We've
looked at the evolution of the Master in three previous features, charting the
change from the Anti-Pertwee of Roger Delgado's incarnation, through the Naked
Evil years of Peter Pratt and Geoffrey Beevers, to the Playful Obsessive of
Anthony Ainley, through the brief and blood-curdling Derek Jacobi awakening and
John Simm's rebirth of the character as the Anti-Tennant. The Master in all his
incarnations has always been uniquely written. Being a fellow rebel Time Lord,
he above all others is able to challenge the Doctor on a philosophical level,
to say "Blah blah universal peace and wonder. You're so wrong it's
infuriating, and I'm going to conquer this world or destroy this galaxy, just
to watch your face fall when you realise I'm right.' He is and always has been
obsessed with proving the Doctor's worldview to be utterly childish and naive,
his plans a punch in the face to the Doctor's wide-eyed wonder at the universe.
So
then what are we to make of the latest on screen Master to blaze a trail of
destruction across the Doctor's life? What of Michelle Gomez's Mistress? What
does she add to the mythos and the legend of this unique character in Doctor
Who history?
Firstly
of course, and let’s get this out of the way, she’s a female incarnation, so
she proves on screen the idea that Time Lords can change their sex when they
regenerate. There has been much outrage in pockets of fandom at this idea –
some claiming she’s just a ‘stolen’ body, others that this regenerative
sex-change capacity is unique to the Master (though The Doctor’s Wife made it
clear this was not the case). But no – as far as we know, it was a perfectly
normal regeneration that turned the Master into the Mistress (and NB – even if
it was a body-theft, that’s still a valid incarnation of the Master, otherwise,
Anthony Ainley’s whole career in the role is null and void, and so is the Eric
Roberts version).
Does
her new femininity bring anything unique with it though? It’s important to
remember that this is Steven Moffat’s Master, and while he’s eager to fill the
show with strong female characters, they’re not – to put it kindly – a
particular speciality of his, so it’s easy perhaps to dismiss the new elements
of the Mistress’s personality as underwritten, or explained as ‘the bananas
incarnation.’ But look a little closer and there is method in the madness.
The
Master has always been obsessed with the Doctor, his plans have always been
‘devious and over-complicated’ (to quote the Rani), and he’s always been a
master of disguise. All of this is very much to the fore in Missy – the plan
seems more over-complicated than ever, and the obsession with the Doctor very
much the driving force for the whole Nethersphere operation. And what better
disguise could there be than a physical transformation into something the
Doctor’s not expecting – a female form? So there are definitely touchstones of
Masters past and venerable in Missy. John Simm introduced a ‘barking mad’
element to the character to deliver some unpredictability, some turn-on-a-dime
frailty that could see him smile one minute, and order the decimation of the
Earth the next. Gomez, if anything, takes that element and runs right off the
screen with it, while adding a particularly personal cruelty to her make-up.
Where Simm deliciously killed off the British Cabinet and sat drumming his
fingers, and decimated the Earth, Gomez is up close and personal, obliterating
people because she can, and demanding they ‘say something nice’ so she can have
a happy memory of them.
The
Master often works best when he’s very specifically the antithesis of a
particular Doctor – Delgado was the Anti-Pertwee, Simm, the Anti-Tennant, and
both were perhaps the most successful, the most shocking incarnations of the
role, because they matched and bounced the personality of their particular
Doctor back at him. So is Gomez the Anti-Capaldi? Yes, beyond a shadow of doubt
– he’s against bantering, she’d banter with a brick wall if it stood still long
enough; he’s full of self-doubt, she’s the spirit of blissful self-possession;
he seems uncomfortable with his physical body, so what better way to accentuate
that than to kiss him, to make him confront it, and his naivety or hypocrisy
about it? Plus of course, he barely registers that Clara’s a female – or indeed
that there are such things as females – throughout his first series. She’s
undeniably a female incarnation, reveling in the newness of it, even camping it
up to oversell the point, and heighten his confusion, his wrong-footing at the
world as she has remade it.
There’s
still more originality in the Gomez mistress though. The ‘playing to the
gallery’ tactic is something Simm’s Master was able to do in The End of Time,
but for the essence of Gomez’s Mistress, look at the Osgood scene. Every Master
would have escaped from the handcuffs, absolutely, but Delgado’s Master would
have hypnotized Osgood into becoming his slave. Ainley’s would have bargained
for his life. Simm’s would have offered the way into the Doctor’s affections,
and then, when free, would have become a tower of male rage. Missy’s use of
Osgood’s psychology – the oh-so-desperate desire to be thought useful, to be
thought worthy, by the Doctor, even the insecurity over how she smells – is
dark, and cruel beyond the point of need. The use of the ‘sisterly confidence’
trick shows the Mistress has an implacable disregard for the humans she uses,
and the chatty, terrifying countdown she employs to intimidate Osgood even
further is monstrous to a degree that no plan to take over the world, no plan
to build an army of Cybermen, could ever be, because she takes the time to do it, like a cat playing with
her food. The killing of Osgood is the scene that stamps Gomez’s Mistress very
firmly on the Master blueprint – that additional, personal cruelty is
breathtaking and a fresh dimension of unpredictability to the character, and,
even when Osgood pleads that she’s more useful alive, Missy can’t resist the
opportunity for one more twist of the hope-knife, agreeing with her,
recognizing a good point, well made – and then blasting her in the head anyway.
It’s awful and wonderful in the same instant, this blowing away of the cobwebs
of understanding we think we have about the Master. Followed immediately by the
scene where she blows the side of the plane out to fling Kate Lethbridge-Stewart
out into what we think is oblivion, it announces a tearing up of the rule book.
The Mistress is unknowable and unreasonable, and two of the Doctor’s friends
pay the real price of her unpredictability. We’re not in safe ‘Battle of the
Time Lords’ territory any more, boys and girls.
If
the terrifying unpredictability is a new character dimension for the Master,
then the ending of Death In Heaven proves why only a female Master could do the things she does. The ending is
oddly weak, looked at one way – she builds the army of Cybermen, they can
weaponise the dead. She’s won. The universe will not be likely to be able to
stand against her.
Then
she hands the army over to the Doctor. The audience blinks, and asks ‘What just
happened?’ Missy doesn’t want to conquer the universe – Missy wants her friend
back, but she wants him back on the strict understanding that she shows him
what he really is; manipulative, and determined to make the universe in the
image of his idealism, just as she has always been determined to make the
universe in the image of her power. She has looked at his doe-eyed optimism
about the universe and said ‘Oh alright then, if you must, go and make it that
way – but don’t pretend you don’t want
it all to look the way you look, to believe the things you believe. Accept what
you are, and who you are, and then, let’s be friends again.’
From
the Gentleman Psychopath of Delgado, through the Naked Evil and the Playful
Obsessive, Missy stamps her incarnation on the world of Doctor Who right there.
She is the Psychological Adept, and she’s also the Ultimate Realist, the Master
who can admit the things no other Master could – that she’d remake the universe
in the Doctor’s image if it would get him to realize they’re the same, if it
would get her her friend back.
And
of course, she saves the best for last. Telling the Doctor where Gallifrey is,
priming him to go and look for it, she gives him hope again, knowing perfectly
well how he’ll react to finding it isn’t there. It’s one last psychological
suckerpunch, and she knows – just as she knew Osgood would fall for it – she
knows the Doctor will go, and find the empty space in the cosmos where
Gallifrey once was, and will rage and roar and tear his hearts in two that he
believed her.
This
is the Master no previous incarnation has had the strength to be. It’s no longer about
conquering the universe, though she’ll still do it to get the Doctor’s
attention. In Missy, Moffat and Gomez delivered a Master more complex, more
personally cruel, and more psychologically honest than any before.
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