The War Chief: Difference between revisions
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=== Ally of the War Lords === | === Ally of the War Lords === | ||
[[File:The_War_Chief_and_Security_Chief_War_Games_in_Colour.png|thumb|left|The War Chief, alongside [[ | [[File:The_War_Chief_and_Security_Chief_War_Games_in_Colour.png|thumb|left|The War Chief, alongside the [[Security Chief (The War Games)|Security Chief]]. ([[TV]]: {{cs|The War Games (TV story)|The War Games}})]] | ||
Now calling himself "[[The War Chief (The War Games)|the War Chief]]", he worked with the [[War Lord]]s. They abducted soldiers from wars spread across [[Earth]]'s history, though they didn't go too far because of the risk of humans' technological knowledge, for [[War Game|simulated versions of the wars]] from which they came. Thinking [[human]]s the most vicious species in the galaxy, the aliens hoped to pit the survivors against each other and use them to conquer [[Mutter's Spiral]] once they had eliminated the weak and the cowards and were left with the hardier warriors. | Now calling himself "[[The War Chief (The War Games)|the War Chief]]", he worked with the [[War Lord]]s. They abducted soldiers from wars spread across [[Earth]]'s history, though they didn't go too far because of the risk of humans' technological knowledge, for [[War Game|simulated versions of the wars]] from which they came. Thinking [[human]]s the most vicious species in the galaxy, the aliens hoped to pit the survivors against each other and use them to conquer [[Mutter's Spiral]] once they had eliminated the weak and the cowards and were left with the hardier warriors. | ||
Revision as of 04:47, 24 December 2024
"The War Chief" was the title used by a renegade Time Lord, formerly of the High Council, who assisted a warlike race of Aliens in an ambitious plot to take over the Galaxy using deadly War Games. Although War Chief seemed to merely be his title within the War Games, (TV: The War Games [+]Loading...["The War Games (TV story)"]) some accounts showed him using it as his chosen title in other contexts, treating it as a name equivalent to "the Doctor" or "the Colonel". (GAME: The Legions of Death [+]Loading...["The Legions of Death (game)"], etc.)
After this plot was foiled by the Second Doctor, the War Chief was fatally shot, (TV: The War Games [+]Loading...["The War Games (TV story)"]) but, by many accounts, regenerated and went on to menace the Doctor again in a new body. (PROSE: Timewyrm: Exodus [+]Loading...["Timewyrm: Exodus (novel)"], Doctor Who and the Doomsday Weapon [+]Loading...["Doctor Who and the Doomsday Weapon (novelisation)"], GAME: The Legions of Death [+]Loading...["The Legions of Death (game)"], TV: The War Games in Colour [+]Loading...["The War Games in Colour (TV story)"], etc.) Accounts disagreed on the details, however.
Most notably, the relationship between the War Chief and the Master was contentious. While some accounts merely depicted them as former schoolmates, (PROSE: Divided Loyalties [+]Loading...["Divided Loyalties (novel)"]) or depicted the War Chief as a "protégé" to the Master, (GAME: The Legions of Death [+]Loading...["The Legions of Death (game)"]) others suggested that only one other Time Lord than the Doctor had run away from Gallifrey in the events leading up to the Third Doctor's exile on Earth, first offering him an alliance as "the War Chief" (PROSE: Doctor Who and the War Games [+]Loading...["Doctor Who and the War Games (novelisation)"], Doctor Who and the Doomsday Weapon [+]Loading...["Doctor Who and the Doomsday Weapon (novelisation)"]) before escaping Time Lord authorities and, in a new body, adopting the name of "the Master". (PROSE: Doctor Who and the Terror of the Autons [+]Loading...["Doctor Who and the Terror of the Autons (novelisation)"], Doctor Who and the Doomsday Weapon [+]Loading...["Doctor Who and the Doomsday Weapon (novelisation)"], AUDIO: The Home Guard [+]Loading...["The Home Guard (audio story)"])
Biography
Origins
According to many accounts, the War Chief was an early incarnation of the Time Lord who would later adopt the title of the Master. (PROSE: Doctor Who and the Doomsday Weapon [+]Loading...["Doctor Who and the Doomsday Weapon (novelisation)","Doctor Who and the Doomsday Weapon"], Doctor Who and the Terror of the Autons [+]Loading...["Doctor Who and the Terror of the Autons (novelisation)","Doctor Who and the Terror of the Autons"]) Such accounts treated “Magnus” as an old nickname for the Doctor's future nemesis, who had yet to choose a title. (COMIC: Flashback [+]Loading...["Flashback (comic story)"], PROSE: Goth Opera [+]Loading...["Goth Opera (novel)"]) However, accounts of the Master's early life were themselves largely contradictory. (PROSE: The Dark Path [+]Loading...["The Dark Path (novel)"], AUDIO: The Home Guard [+]Loading...["The Home Guard (audio story)"], etc.)
Other accounts claimed that the War Chief was an incarnation of a distinct Time Lord (GAME: The Legions of Death [+]Loading...["The Legions of Death (game)"], PROSE: Timewyrm: Exodus [+]Loading...["Timewyrm: Exodus (novel)"], Divided Loyalties [+]Loading...["Divided Loyalties (novel)"], A Brief History of Time Lords [+]Loading...["A Brief History of Time Lords (novel)"]) who, in his youth, went by the name "Magnus". (PROSE: Divided Loyalties [+]Loading...["Divided Loyalties (novel)"]) One such account even suggested that Magnus had a long-lasting fascination with a species of aliens who had come to Gallifrey seeking the secret to time travel for their own purposes, making his eventual involvement in the War Games the culmination and endpoint of his life. Accounts disagreed on whether this distinct War Chief was a schoolmate of the Master, whom the latter had once envied, (PROSE: Divided Loyalties [+]Loading...["Divided Loyalties (novel)"]) or a younger Time Lord who had "apprenticed" himself to the Master as a partner-in-crime before they fell out. (GAME: The Legions of Death [+]Loading...["The Legions of Death (game)"])
While one account claimed the War Chief encountered by the Second Doctor was in hs first incarnation, (PROSE: Dark Secrets of the Time Lords [+]Loading...["Dark Secrets of the Time Lords (feature)"]) others suggested that he had regenerated some time after his turn as a renegade. (PROSE: Save Yourself [+]Loading...["Save Yourself (short story)"], AUDIO: The Home Guard [+]Loading...["The Home Guard (audio story)"]) One of the Second Doctor’s encounters with an earlier incarnation depicted him experimenting with hypnotising human soldiers, as a prelude to some grander scheme about which he did not elaborate. (AUDIO: The Home Guard [+]Loading...["The Home Guard (audio story)"]) The future “War Chief” would first encounter the War Lord in a Trastevarian jail near the end of his life. On the brink of certain death, he told the War Lord that the Sisterhood of Karn’s Elixir of Life was vital to his people’s regeneration process. With the Elixir, Magnus regenerated. (PROSE: Save Yourself [+]Loading...["Save Yourself (short story)"])
Ally of the War Lords
Now calling himself "the War Chief", he worked with the War Lords. They abducted soldiers from wars spread across Earth's history, though they didn't go too far because of the risk of humans' technological knowledge, for simulated versions of the wars from which they came. Thinking humans the most vicious species in the galaxy, the aliens hoped to pit the survivors against each other and use them to conquer Mutter's Spiral once they had eliminated the weak and the cowards and were left with the hardier warriors.
The War Chief aided the War Lords by helping them build SIDRATs, TARDIS-like space-time machines. They used them to kidnap the human soldiers and travel between era-specific zones which they had created. The War Chief and the Second Doctor met and recognised each other, with the War Chief acknowledging the Doctor's change in appearance. The War Chief solicited the Doctor's help to double-cross the War Lords and seize power for themselves. The Doctor pretended to accept the War Chief's offer.
The Security Chief of the operation distrusted the War Chief, believing he meant to call in the Time Lords. While the Security Chief was willing to accept the War Chief had upheld his part of the bargain and had been afforded every need, he had still refused to tell them how to construct the SIDRATS.
The two engaged in a series of machinations against each other which ended with the War Chief disgraced when the Security Chief recorded a condemning conversation between the War Chief and the Doctor, and he took it to his leader. The War Chief got his revenge when he shot his rival dead. Unable to resolve matters, nor return the soldiers to their own times, the Doctor summoned the Time Lords for aid, while the War Lords uncovered the War Chief's plans and executed him, though he tried to talk his way around it, claiming those plans had been faked, but he wasn't believed. (TV: The War Games [+]Loading...["The War Games (TV story)","The War Games"]) Shortly after being shot dead, the Time Lord's regenerative process audibly began. (TV: The War Games in Colour [+]Loading...["The War Games in Colour (TV story)"])
Later fate
Information from The God Who Came For Christmas [+]Loading...["The God Who Came For Christmas (short story)","The God Who Came For Christmas"] should be added.
Regeneration into the Master
Some accounts depicted the Time Lord who had posed as the War Chief as having later become the Master. (TV: The War Games in Colour [+]Loading...["The War Games in Colour (TV story)"]) The Doctor and the Master were stated by the Keeper — who had been one of the Time Lords sent to the War Lords' colony-planet to put an end to the War Chief's schemes after the Doctor called in the Time — to have been the only two renegades ever to escape Gallifrey in stolen TARDISes, and fondly remembered the mess that these two TARDISes being stolen had caused back in the day. (PROSE: Doctor Who and the Doomsday Weapon [+]Loading...["Doctor Who and the Doomsday Weapon (novelisation)"]) A short time after the Second Doctor's sentence and forced regeneration, a Time Lord messenger was sent (TV: Terror of the Autons [+]Loading...["Terror of the Autons (TV story)","Terror of the Autons"]) by the High Council (PROSE: The Legacy of Gallifrey [+]Loading...["The Legacy of Gallifrey (short story)"]) to warn the Third Doctor about the Master, (TV: Terror of the Autons [+]Loading...["Terror of the Autons (TV story)","Terror of the Autons"]) who was out for revenge for "past deeds". (PROSE: The Legacy of Gallifrey [+]Loading...["The Legacy of Gallifrey (short story)"])
However, at least two accounts conflicted with this notion, claiming that the Master, or "Koschei", and the War Chief, or "Magnus", had been two separate childhood friends of the Doctor's. (PROSE: Divided Loyalties [+]Loading...["Divided Loyalties (novel)","Divided Loyalties"], AUDIO: Goth Opera [+]Loading...["Goth Opera (audio story)"]) In the post-Time War universe, one Gallifreyan historian's A Brief History of Time Lords [+]Loading...["A Brief History of Time Lords"] accounted for the War Chief and the Master's experience with the Untempered Schism at the age of eight as two different events, though in both casing ending with the young Time Lord initiate being secretly driven mad by what he saw in the Schism. (PROSE: A Brief History of Time Lords [+]Loading...["A Brief History of Time Lords (novel)","A Brief History of Time Lords"])
Aborted regeneration
- Main article: Felix Kriegslieter
When they examined the War Chief's "body" as they evacuated back to the War Lord homeworld, the War Lords realised that his body was not quite dead, and they loaded him into one of the last ships to leave the planet for further study. There, he began to regenerate, but because of the extent of his injuries and the inopportune circumstances, the regeneration aborted, leaving him trapped in an intermediary body, halfway between one form and the next.
Horribly deformed, this body looked like his past and would-be-future body conjoined together, with a misshapen dual skull and multiple stubby additional limbs growing out of the torso. Unable to regenerate again to fix the damage, he took to wearing cloaks, hoods and cane sticks to disguise the fact, with white hair and a bushy white beard. Eventually convincing the original War Lord leader's son and successor that his supposed "betrayal" was just a misunderstanding, he resumed his post as War Chief and helped the War Lords to break out of the time loop the Time Lords had erected around their world. Travelling to Nazi Germany, he continued to pursue the War Lords' agenda by posing as Felix Kriegslieter and trying to take over the Nazis from the inside.
Trapped in a burning building after the scheme was foiled by the Seventh Doctor, Kriegslieter found that being violently killed again reset his regeneration, and Ace glimpsed him, "bathed in the flame", having reverted to his "young, dark and satanically handsome" appearance. She had to flee before she could see what then became of him. (PROSE: Timewyrm: Exodus [+]Loading...["Timewyrm: Exodus (novel)","Timewyrm: Exodus"])
Regeneration into another War Chief
- Main article: The War Chief (The Legions of Death))
According to one account, the War Chief had been a "protégé" of the Master, who had helped him concoct the War Games scheme. After the scheme collapsed, the mortally-wounded War Chief escaped in a SIDRAT, regenerated into a new body, and found his own TARDIS. However, because the Master blamed him for the scheme's failure — a feeling which was mutual —, he lay low for a while, before reemerging in a plot in Roman Britain, whose eventual downfall may have involved any of the Third Doctor, the Colonel and Leora as well as their respective companions. (GAME: The Legions of Death [+]Loading...["The Legions of Death (game)"])
Personality
The War Chief was an ambitious and arrogant individual, cunning, and with great tactical abilities. He pretended to serve the War Lords loyally, while plotting to take control of them after they succeeded in their plans. He also made feuds easily which made it easy for his allies to turn against him. (TV: The War Games [+]Loading...["The War Games (TV story)","The War Games"])
Magnus was unconcerned about using up regenerations and never listened to the Doctor, who advised him not to waste them. (PROSE: Invasion of the Cat-People [+]Loading...["Invasion of the Cat-People (novel)","Invasion of the Cat-People"]) Behind the War Chief's actions lay real idealism, tainted with power lust.
While allied with the Nazis, the War Chief considered much of their racial beliefs, scientific works and belief in the occult to be nonsense. However, he was perfectly willing to play along with all of this to win favour with the Nazi leaders, especially Heinrich Himmler. He used a laser weapon disguised as a silver cane. During a sacrifice ceremony he wore a goat mask. (PROSE: Timewyrm: Exodus [+]Loading...["Timewyrm: Exodus (novel)","Timewyrm: Exodus"])
Behind the scenes
- The necklace prop the War Chief wears in The War Games [+]Loading...["The War Games (TV story)","The War Games"] is the same prop previously worn by Zephon in The Daleks' Master Plan [+]Loading...["The Daleks' Master Plan (TV story)","The Daleks' Master Plan"].
Connection with the Master
Although the character was never called anything but "War Chief" in his only televised story (1969's The War Games [+]Loading...["The War Games (TV story)","The War Games"]), there was no evidence that this was a regular moniker or modus operandi; during the story, the term "War Chief" was treated more as a title akin to "War Lord" and "Security Chief" instead of a name.
The War Chief had several qualities in common with the more lasting character of the Master, who would be introduced a season into the Third Doctor's exile on Earth storyline which followed on from the events of The War Games [+]Loading...["The War Games (TV story)","The War Games"], in an incarnation portrayed by Roger Delgado. By all accounts, the Master, though presented as already being an old enemy of the Doctor, was intended to be a new character.[1] However, the notion was subsequently proposed that, in light of the introduction of regeneration as a plot mechanic, the War Chief might be interpreted as a prior incarnation of the same Time Lord who went on to name himself the Master. Indeed, in such sources as the 1997 novel The Dark Path [+]Loading...["The Dark Path (novel)","The Dark Path"], incarnations of the Master before Roger Delgado were presented as not having used the "Master" title (though others, such as The Legacy of Gallifrey [+]Loading...["The Legacy of Gallifrey (short story)","The Legacy of Gallifrey"] and Masterful [+]Loading...["Masterful (audio story)","Masterful"], would suggest it went back to the Master's time in the Academy).
The earliest official source for the conflation of the War Chief and the Master was 1974's Target novelisation Doctor Who and the Doomsday Weapon [+]Loading...["Doctor Who and the Doomsday Weapon (novelisation)","Doctor Who and the Doomsday Weapon"], written by Malcolm Hulke, which established that the Doctor and the Master were the only two renegades ever to have run away from Gallifrey, while also calling back to the events of The War Games. Although the notion of the Master and the Doctor as the only two renegades in Gallifrey's history was soon abandoned with the introductions of Drax and the Rani, the retroactive reading of the "War Chief" as an early incarnation of the Master would continue to be referenced, discussed, and sometimes pointedly contradicted in many licensed and unlicensed works of Doctor Who fiction.
However, various other other accounts of the Master's early life ignored or contradicted the notion, and BBC marketing tends to stick with preseting Delgado as the earliest televised Master, ignoring both the War Chief proposal, and the parallel claim in stories related to The Doctor Who Role Playing Game [+]Loading...["The Doctor Who Role Playing Game"] that Peter Butterworth's Meddling Monk represented an unrelated pre-Delgado form of the Master.
Origins
The Target novelisations of Doctor Who TV stories were the main medium in which the idea of the War Chief eventually becoming the Master gained traction, principally under the pen of Malcolm Hulke, and secondarily that of Terrance Dicks, the two co-writers of The War Games [+]Loading...["The War Games (TV story)","The War Games"] and co-creators of the War Chief.
The novelisation Doctor Who and the Doomsday Weapon [+]Loading...["Doctor Who and the Doomsday Weapon (novelisation)","Doctor Who and the Doomsday Weapon"] - written by Malcolm Hulke and edited by Terrance Dicks - established that the Doctor and the Master were the only two renegade Time Lords who had ever left Gallifrey in stolen TARDISes, implying by process of elimination that the Master was the War Chief. Shortly after this assertion, the events of TV: The War Games [+]Loading...["The War Games (TV story)","The War Games"] were also recalled. Hulke's 1979 Doctor Who and the War Games [+]Loading...["Doctor Who and the War Games (novelisation)","Doctor Who and the War Games"] called back to the notion by having the War Chief explicitly state that he and the Doctor were the only travellers in the galaxy with their own stolen TARDISes, a passage which directly echoed the lines in Hulke's earlier Doomsday Weapon. The novelisation noted that the War Chief was declared dead by the Time Lords, but, as highlighted in 1985's CIA File Extracts [+]Loading...["CIA File Extracts (novel)","CIA File Extracts"], the Time Lords had never found a body.
Doctor Who and the Terror of the Autons [+]Loading...["Doctor Who and the Terror of the Autons (novelisation)","Doctor Who and the Terror of the Autons"], written by Terrance Dicks, stated that "Master" was a new title and that the Doctor had interfered with the Master's schemes in the past but that the Master had escaped the Time Lords before his TARDIS could be deactivated. This prompted the Doctor to comment, "He was luckier than I was," seemingly referencing the Doctor's The Doctor's trial and punishment by the Time Lords in The War Games. It again nodded toward The War Games by mentioning that, had the Master not escaped, his lifestream would have been reversed, just like the execution of the War Lords.
Finally, Dicks' 1975 novelisation of The Three Doctors [+]Loading...["The Three Doctors (novelisation)","The Three Doctors"] stated that the Master and Omega were the only two Time Lords that the Doctor had ever fought. Notably, even should one accept the implied link between the Master and the War Chief, this would seem to overlook the Monk, but, at the time The Three Doctors was novelised, neither of the First Doctor serials with the Monk had yet been novelised, meaning he did not necessarily need squaring away in terms of the perspective on the Doctor Who universe that a devoted reader of the novelisations could be expected to possess. Furthermore, the idea that the Monk was himself also an early form of the Master was also proposed on occasion, later making its way into licensed media in CIA File Extracts [+]Loading...["CIA File Extracts (novel)","CIA File Extracts"]. However, The War Games itself was not novelised until some years after the three Third Doctor novelisations, which made no mention of the War Chief, so it is possible both earlier Renegade Time Lords were ignored to simplify the conflict between the Doctor and the Master.
Later developments
In 1985, Gary Russell penned The Legacy of Gallifrey [+]Loading...["The Legacy of Gallifrey"], a prose overview of Gallifrey's history from the perspective of Rassilon. In that story, the Doctor's friends and fellow dissenters at the Time Lord Academy were a mere group of three future Renegades: the Doctor, the Master and the Rani. The War Chief was mentioned in the summary of the Second Doctor's trial as having been a treacherous member of the High Council, and a Time Lord messenger later warning the Third Doctor about the Master (as seen in TV's Terror of the Autons [+]Loading...["Terror of the Autons (TV story)","Terror of the Autons"]) was reframed as a direct consequence of CIA-loyal Time Lords being told to keep an eye on the Doctor after his trial, with the Master now being described as "seeking revenge for past deeds".
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The first licensed Doctor Who work to contradict Hulke's implications that the War Chief had gone on to become the Master came in The Legions of Death [+]Loading...["The Legions of Death (game)","The Legions of Death"] in FASA's The Doctor Who Role Playing Game [+]Loading...["The Doctor Who Role Playing Game"]. There, the Master and the Monk were conflated, but the War Chief was distinct from, but a former ally of, the Master. His former partnership with the Master, and survival of the events of The War Games, was the subject of a feature within the The Master sourcebook. A regenerated incarnation of the War Chief was then properly introduced as the main antagonist of The Legions of Death [+]Loading...["The Legions of Death (game)","The Legions of Death"], one of FASA's narrative modules for the game. The resemblance of the War Chief to the Master was highlighted, with the gamemaster being invited to play up red herrings about the story's villain being the Master until the rug-pulling reveal that it was a different but similar Renegade.
The War Chief has been specifically provided as a good on-going villain, a sort of minor-league version of The Master. In the Doctor Who universe, the Master is the very personification of evil, an extremely powerful foe who cannot easily be overcome by novices. The War Chief, on the other hand, is considerably less dangerous but stil an enemy to be reckoned with. That means less experienced players can be pitted against a renegade more in line with their own experience and powers, while The Master is reserved for those few occasions when a really difficult, deadly scenario is desired. Moreover, the War Chief can be made into a recurring enemy more easily than the Master simply because the latter already has an ongoing nemesis — the Doctor.
Virgin Books' editorial policy for the Virgin New Adventures and Virgin Missing Adventures was that the Master and the War Chief were two distinct characters. In Terrance Dicks's Exodus [+]Loading...["Timewyrm: Exodus (novel)"," Exodus"], the Doctor encountered a version of the War Chief who had survived the events of The War Games [+]Loading...["The War Games (TV story)","The War Games"] in a crippled state. No mention of the Master was made, with the Doctor treating the War Chief as a foe he had not met since The War Games, noting that he was aggrieved by his resurgence, thinking he had "dealt with him a long time ago".
A different encounter between the Second Doctor and a pre-Terror of the Autons [+]Loading...["Terror of the Autons (TV story)","Terror of the Autons"] Master, known as Koschei, occurred in The Dark Path [+]Loading...["The Dark Path (novel)","The Dark Path"]. This novel made no mention of the War Chief, but a deleted scene, later published in the charity anthology Perfect Timing, had Koschei informing the Doctor that their mutual friend Magnus had stolen a supply of spare TARDIS parts and disappeared, indicating that Magnus was the War Chief and a different person from the Master. However, author David A. McIntee later noted that the novel as published left open the possibility that Koschei would regenerate into Brayshaw's War Chief before finally regenerating into Delgado's Master.[2]
Craig Hinton and Chris McKeon's ultimately-unpublished Virgin novel Time's Champion [+]Loading...["Time's Champion (novel)","Time's Champion"], in its completed unlicenced charity version, treated the War Chief and the Master as the same person (also working in Magnus from Flashback [+]Loading...["Flashback (comic story)","Flashback"]).
Pride of place was given to the Master - or rather the Masters: the familiar, music-hall villain in his velvet penguin suit had been captured in all of his melodramatic glory, but there was also a suave, older man, his eyes radiating a fierce, evil intelligence wrapped in charm, next to which was positioned the portrait of a young, satanically handsome man with long, sharp sideburns and a thin, beard length moustache, whose hand vainly clutched at a strange medallion hanging around his neck, as if clinging to the only power in his possession. And then there was an image of the cadaver, that rotting corpse that Mel knew was all that remained of the Doctor's oldest friend and oldest enemy, animated by nothing but pure malice and spite.
The DWM Winter Special 1992 included a feature named Everything You Wanted to Know About Gallifrey, in which the War Chief is referenced as a separate character from the Master, who was explicitly described as "a new Time Lord enemy created by series producer Barry Letts and script editor Terrance Dicks, with Dicks coming up with the character's name".
1992 also saw the comic story Flashback [+]Loading...["Flashback (comic story)","Flashback"] published in Doctor Who Magazine [+]Loading...["Doctor Who Magazine"]. The story introduced the character Magnus as the First Doctor's close friend on Gallifrey who became his rival after a betrayal. The story hints that Magnus already had more than one body. The name "Magnus" means "great" and was popular among royal houses in the Middle Ages. Most readers immediately identified the character as a younger version of the Master, as the Master had previously been established to be the Doctor's Academy friend in TV: The Sea Devils [+]Loading...["The Sea Devils (TV story)","The Sea Devils"]; indeed, according to DWM editor Gary Russell, this was the original intention.[3] Accordingly, Invasion of the Cat-People [+]Loading...["Invasion of the Cat-People (novel)","Invasion of the Cat-People"] had the Doctor mentioning "Magnus" as someone whom the Second Doctor had once warned to be careful with his regenerations, tying into the fact that the Master had quickly used up all his regenerations, an important plot element in The Deadly Assassin [+]Loading...["The Deadly Assassin (TV story)","The Deadly Assassin"] and The Keeper of Traken [+]Loading...["The Keeper of Traken (TV story)","The Keeper of Traken"]. In Goth Opera [+]Loading...["Goth Opera (novel)","Goth Opera"], Ruath lists the Doctor's fellow students at the Academy under Borusa to have later become "scoundrels": "Mortimus, the Rani, that idiot Magnus… and you, Doctor", implying that Magnus was the Master's original name, as it would be unlikely for such a list to omit the Master.
In 1995, Issue 6 of Doctor Who Poster Magazine [+]Loading...["Doctor Who Poster Magazine"] included a feature entitled The Time Lords of Gallifrey... and other Gallifreyans, which included short illustrated profiles of all named Time Lord or Gallifreyan characters in televised Doctor Who [+]Loading...["Doctor Who"]. This time, it included an entry for the Monk separate from the Master, but none for the War Chief, implicitly supporting their conflation, although only the likenesses of Roger Delgado, Peter Pratt and Anthony Ainley's Masters were featured, omitting Edward Brayshaw.
In 1999, while writing the Fifth Doctor novel Divided Loyalties [+]Loading...["Divided Loyalties (novel)","Divided Loyalties"], Russell chose to retcon Magnus into being the War Chief so as not to conflict with McIntee's declaration that the Master's original name was "Koschei".[3] The novel sees the Toymaker give the Fifth Doctor nightmares about his time in the Academy. In the dreams, "Magnus" (who plans to ally himself with the War Lords) and "Koschei" (clearly the Master) are intentionally characterised as extremely similar; Magnus is obsessed with the War Lords, and Koschei looks up to Magnus. Despite the execution of this separation, this novel did formally establish an in-universe distinction between the two characters, in a deeper sense than being two different incarnations of the same Time Lord.
The character of the War King, who debuted in the 1999 Eighth Doctor novel The Taking of Planet 5 [+]Loading...["The Taking of Planet 5 (novel)","The Taking of Planet 5"], was strongly implied to have once been the Master. 2002's The Book of the War [+]Loading...["The Book of the War (novel)","The Book of the War"], the launch of the Faction Paradox [+]Loading...["Faction Paradox (series)","Faction Paradox"] in prose, added that he kept a disassembled hypercube in his chambers as a nostalgic keepsake, in a clear allusion to the denouement of The War Games — besides which there is the sheer parallelism in the monikers of "War Chief" and "War King". As quoted in Downtime – The Lost Years of Doctor Who, Alan Stevens, producer on The True History of Faction Paradox [+]Loading...["The True History of Faction Paradox"] (where the character also appeared), asked if the War King was in fact the Master, answered "The laws of copyright infringement prevent me from answering that question, although it may also be the War Chief".
In the 2007 Doctor Who Confidential episode The Saxon Mystery (14:11), released to tie in with the Master's reintroduction in the TV series in Series 3, the possibility of the War Chief as a pre-Delgado Master was not discussed, with the background on the Master simply seeing Russell T Davies, lead writer of the TV series from 2005-2010 and since 2023, report that the Master was first introduced in Jon Pertwee's second series, and Tenth and Fourteenth Doctor actor David Tennant says the Master was created in "the 70s".
The Master was first introduced in 1971. It was Jon Pertwee's second series where the production team decided they want the ultimate nemesis for the Doctor.
I think when the Master was first created back in the 70s there was this notion that the Doctor needed a Moriarty to his Sherlock Holmes. [...] Certainly when the Master started, he was quite a machiavellian figure. He seemed quite contained.
Likewise, the 2014 interview of Terrance Dicks published in DWM 475 (pages 20-27), DWM 476 (pages 24-31), and DWM 476 (pages 50-55), looked back on the genesis of the Master in the Pertwee era, while taking it as read that this was the character's earliest diegetic appearance.
In 2015, Alan Barnes, writing in The Fact of Fiction in DWM 492 (page 64), specifies Magnus/the War Chief as a renegade Time Lord distinct from the Master.
Terrance Dicks' New Adventures novel TimeWyrm: Exodus (Virgin Publishing, 1991) reveals the War Chief's origins as a one-time political rival to Cardinal Borusa, villain of The Five Doctors (1983); he fled Gallifrey after Borusa tried to frame him for treason. Gary Russell's later novel Divided Loyalties (BBC Books, 1999) delves even further back into the Chief's biography, naming him "Magnus" — one of the Deca, a secret society formed by members of the Time Lords' Academy, many of whom would later turn renegade: the Monk, the Master, the Rani... and, of course, the Doctor himself.
In 2018, the production notes in TCH 16, chiefly contributed by Andrew Pixley, again merely reported the Master as played by Roger Delgado as a "new threat", with Terror of the Autons "[h]aving introduced the Master" (page 56), and the Master being a "new arch-enemy" and "new adversary" (page 62) created by Dicks and producer Barry Letts.
Looking for a gimmick to help launch the 1971 series and wanting to replace the Daleks — whose last major appearance had been in 1967 — Letts and Dicks developed a new arch-enemy for the Doctor. Over discussions in the BBC bar one evening, they reasoned that if the Doctor was now an Earthbound investigator similar to the fictional detective Sherlock Holmes with the Brigadier as his Dr Watson confidante, then he would need a nemesis in the mould of Professor Moriarty — a Time Lord criminal as clever as the Doctor. [...] Following the thinking that the name of "the Doctor" was in fact a qualification, Dicks suggested that this new adversary should be known as "the Master".
2019 saw the release of The Home Guard [+]Loading...["The Home Guard (audio story)","The Home Guard"], a Big Finish Productions audio story written by Simon Guerrier, which featured James Dreyfus's early Master opposite the Second Doctor. In 2020, on Twitter, Guerrier confirmed a fan's suspicions about "the Master's cryptic references to a grander plan that was being served by these events" being a hint that the story served as a "soft lead-in" to The War Games [+]Loading...["The War Games (TV story)","The War Games"]. However, he admitted that he "couldn't quite remember" what he'd been thinking, and added: "Also, it doesn't matter what I intended anyway. What do *you* think?".[4]
Both the entirety of DWM 560, as well as the BBC Doctor Who Twitter account,[5] celebrated the 50th anniversary of the Master's introduction in Terror of the Autons, with no caveats acknowledging the earlier, post-hoc incarnation represented by Brayshaw; on page 39 of the DWM issue, David J. Howe wrote of Delgado is "the original Master".
In 1973, Season 10 of Doctor Who included an epic 12-part adventure spread across two serials: Frontier in Space and Planet of the Daleks. The first of these stories marked the final appearance of the original Master, Roger Delgado, who later that year would be tragically killed in a car crash.
The 2021 audio play Masterful [+]Loading...["Masterful (audio story)","Masterful"], likewise released to tie in with the anniversary, featured every surviving audio and TV incarnation of the character besides Dreyfus's, and made direct references to the deceased Delgado and Ainley's incarnations, but made no reference to the War Chief (nor the Monk, or any original incarnation wholly original to non-performed media).
The character profiles of the 2022 revamp of the Doctor Who website clearly places Terror of the Autons as the debut appearance of the Master, and does not list Brayshaw as having portrayed the character.[6] An older profile relating the events up until 2017's The Doctor Falls [+]Loading...["The Doctor Falls (TV story)","The Doctor Falls"], and a character gallery showing appearances of the character up until 2014's Dark Water [+]Loading...["Dark Water (TV story)","Dark Water"] likewise assert the same thing.[7][8]
In 2023, a fan-made infographic of the Master's incarnations which identified the War Chief as the "Eleventh Master", immediately preceding Roger Delgado's "Twelfth Master", was retweeted by the official Big Finish Productions Twitter account, who compared the character profiles to "new Weetabix cards".[9] The artist replied to the retweet, half-jokingly pointing out the apparent acknowledgement of "the truth of the Eleventh Master".[10]
In 2024, The War Games in Colour [+]Loading...["The War Games in Colour (TV story)"] had the War Chief accompanied by incidental music associated with the Master. In addition, the sound of regeneration from the "new series" is heard after the War Chief is shot dead.
Statements by writers
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In the 1996 reference work The Third Doctor Handbook, David J. Howe and Stephen James Walker mention that an innovation of Terror of the Autons was "the introduction of a new villain in the person of the Master" and also that he was a creation of Letts and Dicks.[1]
Another, arguably even more significant, innovation in Terror of the Autons was the introduction of the Master — a renegade dedicated to evil — who would appear in every story of the eighth season. Dicks and Letts, when recalling how they created this character, generally cite Sherlock Holmes's great adversary Moriarty as their chief inspiration. The fictional concept of their arch-enemy goes back much further than Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's novels, however, and was firmly established in many of the genres and individual sources upon which Doctor Who drew in its seventh and eighth seasons.
In 2014, David A. McIntee, writer of The Dark Path [+]Loading...["The Dark Path (novel)","The Dark Path"], noted on his Tumblr blog[11]:
I'm kind of pulled between two opposites on whether the War Chief is the Master. Personally I prefer to think he is — but professionally I wasn't allowed to!
Asked in 2021 whether he thought of "the Master and the War Chief to be the same character, or two, separate characters", writer of various anthologies Dave Rudden, citing the wisdom of Malcolm Hulke, answered[12][13]:
I am of the House of Hulke in this matter... They're the same in my book - actually, maybe that's a book I should write... I'm kidding, what would people argue about if it was ever fully explained.
Asked in 2021 what he thought of "the old Malcolm Hulke and Terrance Dicks lore of the War Chief being the Master", prominent Big Finish writer John Dorney answered[14]:
Conflicted. Since I grew up feeling they were definitely different, my heart probably says no. But my head probably acknowledges that it’d make a good deal of sense.
In 2023, Big Finish Doctor Who writer and prolific documentary director Chris Chapman answered "Yes please." to the question "Is Edward Brayshaw the Master?".[15]
External links
Footnotes
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 David J Howe, Stephen James Walker & Mark Stammers (2016 compilation of The First Doctor Handbook, The Second Doctor Handbook, and The Third Doctor Handbook). The Handbook: The Unofficial and Unauthorised Guide to the Production of Doctor Who. Volume 1. p. 457. Telos Publishing.
- ↑ https://originallonemagpie.tumblr.com/post/91272595232/tuppence-beresford-hipsterbrigadier
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 Gary Russell forum post about Magnus
- ↑ Simon Guerrier (11 February 2020). Oh! Yes, I think that's what I was thinking of (…). Simon Guerrier on Twitter. Archived from the original on 20 January 2023.
- ↑ Doctor Who on Twitter. Twitter (2 January 2021). Retrieved on 30 April 2024. “"I am usually referred to as the Master..." Today marks 50 years since the Master first terrorised the Doctor... and our television screens!”
- ↑ The Master. Doctor Who. Retrieved on 30 April 2024.
- ↑ https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/profiles/55584DPj9h9RyxV6hXWhcKV/the-master Retrieved 30 April 2024
- ↑ https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p01bb844/p01bb470 Retrieved 30 April 2024
- ↑ Big Finish Productions (4 January 2023). New Weetabix cards.. Big Finish Productions on Twitter. Archived from the original on 8 January 2023.
- ↑ @Tigfore (4 January 2023). Reply to Big Finish productions. Tigorello on Twitter. Archived from the original on 8 January 2023.
- ↑ https://originallonemagpie.tumblr.com/post/88466744837/favorite-doctor-who-episodes-the-second-doctor
- ↑ https://old.reddit.com/r/doctorwho/comments/jcyscl/hi_im_dave_rudden_author_of_anthologies_the/g9bn3a8/
- ↑ https://old.reddit.com/r/doctorwho/comments/jcyscl/hi_im_dave_rudden_author_of_anthologies_the/g94jtee/
- ↑ https://old.reddit.com/r/doctorwho/comments/oa3k48/john_dorney_big_finish_actorwriter_ama/h3plc2s/
- ↑ Chris Chapman (11 January 2023). Yes please.. Chris Chapman on Twitter. Archived from the original on 19 January 2023.
