Tony’s feeling the rage.
Derek Jacobi’s War Master is a character
who had just a handful of heartbeats of time on TV, having hidden for the
length of an episode behind the mental and physical disguise of ‘nice old
genius’ Professor Yana. This is Derek Jacobi, so needless to say he made his
mark even in that brief time on screen, but the War Master is a character, not
unlike Paul McGann’s Eighth Doctor and John Hurt’s War Doctor, which has been
so far mostly unpacked and explored in Big Finish audio. With River Song, with
UNIT, in the Gallifrey series, and in his own box sets, the War Master has had
far more time to flap his wings of villainy in the audio environment. But in
box set 3, Rage of the Time Lords, there’s a feeling of renaissance at play. A
renaissance literally means a looking back to go forward, and while the first
box set gave us a tight handful of creepy, powerful but mostly unconnected
stories, and the second set gave us the War Master as a patient, precise
malevolence, this third series is proper, bedded-in Mastery – there’s an
enormous plan that’s taken almost a lifetime to construct and bring to
fruition, as the War Master constructs the Ultimate Doohickey Of Death, a
weapon that, he feels, will not only give the Time Lords victory in their
wretched war against the Daleks, but might just possibly put him where he feels
he belongs – among the pantheon of Time Lord gods.
This is ambition on a scale that was
only delivered from time to time throughout the Master’s on-screen career –
Colony In Space, The Deadly Assassin, maybe the end of Logopolis. And this is a
very different Master to any of the on-screen variants. One who has anticipated
every move, crossed every t, dotted every i, and accounted for every
counter-stratagem even of his old enemy, the Doctor. This is the War Master at
his most devious, his most grandiose, his most brilliant and organised and
vicious.
You’re going to want to strap in.
The Survivor, by Tim Foley, kicks things off with a
nostalgic feel. Mr Magister, the new vicar of a village in the Second World
War, befriends Alice Pritchard, a local Land Girl who can…do things with
her mind. Move things. Change things. Possibly even hurt people. As he at first
guides his new pupil, and then deals with her disobedience, the situation in
the village becomes charged with suspicion, and fear, and finger-pointing, in a
classic, claustrophobic Hammer Horror style as the tight nerves of wartime and
privation and the potential of German spies everywhere turns the village into a
replica of a medieval witch-trial. This is Carrie meets The
Witchfinder-General…in World War II. Only at the end are we entirely sure what
the Master aims to gain from turning a harmless village into a bunch of
witch-killing savages, and of course, with no Doctor to step in and stop him, the
War Master wins. He succeeds. He skips away from all the melodrama having
achieved his aim – step one in very, very many in the building of his grandest
ever Doohickey Of Death.
David Llewellyn follows suit in a very
different setting in The Chameleon of Coney Island – we’re down among
the circus folk, the ‘freakshow’ people, and in particular, the Chameleon – a
young woman who can change her skin to match whatever background she’s against,
and her patron, protector and arguably profiteer, Guiseppe Sabatini. A
gentleman named TS Mereath (take your time, we’ve got all day) offers to buy
the Chameleon from Sabatini, and on his refusal, uncanny levels of bad luck
start to plague the showman and his Chameleon. While there’s a similar central
thread in the first two stories – the Master collecting people with
extraordinary, unusual abilities for some dark design of his own - you get a
feeling for how the first story will go as it descends into claustrophobic,
demented, threatening energy, where in Llewellyn’s story, there’s a final twist
in the tale that you more than likely won’t see coming. In fact, it feels so
much like a U-turn precisely because the clues that in retrospect do lead up to
it are very subtly placed, and because Derek Jacobi’s Master almost brushes it
off in explanation, as though of course that was going to happen, and
it’s not his fault if you stupid apes are too dull-witted to see it. Again, the
first two stories share a fundamental point – showing us the War Master on a
mission, and the lengths to which he’s prepared to go to get that mission
accomplished. In The Survivor, he’s absolutely willing to plunge a group of
hapless humans into torment and turmoil to get his purpose achieved – of course
he is, they only matter as instruments of his malign will. In The Chameleon Of
Coney Island, there’s rather more personal viciousness involved – including a
scene reminiscent of an early Omen movie, where he exerts his mesmerising will
to deadly effect, and a full-on hideous Master cackle when delivering some
humans to an early grave. It’s powerful stuff in both cases, and there’s some
high level War Mastering there for most kinds of fans.
In The Missing Link, again by Foley, we spool ahead
significantly. We’ve seen the Master in two instances of the short game, going
undercover, mingling with the minions to get the things and people he needs.
Now, for The Missing Link and David Llewellyn’s Darkness And Light, which work
together as a two-parter in the same location, we hear and envisage the end
product of the War Master’s grand conceit – an unstoppable superpowered
smoothie of hate. This is a very New Who interpretation of the Delgado and Simm
Master concepts, with more than a touch of Big Finsh’s own Alex MacQueen
middle-management Master thrown in for good measure. This is the Master as a
scientific innovator, funding research, building teams, funnelling
breakthroughs towards what, on the surface, looks like a goal of which at least
the War Doctor might approve – something to put an end to the Time War. In
these two episodes, the trick is that nothing you think is happening is random.
Foley and Llewellyn here do the cheeky thing – they throw seeming obstacles and
curve balls at their War Master, only to have him be the cleverest life
form in the room, and have thought it all through ahead of time.
When things finally do go wrong,
though, only a Pertwee-Delgado compromise and a hell of a lot of luck stands a
chance of letting the Master and the Doctor survive this adventure. Pitting
Jacobi and McGann together in an inevitable ‘We’re going to forget all about
this once it’s over’ storyline is genius, because the sparks you get from them
are completely unique to this pairing. The Missing Link is for the most part a
‘hideous creature let loose in a scientific complex’ chase story, complete with
lycanthropes (or werewolves to the likes of you and me), while Darkness And
Light continues the chase, ups the stakes, reduces the likelihood of a happy
ending, throws in enough double-crossing to satisfy the wildest conspiracy
theorist, and brings the whole thing to a rolling character-boil at the end,
the future of the Master, the Doctor, the Time Lords, the Daleks and – oh yeah
– the whole universe of space and time coming down to whether the War Master
can make a deal with the devil of his own ambition.
The War Master #3 – Rage of the Time
Lords takes us from dark satire, through vicious Godfather-style crime among an
indigent community, to a soaring opera of horrifying ambition and power, only
to bring the ‘hero’ crashing down in his own hubris for the sake of there being
a universe to exist in. It’s cheesy as hell to say, given the character’s name,
but it’s a masterpiece of storytelling over four hours. What’s more than that,
it’s the latest instalment in a series that is consistently among the best that
Big Finish has to offer, and far from dropping the ball, it pushes our
understanding of the character considerably forward, while entertaining every
step of the way. Feel the Rage of the Time Lords at your earliest opportunity.
It’ll make your ears very happy indeed.
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