Editorial: My Problem with the Master
Before I start this rant, I’d like to say that I’m not bashing Roger Delgado as an actor in any way. It’s the character that he plays that I have an issue with, not Delgado himself.
Right so everybody knows the Master from that one British Television Show I’m constantly banging on about, Doctor Who. Here’s a little background on the Master. So back in 1970 Doctor Who changed a lot, and I mean A LOT. The series was now in color, there was a new Doctor, and the Doctor was now tied down to Earth after being exiled by the Timelords. With these changes came the introduction of UNIT and the whole series took on a sort of 007 tone, but was still Doctor Who at its essence. The Doctor now had a branch the army backing him up, a lab, some really nice clothes, a laboratory, and now used an alien form of karate known a “Venusian Aikido.”
Despite all these James Bond parallels the Doctor was still missing one thing, a Blofeld or an arch enemy. So, season 7, Jon Pertwee’s first season as the Doctor, goes by and we get settled in with the third Doctor. Then, season 8 rolls around and the Master is introduced as our Blofeld and… the stories suffer a lot from it in my opinion.

Throughout the rest of Pertwee’s era as the Doctor, the Master isn’t as big of a main character as he was in season 8 and as the series goes on he appears less and less and when he does appear it’s more enjoyable because we’ve had a break, I still, however, must point out that he still doesn’t develop any more than he did in season 8. We finally end up at Pertwee’s last season, season 11, where the Master doesn’t appear at all because Roger Delgado sadly died, which is a real damn shame because he was a great actor.

The next two Master stories, The Deadly Assassin and The Keeper of Traken do make the Master seem a bit more threatening before going back to making the Master the bland, not very threatening character he was when Delgado was the Master. Now, I can’t speak for every Big Finish audio with the Master out there, but from what I have listened to it seems like Big Finish is doing what I think should have been done with the Master. They develop him and make him seem like a bigger threat and that’s all I wanted the Master’s character to be. What? What’s that? What about the New Series Master? Oh Hell no, don’t even get me started on how the Master is portrayed in New Who.
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