his eyes,
and aiming for ultimate power. The Master’s sense of humour here is seldom
given a chance to come to the fore again – a line or two in The Five Doctors
and Mark of the Rani – until the John Simm Master is born, and gives us an
incarnation who is stark raving mad. Delgado plays the laughs up his insanely
large sleeves here, and The Daemons is a strong fan favourite because of it.
The decision to
feature the Master in every story of Season Eight was a brave gamble, but one
thing it allowed was the creation of a rich character, at least as complex as
the Doctor, and who had very definite skills – in disguise, in subterfuge, in
psychology and in classic Time Lord Jiggery-Pokery. After five stories, Roger
Delgado’s Master was a hit on playgrounds all across Britain, because apart
from being easier on the vocal chords than the Daleks, he was infinitely
adaptable. The Master could be behind anything: scientific experiments,
political shenanigans, stealing the ultimate weapon or raising the Devil – he
was a villain for all seasons.
Season Nine opened
with a different take on the same dilemma. The Master had become a hit, had
become the Doctor’s Moriarty he had been intended to be. Which meant the
success of Season Eight couldn’t be replicated again, or it would be just more
of the same. Besides, the strain of appearing in every episode of the season
was huge and the production team wanted to wriggle increasingly free of the
constraints of the Earthbound format.
In a neat little bit
of symmetry, where Season Eight had opened with the Master joining forces with
the first monsters of Season Seven, the Autons, when we catch up with him in
Season Nine he has joined forces with the second
monsters of Season Seven – almost.
The Sea Devils is essentially
a re-tread of the Silurians, but with added Master. That means all the
established hallmarks are there – the Master hypnotising hapless humans to do
his bidding, the Master swanning about the place in uniform, pretending to be
somebody else, the Master actually being in control of the situation while
convincing everyone he’s a prisoner. There’s also a re-run of the kind of
Yin-Yang debate between the Doctor and the Master that has by now become a
hallmark of their encounters – from Axos, through Colony In Space, to The
Daemons, their battle for the hearts and minds of the “monsters” here has
become fairly standard, and in a nod to The Daemons, the Doctor wins the day
but the Sea Devils are then despatched in a neat explosion – though here, the
climax serves as a parable of the fear at the heart of the military mind,
destroying the potential of a shared future with the Sea Devils by not being
quite brave or quite brilliant enough – remind anyone of The Hungry Earth and
Cold Blood?
Then there’s The Time
Monster. Taken as a whole, it’s a somewhat confused affair, but as an example
of the Delgado Master and his high ambitions and low methods, it serves rather
well. In the first place, he’s busy pretending to be an Earth scientist again –
Professor Thascales – and indeed, there are other similarities between The Time
Monster and The Mind of Evil, the Master using a living alien
consciousness for
his nefarious purposes being the most obvious. But in other respects, this is
as close as the Delgado Master gets to cackling pantomime villainy: how to stop
an approaching UNIT force? Oh here, have a V1 bomb, conjured up out of nowhere!
How to dispose of the tiresome Miss Grant? Oh, let’s send her spinning off into
the time vortex, stranded alone on the Tardis (an idea briefly recycled in The
Lodger). In among the cackling and a plot mad enough to confuse the monster
that lives under Steven Moffatt’s bed, there are elements of the Master’s
character that we’ve never seen deployed with quite such cruelty before. His seduction
of Queen Galleia is an odd note in the largely asexual realm of 70s Who, and a
particularly callous example of the Master lying without a care to those whose
help he needs to get where he wants to go. Throughout the whole of the Delgado
era, it’s only really here that the viewer loses sympathy with the character
that we see beneath the suavity and the dark gentlemanly cad. This is the
Master in thug mode, the Master we will recognise in the Pratt and Beevers
incarnations – for just this moment, all the fun and the sparring fall away,
and the true and barren nature of the man who kills people with armchairs and
gargoyles stands revealed. Despite the fact that it’s not a thing on which we
focus (after all, in The Time Monster, there’s barely time before the next
insane thing), in the Master’s treatment of Galleia and her husband, we catch a
glimpse of the mad-eyed monster he will become.
But not before
Frontier In Space.
Frontier In Space
There’s so much to
love about Frontier In Space – Draconians looking amazing, Ogrons being
gorgeously stupid, the gritty almost-soap of the human and Draconian politics -
that the Master’s pitch perfect turn as the Commissioner from Sirius 4 (and his
more honest approach to Jo) get a little lost in the mix – again, an example of
writers having too many elements to handle effectively. It’s a shame, because
it is the Master’s only on-screen appearance with the Daleks and in a less
packed plot, the combination of Delgado’s tall, imperious Master and the
shrieking pepperpots of doom could have been more than enough to fill six
episodes. The fact that so much of what does
fill those six episodes is good anyway is a consolation, but the Delgado
Master’s final scene, having “brought the Doctor some friends” – a Dalek squad
– and then skipping off to have adventures of his own – feels genuinely
semi-comical, the same Master who phoned up to make pleasantries before killing
his old friend and enemy. It feels like a joke between Time Lords.
It absolutely doesn’t
feel like the end.
Real life is frequently
unkind. While it’s true of course that Roger Delgado was planning to hand in
his Tardis key in any case, his death in a car crash shortly after Frontier In
Space was completed makes that flippant exit, that almost-“See you around” at
the end, leading to Planet of the Daleks, all the more lurching to watch.
When a Dalek operator
dies, we mourn, but the Daleks themselves go on. When a Cyber actor passes
away, the point is that they are all interchangeable, and the silver boots can
be refilled.
In creating a rounded
character with unparalleled nuance, Roger Delgado ensured that the Master would
live forever – or at least as long as there was a Doctor to battle. He himself
was irreplaceable. When the Master returned to the universe some three years later,
he would be a very different creature. The gentleman-tyrant, the contained
egomaniac, the villain for all seasons would never be quite the same again.
©BBC Doctor Who 1963
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