
For the past two years, Jokerside has tracked the Doctor’s arch-nemesis through time… Well, through the past five decades. From his suave arrival in the 1970s to her tussles with the Twelfth Doctor, Jokerside presents the summary… The Master throughout the Classic Series!
IT’S THE DOCTOR’S 53RD BIRTHDAY, BUT IT’S STILL A GOOD FEW YEARS OFF THE GOLDEN ANNIVERSARY WHEN WE FIRST SAW HIM CATCH UP WITH AN OLD SCHOOL FRIEND. ARRIVING IN 1971, EIGHT YEARS AFTER THE DOCTOR, THE MASTER QUICKLY ESTABLISHED HIMSELF AT THE HIGH TABLE OF WHO VILLAINS. With some Doctors, particularly his fifth and third incarnations, the Master was a pervasive, era-defining foe. During his fourth incarnation, the first of the villain’s rare appearances proved to be a classic against the adversary. While almost the entirety of his eighth incarnation would have the Master in opposition. He’s the foe who has caused the death of at least two, possibly three, of the Doctor’s 13 lives so far. And that puts him far ahead of the other great contenders for the throne of evil.
Series 9 of the New Series kicked off with a spat between Davros and the Master, the latter now in her Mistress form, one-sided as it was. The creator of the Daleks emerged three years after the Master, but which one could be said to be the Doctor’s nemesis? Each character is a scientific genius, has put up with huge physical discomfort and revealed layers of intricate hate over the years, but there’s an important difference. Davros is the background to the Doctor’s great opposition, the one we’ve followed from its very beginning. But the Master, purely malevolent, emerged fully formed with so much of his back-story with the Doctor and the universe in general, hidden in time.
Where from Whovember?
For the anniversary Whovember retrospectives, Jokerside took each of the Classic Series Doctors, and followed a specific journey through each incarnation. Having completed the Eleventh Doctor retrospective, where else could Jokerside go but the Moriarty to the Time Lord hero’s Holmes? Taking a similar tack with the Doctor’s nemesis, what started as the spring-based MarchSter series grew to span six decades. From suave opportunist to desperate survivalist in one era, from android to Time Lady in another. When it comes to the classic years, it all began in a circus…
Terror of the Autons, Season 8 (1971)
We should have known when it started so surreally… At the beginning of Doctor Who’s Eighth Season an eccentric Time Lord, popping up in a Monty Python-going-on-Douglas Adams way, warns the Doctor that his old school colleague had arrived on Earth with the marvellous parting shot, “oh, good luck!” We’d already seen the Master arrive by that point, setting an immediate dapper impression in the crucially off-kilter setting of a circus. As Jokerside observed, “In just a few lines, in his first scene (appearing before the Doctor), Robert Holmes and Roger Delgado define a cool, impeccable, menacing and powerful nemesis.”
Indeed, Robert Holmes made yet another crucial contribution to the fabric of the series by shaping a brilliant Moriarty to the Doctor’s academic, occasionally Venusian Aikido-flaunting, Holmes:
“The Doctor has never worn facial hair, except when in disguise or imprisoned for years in a dwarf star alloy cube, apart from the odd sweeping sideburn that the 1970s couldn’t control. The Master… Had a beard, a goatee that may as well have had a “twiddle this ‘tache menacingly” label hanging from it. The Master had a fine taste in suits, the Doctor had a frilly shirt, multiple coloured velvet jackets and a cape! The Master was a force for evil, with hypnotic control cowardice. The Doctor was noble, occasionally grumpy but compassionate. The Master had a working chameleon circuit in a TARDIS with an occasionally black interior, occasionally reversed. They both dished out the same faint praise to each other, but then again they are both Time Lords.”
But Holmes’ doesn’t just deal in symmetry in shaping a character that would remain as antagonist in every story that season:
“The Master arrives with supreme superiority, no bad feat when facing off against the Third Doctor. It’s in Terror of the Autons that the sparring starts, but where the pretty compelling evidence that the Master is an all-round more skilled scientist than the Doctor is set. Why else would the Doctor feel the need to ridicule him so much?” Continue reading “Doctor Who: The Master through the Decades – The Classic Series Compression Eliminated”