The Master (Classic Who)


 *  NOTE: The article details The Master as depicted from "Classic Doctor Who" - which ran from 1963 to 1989, for information on The Master from the Revival Era of Doctor Who (2005 to present) see here or for info in The Master from Extended Who see here. 

"I only need two things. Your submission and your obedience to MY WILL!"

- The Master

The Master was one of most recurring antagonists in the Classic BBC science fiction series Doctor Who and appeared far more evil than he did in the series revival. He was an immortality seeking renegade Time Lord who was continuously searching for new ways to survive.

He was portrayed by 4 actors primarily in Classic Who the late Roger Delgado, the late Anthony Ainley, Eric Roberts (who also voiced Dark Danny) and Alex Maqueen.

Two actors also portrayed the disfigured version of his 13th incarnation (Peter Pratt and Geoffrey Beavers).

Beginning
The Master's madness begun at the age of eight when he was taken before Untempered Schism, a gap in the fabric of space and time, as part of a Time Lord initiation ceremony. Since then, the Master has been plagued by the four-beat sound of drums, believing them to be the "drums of war", and became into a would-be universal conqueror. Like the Doctor, he got his own TARDIS and continued doing evil until he met the Doctor again, when he was already in his Twelfth incarnation.

13th incarnation
The Master first encountered the Doctor during his Third incarnation when he was trapped on Earth. Wanting to make the Doctor suffer, the Master allied himself with various evils like the Nestene Consciousness or the "Sea Devils", a mutated version of the Silurians, to undermine UNIT. After the Master's scheme to provoke a war between the Human and Draconian Empires on behalf of the Daleks (though he was planning to betray them) failed, the Master retreated.

In search for a new way to survive
By the time he met the Fourth Doctor, the Master had suffered a serious injury in the meantime. As the Master was in his thirteenth and last incarnation when he suffered the damage, he was unable to regenerate, and would normally have been expected to succumb to his injury.

and die permanently. But fueled by his burning hatred, the Master was able to will his body into staying alive, despite it suffering increasing decay over time, eventually reducing him to a rotting husk of his former self. In this state, the Master come across the fellow Time Lord, Chancellor Goth. Sensing that Goth was hungry for power, the Master was able to mentally influence and use him for a scheme to steal the artifacts of Rassilon, in order to steal energy from the Eye of Harmony, which he hoped would help him to restore his damaged body to a healthier state, as well as getting revenge on the Time Lord and the Doctor, by also using the artifacts to destroy Gallifrey. The Doctor was, however, able to foil this scheme, but could not stop the Master from escaping once again in the aftermath.

While hunting for the mysterious White Worm in Derbyshire in 1979, the Doctor once again happened upon the Master, and was surprised to see him in a still damaged, but also notably less decayed form. The Master revealed that he had managed steal a small amount of energy from the Eye during his previous scheme. While it was not enough to completely restore himself, it allowed the Master to heal himself into a more stable state.

The Master would next encounter the Doctor, as he was scheming to take the mighty powers of the mythical Keeper of Traken for himself. Though the Doctor was able to prevent him from accomplishing this, the Master would still achieve a triumph of sorts as he was able to find a more permanent way to cheat death; namely by transferring his being into the body of a Trakenite scientist named Tremas.

14th incarnation
In his new body he headed to Logopolis in hopes of discovering the mysterious purpose the planet's people was working towards. Halting the operations of the planet, he demanded answers from its leader, but through this interrogation he discovered that the purpose of Logopolis was to keep a entropy field which threatened to destroy all the universe at bay, and his through his meddling he had inadvertently brought all of existence in danger. He sought out the help of the Doctor, who reluctantly agreed to work together with him, as he saw as the only way to save the universe.

However, after they stabilized the Charged Vacuum Embodiment and thereby stopped the entropy field, their uneasy alliance quickly ended, as the Master immediately decided to exploit the situation. He send out a message to the people of the universe threatening to unleash the entropy field again, unless they all submitted and accepted him as their supreme ruler. The Doctor was able to stop him, but was seriously injured in the process and had to regenerate into the Fifth Doctor. To get revenge, the Master lured the Doctor to the city Castrovalva where he posed as the librarian Portrevee. After the Doctor foiled his plan the city disappears along with the Master. But the Master would return by unexplained means, still searching for a way to extend his life.

When the five Incarnations of the Doctor were kidnapped by Borusa, the Time Lords promised the Master new regenerations if he could save the Doctor. The Fifth Doctor didn't trust him and was teleported away, so he allied the Cybermen to get to the Tower of Rassilon, hoping to receive immortality.

Although the Doctors can capture him, the Master is able to continue with his evil deeds at the Doctor's future incarnations: This includes teaming up with the Rani, interfering in the trial of the Valeyard against the Sixth Doctor or bringing an evil cat-like alien race to Earth, before he is finally left behind on their dying planet by the Seventh Doctor, while being turned into one of them by the cheetah virus.

Some how escaping from the planet this incarnation of The Master lived on although he was still plagued by the virus even in his next body.

The Master's Apparent End
Eventually, the Master is executed by the Daleks as a punishment for his "evil crimes". But he survives his execution by transferring his mind into a small, snake-like morphant that slithers inside the Seventh Doctor's TARDIS console, forcing the vessel to crash land in San Francisco on December 30, 1999 where it enters the body of a paramedic named Bruce. But as Bruce's body is unsustainable and begins to slowly degenerate, the Master attempts to access the Eye of Harmony with help of a teenager named Chang Lee, who he has convinced the Doctor is evil, to steal the Doctor's remaining regenerations, but instead is sucked into it and seemingly killed.

Living As a Body Snatcher
In truth though, the Master was once again saved by his strong will. Instead of being pulled apart by the destructive forces inside the Eye of Harmony, he managed to keep his consciousness together, and eventually he learned to extend his mental abilities outside the Eye and into the Doctor's TARDIS, hoping to find a way to escape. One day, as the TARDIS was floating at night time over London in the late Victorian Era, he had luck with subconsciously influencing one of the Doctor's companions as he was sleeping, leading the companion to sleepwalk to the Eye and open it, allowing the Master to escape, though in a severely diminished, insubstantial form.

Following his escape into Victorian London, the Master was once again able to possess a human, but he also faced the problem of the body gradually decaying into uselessness, forcing him to continuously possessing new bodies over the years, while trying to keep a low profile to keep the Doctor from detecting him. Knowing that the time of World War I was approaching, the Master eventually decided to emigrate to America to stay out of the conflict. He boarded the Titanic, oblivious to the ship's infamous fate. The Master, though taken by surprise by the accident striking the ship, was able to survive by cheating himself to a spot on the lifeboats, and he eventually reached the shores of the United States, landing in New York, just as his latest host body was about to give out. Here he had a chance encounter with a lieutenant in the infamous Hudson Duster's gang, and was able to possess him.

Determined to make his host body last longer this time, the Master decided he need money and power. Using his devious mind, he was able to climb to the top of the Hudson Dusters hierarchy, taking to calling himself "Don Maestro". After twenty years of living in his current body, he occupied the body of his host's son, Michael, and moved to Las Vegas where he owned a casino, the profits from he accumulated to fund experiments with the short term goal of elongating of the lifespan of his host body and, in the long term, finding a way to restore his Time Lord body. Fearing the eventual decay of his body, the Master used his money to buy a penthouse to isolate himself from infection. After years living in isolation, his host's son confronted him with the knowledge that he had possessed both his father and his grandfather in some way. He then trapped the Master in the penthouse.

After UNIT were alerted to the presence of penthouse, they discovered the Master in a comatose state, which he later revealed he had entered voluntarily as it was the only way to preserve his decaying body during his isolation. He was imprisoned in the UNIT Vault, awakening every five years for one hour, before returning to a coma. After fifteen years living in the Vault, the Master awoke for a third time, and was interrogated by two UNIT officers. However, he managed to hypnotize both of them and escape his imprisonment. Discovering that UNIT had recovered his TARDIS from a sealed tomb in the Valley of the Kings, he used it to escape from the Vault.

Eyes of the Master
The Master was eventually saved from his predicament by the Time Lords. Due to the growing danger of the Dalek Empire, the Time Lords came to see his savagery as a useful trait in a pawn they could use against them, and so they granted him a fully-restored Time Lord body as well as a new regeneration cycle, in return for him becoming an agent in their employ. When the Time Lords detected a possible timeline where the Eminence, a sentient gas that took control of humans, would become the final life-form in the Universe, they saw a potential in using the Eminence against the Daleks and the Celestial Intervention Agency gave the Master the information he needed.

The Master traveled to the Nixyce System and stole an Eminence Teleportation casket, integrating it into his TARDIS console. In 1970s London he posed as Dr Harcourt Diath and performed experiments on human immunity to the Eminence, hoping to remove it so the Eminence wouldn't be defeated. He saved Dr Sally Armstong from being hit by a taxi and recruited her. The Master removed people's eyes, curing blindness but enabling him to see through their eyes and control them. He encountered the Eighth Doctor, who told an Eminence located in his mind how to pilot a TARDIS. Using the casket in the Master's TARDIS it piloted it away with the Master and Sally. However using the telepathic circuits of his TARDIS the Master isolated the Eminence and Sally expelled it into the Time Vortex.

Some time later, Sally and the Master kidnapped Molly O'Sullivan from her home in 107 Baker Street.

Time War
The Master fought in the Time War against the Daleks for many years, but after the Dalek Emperor took control of "The Cruciform", the Master, horrified by the intensity of the the war, decided to flee, and remained ignorant of the war's outcome as he used a Chameleon Arch which stored his Time Lord nature and memories in a fob watch and allowed him to become biologically human in order to disguise himself.

Travelling to the end of the universe, the only place where he was convinced the Time Lords would not look for him, the Master eventually aged into the scientist, Professor Yana.

Quotes
"Doctor. Why don't you come in with me? We're both Time Lords, we're both renegades, we could be Masters of the galaxy! Think of it, Doctor: Absolute power! Power for good. Now, you could reign benevolently. You could end wars, suffering decease. We could save the universe!"

- The Thirteenth Master

"I am now nearing the end of my twelfth regeneration."

- The Thirteenth Master.

"There is some evil in all of us, Doctor – even you. The Valeyard is an amalgamation of the darker sides of your nature, somewhere between your twelfth and final incarnation, and I may say you do not improve with age."

- The Fourteenth Master.

"I always dress for the occasion."

- The Fifteenth Master

Trivia

 * Many producers have compared the relationship between The Doctor and The Master as something comparable to that of James Moriarty and Sherlock Holmes.
 * In the episode "The Final Game", The Master (in his thirteenth incarnation) was supposed to be revealed as the Doctor's dark side or his brother and he should die by sacrificing himself to save the Doctor. However, the episode was never made because the actor Roger Delgado died in a car accident in Turkey. Still the idea of a dark side of the Doctor was used for The Valeyard.
 * The idea for the Master also saving the Doctor was used for the 2009-2010 two-parter The End of Time in which the Master (played by John Simm) saved the Doctor and sacrificed himself to defeat Rassilon.
 * Roger Delgado and his co-star Jon Pertwee (who played the Third Doctor) were best friends in real life, with Pertwee suggesting Delgado for the role. They had also initially supported the idea for the Doctor to be the Master's brother until Delgado's death, which was one of the reasons Pertwee decided to leave the show.
 * In Series 10, the John Simm's Master now sports a goatee similar to that of Roger Delgado and Anthony Ainley's incarnations.
 * Although stories featuring multiple Masters at once has been depicted in other media such as comics and audio adventures, the series 10 two-part finale episodes "World Enough and Time" and "The Doctor Falls" is the first time in the history of the show in which multiple Masters have featured in the series proper. The episode featured the current incarnation Missy (Michelle Gomez) and the Harold Saxon Master (John Simm).