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The Master |
Reviews
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The Master |
Black is the New Black by Mike Morris 5/5/04
It would seem apposite (there's a word I learned from Tony Ainley), at the start of this review, to quote the two best summaries I've heard of the Master's character. One is by Roger Delgado - or rather, it's by Cervantes but Delgado nicked it - "He is the Master of everything, and the owner of nothing." The other is by those good people Chris Howarth and Steve Lyons, whose summation in The Completely Useless Encyclopaedia was different. "He's as nutty as squirrel shit, he always loses, and he's so rubbish he even played second fiddle to the Rani... why, then, is he reputed to be the Doctor's greatest enemy?"
Combining the two of these, you have extreme examples of what the Master could be. Delgado's wonderful summation captures what made the Master so memorable on occasion, combining grandeur with a sense of desperation and twisted pathos. Sadly, the characterisation was more often closer to Howarth and Lyons' summary, which makes him one of Doctor Who's most frustrating characters. One can make the argument that the character himself was flawed, which I would partially agree with... although acknowledging the Master as a "character" in any way at all is a touch generous, given his conception.
Look at where he came from. The cliche that Baz 'n' Tel put forward as his character was that he was a time-travelling Moriarty. Immediately we run into two problems, which should be known to anyone who's read Sherlock Holmes. Firstly, Moriarty was a bit of a crap villain anyway; recurring whodunit villains usually are, because they rather spoil the 'whodunit' bit.
However, Moriarty did work, more or less, within the confines of Holmes (I'll say straight up that I've not read Holmes for years, and I always preferred Poirot anyway, so all this recollection is a bit hazy), because he actually wasn't in it much at all. We found out that he was involved in stuff, and that various villains were in his employ, but it was quite a while before he popped up and he did so specifically to kill Sherlock Holmes. And there's the second problem; the Master isn't Moriarty, and he never was. He's not a shadowy background figure like Moriarty was. He's an overt presence who is repeatedly defeated.
In fact, from the start the Master was something far more tired. He's an arch-adversary; he's more Doctor Doom than Doctor Moriarty. He's a comic-book villain, and he isn't even a good one like the Joker. He popped up during Season Eight, and the initial Master portrays every negative quality that Season Eight - and Nine and Ten for that matter - introduced into Doctor Who.
His first story is Terror of the Autons, and as one might expect he dominates it; but this isn't a good thing. Terror of the Autons is a sinister story crippled by the Master's presence and the need to establish his character. There are a million-and-one crap Doctor-killing devices, there's the Master forging an alliance with the Doctor at the end, and there's his escape with sequel rights. To compare Terror of the Autons and its predecessor, Spearhead from Space, is a chastening exercise. Spearhead is far from perfect, but it has a fresh, dynamic quality. In comparison, Terror of the Autons is horribly tired, a difference encapsulated by comparing two characters; Channing, an alien, uncharismatic stranger with hypnotic powers, and the Master, a suave, charismatic stranger with hypnotic powers. One is edgy, and alien, whose thought processes are unknown, who is menacing because he looks like an accountant. The other is - well, the other is the Master.
For the rest of Season Eight, the Master pops up in every story and is only effective in two. Wonderful as Delgado's quote is, it doesn't stand up to scrutiny as far as his Master is concerned - suggesting that Delgado's understanding of the character was far better than the writers'. In The Mind of Evil the Master attains a real presence as a gangland boss, and in The Daemons he works because of the sheer scale of the forces he is summoning. Even in those stories, though, he isn't a particularly effective villain. He works in The Mind of Evil because he's peripheral, a presence rather than an active agent of the plot, which means that he doesn't really lose at the end... but his plan of capturing a missile is incoherent, and is unconvincingly tacked on to the nice mind-parasite story that the writer clearly has more interest in. Instead we're asked to believe that the Master created (or captured) a mind-parasite thing, built a clever machine to trap it in, masqueraded as a Swiss scientist, then marketed it to various prisons... all so he could kill a few delegates! Wouldn't it have been simpler just to buy a gun? And in The Daemons he has vanished into the realms of cosiness, getting a cliffhanger all of his own and a pantomime booing when captured.
In the season's other two stories he's shoehorned into plots that clearly don't require his presence. The Claws of Axos would have been better without him; imagine if the Brigadier had decided to press the plunger at the end of Episode Three! The conflict between duty and friendship... now that would have been characterisation. And his presence in Colony of Space is an insult to the viewer, as he pops up late in the story to take us away from a vaguely worthy (if dull) political story to a silly runaround about an all-powerful weapon.
I dwell on Season Eight because this was the Master's template, and it wasn't a good one. He was a popular presence, mainly because he gets good dialogue and Roger Delgado is a performer of enormous presence and charisma. But he's a lazy addition. No surprise there; this is the season where Liz Shaw was dropped for Jo Grant because Liz was too much hard work for the writers and it was easier to have a thicko as the Doctor's assistant. The Master's presence is similar, giving writers an easy villain that doesn't require complex motivations. He takes over the world because, hey, he feels like it. Gone are the previous season's ambiguous moral shades of grey - ambitious doctors Lawrence and Quinn, poor tortured insane Carrington, arrogant and driven Professor Stahlman, the cowardly bullying Brigade Leader. Instead we've got every bad Master idea established; the 'no, you must die slowly' traps, the overly-complex plans, the safe good-natured humour of his supposed rivalry with the Doctor. He's never a real threat to the Doctor's life, and you never believe he's really going to go through with it and kill him.
Following this season - when some writers were clearly not prepared for the Master's presence - he improves. He's not there all the time, which is a plus. And although his remaining three stories aren't great either, the Master is the most positive attribute of all of them. The Sea Devils shows him incarcerated and really only looking to escape, prepared to wipe out humanity - not for power, but just to get out of jail. That savage, grand arrogance makes him a tyrant in a very real way, and although we have to endure all sorts of pointless sword fights he works for two reasons. Firstly, it's the Doctor - not him - who is in the position of power, which means that the Master doesn't balls things up as blatantly as before. Secondly, he wins. He does get his freedom at the end, and really, that was all he wanted. An alliance with the Sea Devils was just a sideshow.
His other two stories are The Time Monster and Frontier in Space. The latter is Delgado's last performance in the role, and is a marvellous performance in an appropriate setting. The Master operates as a cosmic manipulator, and rather than actively doing anything himself he exacerbates the xenophobia of two races. It works very well, essentially updating his Mind of Evil persona into a space-setting. And in those two stories we see glimmers of what contributes to Delgado's finest hour in The Time Monster.
Uh, sorry, what?!
Okay, not all of The Time Monster, of course. I mean, it's shit isn't it? And unusually there's also a moment when Delgado's shit, at the end. Now, in the first four episodes he's on rare form, but the acting around him is so appalling that all he seems to do is show up how bad it is. He delivers every line so well that it almost screams "what the hell am I doing in this?" Still, after a nice hour and a half's snooze we're in Atlantis, the Master is seducing Ingrid Pitt, and suddenly it's very obvious who he was always supposed to be.
He's Iago, of course. He's the serpent who turns people into evil versions of themselves. Read Othello and it really slaps you in the face; this is what Delgado's Master could and should have been, and what he is - albeit on a political rather than human scale - in The Mind of Evil and Frontier in Space. He doesn't perform the actions himself, rather he works on people until they do it for him; he's the devil on the shoulder, the tempter. Ingrid Pitt's Queen-character (sorry, can't remember her name) appears likeable enough at first, if arrogant. But it's the Master who brings her thirst for power to the fore, who poisons her love for that King guy (his name escapes me too), who makes her become the villain in the piece.
Othello's a kick-ass bit of Shakespeare, by the way, and Iago is its most memorable character - because he isn't really a character at all. You could almost read him as being a collective hallucination on the part of the characters, a supernatural devil, or a writer's conceit. It works because Othello isn't about him, it's about Othello. He's the agent who twists characters. The Master in Atlantis works in a similar way; the story's about Ingrid Pitt, not him. And the way he manipulates her without resorting to hypnotism makes him more insidious and memorable.
All that said, I can't pretend that what we see on-screen is a particularly interesting villain. If I had to pick my ten favourite Pertwee stories I don't think many would feature the Master(although to be fair I'd be struggling to find ten Pertwee stories I really liked). Not only that, but he does rather tend to bugger up the stories that he's in, because he's an easy option for lazy writers.
After Roger Delgado's tragic death, the Master was obviously and rightly dropped as a character, out of respect rather than any great editorial decision. Still, this was a very good thing in storytelling terms; the break meant that his suave, safe character faded out of public consciousness, and when he returned he had been substantially rethought for the better.
Listen to this; "I brought in elements of the paranoia of the main character being manipulated, and being unable to do anything about it, from The Manchurian Candidate, and had the Doctor go through the same sort of crisis. That lead to the idea of the Doctor being framed for the assassination of the President of the High Council on his home planet. Both Philip and I agreed that the ideal manipulator would be the Master."
Oh my god. They thought about it. They actually thought about how to use him. Imagine that!
Holmes' rewriting of a character whose debut he had also scripted was astounding, and it's hard to imagine how shocked viewers who remembered Delgado must have been. Now able to forge his own programme, Holmes removed all those trademarks which held the character back. The suaveness is gone, instead replaced by a debased creature without the safeness of Delgado's Master. This skeleton-bloke, you felt, would happily knife the Doctor in the back. And the irrationalities of the Master's plans are addressed too, by making the character visibly insane. His plans are irrational because he is irrational. Rather than having a tired 'the Doctor's enemy, equal but opposite blah blah blah,' we've got a creature who is defined by hating the Doctor. As in the following exchange: -
Goth: It was a mistake to bring him here. We could have used anyone.
Master: No! We could not have used anyone. You do not understand hatred as I understand it. Only hate keeps me alive. How else could I endure this pain?
It comes back to The Time Monster, although Holmes' take is utterly different and far more visceral. What the two stories have in common, though, is that the Master isn't a character as such. In The Time Monster he's a personification of the evil within the other characters; and in The Deadly Assassin he's a full-out monster.
What we have is a walking, talking embodiment of obsessive hatred, that most powerful and destructive of emotions. Now that is terrifying. This Master is both crippled and kept alive by hate (there's another exchange, where the Doctor notes that his weakness is that he is consumed by hatred, and the Master retorts that "hatred is strength"). He is hate. See, all great monsters tend to boil down to a psychological personification - vampires are about sex and zombies about a fear of collective dehumanisation. To come closer to home, Daleks are representative of repression and psychosis (weakness trapped behind a clinical exterior, which rapidly turns to hate), and Cybermen... well Cybermen are metal zombies really. In The Deadly Assassin the Master joins their ranks, and it works better than it has before or since.
Then he vanished again - Graham Williams was apparently under pressure to bring him back, but this moral absolute wouldn't have suited the Williams-era tenets of believable villains. One might argue that at this period he actually re-appeared on another programme - but I'll come to that later.
The 'regeneration trilogy' is his next appearance and, in many ways, the best-advised use of the character. Finally, he wins! He does kill the Doctor! And his re-emergence in The Keeper of Traken is marvellous. Melkur is a Master-type figure anyway, again close to the Iago interpretation, so there's a rightness to him popping up at the end of Part Three. He's very much the power behind the face, which suits him; and again, he gets out with what he wanted. A new body, at last. The jolt at the end of that story is tremendous, and sets us up for Logopolis.
And then... urgh. Not that the Master's bad in Logopolis, but he works mainly because of his role as the Doctor's nemesis. It quickly becomes obvious that JNT has brought back the Master-gimmick rather than trying to re-invigorate the character. He's dressed in a way that's reminiscent of Delgado anyway, and his characterisation isn't a million miles out. He's obviously more unbalanced, but it's not really clear whether this is a conscious decision on behalf of the team to re-interpret the character, or just an arch-villain-who-cackles sort of thing. There's hints of the former at the end, with the Doctor seemingly genuinely shocked when he says that Master is "utterly mad", as if he's realised that this isn't the Master he remembers. If that really were the case, though, you would expect it to have been followed up. Instead, we revert back to the Delgado model, only without the good bits.
In Castrovalva his inclusion makes sense, with the new Doctor vanquishing the foe who vanquished him, but he's returned his old habits; buggering up a decent story, coming up with vastly over-elaborate schemes and generally being rubbish. In all his remaining Saward-era stories he's pathetic. Time-Flight and The King's Demons showcase him in rickety plots with cheap dialogue, and recycle another cliche - the cunning disguises of the Master - without any purpose. The Five Doctors uses him on sufferance, but really, he's only there for Jon Pertwee to score points off. His presence in Planet of Fire is quite smart, but he's shockingly scripted. In The Mark of the Rani he's there to be mocked, the Rani repeatedly pointing out how bloody stupid he is... and if the writers know it, then the character's in trouble. And again, there's no need for him to be in The Trial of a Time Lord at all. In fact, he robs the story of enormous potential; instead of the Doctor finding out all the shocking revelations, the Master simply pops up and tells us! For what? A little ooh-it's-the-Master moment? Why?
Through it all, though, Tony Ainley's there. Although his early performances are OTT, it's clear that the guy can act... and as the scripts get worse, Ainley begins to fight against them and desperately tries to give the character some gravitas. He cuts the chuckling back, and gives the Master a soft-spoken menace. Just look at the scarecrow scene in The Mark of the Rani - his appearance, striding elegantly over the field without a word, is really very good. He even does his best with Planet of Fire; yeah, he delivers the bad lines with the ham that they deserve, but when he's asked to play the proper soft-spoken manipulator with Timanov, he's marvellously slippery and has some cracking scenes. Thing is, though, when you're asked to deliver lines like "I'll hound you to the corners of the universe Doctor", what can you do? That's a line whose shitness extends for miles left and right, so the only way past it is over the top.
With Survival, this fine actor gets a script he deserves. It rivals The Deadly Assassin as the character's best use. He's there to give a broad, unfocused plot a face, really. He's there to tell us who the Cheetah-People are, as they can't do it themselves. He's there to give a voice to evil that would otherwise be mute.
But there's so much thought gone into what he's like. There are two telling lines in the script; one is where the Doctor speaks of the Master as "an evil genius, one of my oldest and deadliest of enemies," and Ace promptly ridicules this with "Do you know any nice people? You know, ordinary people? Not power-crazed nutters trying to take over the universe?" Through Ace, the script acknowledges that the Master we know is a bit shit. Contrast this with Part Three's scene where Ace asks "Why's he doing this?" and the Doctor spits back, "Malice." That's far more believable, on a dramatic level, than any sort of power-hungry fiend cliche. "You are the hunting dog, the teeth for my trap!" he tells Midge, personifying the bad side of Social Darwinism that the script attacks, for no reason other than who he is. He does what he does because he is the Master. He's not a person, he's the face that evil assumes. That's countered by the examination of his relationship with the Doctor; the Master needs the Doctor, and by embracing the savagery of the Cheetah People he finally has the power to destroy him. Oh, it's marvellous stuff.
Since 1989, the Master's use has thinned out. He's in the telemovie, sure, but he's very much a straight villain with the old comic-book touches. Again, there's an appropriateness to his use, as he vies with the Doctor for survival and attempts to subsume his body, but the poetic nature he could sometimes achieve (his tortured soliloquy in front of the mirror in Survival) is replaced by witless sensationalism. What is it about arch-villains that brings out the very best and the very worst in scriptwriters?
In the books he hasn't been used much, as this sort of character isn't that well-suited to novel form. David A. McIntee's attempts to give him a backstory in The Dark Path and The Face of the Enemy are admirable, interesting, and comfortably the author's best work, but the rest of the writers have pretty much ignored this context. He's in Legacy of the Daleks for no good reason, and in Adventuress Lawrence Miles includes him as an archetype who no longer has any meaning; the discussion is interesting, and is far closer to the essence of the Master than ever before, but he's there to show that he's no longer needed.
And yet, when The Scream of the Shalka aired, there he was! Ta-da! And nice as it was to have Derek Jacobi, the fact remained... why? His inclusion is pointless, and reset all the old bad Master ideas for no good reason. It baffles me; and now that the series is returning, it worries me. We won't have to put up with that shite again will we? I mean, will we?
Which brings me to the "other programme", where RTD (all producers should have snappy initially-type titles) should look if he ever feels the need to bring the Master back. It's Blake's 7, of course, and the Master-figure is Travis.
Those of you who've never seen Blake's 7 (Series One on DVD is out now! Go on, you know you want to!) will have to excuse me as I go rocketing off-topic; but if you want a good template for the equal-but-opposite villain then this is it. Travis isn't suave, he's brusque, aloof and brutal. He isn't a well-groomed figure, he's a disfigured soldier who ridicules "decorative staffmen". And, most crucially of all, he doesn't have to see Blake humiliated before he dies. He just wants him dead. He's dangerous. Contrast the Master's hackneyed 'it lacks the personal touch' musings in Frontier in Space with the Blake's 7 episode Duel, where Travis is happy to destroy Blake's ship in a dogfight. Later in the same episode, he's on the point of cutting Blake's throat. "I am your Death, Blake"... he's magnificently played in Series One (as for Series Two, oh well), and is a great character in his own right; but he remains a Master-figure, consumed and obsessed with Blake's destruction, closer to the Deadly Assassin model than any other. Also, while the Master is almost always in a position of power, Travis doesn't hold all the aces. His ships are slower, his crew less talented. He can lose without being incompetent - in the same way that the Master is always at his best when he's in a position of weakness (The Deadly Assassin, The Keeper of Traken, Survival). Travis is a marvellous villain, and shows up just how bad the Master was in comparison.
Ultimately, though, the Iago take is as valid as the obsessive one. This is the thing about the Master... he's chameleonic, and that's not necessarily a bad thing. He's the face of whatever evil is necessary, acting as its agent, with the one proviso that he desperately wants to destroy the Doctor (who is, of course, the face of good). So he works when the evil is well-defined. The Master isn't the Daleks - although he can be an effective force for evil, he can't drive a story without a supporting structure in which to operate. In The Deadly Assassin he accentuates Gallifrey's ceremonial ignorance of itself, in The Keeper of Traken he turns Traken's virtue into pitch, in Survival he's there to personify the Social Darwinism debate. He is an agent of the plot, not the genesis of it - stories created as vehicles for the Master's presence consistently fail.
So, should he ever return in any medium, here's the rules I'd beg for, which may seem to go against the grain but in my opinion would really make the Master work. Don't give him grand plans to conquer the universe. Don't fall into the cosy trap of 'grudging respect' for the Doctor (he hates him, but ah, he likes him really). Don't make him suave (Iago is at his best when played as slightly common). Don't make him easy to write for, as that's an easy excuse for bad writing. Dump the hypnotism. Remember Delgado's summary, which basically says more than this humungous review ever could. Oh and Russell, if you get the urge, it would be nice if you could cast Stephen Greif.
The Master. One of the series greatest villains, very occasionally, when the writer put a bit of thought into it. But too often he's a dreadful safety-net for bad plotting. I wish I could say nicer things, but even after all these years the character remains in a box marked "potential unfulfilled". After all these years, that's not really good enough, but maybe one day that'll change.
A Review by Thomas Cookson 7/7/06
The Master - Doctor Who's longest running recurring arch villain - was first introduced to us in 1971's Terror of the Autons, to give the Doctor a recurring foe and to further connect the Pertwee Era to the trend of James Bond by giving the good Doctor his own Blofeld to play against. The Master in retrospect was the early glint in the eye of writer Robert Holmes' cynical love affair with the seedy and corrupt side of Time Lord society. He became one of the few villains to have an entire season devoted to him from the get-go. One of the things about the Master that always struck me was how his chummy villainy was at odds with just how murderous he was, and that made him a promising villain even if it also represented the only time in Doctor Who where character motivation goes out the window.
It's interesting that when Robert Holmes was script editor in Tom Baker's early years, there were two particular villain characters that seemed to sum up a nihilistic philosophy of destruction and killing being somehow an ends in itself rather than a means. They were of course Sutekh ("Your evil is my good") and Davros ("Yes I would do it!", omitting the obvious "just because I can").
Terror of the Autons inevitably ranks as one of the rare instances where the Master is a dangerous threat to the Doctor. But unfortunately as he carried on, inevitably familiarity robbed him of menace (coupled with the sequel rights clause). I have said before that the introduction of the Master set the show up for a cold blooded turn: a murderer who never got his just desserts, a Doctor who was fond of his old friend and sometimes seemed callous about the fact that the Master had killed innocent people - and I still largely stand by that view, yet inevitably I am learning to appreciate the Pertwee era for what it was.
The Master came to fulfil the function of making the show's morality more accessible or more "dumbed-down" after the more challenging and adult Season 7. There are three scenes in particular that show this method of using the Master as a mouthpiece for a story's morality. The first is in Claws of Axos, where the Master betrays the Axons and decides to help UNIT destroy them. For reasons that cannot be fathomed unless you accept this as a necessary contrivance to put the Master in this position of the mouthpiece, the Master becomes entrusted with the task of pressing the plunger that will blow up the Axons, but most likely kill the Doctor and Jo in the process. Funnily enough, when the Brigadier protests, the Master doesn't press the button until he has made his pragmatic case for doing so and is assured of the Brigadier's agreement to sacrifice two lives to save a whole planet. In The Sea Devils, the Master is trying to manipulate the Sea Devils to wage war on man. By a tragic coincidence, in the middle of giving warnings that the humans will never make peace, the Navy begin bombing the underwater city, proving him right, and finally he has a moment in Frontier in Space where he goads the prison governor to confess how corrupt the prison system is.
In each case the Master gets to briefly dance in the hero's shoes as he uncovers prison corruption, saves the world from the Axons and using his intelligence and a desperate bluff to briefly save the Sea Devils from further attack. In Season 7, the heroes occasionally stepped into morally ambiguous territory: the Brigadier blew up the Silurians, and in the same story the Doctor betrayed the Brigadier by warning the Silurians that the soldiers were coming (which actually results in several deaths), and in Inferno we see the Brigadier at his worst and we see the Doctor forced to leave the doppelgangers to their death. But as the show was becoming aimed at popular appeal and audience accessibility, these shades of grey for the heroes had to go. In that case, the Master being on the scene allowed for the alternative of having the villain be occasionally heroic in only the ruthless ways a villain can. So whilst in retrospect it might have been better if in Claws of Axos, it was the Brigadier who had to press the button, the mainstream audience might not accept this ruthless streak to the Brigadier resurfacing. Notice also the Brigadier's absence in The Sea Devils, almost as if the program is trying to distance the character from his actions in The Silurians. In fact I'm of the opinion that either of the prior Doctors before Pertwee would have been far more violent towards the Master.
The tragic and unexpected death of Roger Delgado was certainly a sad loss for the acting world, and it also left the program makers unable to round off the story of the Master as they had intended. There was supposedly a masterplan at work, whereby the Master would eventually meet his demise in battling Pertwee's Doctor (possibly climaxing with the Master's suicide, suggesting that the Master couldn't bring himself to kill the Doctor after all), whilst the revelation about the Master's background would finally see the light of day - something to do with the Master turning out to be the Doctor's brother or a living composite of the Doctor's darker side. Instead the Master's story was unfinished, making me pause for wonder about how it might have been better if The Daemons had seen the character out early but conclusively; if we could remember the Doctor-Master conflict as being more edgy and less chummy and we could consider it case closed. On a narrative level it was a shame that this intended finale story didn't see the light of day as such a revelation might have added a compelling dimension to the moment in The Time Monster where the Doctor can't abandon the Master to the vengeance of Kronos and has his arch-enemy released back into the Universe to cause more havoc. As it stands, however, such a scene is left as a standalone and seems to make the Doctor look like an idiot of the highest order. Okay maybe it doesn't, I've looked at the scene again and realised that the Doctor does have it in mind to take the Master into his own custody when Kronos releases him, but the Master escapes from him. It actually seemed appropriately merciful of the Doctor at the time and he justifies his decision well, but unfortunately it looks retrospectively like a stupid thing for the Doctor to do, because had he not done that then the world of Traken wouldn't have been destroyed.
Instead Frontier in Space ended up unintentionally being the final swansong for Delgado's Master. It's a Master story I can think back on very fondly indeed, where the Master is at his most villainously entertaining, whether reading aloud his (forged) long list of crimes that the Doctor has allegedly committed, or passing a space journey's time by reading War of the Worlds at the backdrop of the story's tensions between Earth and Draconia (look ma, it's postmodernism!) Actually that's one moment where the Master's connoisseur tastes really hints at him and the Doctor being two sides of the same coin. It couldn't have been made any clearer that Delgado enjoyed himself enormously in the role and that he really wanted the kids to be entertained by his villainy, in a safe way.
I've come to terms with the fact that Doctor Who couldn't always be so edgy and golden as it was under Troughton and Tom Baker, and am even glad for the lighter and cosy eras. But come the Tom Baker era and the show had moved on to more adult territory and Delgado's Master would have looked out of place in such an era. Although Tom Baker is frequently dubbed as the 'comedy' Doctor, the era he inhabited had a far less squeamish seriousness about it that few other eras shared. In an era where conflicts were dark and hands-on, and where the Doctor was arguably less tolerant of his enemies, the chummy Doctor-Master relationship would have to go. Furthermore if Delgado's Master had been the equal of Pertwee's Doctor, he achieved this easily with a connoisseur character, good manners and a mocking contempt for the military. When it came to Tom Baker's Doctor, it wasn't so easy to create an equal of sorts to the Fourth Doctor. Tom Baker's Doctor had an omnipotence of knowledge and a sense of immediate authority and quick adaptability. As a godlike Doctor, Tom Baker's best enemies tended to be those with either godlike powers such as Sutekh and the Black Guardian, or enemies with godlike ambitions such as Davros and Morbius.
It seemed to me actually that the Master as he appeared in The Deadly Assassin was actually more the antithesis of the Doctor than his equal. Whilst the Doctor commanded authority, the master shied away into the shadows; whilst the Doctor was articulate and restrained, the Master spat rage with every word he uttered. If the Doctor was God, and the Master was the fallen Lucifer, and Gallifrey was heaven, then this was where the Master would be seen in his true form, an angel with burnt wings, stripped of his Earthly superficial suaveness and caddish charm. The Master in the Tom Baker era, by working hard to further propagate his dying lifeforce, also represented what was perhaps the central theme of the Tom Baker years: survival at all costs. The kind of theme that echoed throughout Genesis of the Daleks, The Brain of Morbius, Talons of Weng-Chiang and even City of Death.
Most eras had a theme of sorts (usually by accident). The Hartnell era was about the meeting between the primitive and the advanced, the Troughton era was about the dangers of technology, the Pertwee era was anti-authority (after all, its central adversary was someone who used hypnotism to coerce obedience), the Davison era was a Doctor-centric theme about the failure of the Doctor's peaceful methods in a dark universe, the Colin Baker era was a bored era where stories were on a plotless randomiser, but gradually a consistent theme became that of life under surveillance, and the Sylvester McCoy era was about 'unfinished business' (so was Davison's last season actually, but Colin's era gradually undid the tied threads again).
It is quite fun to speculate on what might have happened between Frontier in Space and this story. I could take it as read that Delgado was the Master's next to last incarnation, and that he became emaciated when the Terran and Draconian empires attacked the Ogron homeworld, which would explain why the Master now hated the Doctor so, and likewise the Doctor's renewed hatred of the Master (he is not sorry when he thinks the Master is dead at the end), was possibly based on feeling the Master has crossed the line when he allied himself with the Daleks.
To all intents and purposes, The Deadly Assassin ranks as the Master's finest hour and a half in the show. It is part of the reason why it has never been easy to peg down whether the Master was a disposable pantomime villain, or a character that carried great potential for jaw-dropping plots, for he could be both and neither, but for The Deadly Assassin he was the latter.
The Deadly Assassin is hard to dispute as one of Doctor Who's greats. It has often been dubbed as an exposure of the corrupt side of Gallifreyan society; an exposure of that kind seemed to be inevitable given how many villainous Time Lords we'd already come across: the Monk, the War Chief, the Master, Omega and Morbius. To my mind The Deadly Assassin didn't go that far, but it accounted for the fact that Time Lord society wasn't perfect and individual Time Lords like Goth were not above corruption, and that the righteous image of the Time Lords was simply propaganda.
Although The Brain of Morbius, in reinforcing the darker past of Time Lord society does seem like a season-early omen of The Deadly Assassin, there wasn't so much a masterplan at work when it came to bringing back the Master for that story. Robert Holmes allegedly wanted to follow the Master's story up by making him the villain in The Talons of Weng-Chiang (that would have been a great story for him to go out on) but Philip Hinchcliffe vetoed the idea, since his ambitions for the series were to keep it fresh and original. I suppose that's why in The Deadly Assassin, the old concept of Gallifrey and the Master are given major reinvention, much like Genesis of the Daleks does for Skaro and the Daleks. The history of Gallifrey, just like the history of Skaro, is majorly rewritten and the Master, just like the Daleks, is given a newfound seriousness and primal hatred that makes them frightening and into a major threat against the universe once more. The fact that both stories ended with the respective villain surviving and at liberty, despite coming closer than ever to being vanquished forever, leaves some major universe-shattering imponderables unresolved at the end of Hinchcliffe's reign.
Certainly I can understand Kim Newman's argument that after Horror of Fang Rock, Doctor Who just wasn't as important as it used to be, and that the greatness of the Hinchcliffe era set up a hole that subsequent eras of Doctor Who inevitably fell into very often. The Hinchcliffe era was the point where everything reached its apex of development: the Daleks, the Master and the Doctor himself had reached a point that could never be bettered and all subsequent stories would only diminish the effect. Certainly the corrupt nature of Gallifrey was revisited many times, but each time familiarity made it a duller place to be. Once Davros had been introduced he wouldn't go away, the Daleks were suddenly far less adept at conquering the universe, were being literally creamed by Movellans and soon ended up just shooting each other. The Master reverted into his old pantomime self, and the Doctor regenerated firstly into Peter Davison, a more naive incarnation that was toothless compared to Tom Baker; and then regenerated again into Colin Baker, a Doctor who was as scattered as Tom Baker was collected, and who was generally not likeable; before finally regenerating into Sylvester McCoy who brought back the omnipotence and ruthlessness of Tom Baker's Doctor. Perhaps it would have been better to end Doctor Who on an imponderable note in 1977 and then let those imponderables be wrapped up in the 2005 revival, rather than have those imponderables stretched and over-familiarised and demeaned piece by piece.
Wait a minute, I'm getting ahead of myself. The Master's return was a belated one, but he eventually came back in The Keeper of Traken and got a trilogy to himself throughout Traken, Logopolis and Castrovalva. Throughout thistrilogy, he felt as dangerous as he had in Terror of the Autons and The Deadly Assassin - and this time he eventually kills the Doctor. To me the Master Returns Trilogy had a certain Harry-Potter-before-its-time feel with the dark fairytale feel, old mystical rituals, sinister parochial figures and a life and death struggle at a great height.
The Keeper of Traken to me really captures the Master at his best for me: it taps into the idea of the Master as being a force of nature with the powers of fate at his command. That coincidence is on his side. The keeper declares "Evil!" when he sees the Master but, as fate has it, everyone thought he was referring to the Doctor. That to me is a great moment of fate being against the Doctor, sustaining the Master's deceit, just like the similar scene in The Sea Devils.
Logopolis follows up as the Master achieves his greatest victory and kills the Fourth Doctor. I personally think that is the best regeneration scene of them all. As poignant as Peter Davison's death, but without Colin Baker there to kill the scene by bitching at Peri the first chance he gets. Whilst the JNT trademark montage of flashbacks can usually be dismissed as indulgent fanwank, here it almost reads as Paul Cornell's idea of Doctor Who before its time - whereby the lives that the Doctor has touched are just as important as his acts of heroism (to me it's as much a Paul Cornell prototype as the scenes in the church in Curse of Fenric).
Over the course of the trilogy, the Master regenerates, as does the Doctor; it would have been nice if this had been the tradition for the show. Since every Doctor-Master encounter was always in linear fashion, it would have been good if each Doctor could be drawn as having a different Master to face off with: Pertwee with Delgado, Tom Baker with the emaciated Master, and Peter Davison with Ainley.
In many ways the Master seems to say something about each incarnation of the Doctor. In the absence of the Master in the Hartnell and Troughton eras, the Doctor was a fully-formed character with grey areas and a ruthless streak. The appearance of the Master in the Pertwee era seemed to emphasise the Doctor's new compassion, just as much as the focus on the Doctor having two hearts and therefore twice the caring, or how he had appealed for peace in the conflict with the Silurians or Sea Devils, and likewise the Doctor had shown mercy towards the Master at frequent points.
The Master in the Tom Baker years was less frequently seen but always seemed more dangerous when he did, seeming to mirror the fact that Tom Baker's Doctor was also more ruthless.The Brain of Morbius can be seen perhaps as an example of how snappily and how fiercely a conflict between the Doctor and an evil renegade Time Lord can be when done as just a standalone and the sense of relief when the Doctor vanquishes the evil Time Lord for good - and by comparison really makes the Doctor/Master conflict seem tedious. Added to that was Logopolis, where we see one of the few occasions where the Doctor is prepared to actually kill the Master, in his operation to drown the TARDIS.
Then of course came Peter Davison, and it seemed that the Doctor could never be so ruthless again; there'd be no more stories where the Doctor could get away with shooting Ogrons or Ice Warriors. This was a Doctor who was especially repellant to violence. Peter Davison's Doctor didn't really seem to understand the logic of violence in the way that his predecessors did. After all if the Doctor was completely opposed to violence of all kinds no matter what the situation, it stands to reason that he never would have associated with Jamie, the Brigadier or Leela in the first place. Patrick Troughton had a tendency to annihilate his enemies utterly, and Tom Baker was rarely merciful to his enemies either. In fact the one time he was merciful and spared the Daleks' destruction, part of his reasoning was that the universe needed something to wage war against - and the next time he visits Skaro, he tries to blow up Davros.
When Peter Davison got on his soap-box, he didn't seem to do so as intelligently as his predecessors. It's small wonder then that his best stories are actioneering ones that feature an absence of any moral debate, such as Caves of Androzani and Earthshock.
Still it was fitting for this new Doctor that after the Master not only cost the Doctor one of his lives but also destroyed Traken, that this Doctor would leave the Master to a more merciful fate imprisoned in Castrovalva.
It did seem that there were plans to make a masterplan of some kind out of the Doctor-Master conflict that would get to the core of the Doctor's wrestle with his own misguided compassion and hopefully would be completed in a way that Delgado's story sadly couldn't. Certainly The Five Doctors does seem to make a premonition of how the Master will die in Planet of Fire.
It also seemed to follow a path as to the Doctor's development; at a time in the 80's when cinema was dominated by negative images of society and a conforming macho masculinity, the story of the fifth Doctor told a tragic tale of a new age sensitive man who couldn't survive in such an environment. His stories often work better as a characterisation of him than plots in their own right, as often the Doctor himself is required to work against the plot in each case, and although it's something I've been sceptical of, it became a relateable kind of characterisation for the times that we fail, for when we alienate friends, when we struggle to adjust or when we're forced to go against our own nature somehow.
He had beaten the Master without violence in Castrovalva, and in Kinda he had saved the lives of everyone, which seemed to make a hopeful hero of the new Doctor. But his optimism didn't last; first his hand was forced and he ended up killing Omega to save the universe, then he found gradually that his hand was being forced more often. He perhaps realised that the Doctor's calling in life often meant being a terrorist, and in The Five Doctors he proved to be far more squeamish about doing so than his more pragmatic and ruthless predecessors, after all that the Doctor had done to try and do the right thing: sparing the rod in Warriors of the Deep only for the humans he was meant to protect to be killed; hesistating over executing Davros (a war criminal of the highest proportions) but in his attempt to do so, got his fellow escorts killed because he delayed them; then going to the other extreme and breaking out the plague against the Daleks (seeing these conditioned creatures suffering such a nasty fate by a Doctor whose methods were exactly mirrored by Davros' own, because of his failure to eliminate the man who birthed and conditioned them out of choice), only to alienate Tegan; finally, the Doctor faces the Master and is seemingly surprised how vicious the Master has become, and eventually he kills the Master by ultimately doing nothing to save him.
As Resurrection of the Daleks had done for the Dalek empire, Planet of Fire saw the Master already underfooted by offscreen events that would make it easier for this squeamish Doctor to succeed; except, of course, that it would call on the Doctor to pay the price of his soul to win. There was something about the Master's fate in Planet of Fire that made the character's death a strangely tragic one in perhaps the same way that The Final Game might have done for Delgado. As with stories like The Daleks, The Sea Devils, Genesis of the Daleks and most of Season 21, the Master's story had told of the failure of merciful methods at combatting an evil man. The Doctor couldn't save the Master, because he had already done so before at the cost of Traken's destruction ultimately, and he couldn't make that mistake again. As a final ending it could have said so much about the history between the characters that we had witnessed since the 70's. It's an episode that made the Master such a tragic figure that whenever I criticise the character and the Doctor's softness toweards him, I now feel like I'm kicking a puppy.
It would have been wholly appropriate for the Master to have met his end here, but he didn't. It seemed that once Colin Baker became the Doctor, the show was ultimately left without a plan. The fact that the Master survives, through some cock and bull, completely overwrites the weight of the Fifth Doctor's decision to finish him, as much as Colin Baker's first words in the role completely destroys the poignant air of noble sacrifice of the Fifth Doctor.
As I've said before, the Sixth Doctor era was a mess. It is sad that lines from Colin's stories such as "I am the Doctor, whether you like it or not" and "Can't we just have the edited highlights" have been immortalised for all the wrong reasons. (I suppose the same is true of Resurrection's "I can't stand the confusion in my mind.") To my mind they never had a real clue how to characterise the Sixth Doctor either; he seemed like a product of bored writers who decided to bring out all manner of sporadic feelings to the Doctor, from farcical to menacing to just snobbish without rhyme or reason. The Doctor lacked his old consistency, so where did that leave the Master?
Well basically he was, like nearly everything else about the program in this 1985-86 period, merely entertaining on a superficial level. In fact, it must be said that in an era of grotesques, where even the Doctor himself was seen as a grotesque in The Twin Dilemma and Mindwarp, there was something quite refreshing about the Master's presence and Ainley's charisma. A throwback to the period where the show had more class and charm and restraint and where even the villains weren't so ugly or volatile. I must say he ended up being one of the most entertaining aspects of Trial of a Time Lord, particularly his moments with Glitz ("perhaps this will appeal to your crass soul") and, of course, "moments like this should be savoured".
If I've ever had a problem with the Master it was never because of his lack of charisma or the way he was performed, but because of how his effect on the program often made the program feel stuck in a rut and made the Doctor seem inadequate.
But the Master basically began to matter less as a character: his history in the previous episode was frequently forgotten whether he was killed in fire, trapped in the Rani's TARDIS with evolving dinosaurs or trapped in the Matrix at the mercy of the Time Lords. He eventually was relegated to second fiddle to Time Lord villains like the Rani and the Valeyard.
The Valeyard was perhaps the closest that Robert Holmes had gotten to his idea of having the Doctor literally up against a distillation of his darker half, which apparently was intended to be answer to the Master's own origins in The Final Game. Unfortunately, again, the death of Robert Holmes prevented this idea from being properly explored and the conclusion of the episode was half-hearted: the Valeyard was meant to say something about the dangerous Doctor regaining his moral integrity and there were scenes in The Ultimate Foe where it threatened to be brilliant, but it never really became anything but contrived and ridiculous. The Valeyard ended up only proving that Michael Jayston would have made a far better Sixth Doctor than Colin Baker did. The Big Finish audio adventures (and perhaps Terror of the Vervoids as well) have proved that Colin Baker could be a brilliant Doctor, but as most of the TV episodes proved, he didn't make a good 'dangerous' Doctor at all.
Then there's the outrage caused by the violent characteristics of Colin Baker - which were perhaps no different really to Patrick Troughton or Tom Baker's own violent methods, but which stuck out more because of the contrast with Peter Davison's Doctor and also the fact that plot deficiencies of the era made the Doctor's actions feel unmitigated because of a lack of momentum.
In any case, the Doctor regenerated in what is perhaps the only time where the Doctor's regeneration is simply thrown in for the sake of recasting, and in which nothing about the episode seems to lead up to it. There was no dying planet Mondas to reflect the Doctor's own ageing to decay, no elaborate but futile run from the Time Lords before they forced him to change, no minor narrative of gangland America to lead up to the Doctor being in the wrong place at the wrong time, and no noble sacrifice like all the others.
This was a Doctor who could be ruthless but who had to adhere to a code of honour, unlike the Sixth Doctor. He could for instance engineer the destruction of Skaro and Davros, but only if it wasn't him who pressed the button. When he taunted Davros into pressing the button, he was making one last desperate attempt at proving to himself that he was doing the right thing and that Davros really was beyond redemption.
Similarly it seemed as though the Master in his appearance in Survival had been struggling with maintaining some degree of dignity - a killer trying to contain his savage nature - and ultimately he fell to his savagery while the Doctor regained himself.
But there was still one last TV encounter with the Master to be had in the TV Movie (I'm not going to go on things that happen outside the TV canon) and the parallels between the Doctor and Master, as they regenerate together and find respective companions, are conveyed very heavily by the visuals and cross-cutting. But ultimately the whole point of the Master in that film is to simply kill him off for good in a way the old series never did.
I have said that the story of the Master was needlessly drawn out and how nice it would be if we could have had the 'edited highlights'. If the character merely had six stories that caught him at his best: Terror of the Autons, The Daemons, The Sea Devils, The Deadly Assassin, The Keeper of Traken, Logopolis and Survival. And yet, as I've said, the Master's charisma sometimes was the most entertaining aspect of the show when it was running on bust. There was a great story in there somewhere that was drawn out, then truncated before it could reach its climax and in which the character of the Master never really reached his full form. Suffice it to say, maybe it's for the best that the story of the Master is over now.
Some may speculate that the Master might have a chance of survival in the New Series. The last we saw of him was being gobbled up by the TARDIS, and we know from Boom Town that the energy of the TARDIS can be released and that it is possible that the Master's essence has already escaped and found a new host body, just as it's possible that since Davros was last seen leaving his mothership in an escape pod, he could still come back in the new series.
But then again that is clearly not Russell T Davis' intention. He is not such a fan of the old recurring villains, so from Russell's take on the story, the Master probably did meet his final end in the TV Movie, just as Davros himself was probably killed in the Time War. And so if the Doctor's old enemies are gone - the ones who always worked as his antithesis and his mirror - then the show has focused on the Doctor-companion relationship instead to get to the soul and compassion of the Doctor and the things he does.
A Review by Finn Clark 21/11/06
I'm kinda cheating here. Is this a review? Oh, who cares. I've just watched The Curse of Fatal Death for the first time and for me its big revelation was how much I liked Jonathan Pryce's Master. (Richard E. Grant's Doctor was also fun, incidentally, which sheds light on the depth of Scream of the Shalka's failure with its lead character, although admittedly there poor Richard E. Grant was fighting against Cornell, Flash animation and the director's editing choices.) However even in that story, what's the best thing about Shalka? Yup, that's right. Derek Jacobi.
It's possible to think intelligently about how to turn the Master into an interesting villain. Two people in particular have done so on the Ratings Guide and I was so impressed that I'm just going to point you their way and sit on my hands. Thomas Cookson's article is great stuff, thoughtful and interesting. However what's most impressive about it is that it follows Mike Morris's blockbuster and yet doesn't feel like The Twin Dilemma following Caves of Androzani. Has anyone sent Mike Morris's article to Russell T. Davies? Can someone give me an email address? It's probably inevitable that the Master will return some day, but it's also obvious that Russell T. Davies has reservations about the character.
The Master's popular image is that of a panto villain. One can't pretend that this reputation hasn't been earned, but there are also some interesting uses of the character lurking in the canon. Admittedly we're relying on the law of averages here. Even a blind man will accidentally hit a few bullseyes if he throws enough darts. Nevertheless that doesn't mean one can't proffer intelligent suggestions about making the character work in Doctor Who stories. Mike Morris does so and I think for writers his article's a must-read. Incidentally I'm completely serious about wanting Russell T. Davies to see this.
The big thing about the Master is that he often works even when he shouldn't. I love Eric Roberts in the TVM, yet he's blatantly just having a laugh and playing it as camp as a row of tents. Similarly Scream of the Shalka's Master should theoretically have been dull. He can't move. He can't go anywhere. In Cornell's novelisation he's pretty much a waste of space... and yet Jacobi is "tear the walls down" great, a joy to listen to. Ainley and Delgado could both be terrifically watchable even when lumbered with atrocious dialogue and stupid story roles. Several stories would have been far more interesting had they never starred the Master in the first place. The Claws of Axos could have been a Season Seven story with the Master's "ruthless but necessary" decisions given to the Brigadier. However Delgado lights up the screen and transforms the dynamics of any scene he's in. He's like Spike in Buffy. As a black-hatted "bwahahaha" villain he's more fun than we deserve, but when interacting with the heroes he's an absolute scream.
His hidden secret is that he's cool. It's unfashionable to admit this, but he is. We can all tut-tut that he's gauche and crude on a storytelling level, but when he hits the screen he can be absolute gold. His characterisation is as shallow as it gets, but you can have so much fun with it. He's evil. He loves being evil. He has fun being evil. He thinks it's hilarious to wind up the heroes, murder people and corrupt innocents into serving his malevolent purposes. There are two directions you can take the Master: either take him seriously and scare the living shit out of the audience, or just use him as a scene-stealing vehicle for a charismatic actor. It's not deep, but television doesn't have to be. They're both perfectly valid interpretations. Ideally I'd love to see a Master story that did both. He doesn't have to be suave (c.f. The Deadly Assassin), but when he is he's so damn cool.
Okay, that's the lowbrow stuff out of the way. I'd like to apologise... but I can't, because I'm not sorry in the slightest. It's at the heart of the character's appeal. We didn't go apeshit for Delgado because we're all stupid, you know.
The other good thing about the Master is that he's whatever you want him to be. Because there's so little at the character's core ("the Doctor, but evil"), he can be the personification of whatever evil your story's about. He can be Satan, the tempter. He can be the destroyer. He can be the liar. If you're not just churning out identikit hackwork and you've actually bothered to include a theme, the Master can address it. He's so intelligent and so slippery that he can have a point of view on every issue and he'll do absolutely anything evil you want him to. "Survival of the fittest" Darwinism? The serpent in utopia? No problem.
Unfortunately the character has one big problem. He always loses. There's nothing we can do there. It's in his contract as the bad guy. By the end of the Saward era, even the writers had realised and he was just playing the sidekick to other villains (the Rani, the Valeyard and even arguably Glitz). Of course there's a simple solution... have him win! Permutations on this basic idea can be seen in The Sea Devils, The Keeper of Traken, Logopolis. It's not hard to think of ways to do this. You could weaken him, as in Planet of Fire or even arguably his entire post-Delgado existence. (Losing to the Doctor is also more forgivable if the deck was stacked against him from the start.) You could give him a secondary goal, as in The Sea Devils or The Mind of Evil. Or alternatively you could just make the collateral damage so horrific that you're scared shitless of the guy even when he loses.
The first few years of BBC DVD releases neglected the Master. Suddenly we're getting Mark of the Rani and a boxed set of Keeper of Traken, Logopolis and Castrovalva, not to mention vague threats of Survival, but until then we'd only had The Five Doctors, The Claws of Axos and the TVM. Of those three, precisely one release wasn't "at the earliest opportunity" inevitable. However in longevity terms, the Master outranks more than half the Doctors. His stories even divide into seasons:
SEASON ONE (5 stories, 25 episodes)
Terror of the Autons (4)
Mind of Evil (6)
Claws of Axos (4)
Colony in Space (6)
The Daemons (5)
Well, that was easy. It's Pertwee's complete second year and it ends with the Master getting captured and put on trial.
SEASON TWO (5 stories, 26 episodes)
The Sea Devils (6)
The Time Monster (6)
Frontier in Space (6)
The Deadly Assassin (4)
The Keeper of Traken (4)
Appropriately this season even mimics the Pertwee season structure of 3 six-parters and 2 four-parters.
SEASON THREE (7 stories, 26 episodes)
Logopolis (4)
Castrovalva (4)
Time-Flight (4)
The King's Demons (2)
Planet of Fire (4)
The Five Doctors ("4")
Mark of the Rani ("4")
I think it works better in that order.
Again this season mimics the season structure of its era, this time Davison. Ainley's tenure didn't end here, but these are his sequential stories which tend to start by explaining how he escaped certain death in the last one. The Trial of a Time Lord broke this pattern by having the Ainley Master familiar with an out-of-sequence Doctor (the Valeyard), after which the character disappeared for three years.
SEASON FOUR (incomplete)
The Trial of a Time Lord
Survival
The TVM
The Destiny of the Doctors computer game?
Scream of the Shalka?
The Curse of Fatal Death?
And here things get messy, with a mish-mash of future-Masters and debatable canonicity. Do you count Destiny of the Doctors? Probably not, but its filmed clips are terrific fun and some of Ainley's best work in the role. Scream of the Shalka? It's obviously not canon (heh heh), but it was made by the BBC in a visual medium and "broadcast" on the internet... and again, Derek Jacobi steals the show.
Veering off-topic, you can also play this game with the Daleks and the Cybermen. The latter have two perfect seasons: 1. their black-and-white stories, and 2. everything in colour. You've got to squint a little with the Daleks, but throwing in the Cushing movies yields: 1. Ian and Barbara, plus the Cushing remakes. 2. the rest of the 1960s, with surprisingly little of it written by Terry Nation. 3. the 1970s (Terry's back). 4. everything else (and Terry's gone again).
I've always liked the Master. I'm even a fan of Anthony Ainley, who wasn't well served by his scripts. Look at the dialogue he had to read. When he's not being force-fed the scenery, he can be chilling. However it's notable that he hardly ever got opponents worth his mettle. The Master needs a rich supporting cast to murder, manipulate and deceive. Respect is due to Logopolis, but thereafter he was too often pitted against low-tech dolts (The King's Demons, Planet of Fire, Mark of the Rani). Incidentally some of the Master's best moments have been in Gallifrey stories (The Deadly Assassin, his early scenes in The Five Doctors and even The Trial of a Time Lord).
Yeah, I'd love to see the Master back. Call me crazy, but I'd even like to see them ship in Eric Roberts...
A Man of Wealth and Taste by Charles Phipps 18/5/07
The new series has already revived the Autons, the Daleks, the Cybermen, and a lot of fans are bitterly divided about the next obvious choice to bring back. The Master is probably the most controversial figure in the Doctor Who canon, with only a few characters receiving as much praise mixed with equal parts condemnation. Mike Morris' review on this site indicates that the Master is less a person than an incarnation of evil, Thomas Cookson's review of the character is one that says he's a man with a botched story arc, and Finn Clark's major point is that the Master is entertaining even when he makes no logical sense. None of these reflects my opinion that the Master is actually a grand character that is ill suited to attempts to 'fix him.'
I'll confess that I'm a huge Master junkie and am hardly unbiased. The very first Doctor Who that I watched was Time-Flight, of all things, and it left an impression of villainy in my mind that lasted until my adult life. Which is strange, since the story is rubbish to my adult self. Nevertheless, I was still able to enjoy the Doctor Who Movie simply because it had the Master in it. Despite there being absolutely no reason for me to like Eric Robert's performance as much as I did, there was an emotional reaction of childish glee to every scene-chewing moment. The first DVD I purchased of Doctor Who was Claws of Axos and now I'm eagerly going to get the Master Trilogy that has been long awaited for my movie shelf.
Everyone acknowledges that Delgado created a character that you couldn't take one's eyes off on the screen. Reviews have also softened their stance to Anthony Ainely as they recognize that he 'got it' despite being in some questionable dramas. However, I'd argue that the favorite Master story of many in The Deadly Assassin is one that removes most of the good that is enjoyable in the character. That it's an excellent story is undeniable, but it strips away the characterization that so many say is paper thin.
It seems obvious to state but the Master really is the darker side of the Doctor. Specifically, he's the Time Lord when you've stripped away the "never cowardly or cruel." Cruelty and cowardice are actually the Master's chief personality qualities. He enjoys the sense of power that he gets from lording himself over others and flees whenever things turn against him. An accusation of one-dimensional villainy is foolish in Doctor Who anyway, since the Daleks have been entertaining audiences for decades in their relentlessly one-note hatred. In the case of the Master, he's never so amusing as when you realize that he's a multifaceted villain that is always motivated by a combination of boredom, humor, power lust, and self-preservation.
Delgado and Ainely would probably agree that the Master is a character that embodies sympathy for the Devil. He's a refined character that often contrasts to the clownish silliness of the Doctor. Yet, it's the Master that seems to have a surreal Joker sensibility to his madness. In Terror of the Autons, he hides out in a circus and kills a man with a plastic doll. His 'shrinking ray' is one that transforms people into dolls in what can only be presumed to be a weapon based more on one's sense of style than military practicality. Yet, despite a body count that rivals the Daleks, the Master is one that often ends up showing traces of morality. The respect between him and the Doctor has always been a part of his characterization with their team-ups in The Claws of Axos and Logopolis being particularly enjoyable.
What is the appeal of the Master? I think that what irks so many people is the fact that the Master doesn't seem to take himself seriously. No one ever questions the Doctor's bizarre behavior as its always contrasted against enemies that are relentlessly self-absorbed or stuffy. While no one can question the ego of the man that has tried to take over the universe, the Master is one of the few villains that seems to have a sense of humor that equals the Doctor. Why did the Master dress up as a Chinese mystic for most of Time-Flight? Many have said bad writing but that fails to realize that it fits that the Master would do so to play act for his own amusement and later to screw with the Doctor's head.
Audiences can appreciate a villain who's just a selfish, scheming, and arrogant slimeball. It's worked as far back as Richard the Third. The Deadly Assassin failed to be a good Master storyline because it removed the qualities of the character that are so iconic. By reducing him to being nothing more than a pitiless embodiment of hate like the Daleks, it fails to appreciate that the character is motivated by the same sense of fun that the Doctor is. It's just that Master is playing for himself rather than others.