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.

You see, the Master wasn’t subtle, he was in almost every single goddamn episode in season 8 and each time he was teamed up with another villain. Now if done well, the Master and the other villains could have balanced each other out and the stories could have been really interesting, however, the villains and the Master are never balanced out too well. Throughout season 8 it seems like the Master overshadows all the villains he works with even though, judging by the titles of the separate stories, they’re each meant to focus on the villains just as much as the Master, but that never happens and creates another set of problems with the stories. The writers make the Master so repetitive in his plots and schemes as if he’s meant to be taking the back seat, but he isn’t, so we get stuck with this horribly bland and repetitive main enemy for the entire season, never developing in any sort of way.

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 story that was originally going to end the Third Doctor’s era could have been the last story to feature the Master had it been produced. The story was titled The Final Game. The story would have revealed the details of the relationship between the Doctor and the Master. Revealing that either the Doctor and the Master were brothers, or that the Master was an amalgamation of the Doctor’s dark side, an idea that would be seen in the future when the Valeyard appeared. The story would have ended with the Master sacrificing himself in some way with the moral dilemma that should he set off a bomb, he would be killing his former friend, the Doctor. It’s a damn shame that this story was never produced because if it had been, we would have gotten a bit of backstory as well as some character development along the way, but it never happened.

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.