My Dr. Who obsession started with the 2005 resurgeance. So my Knowledge about The Master is limited. I'd like to know/learn more about The Master. Where should I start?
My Dr. Who obsession started with the 2005 resurgeance. So my Knowledge about The Master is limited. I'd like to know/learn more about The Master. Where should I start?
The character goes back to the third-Doctor episode Terror of the Autons, and in that story, the Doctor already knows him. So if you want to know the "first appearance" background info, you could start there.
If you don't want to watch the rest of his 3rd-Doc appearances, skip ahead to the 4th-Doctor episode The Deadly Assassin. I believe that's the first time you really get to see Gallifrey (if you don't count the 2nd-doc episode, War Games, which doesn't show much).
After that, skip ahead to The Keeper of Traken to see how he gets the appearance he keeps through the rest of the old BBC run, and watch all the way through Castrovalva, which details the last two episodes of the 4th Doctor and the first episode of the 5th. He appears a few more times in the rest of the Doctors' all the way up to the last episode, Survival, but I don't think anything is espeically revealing about the character.
I'm not sure if he appears in the Virgin New Adventures (novels) at all. ISTR there were a number of properties of the BBC that weren't brought in due to rights issues, but I could be mistaken about that. And there's a series of 8th Doctor novels directly licensed by the BBC, but I can't recall if the Master appears in any of them.
There's a little more development in the TV Movie from 1996 starring Paul McGann as the Doctor and Eric Roberts as the Master. After that, he doesn't appear until the Sound of Drums with the 10th Doctor.
Hope this helps. If I've missed anything, please let me know.
Wikipedia article
That's cheating.
Chief Technical Officer
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Here's the BBC's list of all classic series appearances of the Master. (The Master also showed up for a few seconds as a presence in the Doctor's mind as part of the 5th Doctor's regeneration experience in Caves of Androzani; even though it was newly filmed material featuring Anthony Ainley, it's minor enough that it doesn't make this list.)
Potted bio:
The Master's activities were highly hazardous, so much so that when he first appears in the show in TERROR OF THE AUTONS (1971) he's already on his 13th incarnation, played by Roger Delgado, whilst the Doctor was only on his 3rd, played by Jon Pertwee. The Master and the Doctor clashed many times over the next two years or so. The original plan was that the Master would bring about the 3rd Doctor's regeneration and die in the process, but sadly Roger Delgado died in a car crash before this could happen and the character was quietly dropped. The Master is last seen (in 1973's FRONTIER IN SPACE) having allied himself to the Daleks to help them in their plan to destroy the Earth and Draconian Empires, but the Master's part of the plan is defeated. The Daleks later conclude that the Master either betrayed them or failed through incompetence, both outcomes to be answered with extermination.
He returned in THE DEADLY ASSASSIN (1976) played by Peter Pratt under heavy make-up. It is revealed that the Master underwent his 13th regeneration, which normally kills a Time Lord, but managed to stop it midway and use its healing energy to prolong his life without completing the regeneration (and thus killing him), vaguely similar to what the 10th Doctor did to abort his regeneration in the Season 4 finale (although presumably without a spare hand to absorb the energy). This leaves the Master alive, but only barely, reduced to a withered husk. He is defeated in an effort to seize power on Gallifrey and vanishes for a few years.
He returns in the same state in THE KEEPER OF TRAKEN (1981) where he transfers his consciousness into the body of Tremas of Traken (the father of the Doctor's companion Nyssa), played by Anthony Ainley. It is in this 'incarnation' that he returns to plague the Fifth, Sixth and Seventh Doctors. In this incarnation the Master is more vulnerable (since he cannot regenerate at all) and spends most of this time scheming to acquire a new set of regenerations (actually offered to him by the Time Lords in return for an alliance in THE FIVE DOCTORS, but the Master subsequently betrayed them and fled instead). In Ainley's final appearance, in SURVIVAL (1989), the Master is last seen trapped on a planet as it is about to explode, and it is theorised that the Time Lords tracked him down and apprehended him at the last moment.
In the 1996 TV movie, the the Time Lords surrendered the Master to the Daleks for extermination as a gesture of good faith, believing it would avert the looming Time War (this is a later Russell T. Davies-penned retcon, but fits the events of the film quite well). However, the Master had apparently taken steps to allow his consciousness to possess other lifeforms, and he was able to take control of a slug-like lifeform native to Skaro and seek refuge in the Doctor's TARDIS when he came to collect his remains. Arriving on Earth in 1999, the Master possessed an ambulence driver (played by Eric Roberts) and wreaked havoc until the Doctor defeated him, apparently killing him by plunging him into the TARDIS' link to the Eye of Harmony (the black hole that powers all TARDIS technology).
The Master seems to have been imprisoned in a death-like state rather than killed outright (this is precedented: the creator of the Time Lords' time travel technology, Omega, was likewise trapped in the Eye of Harmony for many millennia before being freed in earlier stories), and the Time Lords recovered him when the Time War broke out. They gave the Master a new, Gallifreyan body with a full set of regenerations, and he agreed to join the fight. Thus the 1st incarnation of the Master's second Time Lord body was played by Derek Jacobi. Interestingly, this incarnation never came face-to-face with the Doctor (explaining why he doesn't recognise him) despite the Doctor knowing of his return. As we know from the new series, the Master was so terrified by the Dalek victory in the battle for the Cruciform that he fled to the end of time, disguising himself as a human. The Doctor inadvertantly brought about his restoration and subsequent regeneration into his second body's 2nd incarnation, played by John Simm.
I am highly dubious he either perished or was imprisoned in the Time War again in his latest story, and will probably return in a year or two to confront the Doctor once again.
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Chief Technical Officer
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One really lame thing to mention: in nearly every Master story of the 1980s, the Master is throughly vanquished, and when next he returns, there's usually no explanation offered regarding how he managed to get out of the seemingly inescapable fix in which we last saw him.
Also, odds are good that he's first seen wearing a disguise, quite possibly for no apparent reason.
One really lame thing to mention: in nearly every Master story of the 1980s, the Master is throughly vanquished, and when next he returns, there's usually no explanation offered regarding how he managed to get out of the seemingly inescapable fix in which we last saw him.
Also, odds are good that he's first seen wearing a disguise, quite possibly for no apparent reason.
That's very true, but sometimes I have to seperate the character from the actions of producers and network folk.
Meaning that I never got the sense that some people at the very top actually took the show as seriously as the people who had to do the hands on creative work. So each episode was seen as means to an end of getting to the next episode. I might be wrong, but I never saw anything like long range series planning in the show itself until this modern era.
I can't help but think what character portrayed by Anthony Ainsley or Delgado could do when the writers could develop a plot over an entire season as opposed to one isolated episode.
Vote Saxon!
Vote Saxon!Umm, no, you mean *vote Saxon*.
(Yes, he even had a website set up for him....)
Nice. Thanks for that.
A. Harold Saxon intends to offer a fresh approach to co-operation between nations. As part of this, he believes that the Euro is essentially irrelevant.
Love it.
Remember, no body
not dead!
That doesn't even matter. Remember, the Doctor burned the Master's body on a funeral pyre, and he STILL came back!