CIA File Extracts (novel)
CIA File Extracts was the second in the series of three short DWU books published by FASA to tie in with The Doctor Who Role Playing Game. Like the other two, it contained no interactive elements, instead being presented as an in-universe history of its subjects, one of the Doctor's main enemies: the Master.
The cover gave the title as The Master: CIA File Extracts. However, the book's legal title, as it appeared on the copyright page, was instead CIA File Extracts.
Publisher's summary
According to CIA studies and reports, the renegade Time Lord known as "The Master" is one of the most disruptive forces in the whole time-space continuum. It is now believed that the real goal of all the Master's schemes and operations is to take supreme power in the universe by altering the face of history.
The enclosed data entries and reports provide operatives and interested or affected parties new and detailed information on the Master's activities, abilities, characteristics, accomplices and special foes, preferred equipment, and possible locations for future operations.
Plot
Upon learning that the report the Doctor had filed of the Tremas Master's death on Sarn was inaccurate and the infamous renegade has in fact escaped, Lady Rowellanuraven, a Coordinator of the Celestial Intervention Agency, takes it upon herself to gather biodata file extracts and other reports pertaining to the Master and mails them to the TARDISes of all currently active CIA agents, threatening them with termination of CIA employment if they do not immediately update their TARDIS data banks with this new information.
The files add up to a partially speculative history of the Master from his early days on Gallifrey to his recent apparent death on Sarn. Although by and large accurate, the biography tends to downplay the threat of the Master. This prompts an unstable agent, Melistar, to attempt to add a much more alarming message to the file, which the CIA try to suppress, insisting that Melistar is not of sound mind.
Characters
- The Master
- Rowellanuraven
- Coordinator Engin
- The Doctor
- The Rani
- Drax
- Arkendo
- Rassilon
- Kalaanaraduraken
- Lord Melistar
Worldbuilding
- The CIA have files about Azmael, the Colonel, the Doctor, Drax, K'anpo, the Monk, Nesbin, the Rani, Susan, Tamozar and the War Chief.
The Doctor
- In their early years on Gallifrey, the Doctor and the Master were both interventionists, although the Doctor found the Master's theories excessive.
Notes
- This story hints at a relationship between the War Chief and the Master, the reality of which is categorically denied by Rowellanuraven in the same paragraph where she dismisses the "rumour" that the Master was involved in the events of The Deadly Assassin. Though it is easy to read in light of Target novelisations' assertion that the Master and the War Chief were actually one and the same, it must be noted that in The Legions of Death, which shared a writer with CIA File Extracts, it was instead suggested that the War Chief was a disciple of the Master and had been acting on his orders in The War Games.
- This story sees the Celestial Intervention Agency believing that the Monk (as played by Peter Butterworth) was the sixth incarnation of the Master. This idea, while once a common fan theory, was abandoned as time went on, with stories depicting a different fate for the Monk after The Daleks' Master Plan than immediately regenerating into an incarnation who went by "the Master". Indeed, in the context of a story featuring a post-Butterworth Monk (AUDIO: Too Many Masters), the Monk himself categorically denied being an incarnation of the Master, with the incarnation of the Master present scoffing at the concept also.
- This story treats Roger Delgado's incarnation of the Master as having been the last of the Master's original regeneration cycle, in contrast with other sources which view it as the second-to-last.
- The story lists "James Stoker" as one of the Master's aliases. This was the pseudonym used in Radio Times to disguise Anthony Ainley's appearance as Sir Gilles in The King's Demons.
Continuity
- Rowellanuraven believes the official reports about Pardar V's death according to which Goth was a hero; there are rumours reflecting the true version of events, but Rowellanuraven dismisses them as fanciful. (TV: The Deadly Assassin)
- There are rumours that the Master was involved in "the War Chief affair". (TV: The War Games, PROSE: Doctor Who and the Terror of the Autons)
- The Doctor, the Master and Susan Foreman all left Gallifrey in the aftermath of the Prydonian Academy Revolution. (PROSE: Birth of a Renegade)
- The CIA are aware that K'anpo Rimpoche once assisted the Doctor's regeneration. (TV: Planet of the Spiders)
- The CIA know that the Doctor encountered the Monk in Northumberland (TV: The Time Meddler) and on Tigus, (TV: The Daleks' Master Plan) and of the Master's involvement in the attempted invasion of Earth by the Nestene Consciousness in 1978. (TV: Terror of the Autons)
- Mention is made of the Master's schemes involving the Keller Machine, (TV: The Mind of Evil) Axos, (TV: The Claws of Axos) the Doomsday Weapon, (TV: Colony in Space) the Dæmons, (TV: The Dæmons) the Sea Devils, (TV: The Sea Devils) the Crystal of Kronos, (TV: The Time Monster) and the Daleks (TV: Frontier in Space) and, in his new body, of his activities on Logopolis, (TV: Logopolis) Castrovalva, (TV: Castrovalva) Xeriphas, (TV: Time-Flight) and Sarn, (TV: Planet of Fire) as well as his passage through the Death Zone. (TV: The Five Doctors)
- The Sixth Doctor informed the CIA that he had run into the Tremas Master and the Rani in 1830s England, but they consider it likely that the "notoriously unstable" Sixth Doctor made up the entire scenario. (TV: The Mark of the Rani)
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