| The Master |
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| The Master. Moriarity to the Doctor's Holmes. A product of the most advanced and intelligent race in the Universe, he possesses a time/space machine that can take him anywhere and amazing hypnotic abilities. His one goal: the acquisition of Power, yet getting any sort of power is completely beyond him. As the Master and his nemesis were at uni together, they must be about the same age, so with the Doctor risking life and limb every week to save planets it is a testament to the Master's ineptitude that he's used up all his regenerations while the Doctor's still Jon Pertwee. Quite what sort of Power he wants and what he's going to do with it when he's got is a bit nebulous. His early mistakes a plain to see: he teams up with aliens invading Earth, the planet the Doctor has been exiled to, in the hope that they will gratefully give him some Power. Inevitably, and embarrassingly, he ends up being double-crossed and has to help the Doctor repel the invaders. Later, his methods changed somewhat, though it's difficult to see how he comes up with his schemes. |
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The Master would not appear again until 1976's Tom Baker story The Deadly Assassin, where Peter Pratt played him as an skeletal creature on the brink of death, having used up his regenerations. He appears in a similar form in 1981's The Keeper Of Traken, this time played by Geoffrey Beevers. At the climax to that story he takes over the body of Tremas, played by Anthony Ainley, who would play the Master until the final BBC Doctor Who story, Survival, in 1989. The Master returns in the 1996 TV Movie, Doctor Who, this time played by Eric Roberts. |
The character of the Master was created to be a Moriarty to the Doctor's Sherlock Holmes. William Hartnell had suggested a similar idea during his reign, that involved him having an evil son. The Master didn't appear though, until Season Eight, with Terror of The Autons. He is played by Roger Delgado and meets Jon Pertwee's Third Doctor. He is the villain in all the stories in Doctor Who's eighth season. He returns sporadically throughout Pertwee's run, until Delgado's untimely death in 1973. His final story is Frontier In Space. |
| They range in scale and dastardliness from holding the entire universe to ransom, to trying to stop King John from signing the Magna Carta. His disguises are many, but he usually opts for an alias that is either an anagram or foreign form of "Master", thus always giving himself away to the Doctor. In later encounters, his plans are limited to trying to get himself out of self-inflicted perils, like getting himself stuck on prehistoric Earth, shrinking himself to Lilliputian proportions, or being taken over by giant leopards. In a way it's hard not to feel sorry for him. He's the perpetual under-dog in his battles with the Doctor, his pain at constantly being thwarted hidden under a mask of camp menace and snarled repartee. |
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