Tony will rise from the pit…
The first War Master box set,
Only The Good, was released in December 2017 and instantly became one of the
highest points in the Big Finish year.
This second War Master box set,
Master Of Callous, was released in December 2018…and has instantly become one
of the highest points in the Big Finish year.
Clearly, the War Master’s time
has well and truly come.
Part of the appeal of some of the
best Master incarnations out there is their ability to turn on half a dime,
from whimsical, playful, helpful or polite, to sharp, hard, violent and
impenetrably dark, but it would be difficult, even going back to Roger
Delgado’s original imprint, to find an actor who does this with greater aplomb
or believability than Derek Jacobi. His five minutes of Masterdom on screen was
chilling, but on audio, he channels everything you need and then just a little
bit more, just to make you squirm, into his performance – it stands the hairs
up on the back of your neck, it makes you almost cheer at the achievement and
want his thoroughly poisonous War Master to win, and it blows the breath out of
you at what this particular, seemingly so genteel incarnation can actually
deliver.
But whereas Only The Good was
four episodic incidents from across the War Master’s lifespan, Master Of Callous
is a single tale in four hour-long episodes. Where Only The Good was the
starter, a re-introduction to this character and an expansion of its potential,
Master Of Callous is a solid, succulent, main course affair.
Callous is a planet with
potential. A planet named as a joke, and which might just have enormous mineral
riches under its surface, if only you could extract them. Sadly, this
particular mineral drives you stark raving mad if you go anywhere near it.
Because the universe just hates you that much.
On a planet with mad-minerals and
dark mines of course, what you really need are the Ood, ready to go red-eyed
and slaughtery at jusssst the right moment. Your wish is Big Finish’s command –
there’s a glorious example of Classic-New Who melding here, with the grimy,
profit-driven cynicism and power structures of Colony In Space, but with added
Ood around the place, being lovely and polite and creepy as all-get-out.
And then there’s Derek Jacobi’s
War Master.
That means the stakes are pretty
high, and it would be easy to be fooled into believing nothing could go wrong
with a combination of those elements.
Wrong.
Absolutely everything could go wrong when you’re blending
Colony In Space with the Ood and the War Master – it could be a freighter-crash
disaster of epic proportions. The reason it’s not a disaster but a triumph is that there are lots of people who
are cleverer and more talented than they let you realise, working their
interstellar bums off.
The scripts for this box set are dark.
Relentlessly, prodding-in-the-squishy-psychological-underbelly dark, and in
that, they reveal the fundamental nature of the War Master. He is patient when
he has to be, and thoroughly, irredeemably, almost playfully vicious at his
core.
Call For The
Dead by James Goss sets us
off on the right foot with Elliot King, theoretical owner of the mining rights
on Callous, drowning in debt to suppliers and in particular to the brusquely
awful governor of his sector of space, Teremon (played with a polite, professional
snarl by Pippa Haywood), while being entirely unable to do the mining that
might make him a success. A weak man who feels the pressure of his position and
works himself into what would be in any case an early grave, King is
additionally haunted by an Ood who has, of all things, a telephone call for
him. Day and night, rain or shine, there stands the Ood, like a Poe-style
raven, implacably holding an old-style candlestick telephone, on which there is
a call for him. While James Goss and Guy Adams drew a lot of inspiration for
this box set from Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo,
there’s certainly a sense of the Gothic horror story about the Ood with the
phone call, and King seems to sense that when he finally answers the call, it
will mark his death.
We’re not going to spoil it for
you, but when he takes the call – Wow. Just…wow.
There’s a sense in which the
nature of the War Master, as established in Only The good, is felt as a seeping
poison behind a helpful exterior, and The
Glittering Prize, also by Goss, picks up that theme. It’s felt in Call For The Dead too, but in that
story he’s mostly hidden, mostly just a presence felt at strategic points. In
The Glittering Prize, he’s out and about, helping a new generation of the King
family turn Callous from the disaster it was into a flourishing colony, able to
mine its mineral resources, able to meet – or almost meet - the ever-increasing
demands of Governor Teremon. Everything’s coming up riches, and it looks like
it’s all down to the War Master, suitably hidden behind an alias. But there are
pieces of a darker game being slid into position, and the technology that keeps
the Ood from going mad begins to malfunction in the mines. The smiling man who
helps everyone out has a plan to help Cassandra and Martine King (Maeve
Bluebell Wells and Samantha Beart respectively) get richer than gods, but it
involves a dose of derring and a dash of do that separates them in equally
dangerous company – Martine with a cargo of the mad-mineral, and Cassandra with
increasingly red-eyed Ood, increasingly disgruntled colonists and the
increasingly furious governor. And of course, with the War Master. What could
possibly go right?
When Guy Adams takes over writing
the arc with The Persistence Of Dreams,
things get significantly more psychological and freaky, including Derek Jacobi
doubling as a cannibal trapped in a food machine that’s – ahem – bigger on the
inside than the out. Most particularly, the episode takes us into Martine
King’s darker side, the cracks and vulnerabilities in her psyche, her hopes,
her dreams, her needs and nightmares. It’s a balancing piece, as by the time we
meet this episode, we’ve spent enough time with Cassandra King and her father
Elliot to understand what makes her tick, so seeing the similarities and issues
that drive her wife, who’s so far seemed like the bastion of common sense and strength in the relationship, shows
us the extent to which everybody’s ‘normality’ is likely fractured and
re-healed somewhere, and also the extent to which the War Master lacks any
mercy when people are even just the slightest inconvenience to him. It’s a mad,
bravura piece that will also leave you wondering about perception, and reality,
and which is ultimately which.
And how do you end a four-episode
War Master box set?
Well, with a planetary massacre,
naturally. How else? Guy Adams cries havoc, lets slip the dogs of war, turns
colonists against the Powers-That-Think-They-Be, gives us a full-on red-eyed Oodfest,
and has the War Master showing his skills at the long game. The fun about the War Master has always been
wrapped up in an outrageous freedom. We’ve only ever usually seen or heard the
evil Time Lord when the Doctor is around to defeat him, and so all his plans
must ultimately go awry. The War Master is utterly free of such a necessity,
and so we hear his plans come to a cold, bloody, terrifying conclusion. What’s
more, Guy Adams gives us an inkling of the War Master’s ideas of scale – he’s
been on Callous through two generations of technical rule by the King family,
he’s seen Governor Teremon push and squeeze the colony like a queen grifter,
he’s seen suicides, homicides, Ood-lynching, human revolution and ultimately a
local war, and his ultimate aim is still tied in to the Time War between the
Daleks and the Time Lords. He does it all, bathes the planet in the blood of
generations, to give the Time Lords a thing they want, in exchange for a very
important trinket in his personal timeline.
Master Of Callous is a glorious,
gory, gritty, full-on extravaganza of Time Lord superiority, served up by a
Master who is himself supremely callous, manoeuvring people and events over a
generation of the colony’s struggle, simply to ultimately serve up an advantage
to the Time Lords, and get a very particular advantage of his own. Derek Jacobi
is on paint-blistering form as the politest of devils, who can suddenly drop
you through a hole in the world with a simple change in his tone. The cast
convinces on every level, from Pippa Haywood and Silas ‘The Ood’ Carson down
through Simon Ludders, Maeve Bluebell Wells and Samantha Beart, to Kai Owen,
Angela Bruce and Barnaby Edwards, giving you that heaviness in the chest you
get from experiencing the realism of a hard life alongside lots of people with
dark streaks and cracked-open lives and motivations – the heaviness you get
from reading Conrad, in fact.
Set above all that grinding
realism and hardship, the War Master emerges with a purity to his evil, a
clarity to the perfection of his amorality that takes us back to the first
appearance of the Ood. There, their innocence was corrupted by the power of a
perfect evil buried beneath the surface of a planet. Here, the War Master is
that force of pure domination, controlling all the muddier, more confused and
struggling personalities beneath him for his own ends. The weirdest thing
though is that in the writing of James Goss and Guy Adams, and in the
breathtaking portrayal by Derek Jacobi, the War Master becomes our rock in this
boxset. On a world and in a system corrupted with petty greed and venality, we
cling to the certainty of him, his dedication and his will to power. He becomes
‘the devil’ of Callous, the Ood his fallen angels of retribution, punishing the
small-scale sinners of that world to serve what he sees as his own, greater
cause. Between them, in the clarity of his ambition and his determination to
succeed, the writers and Derek Jacobi put the War Master squarely front and
centre, and even make him oddly, darkly admirable.
Let the War Master whisper into
your head again. He’ll make it worth your while…
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