Big Finish Reviews+ The War Master Anti-Genesis by Tony J Fyler

Tony’s beginning all over again.

What if Davros never completed work on the Daleks? What if the raid that badly crippled him and trapped him in his life support system in fact killed him stone dead, and someone entirely else oversaw the development of the Daleks? Someone without Davros’ signature weaknesses – or at least someone able to channel them more effectively, the megalomania and god complex funnelled into making the Daleks winners, adapting to new developments along much more fluid lines than the rigid doctrines of their own supremacy?

In other words, what if someone did Genesis Of The Daleks…right?

Strap in, people, we’re going back to Skaro in the old times.

Except of course, first we have to get there. Nicholas Briggs devotes large chunks of his first story in this set, From The Flames, to circumnavigating the obvious and logical difficulties with just popping back to Skaro in the old times. It’s a kind of War Master version of Ocean’s Eleven – only with a smaller cast of villains. There are deaths to fake, slaves to manipulate, Gallifreyan archives to steal from, and only firm fan-favourite Co-Ordinator Narvin (Sean Carlsen), to stand between the War Master and the knowledge of exactly how to go about infiltrating one of only a handful of forbidden battlegrounds in the Time War – the birth of the Daleks themselves.

That’s gonna go well…

The story, like much of the box set, is an amalgam of elements which play on nostalgic notes – the War Master here is reputed dead, his body brought home to Gallifrey (*Cough* TV movie *Cough*) by, in this case, a corrupted servant, and he’s brought back from the dead in a fairly ritualistic fashion (a la The End Of Time) – with a sense of freshness and creativity that elevate its elements above the status of pure nostalgia. It’s probably not any particular spoiler, given that you already know the rest of the set exists, to tell you that Jacobi’s War Master is more successful than the Time Lords even imagine is possible. Because Time Lords underestimating the Master is not so much a cliché as a fundamental rule of the universe. And while there’s absolutely plenty of ‘returning from the dead and pilfering a Time Lord archive’ fun to keep you hooked throughout the course of the story, it’s the end of this story, and how everything unfolds from there, that really deliver on the promise of the set. The way in which this story ends and the next begins is so audaciously scampish, while being also some fairly full-on cold-blooded evil on the War Master’s part, it’ll warm the War Cockles of your heart. It’ll make you chuckle, and huff, and then chuckle again at quite how gloriously camp and timeline-devastating it is.

And so to episode two, with a title that should absolutely win awards, The Master’s Dalek Plan, by Alan Barnes.

This is probably the slice of the set that most people will really be buying it for, inasmuch as it deals with the bread and butter of what would happen if the War Master, rather than Davros, had developed the Daleks. There are gracenotes by the bucketload, mentions of characters we remember from Genesis and from I, Davros (the already definitive and groundbreaking Big Finish version of Davros’ road to the Daleks). It gorgeously guts the history we know and overlays it with a version with the War Master (hiding under perhaps just possibly the Master’s least imaginative alias ever) rewriting the destiny of the Daleks. Imagine Davros got to keep the knowledge the Fourth Doctor gave him of all Dalek defeats in Genesis. And also that he happened to not only understand the idea of life on other planets, but already be into his umpteenth life of time travel and evil plans.

Yeah. That.

If you had to keep just one of the four episodes on this box set, this would probably come out on top as your favourite child of Skaro, simply by virtue of all the mayhem it delivers to the timeline we know. Though that said, mayhem in our established timelines and histories appears to be something of a sore point with Doctor Who fans lately, so maybe it’d be the episode you’d be most keen to exterminate). The degree of sheer tap-dancing revision we get in this episode creates a sense of freedom, a shaking off of the shackles of established ‘reality’ – and of course also delivers the opportunity for the Time Lords to potentially meddle, because now they’re meddling in an altered, corrupted timeline, rather than the timeline which created the Daleks we know and perversely love.  What that means is that we’ve now got two competing timelines, each with an at least technically equal right to survive. The Daleks we know or the Daleks amended and updated by the War Master – which would you prefer? Another question referenced by the recent on-screen finale (The Cybermen we know, or the Cybermen augmented by the Master…), the Big Finish version has the scope to be both more complex and more ultimately satisfying to older, less casual, more heavily invested audiences.

In Shockwave, the second Alan Barnes episode in the set, we hear the Daleks we know growing fearful for their own survival, and recruiting a most unlikely ally, providing a welcome return for the artist formerly known as Sam Kisgart. Yes – screw spoiler-warnings, the Unbound Master is back, dragged through the several hedges of improbability backwards to try and protect the reality we know from the reality being knitted together by victory after victory of his alternative self’s Daleks.

With Narvin and President Livia experiencing the flux of dimensions and timelines – you’ll love rural yokel Narvin, that’s all we’re going to say about that – it becomes clear that the Unbound Master and our known-quantity Daleks are facing more than just a standard fight, trying to thread the eye of harmony on the needle of reality with the sledgehammer subtlety of a staser.

To catch a Master, reset the flapping coat-tails of causality and avert a dimensional crisis of unprecedented proportions, it might well be that you need to set a Master on his tail.

Shockwave gives us a thoroughly entertaining, funny, dark example of what might happen if you try.

Which leads us ultimately to He Who Wins, the clincher from Nick Briggs. One way to go about the conclusion of a box set in which the War Master takes over the destiny of the Daleks and uses them to destroy everything else in the universe might be to  throw every blaze of audio glory you can imagine at the listener, but what we get here is grander, colder, darker and (probably not inconsequentially) more low-key and probably much more straightforward to record. It deals with the ennui of success, and echoes of the truth the Doctor has always maintained about the Master’s hatred and fear – every time he wins, it blazes bright for a moment, but then it leaves him slightly colder, slightly sadder, slightly lonelier in a universe of slaves, servants and the ever-present inevitability of his eventual overthrow. The more you clamp down on dissent, the more certain you make your destruction. The War Master has won almost everything. The window on our reality is sliding shut. And that’s when the Unbound Master (Mark Gatiss) steps into the War Master’s life, to give him an extra shove of perspective. And when push finally comes to that disconcerting shove, what will the War Master choose? The life of strife and struggle in our universe, with a Doctor to play with, societies to crush for a while, doomsday weapons to steal, and planet-burning fun to have, or the bleak, quiet, empty certainty of his own victory, and no-one but himself to talk to?

Where the first War Master set gave us a War Master acting like a would-be Doctor with a dark, innovative twist, the second gave us his nature as a contaminant personality, a stalking, shadowy patient evil with a plan, and the third showed us to him as the breathtaking scientific strategist of grand designs, this fourth set lets him loose among the established chronology of the Doctor, the Daleks, and the Master himself. The result is joyous, funny, dark and brilliant, bringing together elements of Gallifrey and the Unbound universe and giving us a race against if not time, then at least the results of causality gone tonto. It’s a punchy set of stories, each of which reward the listener in new and different ways, and all of which seethe with the wonderful, horrifying  character of the War Master, played within an inch of his life and then some by Derek Jacobi at the seemingly ongoing peak of his powers.

Big Finish Reviews+ The War Master Vol 3 by Tony J Fyler

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.

Big Finish Reviews+ Master of Callous by Tony J Fyler

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…

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.