Big Finish Reviews+ The War Master - Only the Good by Tony J Fyler

Derek Jacobi is the Master, and Tony will obey him.

Looking for the Big Finish release of 2017?

You can stop looking now – it’s The War Master – Only The Good.

The original return of the Master to New Who was very much a case of ‘Get a good actor, and let them fly.’ Sir Derek Jacobi, not by any means a Who-fan, had no real idea who the Master was when he stepped onto the set of Utopia. But when the moment of his revelations comes, the Utopia Master is fully formed in an instant, and the switch that’s flipped is astounding. Affable Professor Yana is gone in a handful of heartbeats, and the Master’s eyes are dark, so dark, his gaze malevolent, his rage explosive, his pleasure disturbing, seductive, sadistic –

And then he’s gone. Killed by an insect. Forced to regenerate, and forcing a generation of Who-fans to imagine what a cosmos with this Master in it would have been like.

We don’t have to imagine any more.

Big Finish has put together four stories in a box set that actually helps flesh out the Jacobi Master – his nature, his philosophy, his fundamental character, and then, in an initially controversial move, the company has put him back in the Time War.

Many fans, apparently including Russell T Davies, hadn’t really made the connection that the Jacobi Master was the Master that John Simm later talked about, the one who was ‘resurrected’ by the Time Lords to fight the Time War. They’re supported in not making that connection by a line of dialogue, which claims that Yana was found as a baby with a pocket watch, on the shores of the Silver Desolation.

Big Finish has found a way around that, and the Jacobi Master will now be known as the War Master forever.

The scope of the story arc is enormous but intimate, and it makes you trust in it early on, so as each of the four episodes goes along, there’s never a sense, as there’s sometimes allowed to be with Doctor stories, that the ending will be improvised out of string and exposition at the end. Ohhhh no – the Master is better than that. You sense a progression early, but it’s the progression of a predator. The War Master box set makes you empathise with malevolence, makes you thrill at patient, dripping, venom, and even lets you nod when characters are killed, because they were doomed from the moment they crossed the path of the War Master.

Nicholas Briggs kicks off proceedings with Beneath The Viscoid, which takes traditional Doctor Who tropes and examines their sometimes ridiculousness – the instant trust the Doctor often inspires, the authority he assumes, the brilliant man offering to help the oppressed, and the faith the oppressed have little option but to place in him. Imagine all that, with a scheming psychopath in the central role. It’s unnerving and gorgeous and it makes you want more.

The Gardezzans live beneath the surface of a stinking, viscous sea-world, a world which perversely slows down the firepower of the Daleks, and allows an otherwise hopelessly outclassed race of prey a chance to fight back.

Then ‘The Doctor’ arrives, all politeness and appreciation and offers of help in their fight against the Daleks. Jacobi’s Master is superbly suited to this kind of story, because of course what we the audience know of him going in is so little – we know he had a persona that was affable and helpful, and we know that turned on a dime to reveal the raging drumbeat-darkness at its core. There’s some of that in this first story, a little ranting about the pathetic insignificance of the Gardezzans in private, while appearing always helpful and flustered on the surface. It’s a story for anyone who likes that inevitable sense of eventual reveal, who likes stories of how far liars can go before their fictions collapse in on themselves. Jacobi’s Master is scarily perfect, playing the Daleks and the Gardezzans off against each other, while pursuing his own agenda. With support from the likes of Jacqueline King as Nius, leader of the Gardezzans, and Deirdre Mullins as Osen, their chief scientist, Jacobi flexes his muscles in a story that never lacks for pace, getting your heart racing, with the imminence of destruction by the Daleks powering you through this opening act.

Janine H Jones gives us a medical drama with some sci-fi clout in the provocatively-named The Good Master. The War Master, under an assumed name that will make long-term fans cheer, is working as an actual Doctor on the planet Arcking – a sanctuary for the sick and injured on the fringes of the Time War. He hasn’t been there long, but he’s made a big difference, diligently saving lives and patching up those scarred by the war.

Naturally, there’s more to it than that, and when pilot Cole Jarnish is brought in after his ship is almost destroyed by Dalek firepower, we begin to learn the secrets of this unusual planet. The Master is on the hunt for one of those secrets, but the Daleks have found him, and demand that the Master be handed over to them or the planet will be exterminated. A race against time, in the middle of a time war? Absolutely – can the Master find what he needs before the Daleks can hunt him down, and if he does, what hope does the universe have then? Jones gives us an unusual story, in which things are not what they first appear. Again, the cast is littered with solid support for Jacobi’s performance, in particular from Hannah Barker as Phila, his assistant, and Jonny Green as Cole, a character determined to put his own mark on the universe, and eager to take any opportunity to do so. Listen out especially for a chilling line of explanation of how the Master knows what’s going on on Arcking, and a glorious anti-Dalek rant worthy of David Tennant’s or Peter Capaldi’s Doctors. It’ll make you laugh, and cheer, and give you an appreciation of what the Master does when there’s no meddling Doctor around to cramp his style.

James Goss hates nice people.

That’s the only conclusion one can safely draw from his contribution to this box set, The Sky Man.

If ‘pacey’ is the keyword of Beneath The Viscoid, and ‘deceptive’ is the keyword of The Good Master, ‘poisonous’ is probably the best available keyword for The Sky Man.

Be aware, this is absolutely a compliment. Goss’ story is the most jaw-dropping, the most patient, the most fundamentally eeeeevil story of the set, because it deals in hope. The Master is on holiday, deciding to learn the art and science of viticulture, or wine-making to you and me, on a planet he knows is doomed. Throughout the course of the story, he does very little but sit in a cottage and make wine. But he knows the world is doomed, and after his arrival, the people of the world know it’s doomed too. But who believes a world is doomed when the skies are blue and the harvest’s good? When babies are born and lovers bill and coo, who dares to believe it can end?

One man does. One man determined to change the fate of the world, while the Master makes his wine. The steady progression towards an inevitable yet utterly horrifying fate drags you with it, feet dawdling, and your pulse will thrum in this one – there are only a few moments of high tension, but the sustained tension is a killer. The Master’s presence is everywhere, his handprint of death on everyone. Goss’ script will delight anyone who loves The Daemons, because of that sense of the Master’s dark presence, simply waiting out the inevitable, and busying himself in the meantime. It’s that slowness of progression and the increasingly inescapable truth of the Master’s point of view, that makes Goss’ script the high-point on the release of the year.

And then there’s Guy Adams. Pleasingly, there’s increasingly Guy Adams at Big Finish, and here, with The Heavenly Paradigm, he shows this Master’s philosophy of self-interest and pragmatism while threading the previous stories together, and raising the stakes in a gambit to end the Time War, to write reality according to this Master’s will. Plus, there’s Nerys Hughes in suburbia to boot! The Heavenly Paradigm shows us, more than any other story in the set, what makes this Master tick. He’s not an agent of chaos, but of control, his control, and the way the stories all feed together into Adams’ idea here is – oh, damn the clichés! – masterful. And in case that wasn’t enough, Adams also delivers that solution to the Silver Devastation problem.

The way these four stories knit together, and the way Adams takes them to the dawn on the on-screen War Master, suggests that any more stories with this glorious incarnation will have to go backwards, rather than forwards in his timeline. Listen to this box set and you won’t care. You’ll be waving flags and placards demanding more from the War Master in 2018.

The Mothership Master Class Part 4 - The Queen of Evil by Tony J Fyler

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.

The Mothership Master Class Part 3 - The Master Reborn by Tony J Fyler

We’ve seen that there are essentially two types of Master: the natural Master, who comes by his body by the normal process of regeneration, and the unnatural Master, either disembodied or forced to steal an existence in order to survive. The first tends to play the role for character, the second, mostly for plot.

There’s also a loose correlation between the ‘type’ of Master and the success with which he has been historically played, and also with his ‘fit’ to a particular Doctor.

Roger Delgado, despite being in real life a very pleasant and amiable man, could have been born to play the dead-eyed gentleman psychopath of the universe, and he rarely, if ever, looked forced on-screen. He was chosen specifically to be the Anti-Pertwee.

The two ‘crispy critter’ Masters – Peter Pratt and Geoffrey Beevers – were not chosen specifically to play the Anti-Baker, and such was their emaciation they were forced to play the role largely on plot, to find their way back to a body. Anthony Ainley’s Master was not Doctor-specific either, and having stolen his body, he was forced from the beginning to be a Masteralike of Delgado’s version; it was more important that he looked like what had come before than it was to let him be his own villain. While little is ever heard from the CGI-snake Master, Eric Roberts (bless him, what did he think he was doing up there?) played the Master, again having stolen a body in his outing, purely driven by the plot to get more bodies, rather than as any kind of appropriate Anti-McGann.

When the series became a hit again in 2005, it was more or less certain that the Doctor would face off with his ultimate adversary again. But which Master would it be? Another re-tread of the Delgado Imprimatur, all beard and convoluted plans and gloating? Or someone new and naturalistic, someone that would be genuinely fearsome and scary and funny and dark and aimed squarely at providing the antithesis of whichever Doctor he encountered?

Sir Derek Jacobi works beautifully as a bluff, delivering the delicious oddity of his Hartnell-inspired Professor Yana, a man the Doctor perversely admires, and a great insight into what the Master could be if ever he underwent a ‘reverse-Valeyarding’ and had an incarnation that was dedicated to peace and scientific progress. We think only briefly of the meaning of it all when he gets headaches and a drumming in his head – the noise that drives the Master mad had never been mentioned before, which meant we didn’t know to look for it. When the fob watch is revealed though, the tension and the excitement ramp up, goaded and whipped on by the incidental music. It could be anyone, any Time Lord, hiding out at the end of the universe from the terror of the Time War, but we know, we just know who it is, who it absolutely has to be. The first time you ever see this scene, it’s one that gets you off your seat, and when the kindly Yana looks into the watch, it’s a harrowing scene – we have already been primed in The Family of Blood to think of the Time Lord ‘disguise’ as a real person – as John Smith in the Doctor’s case, a real, decent human being, denied his existence and validity by the necessity of a Time Lord reclaiming his life. And here it is again, the same sensation of watching a good man die, right in front of us, the new Master’s first victim.

When Jacobi becomes the Master proper, it’s oddly wrong, oddly ill-fitting – when Ainley pulled the same trick in The Keeper of Traken, he went on immediately to inhabit his new body with a degree of gleeful hopping about Logopolis, killing for fun. With Jacobi, it’s all in the eyes, and there is a seething hatred and resentment there that harks back to the Peter Pratt Master. It’s delicious to speculate what would have happened had the Jacobi Master continued, escaped to do battle with the Tenth Doctor (as we learn he was found abandoned as a child, this must surely be a new incarnation of the Master who electrocutes Chantho – would he have gone on to become the Anti-Tennant, we wonder). But of course he doesn’t – being ‘killed by an insect’ as he puts it, and determining, almost deliberately it seems, to mirror the Doctor in his youth and strength, and regenerating on-screen and in the Tardis, turning, screaming, into John Simm.

The Simm Master explodes on screen and begins immediately matching David Tennant’s Doctor, trait for trait. It’s all there in his first five minutes – there’s the post-regenerative chattiness, there’s the techno-skill, flying the Tardis with gusto, there’s the glint of mad humour and the smile. And there – right there at the end of Utopia – is something new and modern. When the Doctor says “I’m sorry”, Simm’s spitting of “Tough!” is visceral and dangerous; it’s a boot to the Doctor’s face, and a note of the savagery behind Delgado’s suavity, Ainley’s chuckle and Roberts’s…whatever-that-was.

Simm goes on to imitate Delgado not in any of the trappings of his Master (though the red-lined jacket is a nice touch), but in the fundamental philosophy of what a ‘natural’ Master is. This time, he is absolutely the Anti-Tennant, and the terrifying thing about the script of The Sound of Drums and The Last of the Time Lords is that it’s the ultimate version of the Pertwee scripts – disguise, hypnosis, cunning plans and world domination – but given a brave new twist. Simm’s is the Master who won. This is a devastating proposition, because the Master is no ordinary villain – he’s the philosophical opposite of everything the Doctor stands for, embodied in an equal, who can argue his corner and make the viewer question the Doctor’s position. It’s the combination of the scale of what the Master does to the Earth once he’s won it – “the only person to get out of Japan alive…”, and the unbridled glee with which Simm delivers his ‘stark raving bonkers’ Master, complete with dancing, disco and decimation, that makes his Master something fresh and vibrant in those two episodes.

And then of course, the production team, having well and truly had its cake with a fantastic, energised Anti-Tennant Master, decides to eat it too, and give us Simm as the body-snatching Master, the ‘other’ Master. And like disembodied Masters before him, Simm has no option but to play the character subsumed by plot, this time knowing his body is ‘born to die’ but multiplying almost endlessly and aiming to stop the drumming in his head. The End of Time is a busy script, but Simm manages to deliver the furious need of a disembodied Master more effectively in the burger-chomping scene than either Pratt or Beevers were allowed, because he keeps (largely) his own face and delivers the performance through his own interpretation of the Master as a creature propped up and kept sane by nothing more than ravenous consumption.

Again, the Master is victorious in this story, though it feels (like the character himself) more hollow and reversible this time, less powerful and meaningful, and when events spin out of his control, the Master falls back on another old trope – the idea of joining forces with the Doctor to confront the greater threat. 

What is unique in the Master’s long on-screen history though is what Simm does in his final moments – he makes us sympathise with the Master, driven mad by ‘grown-ups’ who abused his mind if not his body; he is the child who never stood a chance, and grew up determined to be noticed. Simm’s exit might be a cliché, but it’s arguably the best and most worthwhile cliché in fifty years of Doctor Who.

The Master will of course be back, despite Steven Moffat’s protestations otherwise in recent months. Maybe not today; maybe not tomorrow, but soon. And when he comes back, he will have a lot of history to live up to – much of it very recent. The ghost of John Simm’s Master will not be easy to erase. But that of course is what rebirth is all about.

The Coffee Shop Ask The Fans! Vote For Saxon!

If you didn’t know Harold Saxon was the Master, would you still vote for him?

  

Harold Saxon won a landslide victory at the General Election and was sworn in as the Prime Minister of Great Britain.  But what were his policies? Celebrities and politicians couldn’t say enough about him, what he meant to them, yet still there were no clear reasons other than he was cute, and he had their vote.  But what did he stand for? What were his policies?

Given that only a select few knew who this debonair man was, flashing the huge smile, and saying just the right words, the rest of the UK were none the wiser.  He was another politician fighting for a seat at Number 10. 

The Master of course was certain he’d win the election.  After all, he created the Arkangel Telecommunications Network.  It was on every phone, and so there really was no chance he would lose. What with that repetitive 4 beat rat a tat tat tat.....

So if you didn’t know of Harold Saxon’s past, that he was really the Master, an evil Time Lord hell bent on destruction, would you still have voted for him?  We posted this question on our Facebook and Twitter Page and below are some of the responses.  If you want to add yours, please post in the comment box below!

Chris Dodd                Totally ‘Yes!’

Claudia                       Don’t know – anything about his political agenda – apart from destroying the world!

Christine Liddle        Yes *starts randomly tapping 4 beats*

Pauline Howard         Nope

Tal Leavitt Mycroft    At least he gets things done

Caroline Stolze         Tatatatam! Tatatatam!  What?  What was the question?

@Brogalaan              If you had a phone with the Arkangel Network, you would have subconsciously had to.  If you didn’t, no!

@bbwolfgirl11            Why would I vote for him?

Seren Rock                 Nope.  I didn’t like his methods anyway.

@MIP_Charged         Can’t #AmericaFTW!  But if I could...Probably. Mostly because he’s cute!

©BBC Doctor Who 1963

The Mothership Master Class Part 2 - Rogue's Gallery by Tony Fyler

By the time Doctor Who decided the time was right for the return of the Master, a lot had changed in the show. Roger Delgado, who had so emphatically stamped his performance on the role, had been killed in a road accident. Jon Pertwee’s Doctor had bowed out at the end of the following season. Tom Baker’s Doctor had two highly memorable seasons in the role behind him and had just said goodbye to the last on-screen link to the Pertwee years – Sarah-Jane Smith had been summarily shoved out of the Tardis because the Doctor had to go home.

So what would the Master be now, in a show so markedly different?

Anarchy In A Cowl

What Robert Holmes decided to do with the Master was to give him a whole other kind of role. Delgado had been chosen specifically to be the Anti-Pertwee, matching the Doctor for debonair style and cleverness and layered performance. Robert Holmes decided to strip all of that away and give us the soul of the Master, a charred, skeletal thing animated only by purpose – and essentially by plot. If Delgado’s Master was a study in characterisation, Peter Pratt’s genuinely frightening ‘screaming skull’ Master was an elevated plot engine, that could have worked with any Doctor. His whole purpose in that story is to regain himself, his power, his vitality – and then of course use it to inflict maximum misery. While it’s easy to overlook Pratt’s performance given the prominence of Bernard Horsefall’s front and centre villainy as Chancellor Goth and the moderately unfortunate fixed eyes of Pratt’s makeup, the importance of his Master cannot be overstated.

There have been over the fifty years of the show, two types of Master: the natural Master, who comes by his body by the normal process of regeneration, and the unnatural Master, either disembodied or forced to steal an existence in order to survive. The first tends to play the role for character, the second, mostly for plot.

That all began with Pratt’s stripped-back raging beast in The Deadly Assassin. Roger Delgado, having been chosen specifically as a foil to Pertwee, was always easy to watch on screen and rarely looked forced. Pratt showed the evil undisguised, unnuanced and essentially desperate – his plan is as convoluted as anything Delgado’s Master could have come up with, but the powerful rage punches viewers in the face right through the screen. This Master doesn’t threaten, doesn’t grin – he guns people down, almost rather than have to keep up the pretence of civilisation that talking to them would entail.

The breadth of Holmes’ invention in The Deadly Assassin is astounding, viewed in retrospect. He invented the ‘twelve regenerations’ rule, the Matrix, and pretty much all the Gallifreyan hooha of the Chapters, all while debunking the idea of the Time Lords as trans-temporal gods, and rendering The Manchurian Candidate in a sci-fi setting. Against all this (and the notorious violence of some of the Matrix scenes), it’s understandable that Pratt doesn’t deliver many people’s absolutely favourite Master – fans tend to like their Masters to be the Moriarty-mirror of their Doctors, it makes for breathtaking philosophical challenges - but he more than does his job. Arguably, if he hadn’t, the Master could have died a series-death right there on Gallifrey. Pratt, even through the emaciated facemask and without his own eyes, delivers us a whole new take on the Master – a raging, vengeful thing that only looked suave and genteel in Roger Delgado’s body because it could. He shows us the bite behind the Master’s smile, and for the first time, the Master feels really unpredictable and dangerous. It’s also worth remembering that where Masters who are chosen as the antithesis of a particular Doctor can challenge and demean that Doctor’s worldview and throw the viewer onto the back foot, what Pratt and Holmes managed in the Deadly Assassin is actually something broader – they used the Master as the antithesis of a whole idea of civilisation. The Master and Goth are primitivism, violence, animal viciousness, hatred and lust for power, eating the heart out of the oldest and most stagnant society. If Roger Delgado’s Master is a villain for all seasons, then Peter Pratt’s is anarchy in a cowl.

The Serpent In The Garden

The odd thing about the relationship between The Deadly Assassin and the Master’s next connected set of three outings four years later, was that Assassin succeeded in ‘pulling a Troughton’ – making the audience accept that the Master could be a completely different person, played by a different actor – only for The Keeper of Traken to keep him almost the same – burned and cowled, though less physically shocking – and then to cop out at the end and give us not what the Master could have been, a brand new man, poised to kill off the fourth Doctor and match wits with the fifth…but a Delgadoalike version, condemned for the next nine years to look and play the role almost as an impersonation of the Master set out by the original – down to the beard.

This is not to denigrate or belittle what either Geoffrey Beevers or longest-serving Master Anthony Ainley brought to the role. While Pratt gave us anarchy in a cowl, Beevers was very much, both in performance and to a degree in iconography, the whispering serpent of corruption in the Garden of Traken, with Kassia as Eve, prepared to do whatever is necessary not to have her Adam, the elderly Tremas, taken away from her and invested as Keeper. Beevers is on splendid, subtle form here, and just as Delgado was perhaps at his best pretending to be an angel of light or a figure of authority, so Beevers, with his softly sibilant tone plays on every emotion in Kassia’s mind – sympathy for a creature unable to move, fear of being alone, desire to be herself a person of more authority. Beevers’ Master is half serpent in the Garden, but also has an air of genuine suffering, a suffering that has twisted him even more than before to want to hurt the harmless, to not only deny mercy to those less powerful than himself, but to actively destroy them or watch the weak suffer. As with Pratt, it’s unlikely that Beevers is many people’s favourite Master, but if the point of regeneration from a storytelling perspective is to show us a new way of being the same person, then Beevers is an honourable ‘third Master’ in the character’s identity parade.

And so, with the dimming of the fourth Doctor’s light, the age of the Ainley Master began. Ainley as Tremas in Keeper of Traken shows what an adept character actor he was…and then he ran straight into the scientific monolith that was Christopher H Bidmead.

No actor after seven years playing the Doctor should have to leave in a Bidmead script. No actor freshly coming into the role and having to prove himself as the Doctor should have to start in a Bidmead script.

And no actor, having just taken on the role of the Doctor’s greatest humanoid adversary, should have to try and make a mark in not one but two Bidmead scripts, back to back. It’s giving neither the actor nor the character a fair shot.

Concept Constipation

Logopolis and Castrovalva are among that collection of stories that every fan takes out of their collection every now again and watches, just to prove to themselves that the flame of fandom still burns, despite everything. The Underworld, The Gunfighters, Fear Her, The Curse of Fenric (controversial!)…Logopolis and Castrovalva. 

In stories crammed with concept at the expense of knowing or caring what is actually going on, Ainley struggles to make his mark as the Master. Of the two, Logopolis probably sees the slightly better performance from him, as he moves around the planet with a mixture of glee and fluidity, revelling in the things his new body can do, and in killing absolutely for the sake of it. Even his moment of amusement as the Doctor shakes his hand before they set off together to save the universe shows promise for the new Dark Lord of Time. But Castrovalva, which arguably gives Ainley his first chance to Delgado it up with an over-elaborate disguise, dwarfs both Ainley and Davison in the philosophy and dimensional mathematics of an Escher painting, which ultimately ends up going right up its own…erm…never-ending passageway.

If there are points in the Master’s televisual history when the character was in danger of dying out, obviously Planet of the Daleks was one, followed as it was by the death of Delgado. The Deadly Assassin was another, saved by Pratt and Holmes together. If there’s any point at which the Master has deserved to die out, it is probably in Castrovalva.

Oh, wait – Time-Flight…

To be fair to Ainley and his Master, his performance is by several yards the best thing in Time-Flight. There’s an ultimate gleeful pointlessness in the elaborate nature of his disguise as Kalid, and his emergence from that disguise at the end of episode two manages to generate some excitement in a story that was poorly resourced, poorly directed and probably pitched as “Let’s Steal Concorde!” It was, far too frequently, Ainley’s fate to do very good work in scripts that either had no real place for the Master, or had him playing second fiddle to a concept, a co-star, or in this case, a Concorde.

As if to prove that the deficiency was in the writing, rather than in the potential of Ainley’s Master, his next appearance, closing out the following season in The King’s Demons, allowed him to do many of the same things as Time-Flight had – disguise, ending an episode on the removal of that disguise, what was beginning to become the trademark Master chuckle, using another semi-techno-life form to advance his own agenda…but in the tighter, more claustrophobic two-parter, Ainley shone, both in his disguised form and, perversely, as the fully fledged Master throughout the second episode, practically dancing along lines of allegiance, authority and superstition. Not since Tremas has Ainley looked so assured in his own skin, but now it feels very much like the Master’s skin, as he borrows a degree of Delgado’s civility with the Doctor in private, but brings his own gruff focus to the character when things go against him. For the first time in The King’s Demons, Ainley impresses on the audience that while he might look like the old Master, and dress like the old Master, actually, there’s more going on there than meets the eye.

The Master Dances

And just in time for one of the Ainley Master’s best performances, in the 20^th Anniversary Special, The Five Doctors. Here, Ainley finally proves that he’s in control of the character – even in a story more crowded than any other; he stands out in almost every scene. Perhaps the best of which is the first – the Master sitting with the High Council of Gallifrey. He feels comfortable, even in this dangerous environment. He even feels playful, considering a universe without the Doctor. But the gnaw of his borrowed body is enough to persuade him to go when offered a completely new life cycle (and weren’t we ultimately glad for the confirmation of the promise of The Deadly Assassin, that the Time Lords can bestow such a gift?). Then there’s that surreal scene – the new Master meets the third Doctor. The more familiar and still playful debate with the fifth Doctor, the Master thinking on his feet with the Cybermen and leading them across the Floor of Death. Another brilliant fan-moment – the Master meets the first Doctor. The giving way to the potential of killing the Doctor another three times, and finally, the coup de grace – being knocked out by none other than the Brigadier. It’s possibly the Ainley Master’s finest hour, and it showcases all the strengths of this Master; the glee, the quick feet and quicker brain, the ruthlessness and the raw-throated savagery at the end.

In his final battle with the fifth Doctor, despite the busyness of a script involving the death of Kamelion, the leaving of Turlough, a satire of the battle between science and religion and, lest we forget, the introduction of Nicola Bryant’s chest, Ainley’s Master feels as though he’s grown in assurance, however much he’s shrunken in stature on the Planet of Fire. While Ainley, closeted in scenes on his own, delivers a credible threat through his diadem of ping pong balls, and his Kamelion-version feels imbued with the physical power of the man, the need to give Peri some pith and vinegar – ‘My name’s Perpugilliam Brown and I can shout just as loud as you can!’ – rather deflates the Master’s presence, and when it’s revealed that he’s little more than a mouse in the wainscoating, there’s a degree of probably unintentional comedy in the Master’s predicament, if not, ever, in Ainley’s performance. It’s a slightly odd tone, but it regains some gravitas at the end, when – perhaps fittingly for a Master who came to be when his predecessor had won the paradise that was Traken – he is burned in what might as well be everlasting hellfire, giving an additional final spin to the science versus religion theme.

The Ainley Master faired just as badly during the brief time of the sixth Doctor. In Mark of the Rani, he was a necessary adjunct and little more, an overcomplicated, faintly pantomime villain dressing up as a scarecrow for…some reason…and a butt for the Rani’s contempt. In a way, his presence was necessary so that the Rani could be established as a clever villain – she didn’t have to have any of the faults that make a villain’s plans go wrong, because the Master had plenty for both of them. Note the change in Time and the Rani, when she had to be responsible for her own downfall, and a much less satisfying story all round ensued. But as a Master story, Mark of the Rani serves the character badly.

His appearance in the final two episodes of the Trial of a Time Lord, likewise, seems unnecessary and gives him little to do, though Ainley again makes meat where there is barely gristle, channelling Pratt’s capacity to be the antithesis of Time Lord society, and to laugh at its corruption, where the Doctor rails. The Ainley Master by this point was revelling in a certain degree of pantomime – there were flashing eyes and good-humoured teeth-sucking as he looked down on the Time Lords apparently from on high in the Matrix).

By the next time the Master returned to the show, it would be for what was ultimately the last broadcast episode of ‘Classic’ Who. Any honest fan knows that he wasn’t necessary in Survival either – and indeed had been landed in the story as a requirement from the producer, rather than an integral part of the plot by the writer. But oh, what magic he wove while he was there. The post-Traken outfit was finally ditched in favour of something rather more rakish, and Rona Munro did an excellent job of rationalising his presence – in a storyline about different forms of strength, and about the battle between cool intellect and primal animalism, who was more natural to face off against the seventh Doctor than his alter ego, the Master. Ainley in this story ditched the hints of pantomime villainy and was back on top form, talking himself down from giving in to the power of the beast and then ultimately surrendering to the need to kill, to see the Doctor dead at his feet. If the series had to end, it was fitting it should end on one of the strongest performances by the Ainley Master in nine years of plotting and cackling and just occasionally chewing the furniture.

The Last of the Camp Lords

And then…

Oh, and then…

If the potential of Deadly Assassin was squandered by Traken, Logopolis and Castrovalva, what can we make of the roller-coaster ride between Survival and the TV movie?

Ainley’s Master went out on – arguably – a career high in the role. He was replaced by a CGI snake, and Julia Roberts’ brother. Played – to come back to the theory of two types of Master – solely for the plot, Eric Roberts’ outing as the Master had potential as far as his look went, and developed some effective ruthlessness, killing his host’s wife and making sardonic, inappropriate comments to fellow hospital staff, but the moment Roberts was called on to simply be the Master, he played it for high pantomime camp – ‘I always drezzz for the occasion’ sounding like he’d stepped out of Hell’s touring company of La Cage Aux Folles. Ultimately there were many more things wrong with the TV movie than the performance of the Master, but Roberts’ over-the-top flamboyance as the Time Lord Victorious must surely have confused the American audiences the show was intended to court.

If there are two types of Master – the naturally regenerated kind, who act as the antithesis of a particular Doctor and play it for the character conflict, and the more desperate, bodysnatching Master, playing largely for plot, the 23 years between 1973 and 1996 were most definitely the age of the body snatcher. Along the way, there was brilliance from each of the Masters – Pratt’s performance proved the Master still had life and fury in him; Beevers’ showed us the insinuating, persuasive, genuinely cruel core of him; and Ainley’s brought a combination of playfulness and viciousness to bear.

When the eighth Doctor and the fifth TV Master disappeared from the screen at the end of the TV movie, it truly felt as though the world was done with both of them.

It would take another 11 years to prove that feeling wrong. But when he came back, the Master would be truly reborn, right in front of our eyes.

The Mothership Master Class - Pt 1: A Villain For All Seasons by Tony Fyler

“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.

You do know there’s an Axon just behind us, don’t you?

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