"The Master"
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"The Master" — known in female form as "Missy", short for "Mistress", and at times by various other aliases — was a renegade Time Lord, originally a friend and longtime opponent of the Doctor.
Though they had been friends from childhood and schoolmates at the Academy, the Master's lust for power would eventually pull the two apart. While the Doctor and the Master would sometimes remain close friends despite their rivalry (TV: Terror of the Autons, et. al) the Master developed an intense hatred for and often sought to kill the Doctor, who came to regard the Master as his arch-enemy. (TV: The Deadly Assassin, Castrovalva, Time-Flight, Doctor Who) Despite this enmity, however, the two would on occasion act as allies. (TV: The Claws of Axos, The Five Doctors, The End of Time, The Magician's Apprentice, The Lie of the Land, World Enough and Time/The Doctor Falls)
Biography
Early life
The Master grew up on Gallifrey in the House of Oakdown, (PROSE: Divided Loyalties) though he would later comment to Wilfred Mott that growing up on Gallifrey was not something one could call childhood, but "more a life of duty". (TV: The End of Time)
Sharing the same heritage and upbringing, (AUDIO: Dominion) the Master had a friendship with the First Doctor (TV: The Sea Devils, The Sound of Drums) and his family, (AUDIO: The Toy) with UNIT scientist Osgood even describing the Master as the Doctor's "childhood friend". (TV: Death in Heaven) The Second Doctor recalled that he and the Master had everything in common, except that the Master enjoyed being scared of the dark "a little too much", (PROSE: The Menagerie) while the Third Doctor told Jo Grant that the two were "inseparable" due to their shared interests, such as a desire to break the non-interference policy. (PROSE: Doctor Who and the Sea Devils)
The two youths would play in the fields near the Master's father's estates, with pastures of red grass near Mount Perdition. (TV: The End of Time) They would also sneak out of the Capitol and drink with the Shobogans, (PROSE: The Eight Doctors) with the young Master picking a fight with six drunken Shobogans during one of these outings. (PROSE: UNIT Christmas Parties: Christmas Truce) The Master also taught his friend hypnotism. (PROSE: The Dark Path)
During their childhood, the young Master and the Doctor were mercilessly and viciously bullied by a boy called Torvic; the young Doctor was eventually forced to kill the bully to save his friend's life. He was later confronted by the personification of Death, who insisted he become her disciple, but the Doctor refused and suggested Death make the Master her champion instead. Death agreed, and the Doctor subsequently forgot about their deal. (AUDIO: Master)
Like all Time Lords, the Master was taken for his initiation at the age of eight. During the ceremony in which he gazed into the Time Vortex through the Untempered Schism, he went mad, (TV: The Sound of Drums) due to a rhythm of four beats being implanted into his head. (TV: The End of Time) This malady manifested itself as the constant drumming he heard ever after, worsening with time. (TV: Utopia, The Sound of Drums, Last of the Time Lords)
Academic career
The Doctor, the Master and the War Chief were friends from their first day at the Academy, (PROSE: Divided Loyalties, TV: World Enough and Time) with both the Doctor and the Master tutored by Borusa. (AUDIO: Masterplan) While at the Academy, the Master went by the name "Koschei", (PROSE: Divided Loyalties) and was also in charge of organising end of term parties, although the Eighth Doctor later noted that they "weren't very good". (COMIC: The Glorious Dead)
The Master developed a strong bond with the Doctor, and the two had a pact, to explore together every star in the universe. (TV: World Enough and Time)
At the Academy, the Master belonged to a clique of ten young Time Lords with the collective name of the Deca, (PROSE: Divided Loyalties) and was also part of the "Gallifrey Academy Hot Five" band, in which he played the drums. (PROSE: Deadly Reunion) He and the Doctor also enjoyed building "time flow analogues" to disrupt each other's experiments. (TV: The Time Monsters)
The Master would often hypnotise people as a joke, (PROSE: The Dark Path) and would go unpunished for it, as well as other misdemeanours, always finding a way to avoid his comeuppance. (PROSE: First Frontier)
Whilst at the Academy, the Doctor and the Master travelled into Gallifrey's past in search of Valdemar. They found nothing of the Old Ones except for warnings. The Master was fascinated by the power that Valdemar represented, while the Doctor was horrified. (PROSE: Tomb of Valdemar) The Master also showed a fascination with the Necronomicon. (PROSE: The Nameless City)
Koschei was on an Academy research project when the Doctor was expelled from the Academy. (PROSE: Divided Loyalties)
When the Time Lords created the Consolidator to conceal various dangerous historical secrets from the rest of the universe, unwilling to destroy the items or races in the ship in case they proved useful later, the Doctor and the Master were assigned to come up with a solution where their peers failed. The Master had the idea of using a black hole to tear a rift in time and send the Consolidator into the distant future, where the future Time Lords could deal with it. However, when the experiment was actually attempted, the Consolidator was apparently destroyed by a mistake in the calculations when it struck the edge of the black hole, leaving the Time Lords to hush the matter up. (PROSE: Harvest of Time)
The Master ultimately did not perform well at the Academy. (AUDIO: Masterplan) Although he did earn a higher degree in cosmic science than the Doctor, (TV: Terror of the Autons) the Doctor's grades were overall better. Because of this, the Doctor received the prizes and praise that the Master so desperately wanted. The Seventh Doctor theorised that this may have been the cause of the Master's hatred towards him. (PROSE: Survival)
Family life
Missy claimed she had a daughter and that, while still on Gallifrey, the Doctor gifted the Master a dark star alloy brooch, after an event which involved his daughter occurred. (TV: The Witch's Familiar)
The Master attended a ritual in Arcadia where he gave Susan Foreman a communication node disguised as a toy, with the Master intending to use the node to locate the Doctor if he ever left Gallifrey. (AUDIO: The Toy) Susan remembered the Master as a highly regarded man, as a "stickler for the rules" with "meritorious conduct". He was a form of Truant Officer, and after the Doctor and Susan's escape would be tasked with capturing them. (PROSE: Time and Relative)
Fleeing Gallifrey
According to one account, the Master left Gallifrey because, like the Doctor, it was "too peaceful for [him], [with] not enough happening". (PROSE: Doctor Who and the Doomsday Weapon)
According to another source, during a period of civil unrest on Gallifrey, the Master led many students of the Time Lord Academy in a revolt against the corrupt Lord President, Pundat the Third, and attempted to recruit the Doctor and convince him to take the position as President, but he decided not to interfere with the current constitution. When Pundat died of stress soon after the revolt, his chosen successor was the evil Chancellor Slann. The students had found the last of Lord Rassilon's descendants, Lady Larn, a seven-year old child adopted by Councillor Brolin, who was being groomed as a future president. They decided on a second coup. Yet in trying to convert the Doctor, the students were overheard. Bloody reprisals against the students followed. The Doctor and Larn escaped from Gallifrey after this. Believing the students ready for the second coup, the Master assassinated Lord President Slann. However, the students weren't ready and he took this opportunity to steal a TARDIS and flee Gallifrey as a renegade. (PROSE: Birth of a Renegade)
Dealings with the Second Doctor
In another account , after the Doctor fled Gallifrey in a stolen TARDIS, the Master left Gallifrey on the same day (COMIC: The Glorious Dead) in a Type-45 TARDIS, (PROSE: The Dark Path) that he had also stolen. (COMIC: The Glorious Dead) However, his unstable obsession with order prompted the Time Lords to plant the Time Lady Ailla as a spy to monitor his actions. She posed as a human so Koschei (as the Master had now started calling himself) would take her on as his companion during a stopover in the 28th century.
Koschei caught up with the Second Doctor at the Darkheart colony in the early years of the Galactic Federation. The temptation posed by the Darkheart device proved too much for Koschei, and the revelation that Ailla was a spy killed the last traces of good in him, and he became the Master. After the Doctor trapped him in a black hole, the Master swore that he would take revenge. (PROSE: The Dark Path)
Escaping the black hole, the Master penetrated Gallifrey, and gained access to the Matrix via a console in the old Capitol. This gave him a back door into the Matrix, which he used to collect classified information for his many devious schemes, (PROSE: The Quantum Archangel) including the Time Lords' files on the Doomsday Weapon. (TV: Colony in Space) According to one account, the Master learnt about the Silurians through information stolen from the Time Lords' files. (TV: The Sea Devils) Another account stated he learnt about the Silurians from Liz Shaw while on Earth. (PROSE: Reconnaissance)
The Master then put his TARDIS in orbit of the homeworld of the Archons and made a deal with them that would result in the Archons acquiring the Doctor's TARDIS for themselves. Posing as a Professor Thascalos, the Master gave the Necronomicon to the Doctor's companion Jamie McCrimmon, so that Jamie would give the book to the Doctor and lure the TARDIS to the Archon homeworld. (PROSE: The Nameless City)
According to one Time Lord, before arriving on Earth, the Master was responsible for several interplanetary wars, but always managed to disappear before he could be brought to justice. Though the Time Lords managed to catch him, the Master escaped before his TARDIS "could be de-energised." (PROSE: Doctor Who and the Terror of the Autons)
Nemesis of the Third Doctor
Early times on Earth
The Master was imprisoned on Shada by the Time Lords at the time when the Doctor was exiled to Earth. However, the Time Lords decided to keep the Doctor busy whilst he was trapped on Earth by releasing the Master. (PROSE: Prisoners of the Sun)
The Master was present at the first Auton invasion of Earth, and heard about Channing's attempt to capture the Third Doctor. He contacted journalist James Stevens by phone, whose article he had read in the Daily Chronicle, and told him about the near-kidnapping. He called Stevens again during the Silurian attacks on Wenley Moor, informing Stevens that Edward Masters had been the first to die from the plague sweeping London. (PROSE: Who Killed Kennedy)
Under the alias "Emil Keller", the Master captured a psychic parasite and trapped it within the Keller Machine, and spent many months establishing "Keller" and the machine's credentials. (TV: The Mind of Evil)
Shortly after the Inferno Project incident, the Master once more contacted James Stevens, this time to check up on his work on his UNIT article. He promptly hung up when Stevens mentioned C19 and the Glasshouse. (PROSE: Who Killed Kennedy)
According to one account, the Master first infiltrated the headquarters of UNIT while the Brigadier and the Doctor had gone to meet with government officials. He hypnotised the Doctor's assistant, Liz Shaw, and, through her, learnt of the failed Nestene invasion and the awakening of the Silurians. This inspired him to ally himself with the Nestene and to locate more Silurian colonies. (PROSE: Reconnaissance) Another account stated he learnt about the Silurians from the Time Lords' files. (TV: The Sea Devils)
Becoming a threat
The Master appeared at the International Circus, his TARDIS in the form of a horse box. He hypnotised the circus troupe and plastic factory manager Rex Farrel to obey his orders as part of his plan to assist the Nestenes in their latest bid to conquer Earth. A Time Lord emissary alerted the Doctor to his rival's presence on the planet, and before the radio telescope could be used to bring the Nestene invasion force to Earth, the Doctor convinced the Master that the Nestenes would not distinguish between the Master and anyone else in their takeover, and the two worked together to fling the Nestenes back into space by "chang[ing] the polarity" whilst the radio telescope's transfer shift was still open. Afterwards, the Master fled. The Doctor, however, had already taken his dematerialisation circuit, preventing the Master from leaving Earth in his TARDIS. (TV: Terror of the Autons)
The Master returned again, posing as the scientist who had "developed" the Keller Machine. He used prisoners as a plan to hijack the Thunderbolt, a missile containing nerve gas and use it to destroy the World Peace Conference, which would trigger a nuclear war. The Doctor, with the help of Barnham, stopped the Master with the Keller Machine, and the Doctor reactivated the missile's abort mechanism. UNIT also destroyed the missile along with the Keller Machine, but the Doctor later discovered he had lost the Master's dematerialisation circuit in his altercation with the Master. Shortly after, the Master telephoned to let it be known that he had found the circuit and was free now to come and go as he pleased, while the Doctor had to remain in exile. (TV: The Mind of Evil)
Shortly after the Master regained control over his TARDIS, he tried to gain control of a cult so he could harness the power of the Immortals. He convinced the real cult leader, Hadley, that he could serve the cult loyally, by supplying them with sarg. Unfortunately for the Master, Hadley only intended to keep the Master alive while he was still useful. With no other options, the Master formed a temporary truce with the Doctor to stop Hades' plan. After the crisis was resolved, the Doctor allowed the Master to depart unmolested in the name of their temporary truce. (PROSE: Deadly Reunion)
The Master brought Axos to Earth, hoping to ally himself with them. Instead, he became the prisoner of Axos, and only escaped by saying that he would help it. The Doctor tricked the Master into thinking he was going to betray Earth. Instead, he trapped the Master with Axos in a time loop. (TV: The Claws of Axos)
Posing as an Adjudicator, the Master travelled to a human colony on the planet Uxarieus in the year 2472. There, the Time Lord records indicated he would find the Doomsday Weapon created by a near-extinct native species. Once again the Doctor defeated his plans and the weapon was destroyed. (TV: Colony in Space)
In village of Devil's End, the Master summoned the ancient Dæmon Azal, but he failed to understand the power and control that was necessary following summoning him. Following Azal's confrontation with Jo Grant's selflessness, Azal destroyed himself through Jo's illogical actions. The Master was captured by UNIT following a failed attempt to escape in the Doctor's car, Bessie. (TV: The Dæmons)
In custody
Prior to his trial, the Master was sent to Stangmoor Prison. During his captivity, an army of hypnotised salespeople stormed the facility and attempted to rescue him, but the ploy failed and the Master was sent to another secure holding facility. Meanwhile, the Doctor and Jo were trapped in an extra-universal prison by the Freedom Corporation, so the Brigadier was forced to strike a deal with the Master to save them. But the Master double-crossed him and used time travel technology to regress the Earth backwards in time. However, with help from the Time Lords, the Doctor was freed and was able to stop the Master's plan and restore everything to normal. (PROSE: Freedom)
The government used the Master as a scapegoat for all the alien attacks which had recently occurred. (PROSE: Who Killed Kennedy)
The Master was held at Aylesbury Grange Detention Centre. Demanding the Doctor visit him, he engaged the Doctor in conversation, insisting he had changed. However, the Doctor refused to believe him, and the Master reluctantly revealed that he had drawn the Doctor to the facility as part of an escape attempt, and that the Doctor was speaking to a hologram. The Master nearly escaped, but was stopped by UNIT soldiers accompanying the Doctor, who revealed he had been a hologram as well. (COMIC: The Man in the Ion Mask)
In another escape attempt, the Master created a device that switched his mind with the Doctor's. He went to the Doctor's TARDIS, where he learned that the Time Lords had made the TARDIS ineffective to the Doctor's piloting. Before returning to his own body, the Master, as the Doctor, asked the Brigadier to move the Master to a new holding facility with a good view, and also encouraged Mike Yates to ask Jo Grant out on a date. (PROSE: The Switching)
While in custody, with the Doctor on Peladon, (TV: The Curse of Peladon) the Master collaborated with UNIT to prevent an invasion by a fascist version of Earth, travelling with the Brigadier, Ian and Barbara Chesterton to the alternate universe and encountering Koschei, the alternate version of himself. Koschei was imprisoned and tortured by order of the Leader of the Republic of Great Britain, the alternate version of the Doctor. The Master killed his other self, claiming it was an act of mercy. Before he was imprisoned by UNIT again, the Master hid his TARDIS back in the church crypt in Devil's End. (PROSE: The Face of the Enemy)
The Master was imprisoned inside a castle prison on Fortress Island as the only prisoner. The Doctor believed he would be in this prison "forever". The Master convinced his jailer, Colonel George Trenchard, to help him steal electronic parts from HMS Seaspite, telling Trenchard that this was intended as a lure for enemy agents. With these parts, the Master instead made contact with the reptilian Sea Devils, an aquatic species similar to the land-dwelling Silurians, and planned to cause a war between humans and Sea Devils, making the Sea Devils rulers of Earth again. Because the reactivation machinery of the Sea Devils' hibernation units deterirorated during millions of years of hibernation, the Master saw it necessary to construct a sonar device to awaken the remaining reptiles. The Master captured the Doctor, and forced him to help create this device, but to prevent the device from reactivating further Sea Devil bases and stop the war, the Doctor blew up the Sea Devil base by reversing the device's polarity, creating a massive reverse feedback. The Master escaped in a hovercraft when the officer guarding him, CPO Myers, was hypnotised and framed as the Master's corpse, (TV: The Sea Devils) and the Master returned to the church crypt in Devil's End to retrieve his TARDIS. (PROSE: The Eight Doctors)
At large again
Some time after his escape, the Master took control of the Glasshouse, a facility for traumatised UNIT soldiers, and in particular Private Francis Cleary. He planned to use a time ring to have Cleary go to 1963 to prevent the Kennedy assassination, thereby altering Earth's history to make it more vulnerable to invasion. The plan failed. (PROSE: Who Killed Kennedy)
After being double-crossed by the Voords, (PROSE: The Quantum Archangel) the Master posed as "Professor Carl Thascalos" and constructed a machine known as TOMTIT at Cambridge's Newton Institute to summon the ancient chronovore Kronos, whom he wished to control. He hypnotised the institute's director, Dr Charles Percival, but accidentally killed him by releasing Kronos from the Crystal of Kronos. The Master summoned the Atlantean priest Krasis for instructions on how to control Kronos, while meddling with the flow of time to obstruct the Doctor from getting in his way.
After knocking out Sergeant Benton, the Master retreated to his TARDIS, but the Doctor tried to trap him in a time lock using his own TARDIS, accidentally creating a space loop when both TARDISes were materialised within the other. When the TARDISes were separated during their negotiations, the Master ejected the Doctor into space, but the Doctor survived by using the telepathic circuit of his TARDIS to help Jo return him to safety.
The Master travelled to ancient Atlantis and failed to hypnotise King Dalios, who easily resisted his influence. Confronting the Doctor there, the Master tried to manipulate Queen Galleia into betraying her husband, since she had taken a romantic liking in his charm compared to Dalios' often dull personality. Galleia, however, was enraged when the Master caused Dalios to die in the coup they staged in Atlantis. Before he was arrested, the Master commanded Krasis to use the Crystal of Kronos housed in Atlantis, and brought forth Kronos, who destroyed the entire civilisation.
Fleeing Atlantis with Jo as his hostage, and with Kronos under his control, the Master was in a position to cast destruction unto the entire cosmos, however, the Doctor threatened to time ram the Master's TARDIS with his own, which would take everyone's lives in the process if he did not give up his plans for chaos. The Master did not believe the Doctor would earnestly carry out his warning, because he knew endangering Jo's life was not an option for him. In response to the Doctor's hesitation, Jo tried to complete the time ram before the Master could release Kronos again. Instead, Kronos spared everyone from death, and captured the Master for the crime of trying to control it, but allowed him to go free at the request of the Doctor. (TV: The Time Monster)
The Master set up a talent show called Make a Star, based on the anagram AKA Master, which he used to disrupt the timeline by making the contestants cover songs that weren't yet written. He intended to use the relatively minor disruption caused to allow him to take control of Earth, but this plan was foiled by the Third Doctor. (PROSE: Hidden Talent)
On another occasion, the Master made a deal with the Odobenidans to help them invade Earth, but accidentally trapped both them and himself in a time loop whilst undertaking some temporal mechanics on their behalf. He was trapped in the time loop beneath Greece for months. The Doctor, sent to Greece by the Time Lords to deal with the time loop, released the Master and foiled his plan again. (PROSE: The Seismologist's Story)
The Master planned to release a fog in Tadcaster by using Sarkan mist-flowers to generate a fog that would spread engulf the Earth in a dense fog. Attempting to catch up with the Master, the Doctor commandeered a pier train that crashed into the Master and the mist-flowers, sending all of them into the ocean, where the flowers were destroyed and the Master disappeared. (COMIC: Fogbound)
Reappearing again, the Master took control of the Brigadier's mind, and instructed him to kill the Doctor. However, the Brigadier attacked the Master, but he escaped, restoring the Brigadier to his senses. (PROSE: Smash Hit)
The Master became involved in "a galactic fracas" relating to "a number of large tortoises". The Doctor and Jo put a stop to this scheme. (AUDIO: The Last Fairy Tale)
The Master used time-displaced Scottish warriors to seize a nuclear submarine and threaten Britain with obliteration if he wasn't given the Doctor's TARDIS; he ended up temporarily trapped in the 18th century. (COMIC: The Glen of Sleeping) He also worked with the Gaderene race to conquer Earth. (PROSE: Last of the Gaderene)
Distancing himself from UNIT
The Master travelled to the Land of Fiction, where he intended to steal an advanced piece of technology from the Land, and defeated Professor Moriarty. (COMIC: Character Assassin)
For a short while, the Master adopted the identity of "Duke Dominus", a gangster on early 20th century Earth, but his plan on was foiled by the Fourth Doctor without either the Doctor or the Master realising the others' involvement. (PROSE: The Duke of Dominoes)
The Master travelled to a Sontaran-occupied planet and convinced several of the locals that he was a deity. This would form a new sect of proud, beard-toting column-worshiping Sontarans, which would decades later lead to the destruction of the entire planet by Sontran command. The Master left decades before this, delighted simply by the idea of the chaos he had created. (COMIC: The Judas Goatee)
He attended Bonjaxx's birthday party at Maruthea. When a fight broke out, the Master was seen crouching to avoid the confrontation, evidently annoyed. (COMIC: Party Animals)
Having had enough of Earth, and other plans to set in motion on Skaro, the Master employed the assistance of a being called Verdigris to impersonate him. (PROSE: Verdigris) On Skaro, the Master forged an alliance with the Daleks, acting as their agent to provoke warfare between the Earth Empire and the Draconian Empire in the 26th century. To achieve this, he employed a force of Ogrons who, through the use of hypnosound, made themselves appear human or Draconian, thus provoking the other side. When the Doctor revealed the true perpetrators, the plot was abandoned. (TV: Frontier in Space)
Meeting his end
According to one account, the Master went under cover on Earth following the 22nd century Dalek invasion and killed David Campbell, the husband of the Doctor's granddaughter Susan. After being defeated by the Eighth Doctor, he fled in his TARDIS, taking Susan with him as a hostage, unaware of her Gallifreyan heritage. As his TARDIS materialised on Tersurus, she used his TARDIS's telepathic circuits to attack him, forcing him out onto the planet's surface. She used his own Tissue Compression Eliminator against him while he was holding the Dalek's matter transmuter. The blast severely deformed and nearly killed him. Susan departed in his TARDIS; this brief materialisation, however, alerted the Time Lords to the Master's presence on Tersurus.
Investigating the materialisation of an unauthorised TARDIS, the Time Lord Chancellor Goth arrived on Tersurus, where he found the Master in a wasted condition — that of a decaying animated corpse. The Master sensed that Goth wished for power and offered it to him, whilst Goth, seeing the Master as a dying "creature", thought he could control the Master for his own means. (PROSE: Legacy of the Daleks)
According to another account, the Master decided to return to Earth after the affair with the Daleks and the Draconians and detected a massive discharge of temporal energy. He watched as the Twelfth Doctor's TARDIS exploded (COMIC: Doorway to Hell) in 1972 after it was overloaded by its efforts to rewrite a mutated plague. (COMIC: The Pestilent Heart) The Master wrongly speculated this was the cause of the Doctor's third regeneration. (COMIC: Doorway to Hell) When the Doctor moved in with Jess Collins' family in Brixton and brought the TARDIS into the back garden to repair itself, (COMIC: Moving In) the Master plotted to use the artron energy given off by the regenerating TARDIS that now lay in the bodies of the Collins family to create a portal to a time locked dimension he learnt about in the Dalek databanks. When the TARDIS had healed in 1973, the Master utilised the efforts of Katya Dabrowski to bring the Collins family to an apartment in central London, while creating a diversion for the Twelfth Doctor in Barking with glass mosquito creatures. Warning the Collins family that the Doctor was a dangerous and deceitful alien, the Master tricked them into being scanned for damage, when he actually used them to create a portal to the dimension which they were also sent through. The Master also stole the Doctor's TARDIS, and had the Doctor escorted from the Collins family's home to the Master's apartment. The Master linked the Doctor's TARDIS to the Master's to aid the Doctor through the time lock so he could be reunited with the Collins family. The Master had Katya accompany the Doctor there.
Travelling to the locked dimension, the Master met Kiadine, a being who once split the chronon. The Time Lords locked him away for this, and he hated them for it ever since. He gave the Master his powers so that he would conquer Gallifrey on his behalf. His exposure to the chronon storm gave him god-like powers, and he began to fight with the Doctor for mastery of them. The Master fired one final attack as the Doctor stood arm in arm with the Collins family, and found that his attack had been repelled back at him with the same artron energy in the bodies of the Collins family that had brought the Master to the dimension. Though battered from the attack, the Master was able to escape in his TARDIS and regenerated while declaring his intent of revenge on the Doctor. (COMIC: Doorway to Hell)
A body in decay
Meeting his future
The Master, now in his final incarnation, arrived on a Time Lord base on Tersurus with the intention of infiltrating their database. There he encountered a future version of himself, who burned his body, leaving him a fraction above death. The future Master then signalled Gallifrey for Goth to arrive.
Before Goth could arrive, the Cult of the Heretic switched the Master's mind with that of his future self. (AUDIO: The Two Masters) While he remembered being in great pain, the process left gaps in his memory. He proceeded to return to a site of former imprisonment to construct a plan to regain his memories. He returned to a prison in the south of England, where his former self had lured a Carmentine Mind Leach. He set up the Dominus Institute in order to lure the Doctor to him, planning to absorb his intellect.
The Sixth Doctor made a deal with the mind leech, one which had the leech only take the Doctor's short term memory. This was enough to sustain the Master, but ruined his overall plans. The Master fled from the prison in his TARDIS. (AUDIO: Vampire of the Mind)
Regaining his memory of what had happened to him, the Master hired the Transhuman Sisters of the Unholy Protocol and the Dragonhunters to kill the older Master.
The act of having a Time Lord inhabiting the body of his past self led to universe beginning to break down. Realising this, the Seventh Doctor encountered both of the Masters and helped them get back into the right bodies. The two Masters then returned to the Cult's headquarters and killed all of the members. They then plotted to use the anomaly cage, but were stopped by the Seventh Doctor, who made sure that the universe remained practically unchanged by its regeneration. After this, history was allowed to run its normal course, and Goth collected the emaciated Master and took him to Gallifrey. (AUDIO: The Two Masters)
Revenge on Gallifrey
The Master made Goth, in line for the position of Lord President of the High Council of Time Lords, into his slave, continuing to promise him power until Goth could no longer fight his mental dominance.
Whilst on Gallifrey, the Master also took over the Matrix, and realised that the Eye of Harmony resided beneath the Panopticon. He believed he could use the Sash of Rassilon to protect himself from the raw power of the Eye and channel that energy to renew himself.
With a telepathic summons and a vision of the future created by the Matrix, the Master lured the Fourth Doctor to Gallifrey, seemingly to prevent the murder of the then-serving Lord President. The Doctor failed and ended up on trial for the President's murder.
After Goth died, the Doctor defeated the Master in physical combat and, as a result, the Master fell into a crevice created by a localised earthquake. He gained access to his TARDIS in the confusion and escaped, (TV: The Deadly Assassin) having been able to convert the energy from the Eye of Harmony and partially heal himself. (AUDIO: Trail of the White Worm)
Beyond Gallifrey
The Master followed the Doctor's TARDIS from Gallifrey, but was knocked off course passing through the transduction barrier and landed in London during the 1890s. (AUDIO: Masterpiece) He asked the locals if he could speak to someone in authority. Inspector Quick was the first on the scene. The Master wasted no time in hypnotising Quick for his goals, (AUDIO: The Museum of Curiosities) giving him several tasks to carry out on his behalf. (AUDIO: Jago & Son)
The Master walked the streets of London, concealing himself with a mask and walking with a cane. He spoke to Maurice Ravel, interested in a watch he carried with the Prydonian Seal on it. The Master later learned that Jago and Litefoot were the Doctor's contacts in the time period, and intended to visit them. (AUDIO: Maurice) The Master had Quick bring him a sample of Jago and Litefoot's DNA, planning to poison them so that they would summon the Doctor to help them. (AUDIO: The Woman in White)
The Master became frail, barely able to stand. He planned to use the Doctor's artron energy in order to heal his form. He travelled to the Red Tavern and spoke to Ellie Higson, hypnotising her so that he could learn of Jago and Litefoot. Jago and Litefoot learned of the location of the Master's lair with the help of Madame Sosostris, and encountered the Master there. Sosostris' assistant revealed himself to be the Sixth Doctor. The Master activated a machine to drain the life energy of Jago and Litefoot, before absorbing the Doctor's artron energy. The Doctor reversed the flow of the machine and the Master's life began to be drained. After the Doctor smashed his equipment, the Master slipped into his TARDIS and escaped. However, he left behind some trouble for Jago and Litefoot to deal with; he reverted Ellie Higson's metabolism to its natural state, causing her to lose control of her vampiric hunger. (AUDIO: Masterpiece)
With his TARDIS still in the form of a clock, the Master attempted to steal Iris Wildthyme's body, (PROSE: The Scarlet Shadow) and was captured by the Sild. (PROSE: Harvest of Time)
Still looking a little "putrescent", (COMIC: The Abominable Showmen) the Master was greeted by a female incarnation of himself known as "Missy", who had developed a plan to form a band to hypnotise viewers of The Battle of the Bands Beyond the Stars. His next incarnation, an incarnation possessing the body of a man named Bruce and an incarnation going by the name "Saxon" all joined in the plan, and the team spent "decades" practising. (COMIC: The Five Masters) After unveiling their presence to the Twelfth Doctor and Clara Oswald, (COMIC: The Abominable Showmen) the Masters prepared for their performance. However, the "Tremas" Master began to fight with Missy over the control of her device, believing that he alone could hold the universe in his grasp. The decaying Master joined in the struggle, declaring that his future selves were idiots. The five were quickly disqualified, seemingly destroying them. (COMIC: The Five Masters)
Discovering that the Celestial Intervention Agency were gathering illegal Vess weapons, the Master blackmailed their agent, Straxus, into handing over a conceptual bomb. The Master then visited Bob Dovie and, after killing his family, planned the device into his head. When Dovie saw the inside of the Doctor's TARDIS, his refusal to believe in it caused the Doctor's TARDIS to explode, causing its timeline to begin to collapse. With the Doctor's timeline collapsing along with the TARDIS's, the Doctor's first eight incarnations joined forces to avert the detonation of the bomb, before the First Doctor erased the events from history. (AUDIO: The Light at the End)
Fighting the Fourth Doctor
The Master plotted to capture the Z-battery that the Doctor left on Earth to repair his TARDIS during his exile. The Master's plan was to use the Z-radiation within the battery, combined with the O-radiation which permeated Oseidon, to create powerful ZO-radiation which the Master could use to renew himself. For his plot, the Master entered into an alliance with the Kraals, and created two robot duplicates; one to pose as Kraal Chief Scientist Tyngworg, (AUDIO: The Oseidon Adventure) and a second to search for genetically engineered alien worm in Derbyshire. (AUDIO: Trail of the White Worm) The Doctor defeated the Master by using a Master android duplicate he had constructed to kidnap the real Master, and take him away in his own TARDIS, before his plan could be fulfilled. (AUDIO: The Oseidon Adventure)
The Master then posed as Inspector Efendi of the Intergalactic insurance agency so that he could find spaceships full of gold bullion. He then employed the Salonu to steal this gold, which attracted the attention of the Doctor and Leela to investigate. The Master then used the telepathic abilities of the Salonu to influence Leela into thinking that she was the Master's assassin, and that he was the great Xoanon who desired the death of the Doctor. The Salonu Prime, with the help of the Doctor, noticed the Master's influence and undid the conditioning. (AUDIO: The Evil One)
Shandar of the Rocket Men invited the Master on his ship the Asteroid, where the Master saw the Doctor was Shandar's prisoner. When he confronted the Doctor, the Master used his Tissue Compression Eliminator on him, and apparently killed him, but he realised he had only destroyed a duplicate. The real Doctor was in fact pretending to be Oskin, and used that guise to bring down the force field around the ship, and used K9 Mark I to stall the Master's TARDIS once it had passed the force field so that the slaves on board the Asteroid could be freed. The Master overrode K9's tampering and kidnapped Leela after she had left the Doctor. (AUDIO: Requiem for the Rocket Men) The Master then used Leela to be his champion at the death match, where she used her skills to win. The Doctor tracked her down to the death match and managed to destroy it. (AUDIO: Death Match)
The Master attempted to rend asunder the constellation of Mandus using a segment of the Key to Time, but was defeated by the Doctor. (PROSE: Cold Fusion)
On Kendrax, the Master attempted to ally himself with the Daleks and the Cybermen, but his plan was foiled by Romana II. (PROSE: The Not-So-Sinister Sponge) He also entered a pact with the Embodiment of Gris, but found himself again bested by the Doctor. (PROSE: Cold Fusion)
The Master was drawn to and became stranded on the planet Traken, the centre of the Traken Union, in a TARDIS configured into the sculpture-shaped Melkur. He plotted to take over the Source also located on the planet Traken, the power behind the Traken Union, and use it to restore himself. To this end, over a period of years, he won over Kassia, who later married Tremas and became a stepmother to Nyssa. His plans were thwarted by the Doctor and Adric when the Keeper of Traken summoned them, having sensed something of his machinations. With the help of Tremas and Nyssa, the Doctor removed the Master from the Source.
However, with some of the Keeper's powers lingering, the Master merged with Tremas, stealing his body. (TV: The Keeper of Traken)
In Tremas' body
Besting the Fourth Doctor
In his new body, the Master went to Earth, where he trapped the Doctor's TARDIS in a gravity bubble. He killed Tegan Jovanka's aunt Vanessa and a police constable with his Tissue Compression Eliminator. He then went to Logopolis, where he pretended to be Tremas to gain Nyssa's cooperation, giving her a bracelet that allowed him to control her arm. Using her as a hostage, he perverted the Block Transfer Computations and held the planet for ransom until its secret was revealed. This made the causal nexus unravel and also broke the Logopolitans' blockade of entropy, allowing it to swallow several galaxies, including the entire Traken Union.
The entropy wave was so threatening that the Master agreed to work with the Doctor to stop it. They travelled to the Pharos Project on Earth to do so, using the last theorem of Logopolis to reopen Charged Vacuum Emboitments. His true plan was revealed however, when he sent a message to the peoples of the universe that he would stop the entropy only if they submitted to his rule. While the Doctor stopped the Master's signal to shut down the CVE that would halt the entropy wave, the Master caused him to fall off the Pharos Project's radio telescope and regenerate, allowing the Master to escape. (TV: Logopolis)
Battling the Fifth Doctor
As the Fifth Doctor made his leave in the TARDIS, the Master reappeared and kidnapped Adric and held him in a hadron web to make him a part of his TARDIS. Using a projection of Adric on board the TARDIS, the Master sent the Doctor's TARDIS hurtling to destruction at Event One, but the Doctor saved his TARDIS through the Architectural Configuration. The Master used Adric's block transfer computations to create Castrovalva in the Andromeda Galaxy, where the Doctor would recover from his regeneration. He escaped from the recursion trap and tried to kill the Doctor, but was attacked by the enraged citizens with the city itself due to collapse. (TV: Castrovalva)
The Master remained trapped Castrovalva for some time, but was able to find a way to project himself in England in the 1920s. In an attempt to capture and kill the Doctor and his companions and escape Castrovalva, the Master manipulated Harry Houdini to send a psionic distress call to his old friend. When the Doctor answered the call, Houdini claimed that he needed help to stop a fortune teller. However, when the Master's plan was uncovered, the Doctor managed to stop his enemy's revenge plan. (AUDIO: Smoke and Mirrors)
The Master eventually escaped from Castrovalva, (TV: Time-Flight) but in the attempt, it caused damage to the dynamorphic generators, making it difficult to continue piloting his TARDIS. (PROSE: The Quantum Archangel) He travelled to Earth in 140,000,000 BC, where he disguised himself as the magician Kalid, hoping to use the Xeraphin gestalt to replace his dynamorphic generators. He brought two Concordes to his Citadel via a time contour. The second held the Doctor, his TARDIS and companions. He originally planned to use the captured passengers to break into the Sanctum and take control of the Xeraphin and add him to his TARDIS, but then he acquired the Doctor's TARDIS in a trade with him for a part the Doctor needed for his own TARDIS. The Xeraphin contacted Nyssa and let Tegan and her enter the Citadel, where the Master revealed his true form. The Master held the passengers hostage for parts from the Doctor's TARDIS. The second Concorde was returned to its own time and the Master ended up on Xeriphas with the freed and angry Xeraphin. (TV: Time-Flight)
On Xeriphas, the Master found and acquired Kamelion, a shape-changing android that could be easily controlled by a strong mind. Managing to elude Xeraphin, the Master escaped to England in 1215. (TV: The King's Demons) Killing the French knight "Sir Giles Estram" to assume his identity, (PROSE: Sanctuary) the Master made Kamelion impersonate John of England to prevent the signing of Magna Carta. However, the arrival of the Doctor caused interference with his plans. After the Doctor defeated him in a joust, the Master fled in his TARDIS after the still-disguised Kamelion offered the Doctor the choice of saving him or another captive. (TV: The King's Demons)
When the High Council of the Time Lords discovered that various incarnations of the Doctor had been taken into the Death Zone on Gallifrey, they asked the Master for help and offered him a new cycle of regenerations as a bargaining tool. He agreed and was given a copy of the Seal of the High Council by the Castellan to prove his credentials. However, the Third Doctor did not believe the Master and blamed him for their being there, taking the seal from him on the pretence that he would return the "stolen property" to the High Council.
He soon after encountered the Fifth Doctor, who also had trouble believing him, especially now he no longer had the seal. Before he could further attempt to gain his trust, however, a group of Cybermen ambushed them, the Doctor using the Master's recall device to escape and meet with the High Council when the Master was knocked out. Upon waking up, he formed a temporary alliance with the Cybermen to guide them to the Dark Tower, although it was clear they would kill him once he was no further use. After he let the Tower's traps slaughter the Cybermen, he hinted to the First Doctor how to get past security, but then grew power-hungry at the mention of immortality, and prepared to kill the first three incarnations of the Doctor, angry at the Doctors for refusing his help when he was genuinely there to assist them. Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart knocked him unconscious and Sarah Jane Smith and Tegan Jovanka bound him with rope. After Borusa was encased in Rassilon's tomb, Rassilon sent the Master back to his own time, promising that "his sins will find their punishment in due time". (TV: The Five Doctors)
As an attempt to trap the Doctor, and steal his remaining regenerations, the Master faked his own death, ensuring the Doctor would attend the funeral at the nursing home where he supposedly spent his final days. But the Doctor was saved by Turlough, and the Master's plan was foiled yet again. (PROSE: The Velvet Dark)
The Master arrived in Camelot just after the coronation of King Arthur, and became the new Merlin after the old one died. He planned to make Arthur believe Mordred was dead so Mordred would grow up to kill Arthur at the battle of Camlan. When the Master saw that the Doctor and Tegan had arrived, he left the court and hurried to his TARDIS to retreat, while the Doctor suggested Arthur create the Knights of the Round Table to prepare for when Mordred came. (PROSE: The Creation of Camelot)
The Master developed a more powerful version of the Tissue Compression Eliminator and accidentally shrank himself and his lab, without the ill effect of death. Using a device to boast his telepathy, the Master made contact with Kamelion once more, directing him to use the Doctor's TARDIS to land on Sarn. With Kamelion acting as his physical proxy, the Master had him pretend to be the locals' god and order the Doctor's death. When this failed, he had Kamelion take the small box his lab had become and take it to the lab on Sarn that used Numismaton Gas, hoping it could restore him.
As the Master stood in a gas vent and returned to normal size, the Doctor used the gas to apparently burn him to death. (TV: Planet of Fire) However, the Numismaton Gas increased the power of the Source of Traken still remaining in the Master's body, enabling the Master to survive. (PROSE: The Quantum Archangel) Horrifically burned, the Master went in search of the Fountain of Youth to restore himself. (PROSE: A Town Called Eternity)
Using his link to Kamelion, the Master attempted to psychically interfere with the Doctor's fifth regeneration, (AUDIO: Winter) urging the Doctor to die from the spectrox toxaemia poisoning in the TARDIS, (TV: The Caves of Androzani) but was foiled by Nyssa. (AUDIO: Winter)
Encountering the Sixth Doctor
The Master allied with his old Academy pupil the Rani in Killingworth against the Sixth Doctor and Peri Brown; the Master hoped to hasten the advancement of Earth's technology for his own nefarious reasons, while the Rani wanted the brain chemical that induced sleep in humans. The Doctor trapped the Master and the Rani in the Rani's TARDIS, which the Doctor had sabotaged, with the time spillage putting them in danger of being eaten by a tyrannosaurus rex. (TV: The Mark of the Rani) The Master separated the Rani's console room from the rest of her TARDIS, freeing himself while leaving the Rani to drift aimlessly through the vortex. (PROSE: State of Change)
Recovering his own TARDIS and learning of the Valeyard, the Master materialised in the Matrix and observed the Doctor's trial on Space Station Zenobia while examining the Matrix footage himself to see what was tampered with. Learning that the Valeyard was an "amalgamation of the darker side of the Doctor's nature", the Master decided that the Valeyard a threat to himself and rescued the Doctor by supplying the Doctor with witnesses in the form of Melanie Bush and Sabalom Glitz, and revealing himself to the court as a surprise witness. Using Glitz as a tool, the Master tried to steal secrets from the Matrix, but was beaten by the Valeyard, and imprisoned in the Matrix with a limbo atrophier. (TV: The Ultimate Foe) The Time Lords released the Master from the Matrix, whereupon the Master killed the technicians and fled in his TARDIS. (PROSE: Mission: Impractical) After escaping, the Master could regenerate his body because the Source of Traken still existed within him. (PROSE: The Quantum Archangel)
After escaping from an unsuccessful alliance with the Krotons, the Master was attacked by the Chronovores looking for revenge for his torture of Kronos, and discovered that the last remnants of the Source of Traken were fading, reducing him to his previous cadaverous form would return. The Master devised a plan to destroy the Chronovores and achieve omnipotence by trying to access the Lux Aeterna using the son of TOMTIT, the TITAN Array. He stole the equipment and used it upon a woman he hypnotised, Anjeliqua Whitefriar, expecting it to destroy her before he used it. However, she absorbed the Lux Aeterna, achieved omnipotence and became the Quantum Archangel.
Using her power, she filled the universe with too many alternate timelines, leading the Chronovores to feast upon them, eventually leading to the end of the universe. The Master and the Doctor teamed up to rectify the Master's mistake by defeating the Quantum Archangel. They discovered that the Quantum Archangel had allied itself with the Mad Mind of Bophemeral so it could have infinite knowledge of the Universe. The Doctor and the Master encountered Kronos, who claimed to have been the one who attacked the Master's TARDIS, so he would come up with his plan, and would eventually lead to the Master's destruction as well as allowing Anjeliqua to survive, causing Kronos' plan for revenge to go wrong. They succeeded by draining the Lux Aeterna out of her, although not before the Master escaped using the TITAN equipment to harness the Lux Aeterna to restore his Trakenite body. (PROSE: The Quantum Archangel)
At some point he discovered the Parallel Sect, where he discovered the Valeyard. He possessed the body of Keith Potter. He encountered the Sixth Doctor and Constance Clarke. He wanted to use the dimensional nexus to dominate them all. After the Doctor defeated him, the Master was confronted by the Valeyard, who threatened him, forcing the Master to both leave the nexus and never return and to leave the Doctor alone, as the Valeyard had a plan to deal with him. (AUDIO: The End of the Line)
Further exploits
The Master was greeted by a female incarnation of himself known as "Missy", who had developed a plan to form a band to hypnotise viewers of The Battle of the Bands Beyond the Stars. His previous incarnation, an incarnation possessing the body of a man known as Bruce and an incarnation who went by the name "Saxon" all joined in the plan, and the team spent "decades" practising. (COMIC: The Five Masters) After unveiling their presence to the Twelfth Doctor and Clara Oswald, (COMIC: The Abominable Showmen) the Masters prepared for their performance. However, this Master began to fight with Missy over the possession of her device, believing that he alone could hold the universe in his grasp. The other incarnations joined in the fight, and the five were eventually disqualified, seemingly destroying them. (COMIC: The Five Masters)
Facing the Seventh Doctor
After trying to start a war between Antari Two and Antari Three, (PROSE: First Frontier) the Master went to the Cheetah World, where he took control of the Cheetah People and the kitlings. He sent them to Ace's home in the London suburb of Perivale and hunted for human recruits. At the same time, exposure to the planet was changing the Master himself into a Cheetah Person. He found a pliable young man called Midge and used him to escape.
Using Midge as his "hunting dog", the Master recruited a gang of Perivale youths to defeat the Seventh Doctor and Ace. The Master killed Midge and teleported the Doctor to the Cheetah World, which had begun to break up. The Doctor escaped, but the Master was trapped on the dying world. (TV: Survival)
After Cheetah World
- How exactly the Master escaped the Cheetah World and what occurred next was a matter of debate.
Many accounts held that the Master, still in Tremas's body, somehow escaped the Cheetah World, and that he either remained infected by the Cheetah Virus for quite some time, (PROSE: Stop the Pigeon, Prime Time) was cured by Tzun nanites, which restored his Gallifreyan physiognomy, (PROSE: First Frontier) or took on that of a Deathworm Morphant. (PROSE: The Eight Doctors)
No longer infected by the virus, the Master either lost Tremas's body and reverted to his previous cadaverous form, (AUDIO: Dust Breeding) or regenerated into a new body. (PROSE: First Frontier) Ultimately, however, he was once again in a stolen body by the time of his execution on Skaro. (PROSE: The Eight Doctors)
Tremas persists
One account had it that, having somehow escaped Cheetah World, the Master spent a short time on Earth attempting to cure the virus by extracting nutrients from dying humans, but was once again defeated by the Doctor. (PROSE: Stop the Pigeon) Now attempting to gain a new body from the legendary race known as the Fleshsmiths, his plan was yet again stopped by the Doctor, who ejected the new body from the Fleshsmith vessel into space. (PROSE: Prime Time)
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After meeting Adam Mitchell, a companion who had betrayed the Ninth Doctor, the Master began working to help him take revenge on their common enemy. Together, they set up an asylum in 7214 with Autons as staff as a trap for the Sixth Doctor, Peri and Frobisher. The Doctor broke out of his cell thanks to Peri and Frobisher and melted the Autons. The Master escaped by tripping up the Doctor, leaving Adam to capture Frobisher, who was disguised as Peri. (COMIC: Facades)
Using a group of Aeroliths to further his alliance, the Master syphoned their life force, to transmit to Adam, using a Gulwort. However, when they were freed by the Seventh Doctor, they chased after him. (COMIC: Cat and Mouse) After being tortured by the Aeroliths, the Master escaped, and, reunited with Adam, encountered the Eleventh Doctor. Preventing Adam from listening to the Doctor, the Master elected to kill the captured companions, (COMIC: The Choice) but was prevented when the Doctor summoned his earlier incarnations.
The Master and Adam released an Auton army, but the Doctors defeated them and released their companions. However, unbeknownst to Adam, the Master planned to destroy reality itself, using the merged TARDIS that brought the Doctors there. Convinced by the Doctors, Adam stunned him, but the Master stabbed him with a hidden knife. The injured Adam managed to foil the Master's plan, but died in the attempt. The Master, still pleased by his role within all the chaos, teleported away. (COMIC: Endgame)
Looking much older with greying hair, the Master captured the first seven of the Doctor's incarnations and put them into a void called the Determinant. However, the Graak successfully freed the Doctors and the Master was captured and imprisoned by one of the races involved in his game. (GAME: Destiny of the Doctors)
Finding a new regenerative cycle in the past
Another account claimed that, escaping from Cheetah World with the aid of a Kitling just as the planet exploded, the Master was flung back in time to Earth in 1957.
Trapped on Earth at the dawn of the Space Age, the Master interrupted the first Soviet satellite launch and sent a distress signal to the Tzun Canton on Zeta Reticuli Four. He offered to help assimilate Earth into the Tzun Confederacy. In return, the Master asked for passage off Earth and the use of the Tzun's genetic engineering to cure his Cheetah Virus infection. The Tzun accepted and prepared nanites for him that broke down the corrupted Trakenite DNA in his cells and restructured it. This restored the Master to being a "full" Time Lord, which gave him a new regenerative cycle. While assisting the Tzun, the Master used the alias "Major Kreer". Shortly after being restored to his full Time Lord heritage he was shot in the back by Ace, causing him to regenerate.
Following the regeneration he was able to make his escape, summoning his TARDIS using a Stattenheim remote control built from Tzun technology. After leaving a booby-trap for the Doctor in a nuclear warhead, the Master fled. (PROSE: First Frontier)
Later, the Master laid a trap for the Doctor in one of the Doctor's homes using a device which would release the energy from a time fissure once the Doctor's TARDIS materialised, destroying it. The plan failed when Sarah Jane Smith, Mike Yates and K9 destroyed the device, causing the Master to flee. (PROSE: Housewarming)
The nanites the Tzun gave the Master eventually began to fail risking him returning to his former failing form, causing him to seek the Loom of Rassilon's Mouse in order to make himself a new body. His plan failed when a Fortean Flicker caused Bernice Summerfield's wedding to occur in the same place, exposing his scheme to her guests. However, the Master managed to escape by hypnotising Kitai into posing as a decoy. (PROSE: Happy Endings)
Tremas lost
The Master learned of a device known as the Warp Core, a sentient powerhouse of mental energy designed as a weapon to safeguard the planet Duchamp 331. He tracked the Warp Core to Earth, intending to use it to power his TARDIS. Unprepared for its power and underestimating its outside awareness, he was attacked by the Warp Core, having the body he stole from Tremas stripped from him and reducing him to his previous decaying form. He then collected four Krill eggs with the intention of awakening the Warp Core from its slumber and exhausting it, so that he could draw it into his TARDIS to be his slave. The Master then used a mask to disguise his deformity and followed the Warp Core as it arrived on Duchamp 331. Under the alias Mr Seta, the Master funded Madame Salvadori's trip to Duchamp 331.
There, he unleashed the Krill upon the passengers, hypnotising Salvadori's aide, Klemp, in the process. Revealing his true identity, the Master kept Salvadori alive, before encountering the Doctor. When the Core arrived, the Master tried to ally with it, but it dismissed him, leading his to ordering Klemp to kill Salvadori, but Klemp's loyalty was too strong, so the Master killed him. The Doctor escaped to his TARDIS, and attempted to gain control of the Warp Core through his TARDIS's telepathic circuits, while the Master used his own to fight of the Doctor's influence, and gain control of it. After it and the planet was destroyed, the Master was flung through time and space. (AUDIO: Dust Breeding)
The Doctor later made a deal with Death whereby the Master would have ten years of peace and sanity, at the end of which the Doctor had to kill him.
During his ten years, the Master had become a physician on the colony world of Perfugium with no memory of his past, and took the name John Smith. He was taken in by Wolstonecroft, and inherited his house when Wolstonecroft died. During his time as John Smith, the Master had become emotionally involved with Jacqueline Schaeffer.
At the end of the allotted time, the Doctor arrived, but strove to avoid fulfilling his side of the bargain. The Master became aware of the Doctor's role in pledging him to Death as her servant, but while restored to John Smith, Smith forgave the Doctor for it, understanding that the adult couldn't be blamed for the actions of a child who didn't understand what was being offered. Death herself was present at these events, disguised as the Master's maid, and manipulated events so that the John Smith persona would crumble and the true Master would become dominant once more. It was during these events he learnt that the Doctor made a deal with Death after killing Torvic which made the Master Death's champion. (AUDIO: Master)
Tremas retained
Another account indicated that, immediately after his experience on Cheetah World, and still in Tremas' body, the Master travelled to the planet of the Morgs in search of a way to cheat death, and obtained the form of a Deathworm. (PROSE: The Eight Doctors)
A new body again
Once again in a stolen body, the Master tried to steal the body of a boy named Callum, but his plan was foiled by the Doctor. (PROSE: Omegamorphosis)
Fighting the Eighth Doctor
Now in his "final incarnation", (TV: Doctor Who) the Master arrived in the Valley of the Kings in Egypt and was captured by the Daleks to be placed on trial, (AUDIO: Mastermind) for his attempts to destroy them and usurp their place as "the supreme creatures of the universe." (PROSE: The Novel of the Film) After he was tried and executed by the Daleks on Skaro as part of a Time Lord-Dalek treaty, (PROSE: Lungbarrow) he made a final request: for the Doctor to transport his remains back to Gallifrey. However, his essence survived his physical death in the fluid-like form (TV: Doctor Who) of a Deathworm Morphant. (AUDIO: Mastermind)
The Doctor stored the Master's ashes in a casket and set his TARDIS on course for Gallifrey. However, en route, the Master's consciousness escaped from the casket and interfered with the TARDIS, causing a timing malfunction that resulted in an emergency landing in San Francisco during the final days of 1999. While the Doctor lay wounded after being caught in the crossfire of a gang war and was picked up by an ambulance, the Master exited the TARDIS via its keyhole, and, (TV: Doctor Who) deciding that the Doctor was too injured, and the nearby boy, Chang Lee, too young, (PROSE: The Novel of the Film) he hid inside a bag belonging to the ambulance driver, Bruce. After Bruce had gone to home and bed, the Master forced his way into Bruce's body through his mouth, killing him and taking over his body. The next morning, the Master awoke, now inhabiting Bruce's body, but realised that the American's body had started decaying and would not last long and launched his scheme to steal the Doctor's remaining regenerations, with his first act being the murder of Bruce's wife, (TV: Doctor Who) and then used Bruce's memories to track the Doctor to Walker General Hospital. (PROSE: The Novel of the Film)
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Learning from Bruce's colleagues that the Doctor had died on the operating table and that his body had apparently been stolen, the Master was also informed by Nurse Curtis that the young gang member who had been present when the Doctor was shot, Chang Lee, had also stolen the Doctor's possessions, including the TARDIS key. (TV: Doctor Who) Heading to the TARDIS, the Master found Lee already inside, (PROSE: The Novel of the Film) and regaled him with stories of the Doctor's supposed villainy, claiming that the Doctor had stolen his lives and home, and was also Genghis Khan. With Lee's help, the Master was able to open the Eye of Harmony, and discovered that the Doctor had regenerated into a new body, and that the Doctor was apparently half-human. (TV: Doctor Who)
Stealing Bruce's ambulance by murdering his paramedic partner, the Master and Lee answered Dr. Grace Holloway's request for an ambulance to collect the Doctor, (PROSE: The Novel of the Film) and agreed to take them to Professor Wagg's atomic clock at the Institute for Technological Advancement and Research and repair the timing malfunction the Master caused with the clock's beryllium chip, when he was really planning to bring the Doctor back to the TARDIS. Realising the Master's true identity, the Doctor and Grace escaped, but before they could do so, the Master secretly possessed Grace's mind. When the Doctor got back to the TARDIS to fix the timing malfunction, the Master had Grace knock the Doctor out and put him in restraints. (TV: Doctor Who)
Still wearing Bruce's clothes, (COMIC: The Abominable Showmen) the Master was greeted by a female incarnation of himself known as "Missy", who had developed a plan to form a band to hypnotise viewers of The Battle of the Bands Beyond the Stars. His decaying thirteenth incarnation, an incarnation possessing the body of Tremas and an incarnation going by the name "Saxon" all joined in the plan, and the team spent "decades" practising. (COMIC: The Five Masters) After unveiling their presence to the Twelfth Doctor and Clara Oswald, (COMIC: The Abominable Showmen) the Masters prepared for their performance. However, the "Tremas" Master began to fight with Missy over the control of her device, believing that he alone could hold the universe in his grasp. The decaying Master joined in the struggle, followed rapidly by the "Bruce" Master, and the group soon became involved in a full on brawl. The five were quickly disqualified, seemingly destroying them. (COMIC: The Five Masters)
Having donned more traditional Gallifreyan robes, the Master boasted his plans to the retrained Doctor, accidentally letting it slip that he had lost his lives trying to destroy the Doctor, exposing his earlier lies to Lee. After killing Lee for refusing to follow his orders, the Master forcibly opened the Eye using Grace's retina so that he could steal the Doctor's regenerations. Although the Master was able to initiate the transfer process that would give him access to the Doctor's remaining regenerations, Grace was able to prevent this by rerouting the TARDIS' power and sending the ship into a temporal orbit. Grace released the Doctor from his restraints, but the Master threw Grace off of a balcony inside the Cloister Room, killing her. With the Master's body dying as the Doctor's regenerations were returned to him, the two Time Lords fought near the Eye of Harmony, culminating in the Master falling into it when he leapt at the Doctor and misjudged the angle. (TV: Doctor Who)
Imprisonment
While his essence was left wandering the Time Vortex, (COMIC: The Glorious Dead) an "echo" of the Master remained imprisoned inside the Doctor's TARDIS. In the singularity of the Eye of Harmony, the Master commanded infinite power, but could only wield it from within the confines of the Eye. (PROSE: The Gallifrey Chronicles)
Shortly after his defeat, the Master laid a final trap for the Doctor, leaving a crystalline structure on the Eye that would give the Doctor amnesia. However, the Doctor was subconsciously guided by Rassilon to recover his memories by visiting his previous seven selves. (PROSE: The Eight Doctors) Whilst exploring the Eighth Doctor's TARDIS, River Song thought she heard an American screaming from within the walls. (GAME: The Eternity Clock)
During his imprisonment the Doctor came to speak to the Master where he dwelled in a room with his face on a screen. The Master spoke to the Doctor in the room on several occasions, telling him that he was an "old friend". After the defeat of the Council of Eight, the Doctor spoke to him about the death of Miranda Dawkins and if it was worth the cost of him saving the universe. (PROSE: Sometime Never...)
The Master later appeared to the Doctor within a mirror in the TARDIS, where he asked the Doctor what was going on inside his head. The Doctor was unable to answer the question before the image in the mirror returned to that of the Doctor's reflection. (PROSE: The Deadstone Memorial)
The Master had a longer conversation with the Doctor from within the Eye of Harmony. The Master showed the Doctor a vision of Marnal's investigation of the Shoal. When the Doctor pressed him about what happened to Gallifrey, the Master teased him with offers to bring it back, and to return his memories. The Master then became angry over the circumstances of his imprisonment. He threatened to use all of his power to detonate a fusion device and have his revenge. The Doctor sealed up the Eye of Harmony before he had the chance to carry out his plan. (PROSE: The Gallifrey Chronicles)
Beyond the Eye of Harmony
Fight for the Glory
One account claimed that after the Master passed through the Eye of Harmony, his essence was left wandering the Time Vortex. Nearing his ultimate destruction, he was rescued from the Vortex by a being named Esterath, the controller of the Glory, the focal point of the Omniverse. The Master was told that it was time for the Glory to gain another controller, but the power had to be fought for. The Master assumed that the battle would be between himself and his greatest foe, the Doctor.
After gliding over the many realities throughout the Omniversal Spectrum for what he described as seeming like centuries, the Master was resurrected into the body of a recently deceased vagrant on the streets of 2001 Brixton. Some weeks afterwards, due to a symbiotic link he had formed with the Doctor's TARDIS when it consumed part of his essence after he passed through the Eye of Harmony, the Master was transported onto the Moon during one of the Doctor's adventures. The Master subsequently used this link to trail the Doctor for some time without his enemy suspecting. (COMIC: The Glorious Dead)
He was present in London during the crisis resulting from Grace Holloway's attempt to merge human and Time Lord DNA, but was using the alien DNA of a Morphant by mistake. He killed Duncan, an M16 agent, with his TCE. (COMIC: The Fallen)
The Master later made contact with Sato Katsura, a Japanese samurai unwillingly rendered immortal as a result of his involvement in the Doctor's adventures. The embittered warrior became the Master's follower. At his behest, Sato adopted the identity of Cardinal Morningstar and became leader of the Church of the Glorious Dead, instigator of a holy war that altered the history of Earth, a planet now renamed "Dhakan".
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The symbiotic link between the Doctor's TARDIS and the Master had also given the latter the ability to influence the flight of the TARDIS, which he used to send the craft to times and places which would weaken the Doctor's self-belief and confidence.
After revealing his plot to the Doctor, the Master won a sword fight with the Doctor by stabbing him, but then learned that the true battle for the Glory was between his companion, Sato, and the Doctor's, the Cyberman Kroton, of which Kroton was the victor. Amongst his first acts as controller of the Glory were to cleanse the TARDIS of the Master's influence and to place the Master somewhere that he could not escape. The Master declared he would survive and return. (COMIC: The Glorious Dead)
Edward Grainger's dreams
Another account had it that the Master eventually escaped through the Eye of Harmony by influencing the dreams of Edward Grainger to unravel the Doctor's timeline, by killing Edward Grainger whilst he was an infant in 1906. (PROSE: Forgotten) However, the Master, in the body of Sir George Steer, was stopped by an older Edward Grainger from 2006 and Violet after being hit with a rolling pin and being removed from the body he possessed. (PROSE: Prologue) The Master then managed to evade the Eighth Doctor's detection, and possessed the body of a human native named Richard. (PROSE: Forgotten)
Wandering the Earth
After possessing Richard, the Master killed Violet out of revenge. However, the Master discovered his possession had caused the host body to decay at an accelerated rate, so he was forced to steal more bodies to prolong his survival. Realising that the First World War was rapidly approaching, the Master decided to migrate to America to avoid the conflict, and boarded a ship to go there in 1912. Unfortunately, he had boarded the RMS Titanic, unaware of its eventual fate, and escaped in a lifeboat when it sank.
Arriving in New York City, the Master took possession of a member of the Hudson Dusters, quickly becoming the leader of the gang and 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. He accumulated money to fund experiments towards the elongation of the lifespan of his host 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. 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 UNIT officers Ruth Matheson and Charlie Sato. However, he managed to hypnotise 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. (AUDIO: Mastermind)
A new lease of life
The Master was rescued from "a predicament" and given a new lease of life (AUDIO: Eyes of the Master) by Coordinator Narvin. (AUDIO: The Death of Hope) Originally intending for him to fight against the Daleks to "soften him up", the Time Lords discovered that the Eminence posed a greater threat, and instructed the Master to use them to fight the Daleks. The Celestial Intervention Agency gave the Master all the information he needed for his mission, (AUDIO: Eyes of the Master) such as an update on the Doctor's activities. (AUDIO: Masterplan)
Impersonating the Doctor
The Master infiltrated a Time Lord base which contained two dimensional nodes, products of technology developed by "the Dimensioneers", Time Lords of old who had travelled across dimensions, and stole them. Attempting to control the dimensional energies of the entire universe, the Master planted one on the planet of the Tolians, allowing it to drain all the energy that was available before giving the Tolians a communicator as a way of drawing the Doctor to their planet, enabling the Master to steal the only node activator still intact from the Doctor's TARDIS. Having successfully tricked the Doctor into restoring the Tolians' source of dimensional energy for them using his Node by manipulating him and using a form of reverse psychology, he allowed the Tolians to force him to open a dimensional rift, causing a catastrophic imbalance to the flow of dimensional energy in the process so great that it threatened the structure of reality itself.
Aiming to infiltrate UNIT, the Master assumed the guise of the Doctor, modelling his TARDIS' exterior on the form of a police box. Successful in his deceit, he began to work alongside UNIT's current scientific advisor, Elizabeth Klein, under the command of Colonel Lafayette and later Major Wyland-Jones. He assisted UNIT in defeating a number of interdimensional alien incursions, including attacks by Mind Leeches, Lava Spiders, Skyheads and the Nexus.
Rescuing the Doctor and his companion Raine Creevy from becoming trapped on the other side of a dimensional rift caused by the dimensional instability, the Master stole the Doctor's node activator and sent all the alien invaders back to their own dimensions, fleeing Earth with the Doctor in his TARDIS. Revealing his true identity to the Doctor, he detailed his plan: he intended to use the activator in conjunction with the two nodes to add even more dimensional energy to the Tolians so he could use them to conquer the Earth and other planet and dimensions beyond. However, the Doctor managed to convince the Tolian leader Arunzell that the Master would betray the Tolians, giving him the opportunity to capture the Master in return for recalling the rest of the Tolians. However, the Master revealed that he had locked the dimensional doorway, prompting him to abandon him to Arunzell. However, the restoration of the dimensional energies reduced Arunzell to his regular size, enabling the Master to kill him with his TCE and escape, intending to try his scheme all over again. (AUDIO: Dominion)
The Eminence experiments
The Master travelled to the Nixyce system and stole a teleportation casket of the Eminence, integrating it into his TARDIS console. He then tried to use the casket to gain influence over the Eminence, and take control of its infinite warriors, calling them his "finite warriors". (AUDIO: Eyes of the Master) After saving Sally Armstrong from being hit by a taxi, he recruited her and began to work for the Ides Scientific Institute in the 1970s. (AUDIO: Time's Horizon) He tried to discover why some humans were immune to the Eminence's influence, experimenting on them in an attempt to eliminate it so that the Daleks could not exploit it.
Encountering the Eighth Doctor in London, the Doctor managed to defeat him by reopening the link to the Eminence located in his mind, teaching it how to pilot a TARDIS. The Eminence then used the teleportation casket located in the Master's TARDIS to pilot it, taking the Master and Sally with it. The Master managed to isolate the Eminence inside his TARDIS through the telepathic circuits, enabling Sally to expel it into the Time Vortex.
The Master and Sally then kidnapped Molly O'Sullivan from her home in 107 Baker Street, (AUDIO: Eyes of the Master) and took her to a world on the edge of humanity's war with the Eminence. There, the Master ran an experiment, using the retro-genitor particles in Molly to fight the Eminence's breath of forever. (AUDIO: The Death of Hope) The Master then destroyed Ramosa, kidnapping all of the planet's human colonists on board his TARDIS. (AUDIO: The Reviled) The Master infected the human colonists of Ramosa with retro-genitor particles, planning to expose them to the Eminence, and gain control of all of them using the fragment of the Eminence contained in his mind. (AUDIO: Masterplan)
The Master unleashed his plans for humanity on Earth. He allied himself with the Eminence and allowed them to conquer Earth. He subsequently activated the retro-genitor particles in the humans and asserted his psychic influence over them. The Doctor escaped the Master's clutches and helped a group of humans overcome the Master's influence and stop his plans. Whilst the Celestial Intervention Agency erased his work from history, the Master escaped in his TARDIS, which was disguised as a palm tree. (AUDIO: Rule of the Eminence)
Creating a new Dalek army
Forming an alliance with the Dalek Time Controller, the Master aided him in creating a new Dalek army in return for control over a number of conquered worlds. Setting the Controller up in Montmartre within the Red Pagoda, he returned to the future and aided the Daleks in their occupation of Earth. (AUDIO: Master of the Daleks)
When the Doctor absconded in time, the Master returned to the Pagoda to help repair it. (AUDIO: The Monster of Montmartre) With the amount of convertible humans still available dwindling, he decided to start converting Sontarans into Daleks. Liv stole his Tissue Compression Eliminator, and then travelled with him to Moscow. He created a mutiny with the Daleks, knowing that the Time Controller would betray him. The Doctor stole his TARDIS, leaving him stranded in the midst of a Dalek-Sontaran war. (AUDIO: Master of the Daleks)
At war with his past
The Master made a deal with the Cult of the Heretic to regenerate the universe using their anomaly cage. The Cult manipulated the Master into coming into contact with his younger self, whom he disfigured with a staser. The Cult then betrayed the Master by switching the minds of the younger Master and the older Master. The paradox of having a Time Lord inhabiting the body of his past self led to the universe beginning to break down. The younger Master hired the Transhuman Sisters of the Unholy Protocol and the Dragonhunters to kill the older Master.
The Seventh Doctor encountered both of the Masters and helped them get back into the right bodies. The two Masters then returned to the Cult's headquarters and killed all of the members. They then plotted to use the anomaly cage, but were stopped by the Seventh Doctor, who made sure that the universe remained practically unchanged by its regeneration. (AUDIO: The Two Masters)
Last Great Time War
The Master was resurrected to fight in the Last Great Time War, due to the Time Lords' belief that he would be to the perfect warrior due to his savagery. (TV: The Sound of Drums) The Time Lords also gave the Master a new regeneration cycle. (TV: Utopia, The Doctor Falls) He was able to write out most of his involvement in the conflict. (COMIC: The Judas Goatee)
In the body of a small child, the Master made a deal with the War Doctor to end their old ways of fighting and to become allies. (COMIC: Kill God) He teamed up with the Doctor and his companion the Squire for a time, during the period of the War in which the Cyclors allied themselves with the Daleks. (COMIC: The Organ Grinder)
The Doctor and the Master travelled to Veestrax, where they saw a broken wall with "Exterminhate" written on it. The Master told the Doctor that he hadn't written it. The Doctor then asked for the Master's help with destroying the planet. (COMIC: Outrun)
He arrived on Golgauth with the Doctor asking what he intended to do. The Doctor replied "what I have to". (COMIC: The Then and the Now, The Organ Grinder) The duo soon encountered the Volatix Cabal, together killing one of its members. They then encountered Alice Obiefune, who had travelled in the Master's TARDIS from after the War had ended. The Master set about tethering his future TARDIS to the Doctor's while the Squire set about saving Alice from the Volatix Tendrils.
With both TARDISes in tow, they travelled beneath the surface of Golgauth, where an Overcaste rebel base was located. The Master and the Doctor revealed a Volatix spy in the group and neutralised him. The spy revealed that he had called for help and moments later a Cyclor tore off the roof of the base. (COMIC: The Organ Grinder) The Master used a device to summon a squadron of Gallifreyan ships to attack the Cyclors. He used this distraction to flee, sneaking into his TARDIS that Alice had brought from the future. He inadvertently created a paradox when attempting to fly the machine, realising too late that he was erasing a timeline that brought his future TARDIS into being. (COMIC: Kill God)
The chronal tumour began to react with the Psilent songbox, which had been activated by Alice. Realising that it would result in a temporal bomb, the Master deactivated it. The Master was too late, however, and the resulting paradox caused his body to regenerate. Horrified by this, he swore revenge on the Doctor and his companions, but ultimately his memory of Alice's intervention in the War was erased. (COMIC: Fast Asleep) The Master's TARDIS recorded that the Master fled the event horizon in his TARDIS before the Doctor's plans were carried out, deeming them too insane even for him. (COMIC: The One)
The Master fought the Supreme Dalek on the slopes of the Never Vault, (TV: The Witch's Familiar) and was present when the Dalek Emperor took control of the Cruciform. Frightened by the horror of the Time War, he ran away as far as he could, to the end of the universe, (TV: The Sound of Drums) where the Time Lords were forbidden to look. There, he used a chameleon arch to hide himself as a human named Yana. (TV: Utopia) Rassilon sent the War Doctor to find the Master, but he was unable to do so. (PROSE: Engines of War)
Under the chameleon arch
Physically human, Yana recalled that he was found as a naked child on the coast of the Silver Devastation with only an "heirloom" fob watch. His memory of his past was that the watch could never keep time and that he was always late for things as a result. He believed that he spent his life moving from one refugee ship to another and all his life he heard the sound of drums every waking hour as if they were getting closer.
Yana retained the Master's brilliant intellect and ultimately became involved in the attempt to send the remnants of humanity to Utopia. He eventually became friends with another scientist, Chantho, who was thought to be the last of the Malmooth race. Together, they worked on the Utopia Project to convey the surviving humans from the planet Malcassairo to Utopia.
Yana met the Tenth Doctor, Jack Harkness and Martha Jones when they were rescued from the Futurekind. Overhearing conversation between the Doctor and Jack about things such as time travel, Daleks, and regeneration, Yana became visibly upset. Martha drew Yana's attention to the watch in his possession and, hearing voices that commanded and entreated him, Yana opened the watch and returned to his true identity.
The Master then locked the Doctor out of Yana's lab, and opened the gate keeping the Futurekind at bay, saying to a shocked Chantho that "as one door closes, another must open". After Chantho threatened him with a gun, the Master electrocuted her with a loose set of power cables, angered that she was never curious of the fob watch during their decades of working together, and left her for dead. However, Chantho used the last of her strength to pull a laser gun on the Master while his back was turned, and shot him in the chest before she died.
Fatally wounded, the Master slithered into the Doctor's TARDIS while the Doctor watched on, deadlock sealed the door shut to keep the Doctor out. Finding the idea of how he was dying undignified, the Master decided to regenerate into a form that was young and strong as the Doctor was. (TV: Utopia)
As Harold Saxon
Post-regeneration
With his new body, the Master left the Doctor, Martha and Jack on the planet Malcassairo with Futurekind about to burst in the laboratory door. The Master now had the TARDIS and the Doctor's DNA template via the Doctor's hand, which Jack Harkness had taken with him to Malcassairo. (TV: Utopia)
Because of the Doctor's last-minute intervention, the TARDIS would only take the Master to Earth in the 2000s. He took on the alias "Harold Saxon" and set about fabricating Saxon's past to gain political support. He made his first public appearance shortly after the downfall of Harriet Jones. (TV: The Sound of Drums)
Life on Earth
"Harold Saxon" released his autobiography, Kiss Me, Kill Me, and, while writing the book, met the Honourable Lucy Cole, who was working in publishing; they were married in 2007. He also cannibalised and converted the Doctor's TARDIS into a paradox machine to change history, and took Lucy to see the universe. (TV: The Sound of Drums)
Travelling back to the end of the universe, the Master contacted the Toclafane, the childlike, vicious cyborg remnants of the humans who had never found Utopia. He made an agreement to allow the Toclafane to escape extinction and live anew in the past, with the paradox machine preventing them from changing their own history. (TV: The Sound of Drums, Last of the Time Lords)
The Master designed the Valiant, UNIT's air carrier, and a laser screwdriver, which he reserved for his own use. The Master then started the Archangel Network, which was hailed as a telecommunications breakthrough. This telecommunications network, tied to mobile phones, carried a mind control signal which made humans trust him. The network affected the Doctor so he had no suspicions as to the Master's presence as "Harold Saxon", as he would have normally noticed the presence of another Time Lord. To those few humans conscious of it, the signal was a persistent drumbeat, the constant drumbeat the Master always heard, that only they could hear. (TV: The Sound of Drums)
Political career
By 2007, "Saxon" had become Minister of Defence of Great Britain, (TV: The Sound of Drums) and campaigned for the general election as Prime Minister of Great Britain (TV: Love & Monsters) with the slogan "Vote Saxon". (TV: Captain Jack Harkness) On Christmas Eve, he gave orders for British Army tanks to destroy the Empress of the Racnoss's webstar. (TV: The Runaway Bride)
The Master visited "Saxon's" old high school during the campaign, using the Archangel Network to brainwash the staff into having false memories of "Saxon" to gain political support. One teacher, James Curtis, was resistant to the Network, so the Master used his laser screwdriver to implant the appropriate memories into his mind. (PROSE: Speech Day)
"Saxon" asserted that extraterrestrial life did exist and Britain must do something about it. This made him popular in early 2008, after the Judoon had taken the Royal Hope Hospital to the Moon. (TV: Smith and Jones)
"Saxon" also funded the rejuvenation experiments of Richard Lazarus, presumably revealing at least in part the biological processes involved in a Time Lord's physical regeneration; its similarities were noted by the Doctor on observing the process. (TV: The Lazarus Experiment) With the results from this and the Doctor's DNA, the Master could use the laser screwdriver to age the Doctor. (TV: The Sound of Drums)
After Martha had left with the Doctor, "Saxon" had a mysterious man meet with Martha's mother, Francine, (TV: The Lazarus Experiment) and then had an agent tap into a conversation between Francine and Martha through the superphone. (TV: 42)
Before the Doctor, Martha and Captain Jack arrived back from the end of the universe, the Master had sent Torchwood Three on a wild-goose chase to the Himalayas, (TV: The Sound of Drums) and, along with all other incarnations of the Master, was kidnapped by the Sild. (PROSE: Harvest of Time)
With his election a sure thing, politicians from other parties flocked to his side. Harold Saxon was elected Prime Minister of the United Kingdom in May 2008, and visited Buckingham Palace soon after to give a victory speech. (TV: The Sound of Drums)
Prime Minister Saxon
He gathered his Cabinet for a meeting in the re-built 10 Downing Street, and accused them of being traitors for abandoning their political parties to jump on his political ticket. He rigged the desk phone speakers on the Cabinet Room table to release a lethal gas that killed the Cabinet ministers, while using a gas mask to protect himself and mock his victims. He later unleashed the Toclafane on Sunday Mirror reporter Vivien Rook, who threatened to expose his fabricated past to the public.
"Saxon" told the public that the Cabinet had gone into seclusion, and soon afterward announced first contact with the "friendly" Toclafane who could protect Earth against alien threats. The Master then had Francine, Tish and Clive Jones arrested and taken to the Valiant; Leo Jones, however, had received a warning from Martha and gotten away in time. After a telephone conversation with the Doctor, the Master had the Doctor, Martha and Jack framed as terrorists responsible for the Cabinet's murder and forced them into hiding.
The Master moved to the Valiant, which the governments of Earth considered neutral territory and therefore fitting for formal first contact with alien life. The Master had the Toclafane murder the American President Arthur Coleman Winters, and captured the Doctor, Martha and Jack, who had come to the Valiant earlier that day. Using the results from Professor Lazarus's experiment, along with the DNA in the Doctor's hand, the Master used his laser screwdriver to age the Doctor into an old man, and then ordered the Toclafane to kill one tenth of humanity and commence their invasion as Martha escaped. (TV: The Sound of Drums)
Master of all
While ruling the world for a year, the Master discovered that the Drast had secretly invaded before he arrived. Furious, he ordered the Toclafane to burn Japan, where the Drast were situated. (PROSE: The Story of Martha) By 2009, the Master had converted Earth into a slave camp which he ruled from the Valiant. The Master aged the Doctor even further and planned to expand his New Time Lord Empire into space. He built an army of warships to take his war across the universe.
Martha used the legend of the Doctor, which she had spread, and the thoughts of Earth thinking "Doctor" at the same time. Their psychic energy was channelled through the Archangel Network, which the Doctor had spent the year infiltrating telepathically. The psychic energy restored the Doctor and gave him telekinetic powers. After cowering from the Doctor's forgiveness, the Master used Jack's vortex manipulator to teleport him and the Doctor to Earth, where he threatened to use the black hole converter to detonate the rockets, but was foiled by the Doctor's knowledge that the Master could not kill himself, something that in due time would change.
Jack destroyed the Paradox Machine and reversed time one year, although this did not affect anyone aboard the Valiant. Lucy shot the Master. Defeated, he refused to regenerate to spite the Doctor, and died in his arms. The Doctor burned the Master's body on a pyre, (TV: Last of the Time Lords) but, long after he had left, Miss Trefusis, one of the warders of Broadfell Prison, (TV: The End of Time) retrieved the Master's ring from his funeral pyre. (TV: Last of the Time Lords)
As far as the general public were aware, Harold Saxon "went mad" and disappeared, along with President Winters. (TV: The End of Time) Among all ex-Prime Ministers, Saxon was on file by UNIT, who noted him as one of the Master's incarnations. This was revealed to the Twelfth Doctor by Osgood when the Master returned as "Missy", commenting that "she wasn't even the worst." (TV: Death in Heaven) By the year 2119, Saxon was well-remembered enough that Alice O'Donnell, though admittedly a follower of the Doctor's exploits, referred to 1980 as "pre-Harold Saxon" when brought back to that year by the Twelfth Doctor. (TV: Before the Flood)
Resurrection
On Christmas Eve 2009, the prison governor of Broadfell Prison brought Lucy Saxon to a chamber where most of the staff were members of the Disciples of Saxon, who had been working ever since his apparent death to bring about his resurrection.
With the help of the ring and a biometric imprint taken from Lucy, the nude Master reappeared in a swirl of energy, but Lucy and one other warder had prepared for this. To stop his resurrection, Lucy hurled a Potion of Death at the Master. His followers and Lucy were killed in the resulting explosion, but the Master survived. (TV: The End of Time)
Survival
The Master survived the blast, but his physical form was flawed: his once brown hair was now bleached blond, and he was unshaven and unkempt. Also, his life force was left in a state of constant depletion. He consumed huge quantities of food and drained the vitality of humans to stay alive. As a side effect of the failed resurrection, he could expend his life force for enhanced agility and send bolts of energy from his hands. The Master's body would even fluctuate between a fleshy form and a half-skeletal state.
The Master led the Doctor on a wild goose chase after banging the beat of the drums in his mind to lure the Doctor to him and escaped when Wilfred Mott interrupted the chase.
Encountering the Tenth Doctor soon after, the Master and the Doctor discovered the drumming in the Master's head was real, not just a symptom of insanity. The Doctor also told him of the prophecy told to him by the Ood, but the Master quickly dismissed it, assuming that it was referring to him. Billionaire Joshua Naismith then captured the Master and enlisted his assistance to mend the malfunctioning Vinvocci medical machine, which he had christened the "Immortality Gate". The Master co-operated for his own purposes. He broke out of a straitjacket and flew into the gateway, which he had working a billion fold on the human template. The gateway sent out an energy pulse that transformed every human on Earth, except Wilf, whom the Doctor protected with a radiation shield, and his granddaughter, Donna Noble, who was unaffected due to her part-Time Lord physiology, into the Master Race — identical copies of the Master subservient to him. (TV: The End of Time)
Rassilon's Final Solution
After the Doctor and Wilf were rescued from the Master by two Vinvocci, the Master used the combined mental powers of the Master Race and a White-Point Star that had fallen on Earth to trace the origin of the drum beat in his head. Receiving contact from the Time Lord High Council on the last day of the Time War, the Master tore open the time lock on the war, bringing back the Time Lords.
As the Lord President Rassilon and his council arrived through the Immortality Gate, the Master announced he intended to transplant himself into the entire Time Lord race, just as he had done to the human race. Rassilon, using his gauntlet, reversed the effects of the Master's transplantation, and watched as Gallifrey returned to the universe on a collision course with Earth. The Doctor berated the Master for breaking the time lock, warning him that it wouldn't just be the Time Lords and the Daleks, and that he had just opened up Hell; although the Master called it "my kind of world", the Doctor told him even the Time Lords couldn't survive what he had just unleashed.
Rassilon revealed his plans for the Ultimate Sanction; the Master asked if he could also "ascend into glory", but Rassilon rebuffed him, calling him "diseased" and revealed that he was responsible for the drumming that the Master had experienced all of his life, and prepared to execute him, but the Doctor stepped in with Wilfred's pistol. After some hesitation on whether to shoot Rassilon or the Master, he shot the White-Point Star, destroying the link. Enraged, Rassilon prepared to kill the Doctor, but the Master unleashed his bio-electric blasts at the President, roaring that the Time Lords had manipulated him and made him the monster he had become, counting the beat of the rhythm that had resounded in his head and tormenting him all his life. The Time Lords, Gallifrey, and the Master then vanished in a burst of white light, and were sent "back into [the] hell" of the final day of the Time War. (TV: The End of Time)
According to one account, the Master fought with Rassilon to the point that both of them regenerated; the Master became female while Rassilon gained a bald body. (PROSE: Pandoric's Box)
According to other accounts, the Time Lords subsequently cured the Master's "condition". He then took his TARDIS and escaped Gallifrey. He'd later describe it as "a mutual kicking [him] out." (TV: The Doctor Falls)
The Battle of the Bands
Still possessing blond hair and stubble, (COMIC: The Abominable Showmen) the Master was greeted by a female incarnation of himself known as "Missy," who had developed a plan to form a band to hypnotise viewers of The Battle of the Bands Beyond the Stars. His decaying thirteenth incarnation, the incarnation possessing the body of Tremas and the incarnation possessing the body of "Bruce" all joined in the plan, and the team spent "decades" practising. (COMIC: The Five Masters) Much to this Master's appreciation, he was allowed to play the drums. After unveiling their presence to the Twelfth Doctor and Clara Oswald, (COMIC: The Abominable Showmen) the Masters prepared for their performance. However, the "Tremas" Master began to fight with Missy over the control of her device, believing that he alone could hold the universe in his grasp. The other Masters soon joined in the fight for power as well, while the "Saxon" Master joined seemingly for the fun of it. The five were quickly disqualified, seemingly destroying them. (COMIC: The Five Masters)
The Mondasian voyage
The Master eventually ended up on a Mondasian colony ship pulling away from a black hole which was experiencing time dilation. The Master took over the city, "killed a lot of people," and lived like a king. Eventually the Mondasians rebelled against the Master's cruelty, forcing him into hiding. Attempting to escape, the Master went too fast and burned out his TARDIS's dematerialisation circuit, resulting in the Master being stranded on Floor 1056 of the colony ship. (TV: The Doctor Falls)
The Master disguised himself as a man named "Razor" and started Operation Exodus, or rather the genesis of the Cybermen. While in the hospital disguised as Razor, he found Bill Potts, who had been given a cybernetic chestpiece after being shot on Floor 0000. The two of them spent several years on the lower decks, where the Master learned that the Twelfth Doctor was at the front of the ship. Studying the woman travelling with the Doctor, the Master eventually deduced that it was his own future incarnation. "Razor" spent ten years with Bill, becoming her closest friend and ally on the ship. Eventually, he lured Bill into surgery for full cyber-conversion under the false pretense of bringing her to the elevators, just two hours before the Doctor would have arrived on the floor.
Watching as the Doctor, Nardole, and Missy arrived, he revealed his identity to Missy, who did not remember ever being on the ship; the two of them then rejoined the Doctor and gloated at the fate of his companion. (TV: World Enough and Time) The two versions of the Master attacked the Doctor together, knocking him out and taking the Doctor to the roof of the hospital to witness the Cybermen's rise, strapped to a wheelchair. However, in the scuffle, the Doctor had managed to widen the Cybermen's definition of "humanity," changing the variable of hearts from one to two. Missy eventually knocked the Master out, claiming that she had only been faking that she was on the Master's side.
Just as Nardole arrived with a stolen shuttlecraft, the Doctor was attacked by one of the Cybermen. The two Masters attempted to convince Nardole to leave without him, but their shuttle was stopped by a Cyber-converted Bill, who still retained her humanity. Crashing through 507 floors of the colony ship, the shuttlecraft gave out at one of the solar farms.
The Master and Missy spent the following weeks searching for the disguised elevators along the perimeter of the floor. Knowing that Missy did not remember turning into herself from him, deduced that he would die during this adventure, and began jovially preparing to become a woman. Eventually, the pair were able to discover the hidden lifts, and Missy went as far as to summon one to help them escape. The Doctor, however, pointed out that this would alert the Cybermen to where they were. Together, the Master, Missy, the Doctor and Bill destroyed an evolved Cyberman that arrived in the lift, the Master wielding a modified laser screwdriver. Unable to return to the TARDIS due to how quickly time was moving on the floor of the Cybermen, the Doctor insisted that they had to prepare for a confrontation.
As the Doctor prepared to stand, the Master explained to Missy that his TARDIS was held on the bottom floor, which they could reach due to time moving the quickest there, but that he had blown the dematerialisation circuit. Missy, recalling an instance where a very scary woman had pushed her up against a wall and insisted that she always keep a spare dematerialisation circuit, pushed the Master against the wall and insisted that he always keep a spare dematerialisation circuit, revealing a spare dematerialisation circuit which she kept on her person.
Before departing, the two asked what the Doctor's plan was, knowing that he wouldn't be able to save everyone on the ship forever. As they left, the Doctor stopped them, and explained that he wanted to save these people simply because it was the right thing to do. The Master noted that he hadn't been listening to a word of the Doctor's speech, and he left the scene, soon followed by Missy. (TV: The Doctor Falls)
Death
When they approached the door to the elevator, Missy offered to hug the Master before their trek. During this moment she recalled how much fun it was being that particular incarnation of herself and how he "burned like a sun, like a whole screaming world on fire." Stating she would always miss that feeling, Missy then stabbed the Master in the back, mortally wounding him in order to force his regeneration into Missy. Quickly realizing what Missy had done, the Master complimented her trick and was glad that "I haven't lost my touch." However, Missy made the wound precise so that he would have time to reach his TARDIS before the regeneration occurred.
Missy helped the Master to the lift, explaining that she planned to stand with the Doctor, and that it was the inevitable end that they had been leading towards their entire lives. Declaring that he would never stand with the Doctor, the Master shot Missy in the back with his laser screwdriver at full blast, mortally wounding her past the point of regeneration. Laughing, the Master declared that their perfect ending was always going to be "we shoot ourselves in the back." Still laughing and in pain, the Master returned to Floor 1056 in the lift, leaving his redeemed future incarnation to die alone. (TV: The Doctor Falls)
As Missy
A female body
After returning to his TARDIS, the Master regenerated into the incarnation that had fatally wounded him. (TV: The Doctor Falls) As such, she adapted her name of "the Master" into "Missy", short for "Mistress". (TV: Dark Water)
She also managed to acquire a vortex manipulator, which she used for time travel, on a few occasions at least. (TV: The Magician's Apprentice)
Reclaiming her friend
Missy met her former wife, Lucy Saxon in London, who had been sent to sell three matrix data slices to an earlier incarnation of the Master. Missy spoke to Lucy about her husband, and told her that one day she would have to kill him with a gun. Lucy listened to her story about what would happen to her, and how it would all work out. Lucy agreed to the terms, and gave her the three matrix slices. (PROSE: The Unwanted Gift of Prophecy)
Working with the Cybermen, Missy founded the 3W Institute, in order to create a Cyberman army of the dead. She uploaded dying minds to the Nethersphere; a virtual reality housed within a matrix data slice. This reality changed and rewrote the minds, removing their emotions before re-downloading them into their Cyber-converted bodies. (TV: Dark Water)
Missy decided to manoeuvre Clara Oswald into becoming the Doctor's companion, believing that Clara was just the right companion to attract the Doctor's interest and make it easier for Missy to emotionally manipulate him, (TV: Death in Heaven) showing him "the friend inside the enemy [and] the enemy inside the friend." (TV: The Witch's Familiar) Ashildr believed that Missy placed the two together so that that the Doctor and Clara in tandem would become the Hybrid of Gallifreyan myth. (TV: Hell Bent)
At some point before 2013, Missy gave Clara the Doctor's phone number, claiming that it was a tech support line, leading to Clara to meet the Eleventh Doctor. (TV: The Bells of Saint John, Death in Heaven) She then kept the Doctor and Clara together into the Doctor's twelfth incarnation by placing an ad in a newspaper for Mancini's Family Restaurant. (TV: Deep Breath, Death in Heaven)
Missy went along the Doctor's timeline and greeted people who died in connection with him, (TV: Death in Heaven) such as the Half-Face Man (TV: Deep Breath) and Gretchen Carlisle. (TV: Into the Dalek) Finding this made her "a bit busy", (TV: The Caretaker) Missy began to secretly monitor the Twelfth Doctor and Clara, (TV: Flatline) as she did when Earth was saved from a solar flare by a forest that grew overnight. (TV: In the Forest of the Night)
Missy finally met the Twelfth Doctor and Clara at one of 3W's mausoleums, which was hidden inside St Paul's Cathedral (TV: Dark Water) with dimensional engineering. (TV: Death in Heaven) Initially posing as an android and sharing a kiss with a very confused Doctor, she revealed her true identity to him as the Cybermen marched out onto the streets of London. (TV: Dark Water)
Missy was quickly captured by UNIT, having anonymously tipped them off on the Cybermen's presence. She watched as Cybermen flew into the sky exploded above major population centres, creating clouds that rained Cyber-pollen, turning the dead into Cybermen. Taken onto Boat One along with the Doctor, she sent out a signal to the Cybermen, to attack the plane before freeing herself and disintegrating Osgood. Missy then ordered the Cybermen to remove a piece of the fuselage, causing Kate Stewart and the Doctor to be sucked out before ordering the Cybermen to destroy the plane, and teleporting away. In the Nethersphere, Missy and Seb watched the Doctor free falling and saving himself by using his key to summon the TARDIS. When Seb got overexcited at this dramatic turn of events, Missy casually disintegrated him. The Doctor found out from the Cyber-converted Danny Pink that she planned to have the Cyber-pollen fall again, killing humanity, who would be reborn as Cybermen. She teleported into the graveyard to which the Doctor had piloted his TARDIS. Missy then unexpectedly gave the Doctor control of the Cybermen, wanting him to use them as his army, in the hopes of proving the similarities between the two Time Lords. However, after pondering the idea, the Doctor proclaimed himself to be simply an "idiot" with a box rather than a general or any sort of leader. He turned control over to the Cyber-converted Danny, who ordered the army into the sky to destroy themselves, dispersing the threatening rainclouds.
After the threat of the Cybermen had ended, Missy gave the Doctor coordinates to the current location of Gallifrey, lying to the Doctor that the planet had returned to its original location, and that she and the Doctor could travel there together. However, Clara, using Missy's own weapon, decided to kill her. The Doctor wouldn't let Clara kill Missy, decided to kill his old friend himself — not out of vengeance, he told her, but to save Clara's soul. Before he could fire the weapon, Missy was shot by a rogue Cyberman, who was revealed to be the Doctor's old friend, Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart, (TV: Death in Heaven) but used the blast from the blaster to recharge her vortex manipulator and escape undetected. (TV: The Witch's Familiar)
Trapped on Skaro
Some time later, after he was summoned by Davros, (TV: The Magician's Apprentice) the Twelfth Doctor left his confession dial with Ohila (WC: Prologue) for her to deliver to Missy. Missy got the attention of both Clara and UNIT by freezing all the airborne planes on Earth in time. Summoning Clara, she showed her the Doctor's confession dial, the Time Lord equivalent of a will. Together, she and Clara tracked the Doctor down to Essex in 1138.
Unbeknownst to them, they led Colony Sarff right to the Doctor. Sarff then took the three to Skaro, although they were led to believe that they were still in deep space. While the Doctor was taken to Davros, Missy and Clara escaped their cell, but were soon captured by a Dalek. They were taken to the other Daleks before they were both seemingly exterminated. (TV: The Magician's Apprentice) However, Missy and Clara had survived by using the Dalek blasts to recharge her vortex manipulator and teleporting from the Dalek city.
Missy and Clara entered the Dalek sewers, composed of rotting Daleks, using Clara to lure a Dalek there. She cut through its case using a brooch given to her by the Doctor made of dwarf star alloy, enabling the rotting Daleks to kill it. She put Clara inside the case and pretended to be her prisoner, enabling her to re-enter the Dalek control room. When the Daleks began to gain Time Lord regeneration energy, Missy used their incapacitation to find the Doctor. She used a Dalek gun to shoot Colony Sarff, saving the Doctor. She then watched as the Doctor toyed with Davros about the revived Daleks in the sewers and even tapped Davros' Dalek eye as they made their escape.
When the city was being destroyed by the regenerated sewer Daleks, Missy tried to trick the Doctor into killing Clara inside the Dalek. However, the Doctor realised the deception and told Missy to run. She was surrounded by Daleks when the city crumbled in on itself, but purported that she had "a really clever idea". (TV: The Witch's Familiar)
Further schemes
Hearing that the Twelfth Doctor and Clara had been forced to enter Battle of the Bands Beyond the Stars, Missy came up with a new plan for universal domination. Travelling through her time stream, she recruited her decaying thirteenth incarnation, the Master in the stolen body of Tremas, the Master in the stolen body of Bruce and the post-resurrection "Harold Saxon" Master, and formed a band to compete on the show. The group planned to use the popularity of the program to hypnotise the audiences across the galaxy. According to Missy, the five spent "decades" preparing for the performance. (COMIC: The Five Masters)
The group went on before Clara and the Doctor due to a shift in the program's schedule, and the five revealed themselves to the pair. (COMIC: The Abominable Showmen) Missy expected the Doctor to attempt to stop the five of them, or to at least esquire on their plans, but the Doctor refused to intervene or question their scheme. After much prying, the Doctor correctly predicted the group's plan, but still refused to intervene as they started their song.
As she prepared to hypnotise her audience, her previous incarnations began to fight with her over her device, as each wanted to control the universe without the others. During the fight, viewers began to turn off their sets and the group were soon all disqualified and were thus blown up, although neither Clara nor the Doctor believed that they had truly been killed. (COMIC: The Five Masters)
Missy became a headteacher for the school Saxon Heights, after she had done away with the previous one, Mrs Goss. She had implemented new and strange rules, such as a school uniform that was almost identical to her own clothing, and getting rid of everyone's mobile communication devices, with her excuse being that they were used too often. However the real reason was because she wanted to summon up a Daemon by hooking up her newly aquired devices to a transmitter. The Osgoods found this out, and had UNIT stop her, although she managed to escape. (PROSE: Yes, Missy)
Missy goaded the Doctor into following her through various time periods while she stole valuable items. The Doctor was too late to stop her each time. Finally catching up with her in the Stone Age, the Doctor revealed to her that he had discovered her true plan: to leave Cybermats behind where she stole each item. Missy expressed her desire to further reveal her plan to him. The Doctor instead refused to listen and boarded the TARDIS in search of some lunch. (PROSE: Dr. Twelfth)
The Vault
After she was captured by an unnamed species on an unnamed planet, Missy was sentenced to death. In accordance with their Fatality Index, the Twelfth Doctor was chosen to carry out the sentence. However, he sabotaged the execution machine so that she was knocked unconscious instead of being killed. Swearing an oath to guard Missy's "body" for a thousand years, the Doctor scared the executioners away and had Nardole place her inside a Quantum Fold Chamber. (TV: Extremis) The Doctor and Nardole transported the vault to St Luke's University, where they continued to guard it for several decades. (TV: The Pilot)
In 2017, (TV: Knock Knock) after the Doctor began traveling with Bill Potts, (TV: The Pilot) Missy began banging on the doors of the vault, only for Nardole to assert that he would stand guard and prevent her escape. (TV: Thin Ice) When he later double-checked the locks, she started playing Für Elise on a piano the Doctor had given her. Once Nardole was dismissed by the Doctor, Missy started playing Pop Goes The Weasel when the Doctor told her about his adventure at 11 Cardinal Road. (TV: Knock Knock)
After he received an email from a simulation of himself warning of an upcoming invasion, the Doctor became tempted to release Missy from the vault. (TV: Extremis) When the Monks later occupied the Earth, the Doctor was kept prisoner for six months. After Bill helped him escape, he decided to consult Missy on how to defeat the Monks. Missy revealed she had dealt with them before, and that the only way to weaken their grip on power was to kill the psychic lynchpin being beamed to the whole planet. After the Monks had been driven off-world, the Doctor visited Missy in the vault again. This time, she claimed to be in deep regret of all the people she had killed throughout her lifetimes. The Doctor assured her she was making good progress on her redemption. (TV: The Lie of the Land)
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Nardole later released Missy from the vault so that she could help him return the TARDIS to 1881 Mars. However, the Doctor reminded her she was acting against their agreement and that he would put her back in the vault. (TV: Empress of Mars)
Deciding Missy may be worth trusting, the Doctor released her from the Vault to perform maintenance work on the TARDIS while he took Bill and Nardole to find the lost Roman legion. Missy finished the work, then took to watching the Doctor at work until he returned some days later. Nardole was frustrated the Doctor had freed her, but he brushed him off, preferring to see if Missy had learned anything. Missy later cried as the Doctor watched on, both wondering if it was possible for them to be friends again and whether Missy was finally becoming the person the Doctor had desired to make them. (TV: The Eaters of Light)
Meeting her predecessor
To test Missy's goodness, the Doctor recruited Bill and Nardole to be her "companions" and followed a distress signal to a colony ship while the Doctor monitored Missy's progress from the TARDIS. Missy introduced herself to the cameras as "Doctor Who", telling Bill that it was the Doctor's original name; she addressed Bill as "Exposition" and Nardole as "Comic Relief". However, she was ill-prepared to handle a frightened and violent crewmember, Jorj, who subsequently shot Bill; she was carried off by passengers from Floor 1056. Missy accompanied the Doctor and Nardole down the elevators to Bill's floor, where the Doctor left her in charge of gleaning information from the computers. She discovered that the colony ship originated from Mondas while being pestered by a man called "Razor", who, upon confrontation, revealed himself to be her past self. (TV: World Enough and Time)
The two versions of the Master then attacked the Doctor together, knocking him out and taking the Doctor to the roof of the hospital to witness the Cybermen's rise, strapped to a wheelchair. However, in the scuffle, the Doctor had managed to widen the Cybermen's definition of "humanity", changing the variable of hearts from one to two. Just as Nardole arrived with a stolen shuttlecraft, the Doctor was attacked by one of the Cybermen. Missy entered the shuttle after the Master, as her younger self attempted to convince Nardole to leave without him. However, their shuttle was stopped by a Cyber-converted Bill, who still retained her humanity. Crashing through the floors, the shuttlecraft gave out at one of the solar farms on Floor 0507.
The Master and Missy spent the following weeks searching for the disguised elevators along the perimeter of the floor. Eventually, the pair were able to discover the hidden lifts, and Missy went as far as to summon one to help them escape. The Doctor pointed out that this would alert the Cybermen to where they were. Unable to return to the TARDIS due to how quickly time was moving on the floor of the Cybermen, the Doctor insisted that they had to prepare for a confrontation.
As the Doctor prepared to stand, the Master explained to Missy that his TARDIS was held on the bottom floor, which they could reach due to time moving the quickest there, but that he had blown the dematerialisation circuit. Missy, recalling an instance where a very scary woman had pushed her up against a wall and insisted that she always keep a spare dematerialisation circuit, pushed the Master against the wall and insisted that he always keep a spare dematerialisation circuit, revealing a spare dematerialisation circuit which she kept on her person.
Before departing, the two asked what the Doctor's plan was, knowing that he wouldn't be able to save everyone on the ship forever. As they left, the Doctor stopped them, and explained that he wanted to save these people simply because it was the right thing to do. The Master noted that he hadn't been listening to a word of the Doctor's speech, and he left the scene. Missy spoke with the Doctor in private, and admitted that she too had only ever wanted to stand with the Doctor as an ally. Despite this, she still left with the Master. (TV: The Doctor Falls)
Death
When they approached the door to the elevator, Missy offered to hug the Master before their trek. During this moment she recalled how much fun it was being that particular incarnation of herself, and how he "burned like a sun, like a whole screaming world on fire" during his life time. She then stabbed the Master in the back, mortally wounding him in order to force the Master's regeneration into Missy. However, she made the wound precise so that he would have time to reach his TARDIS before regenerating. The Master was impressed with Missy's trick and how she hadn't lost his touch, causing Missy to tell him that the Master "deserved my very best."
Missy helped the Master to the lift, explaining that she planned to stand with the Doctor, and that it was the inevitable end that they had been leading towards their entire lives. Declaring that he would never stand with the Doctor, the Master shot Missy in the back with his laser screwdriver at full blast, mortally wounding her past the point of regeneration. Laughing, the Master declared that their perfect ending was always going to be "we shoot ourselves in the back." As the Master departed for his TARDIS, Missy collapsed to the ground and died; redeemed but without hope, witness, or reward. (TV: The Doctor Falls)
Undated events
- The Master travelled with Finsey, a woman who was fascinated by his evilness, until he saw no further use for her and tried to have her killed. (AUDIO: The Transcendence of Ephros)
- Missy claimed to have fought and defeated the Monks on a planet by pushing the Monks' lynchpin into a volcano. (TV: The Lie of the Land)
Other realities
The Sild captured many different alternate versions of the Master. (PROSE: Harvest of Time)
Alternate timelines
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When the Cybermen allied with Rassilon to take over history, (COMIC; Supremacy of the Cybermen) the Master, while fighting the Third Doctor, was caught up in a time distortion which resulted in him being cyber-converted while pleading to the Doctor for help. (COMIC: Prologue: the Third Doctor)
Parallel universes
In the Inferno Earth, the Master was still a loyal Time Lord who went under the name Koschei. He was working for the Celestial Intervention Agency and travelled with a human companion called Ailla. They became stranded on Earth after defeating the Great Intelligence, and the Republic of Great Britain captured him for information. Ailla was killed and Koschei was tortured until all his regenerations were used up. Koschei died when he was confronted by the Master from N-Space, who turned off his life-support machine at his request. (PROSE: The Face of the Enemy)
In an alternative universe created by the Quantum Archangel, the Master aided the Daleks in a war against the Time Lords. The war was being led by the Sixth Doctor, who was President of the Time Lords. Due to the aid of the Master, the enemy began winning the war. Rather than let them win the war, the Doctor activated the Armageddon Sapphire, which destroyed this universe and killed the Master. (PROSE: The Quantum Archangel)
In a different alternative universe created by the Archangel, the Master cooperated alongside the Rani, the Monk and Drax to try to destroy the world using a DNA recombinator, turning the human race into a gestalt consciousness which could be used as a weapon to conquer the universe. (PROSE: The Quantum Archangel)
Aborted timelines
During the Second War in Heaven, the Master was brought back to Gallifrey and used as a tutor for newly-loomed soldiers. (PROSE: The Taking of Planet 5) Father Kreiner possessed the decapitated head of the Master, although it may have been the head of a clone. (PROSE: Interference - Book Two)
A future that never existed, (COMIC: Fast Asleep) the Master became intent on manipulating events to remove many of his actions from the Last Great Time War, even as it was timelocked. (COMIC: The Judas Goatee) The Master operated on the brain of his TARDIS during the Last Great Time War, which resulted in a chronal tumour protruding from one side of the console, (COMIC: The One) though he never activated the tumour. (COMIC: Running to Stay Still) The Master's plan would be a success, as his TARDIS would be taken into the Time War by Alice Obiefune, (COMIC: Running to Stay Still) where it was stolen by the Master's younger self. This created a massive paradox, spiraling the time-ship out of control. (COMIC: Kill God)
Personality
The Master was the polar opposite of the Doctor in almost every respect; condescending, arrogant, vain, and lusting for power. (TV: Terror of the Autons, Colony in Space, The Sound of Drums) However, the Master's insanity was in part due to the High Council from Gallifrey's future sending a four-beat rhythm of drums into the Master's mind, (TV: The End of Time) with the Tenth Doctor recalling that staring into the Untempered Schism as a child caused the Master's personality to change. (TV: The Sound of Drums)
The Master had the ability to control his regenerations, with each face he selected baring the imprint of his mind, leading the Master to keep the same characteristic across various regenerations. (PROSE: Harvest of Time) Comfortable with his villainous reputation, the Master took insults about his madness as compliments, (TV: The Time Monster, The Five Doctors, The Sound of Drums) and reacted with offence if someone asked her if she had turned over a new leaf, (TV: The Magician's Apprentice) to the point that he refused to even acknowledge the Doctor's attempts to change him. (TV: The Doctor Falls)
When introducing himself, or enthralling someone, the Master would say, "I am the Master and you will obey me." (TV: Planet of Fire) He also liked to say "my dear Doctor" when addressing his adversary. (TV: Colony in Space, Time-Flight, The Caves of Androzani, The Doctor Falls)
Unlike the Doctor, who usually needed his companions to convince people that he knew what he was doing, the Master had little problem manipulating people into helping him with his evil plans. (TV: The Time Monster, Doctor Who)
Extremely self-centred, the Master was willing to destroy Gallifrey rather than to regenerate himself, (TV: The Deadly Assassin) believed that the battle for the Glory was to be between him and the Eighth Doctor, (COMIC: The Glorious Dead) thought that Carmen's prophesy referred exclusively to him, (TV: The End of Time) and viewed the Doctors saving Gallifrey as an attempt to save her. (TV: Death in Heaven) So great was the Master's ego that he was unable to work with his other incarnations, with the "UNIT enemy" incarnation being psychically attacked by his other selves when he took control of the Sild's telepathic network, (PROSE: Harvest of Time) and the Seventh Doctor defeating the decayed and bald Masters by tricking them into arguing with themselves over ownership of the universe. (AUDIO: The Two Masters) Though the "Harold Saxon" Master and Missy worked more amicably, their clashing views on helping the Twelfth Doctor eventually led them to killing each other out of spite. (TV: The Doctor Falls)
The Master's schemes usually fell into three categories; conquest, (TV: Terror of the Autons, The Mind of Evil, Colony in Space, The Dæmons, The Time Monster, Logopolis, The Sound of Drums) survival, (TV: The Deadly Assassin, The Keeper of Traken, The Five Doctors, Planet of Fire, Survival, Doctor Who, The End of Time) and the death of the Doctor. (TV: Castrovalva, The Ultimate Foe) Similar to the Monk, the Master would also, on occasion, attempt to disturb the flow of history, (TV: The King's Demons, The Mark of the Rani) and, when imprisoned, would devote his energies to gaining his freedom. (TV: The Claws of Axos, The Sea Devils, Time-Flight, Utopia, The Doctor Falls)
Throughout his lives, the Master would adopt many disguises and aliases, often to pursue his goals, (TV: Terror of the Autons, The Mind of Evil, Colony in Space, The Dæmons, The Time Monster, Frontier in Space, Castrovalva, The Sound of Drums) though other times with no reason or explanation given. (TV: Time-Flight, The Mark of the Rani)
The Master's disguises ranged from the providence of false qualifications, (TV: Terror of the Autons, The Mind of Evil, Colony in Space, The Dæmons, The Time Monster, Frontier in Space, The Sound of Drums) to employing masks and heavy makeup (TV: Terror of the Autons, The Mind of Evil, The Claws of Axos, Castrovalva, Time-Flight, The King's Demons, World Enough and Time) or a change of clothing, (TV: The Sea Devils, Logopolis, The Mark of the Rani, PROSE: Out of the Green Mist) to even changing his physical forms. (TV: The Keeper of Traken, Utopia, Dark Water)
In a show of vanity, the Master's choice of alias would often reflect his title of "Master". (TV: Terror of the Autons, The Dæmons, The Time Monster, The King's Demons, The Sound of Drums, Dark Water; PROSE: Doctor Who Fights Masterplan "Q", Night Flight to Nowhere, The Time Savers, Legacy of the Daleks, Last of the Gaderene, The Quantum Archangel, The Duke of Dominoes, The Spear of Destiny, Yes, Missy; AUDIO: Dust Breeding, Trail of the White Worm, Mastermind, The Evil One, And You Will Obey Me, Masterpiece, The Two Masters)
High Council President Borusa described the Master as "one of the most evil and corrupt beings [the] Time Lord race [had] ever produced" and that his "crimes [were] without number, and [his] villainy without end." The Master seemed amused by the description. (TV: The Five Doctors)
The Master was referred to as a "jackanapes", an "unimaginative plodder", (TV: Terror of the Autons) and the "personification of evil" (TV: The Sea Devils) by the Third Doctor, the "quintessence of evil" by the Fourth Doctor, (TV: The Deadly Assassin) a "psychopath" by both the Eighth (COMIC: The Glorious Dead) and Twelfth Doctors, (COMIC: Doorway to Hell) and "stone-cold brilliant" by the Tenth Doctor. (TV: The End of Time)
Iris Wildthyme called the Master a "phallocentric dope". (PROSE: The Scarlet Empress) Rassilon described the Master as the Time Lords' "most infamous child", (TV: The End of Time) while Ashildr described Missy as the "lover of chaos". (TV: Hell Bent)
First incarnation
Koschei admired Magnus' ability to command people, and wished that he could one day learn to do the same. (PROSE: Divided Loyalties)
He was good friends with the First Doctor at the Time Lord Academy, and the two bonded over a mutual promise to someday explore the universe together. The Twelfth Doctor later recalled that he was "always so brilliant" from the first day at the Academy. The Doctor developed a crush on him during this time. (TV: World Enough and Time)
"UNIT enemy" incarnation
As the rival of the Third Doctor, the Master was often arrogant and impatient, taken to be rude towards all and showing no tolerance for stupidity. (TV: The Dæmons, The Sea Devils, The Time Monster, Frontier in Space) To sway others to his way of thinking, the Master acted as a suave and debonair gentleman, with a sardonic sense of humour. (TV: Terror of the Autons, The Time Monster) When his own survival was at stake, the Master would not hesitate to betray his allies to save himself. (TV: The Claws of Axos)
The Master was willing to play the long game, spinning a web of lies while maintaining several back-ups in his schemes. (TV: The Mind of Evil) He seemed to truly believe his delusions of grandeur, proclaiming that he and the Doctor could "reign benevolently," ending "war, suffering [and] disease," (TV: Colony in Space) and that, instead of "all this talk of democracy, freedom, [and] liberty", the world needed "strength, power and decision." (TV: The Dæmons) When the Doctor accused him of being paranoid, the Master stated that everyone was paranoid, he was just honest about his paranoia. (TV: The Time Monster)
The Master held himself in high-esteem, even believing himself immune to the mind parasite within the Keller Machine, when in truth, he was only able to resist its attack on him for a short time, and with great effort. (TV: The Mind of Evil) He also demonstrated a strong confidence in himself when he walked into the UNIT HQ on the edge of London without fear of capture, instead hypnotising a handful of UNIT personnel. (TV: The Claws of Axos)
This Master also had a juvenile side to him, making blithely sarcastic comments about an impending nuclear meltdown, (TV: The Claws of Axos) enjoying an episode of Clangers in his prison cell, (TV: The Sea Devils) and reading The War of the Worlds while trying to instigate a war between Earth and Draconia. (TV: Frontier in Space) He also had a sadistic side, taking particular pleasure in goading the Brigadier into attacking Axos when they both knew that it would put the Doctor and Jo Grant in danger. (TV: The Claws of Axos) He also took considerable delight in blackmailing the Doctor and Jo on Uxarieus. (TV: Colony in Space)
The Master often killed people, casually murdering those whom he could not control, (TV: Terror of the Autons) or who were standing in the way of an item he required. (TV: The Claws of Axos) He believed that those who died as a result of his schemes to be "necessary sacrifice[s]". (TV: The Sea Devils)
Unlike his following incarnations, this Master was rarely resentful, instead accepting defeat with only a slight annoyance, (TV: The Dæmons, Frontier in Space) though he once stated that destroying the Doctor's favourite species would "be a reward in itself". (TV: The Sea Devils) The Master also learned from his mistakes, placing an anti-intruder alarm beam in his TARDIS (TV: Colony in Space) after the Doctor stole his dematerialisation circuit. (TV: Terror of the Autons)
Being a haughty psychopath, he regarded most beings as his inferiors, but had a mutual respect for the Doctor as a worthy opponent and his near intellectual equal, (TV: Terror of the Autons, The Sea Devils) and even showed a certain respect to the Doctor's companions, even if he still considered them inferior. (TV: Frontier in Space) He often found himself unable to kill the Doctor, because that would rid him of the satisfaction of defeating him, (PROSE: Legacy of the Daleks) and would only resort to killing the Doctor if he viewed him as an unmovable obstacle in his plans, (TV: Terror of the Autons) considering his quarrel with the Doctor to be something of a game,[source needed] though he was willing to risk the Doctor's life on the Keller Machine to satisfy his curiosity. (TV: The Mind of Evil) However, the Master was not above working alongside the Doctor when necessary, (TV: The Claws of Axos) and even offered to rule the universe with him. (TV: Colony in Space)
While in Atlantis, the Master formed a relationship of sorts with Queen Galleia, remarking that she was beautiful and promising her power. Both Galleia and Lakis commented that the Master had "the bearing of a God". (TV: The Time Monster)
After an attack he made on the Twelfth Doctor was sent back at him, the Master proudly welcomed his regeneration, declaring that death was meaningless to him and that he would get his revenge on the Doctor. (COMIC: Doorway to Hell)
During this incarnation, the Master would often smoke a cigar. (TV: The Mind of Evil, The Time Monster)
A master manipulator, the Master knew how to use others' greed and sense of duty as bargaining tools in his schemes, (TV: The Claws of Axos, The Sea Devils) and how to use his authority as an adjudicator to manipulate and influence the human factions and their competing aspirations on Uxarieus. (TV: Colony in Space)
The Master was also stronger than he appeared, as he was able to physically overpower Luigi Rossini, (TV: Terror of the Autons) Harry Mailer, (TV: The Mind of Evil) Smedley, (TV: The Sea Devils) and John Benton. (TV: The Time Monster) He was also able to make a small jump onto a moving lorry from a bridge, and then swing down to the driver's cab to hypnotise the driver. (TV: The Claws of Axos)
Degenerated body
While he first approached a situation with youthful naivety, (AUDIO: The Two Masters) the Master later preoccupied his time with finding a way to regenerate following his disfigurement. With his mobility and capabilities of camouflage decreased, he was often forced to hide his involvement in his plans until the very moment victory was within his grasp. (TV: The Deadly Assassin, The Keeper of Traken)
The Master felt a stronger hatred towards the Doctor than before, specifically guiding the Fourth Doctor back to Gallifrey so he could be framed for the President's assassination and executed in disgrace, (TV: The Deadly Assassin) wished to personally kill a companion of the Doctor, (AUDIO: The Two Masters) and once hatched a plan that would have destroyed all the Doctors and unravelled the Web of Time simply for his revenge against the Doctor. (AUDIO: The Light at the End) Despite the animosity, the Master was able to have a civil conversation with the Doctor when it suited him. (AUDIO: Death Match)
Meticulous in his schemes, the degenerated Master planned for every imaginable obstacle and putting in place a counter for it. (AUDIO: Trail of the White Worm, The Oseidon Adventure) He was willing to be patient with his plans, waiting inside his TARDIS for years to slowly seduce Kassia. (TV: The Keeper of Traken)
While he claimed that nothing he ever did "[was] ever pointless", the Master seemed more comfortable with killing people just for the sake of it, (AUDIO: The Light at the End) showing a sadistic pleasure when he resorted to killing, (TV: The Keeper of Traken) and even destroyed the planet Raskalar for amusement. (AUDIO: Death Match) Despite this, the Seventh Doctor recalled how this Master was "generally a serious sort", remembering how he was "cold and cruel." (AUDIO: The Two Masters)
He considered the Doctor to be "one of the most dangerous men in the cosmos." (AUDIO: Requiem for the Rocket Men)
In his degenerated state, the Master's telepathic capabilities and willpower grew stronger, with the Master proclaiming that "only [his] hate keep[ed] [him] alive". He was able to launch a telepathic message to the Doctor from Gallifrey to the Doctor's TARDIS, (TV: The Deadly Assassin) and, once he became the Keeper of Traken, the Master forced Tremas to kill Neman through sheer willpower, and also paralyzing the Doctor to make him watch. (TV: The Keeper of Traken)
"Tremas" incarnation
After possessing Tremas's body, the Master became more flamboyantly evil, bombastic and sophisticated individual, (TV: Logopolis, Castrovalva, Time-Flight, The King's Demons, The Five Doctors, The Ultimate Foe) who only put trust in himself. (TV: The Mark of the Rani) He was prone to laughing maniacally and reciting lengthy and verbose speeches, accompanied by melodramatic gestures and poses. (TV: Time-Flight, The Five Doctors, The Mark of the Rani) The Seventh Doctor recalled this Master as having "a taste for melodrama." (AUDIO: The Two Masters)
This Master was unwilling to share any form of power with others, often betraying those he worked with to accomplish his own goals, (TV: Logopolis, The Five Doctors, The Ultimate Foe, Survival) even when working with his other incarnations. (COMIC: The Five Masters)
While in Tremas's body, the Master became devoted to killing the Doctor, often employing elaborate gambits and strategies to this end. (TV: Castrovalva, The Mark of the Rani; GAME: Destiny of the Doctors) However, he mused that a cosmos without the Doctor "scarcely bear[ed] thinking about", and was willing to join forces with the Doctor if he viewed it as beneficial to himself. (TV: Logopolis, The Five Doctors, The Ultimate Foe)
He showed a genuine disregard for life and was often uninterested in how many people died at his hands, (TV: Logopolis, Castrovalva, The King's Demons, Survival) and had a particular fondness for the Tissue Compression Eliminator. (TV: Logopolis, Time-Flight, Planet of Fire, The Mark of the Rani) However, he showed an unusual level of moral standards when he apologised to Peri Brown for involving her in a battle that was originally supposed to be between him and the Sixth Doctor, and was genuinely horrified when the Rani's contraption turned Luke Ward into a tree, although the Doctor considered it an example of how warped and callous the Master was if he thought that establishing that Luke's death was an accident was any kind of excuse. (TV: The Mark of the Rani)
The Master was delighted and satisfied when Lord President Borusa addressed him as "one of the most evil and corrupt beings [the] Time Lord race [had] ever produced", but was surprised and outraged when his attempts to convince the Third Doctor of his sincerity was ridiculed and spurned. (TV: The Five Doctors) He also thanked Mel Bush when she remarked on how "evil" he was. (TV: The Ultimate Foe)
After he was infected by the Cheetah virus, the Master became more calm and calculating. However, as the virus took its toll, he became more animalistic and sadistic, taking satisfaction in murdering Karra and attempting to hit the Seventh Doctor's head with a club during their fight. (TV: Survival)
After he was shot in the back by Ace to avenge his murder of Joe Manco, the Master withered in extreme pain that he tried to fight while complaining about how close he was to victory. Clawing at his wound and grasping his head, the Master regenerated while cowering from the pain in his TARDIS, begging to be "free". (PROSE: First Frontier)
This Master referred to the First Doctor as a "bore", the Second Doctor as an "incapable comedian", the Third Doctor as a "worthy foe", the Fourth Doctor as "the bohemian, [and] the wanderer", the Sixth Doctor as "the blustering one in the stupid coat", believed that the Fifth Doctor was "the nice one full of charm, innocence, and naiveté", and that the Seventh Doctor was "too busy setting traps" to realise the ones "set for him". (GAME: Destiny of the Doctors)
Unlike his predecessor, this Master seemed unable to use natural hypnotism, instead using an Electro-muscular constrictor to enslave Nyssa, (TV: Logopolis) causing misdirection to discredit the Fifth Doctor at Fitzwilliam Castle, (TV: The King's Demons) and took control of Luke Ward by combining hypnotic suggestion via a crystal necklace with the Rani's mind parasites. (TV: The Mark of the Rani) When his attempts to hypnotise Sabalom Glitz with a swinging silver pendant failed due to Glitz's mind being occupied with calculating the wealth of the pendant, the Master resorted to offering Glitz a chest full of jewellery to ensure his cooperation. (TV: The Ultimate Foe)
This Master was able to accurately predict the Doctor's movements, implementing multiple ways to kill him and manoeuvreing him into them with relative ease. (TV: Logopolis, Castrovalva, The Ultimate Foe) The Rani even believed that his plans were so overcomplicated that if he walked in a straight line he would get dizzy. (TV: The Mark of the Rani) Unlike his other renditions, this Master was able to improvise when things turned awry. (TV: Logopolis, The Five Doctors, Survival)
"Tzun" incarnation
In contrast to his previous incarnation, this Master was calmer, less emotional and flustered, with a proud bearing and an inscrutable demeanour, (PROSE: First Frontier) though he would resort to a panicked state upon confronting the unexpected. (PROSE: Happy Endings) Highly manipulative, the Master would maintain control of a situation, while making others around him think he was not, (PROSE: First Frontier) though would lose this advantage when he knew he was overpowered, such as when at Bernice Summerfield and Jason Kane's wedding. (PROSE: Happy Endings)
Unlike his immediate predecessor, this Master was aware that his theatrical plotting could be his undoing, but found amusement in the irony rather than bitterness. (PROSE: Happy Endings)
He thought very highly of his hypnotic skills, finding it amusing when he made two guards believe he was Major Kreer. He looked down at humanity, treating them like children, and believed the concept of regeneration to be beyond them, (PROSE: First Frontier) and showed a disdain for explaining things he did not have interest in. (PROSE: Happy Endings) However, he showed some respect towards Ace, who had killed his previous incarnation, believing she would make a good enforcer and admiring her willpower. (PROSE: First Frontier) He also enjoyed fencing with Mike Yates and Sarah Jane Smith. (PROSE: Housewarming)
While he agreed with the Ice Lord Savaar that he lacked a degree of honour, the Master would only resort to harming others if he found an advantage in the act, opting to perform with "a considerable degree of leniency" when sabotaging Bernice and Jason wedding until he was forced to take Bernice hostage at gunpoint during the ceremony. (PROSE: Happy Endings)
This incarnation of the Master was just as adept at winding the Doctor up as his predecessor was, claiming that the Seventh Doctor's pacifism was pure hypocrisy, (PROSE: First Frontier) and taking delight in his apparent inability to protect his friends from Bloom. (PROSE: Happy Endings) However, he did hold the Doctor in some regard, believing the Tzun incapable of overpowering him on their own, and insisting he was a threat to be eliminated, though he felt bittersweet about it, admitting to himself that the Doctor was an inspiring adversary, (PROSE: First Frontier) though reacted with horror when four variants of the Seventh Doctor confronted him at once. (PROSE: Happy Endings)
Nonetheless, the Master pointed out that the Doctor preferred to kill and destroy from a distance, such as with the Sea Devils. To prove this point, the Master handed the Doctor a blaster and baited him to shoot him at close range, which the Doctor refused to do. (PROSE: First Frontier)
"John Smith" incarnation
As John Smith, the Master was a kind-hearted, charming, humble, knowledgeable gentleman who was still somehow deeply aware of his dark nature and troubled by it. (AUDIO: Master) As his true self, this incarnation had a far more darker and evil side to him than most of his other selves. He seemed to enjoy being mysterious about his true identity and enjoyed giving his enemies riddles as to who he truly was. Also compared to his other selves, this incarnation was far calmer and well spoken, which made him sound more sinister. (AUDIO: Dust Breeding)
Evil? I crave power, dominion, knowledge of the forbidden and secret. So much more than simply "evil".
As John Smith, the Master's favourite dessert was marinated figs with a raspberry coulis, he grew tomatoes, made his own wine, enjoyed theatre, books, and the company of friends. The Master was not fond of dogs or people with shifty eyes. (AUDIO: Master)
While body-jumping
This rendition of the Master was generally calm and sinisterly villainous, but was also capable of terrifying rage. After being exterminated by the Daleks, the Master took possession of Bruce and, after finding that his new body was not stable, became determined to steal the remaining lives of the Doctor himself. When his attempt to take the Eighth Doctor's lives was thwarted, the Master reverted to a more basic, brutal approach, attempting to smash the Doctor's head in with a staff positioned around the Eye, proclaiming that life was wasted on the living and rejecting the Doctor's aid when he was being pulled into the Eye. (TV: Doctor Who)
This rendition of the Master viewed life as being "wasted on the living", and held it in no regards, unhesitatingly killing Bruce, his wife, four guards, Chang Lee, Grace Holloway, (TV: Doctor Who) Joey Sneller, (PROSE: The Novel of the Film) Duncan, (COMIC: The Fallen) and Violet, (AUDIO: Mastermind) whilst also attempting to kill the Eighth Doctor, (TV: Doctor Who; COMIC: The Glorious Dead) and an infant Edward Grainger. (PROSE: Prologue) He was also petty, snapping Chang Lee's neck when he refused to follow an order, (TV: Doctor Who) turning Earth into a religious dictatorship to spite the Doctor, (COMIC: The Glorious Dead) and killing Violet solely because she foiled his attempt to kill Edward Grainger. (AUDIO: Mastermind)
Unlike previous incarnations, the Master was extremely serious when there was work to be done, more focused on getting the task at hand completed than engaging in small talk and humour. (TV: Doctor Who; COMIC: The Glorious Dead) He was also quite literal, not understanding expressions such as killing someone to mean making them laugh. (TV: Doctor Who)
In this rendition, the Master felt a pedantic need to correct people on bad grammar, such as when he corrected Grace Holloway's "kiss as good as me" to "[kiss] as well as [me]". As with his previous selves, he was also comfortable with his villainous reputation, thanking Nurse Curtis for playfully calling him "sick". (TV: Doctor Who)
During the period of his life when he was forced to possess various human bodies to survive, the Master would take on minor personality traits and quirks from the bodies he possessed, and, as a result, he started to fear that his "essence" would eventually become too diluted if he were to jump to another body too frequently, and began to go to great pains to make sure his bodies lasted as long as possible by only possessing members of the same bloodline. However, as he would later admit, the Master began to somewhat enjoy the experience of being human as the years went by, and even toyed with the idea of dropping his plans of restoring his Time Lord body and just remain in a human body. (AUDIO: Mastermind)
Behind the flamboyancy and brutal savagery, the Master still maintained his cunning, leaving a crystalline structure on the Eye that would give the Doctor amnesia in vengeance for his previous defeat, (PROSE: The Eight Doctors) using his link to the TARDIS to send the Doctor to specific locations to later show him the folly of his worth, (COMIC: The Glorious Dead) and acquiring a casino in Las Vegas to accumulate the money needed to fund the experiments to elongate the lifespan of his host bodies, while also becoming head of the Hudson Dusters, and controlling part of the mafia. (AUDIO: Mastermind)
A patient incarnation, this Master simultaneously juggled a grand plan to achieve divine power with a pettier plan to morally humiliate the Doctor during the fight for the Glory, (COMIC: The Glorious Dead) and also, while trying to remain undetected in the history books, possessed a line of men from the Maestro family to ensure he had a succession of bodies that he could adjust well to, passing from father to son once there was a grandson alive to inhabit later on. (AUDIO: Mastermind)
"Bald" incarnation
This incarnation of the Master was excitable, enthusiastic, theatrical, and attention seeking, (AUDIO: Dominion) priding himself on his fashion sense of a simple, classic suit with a velvet jacket. (AUDIO: Eyes of the Master) He was also a manipulative megalomaniac, who used his polite mannerisms to enhance his diabolicalness.[source needed]
Despite his more theatrical side, this Master was as ruthless as his other incarnations, creating his own Infinite warriors by replacing human eyes with fake ones that had Eminence substance in them, (AUDIO: Eyes of the Master) and manipulating an Eminence attack on Heron's World for an experiment. (AUDIO: The Death of Hope) This Master was also unorthodox in his malice, being more interested in being cruel and spiteful, opting to humiliate and punish his opponents, even after he had bested them. He preferred to let others believe they had defeated him before turning the tides and took great pleasure in emotionally humiliating them after he took back control.[source needed]
He also accused the Eighth Doctor's attitude about a war with the Daleks of being hypocritical, noting that, while the Doctor claimed not to be fighting a war with them, he had battled the Daleks across time and space. (AUDIO: Eyes of the Master)
He would often introduce himself by saying, "Hello, you!",[source needed] and, much like the Sixth Doctor's habit to quoting poetry, had a flair for Shakespeare's soliloquies. (AUDIO: Eyes of the Master)
This Master also had a habit of imitating the Doctor, such as tricking UNIT into believing him to be a future incarnation of the Seventh Doctor, (AUDIO: Dominion) taking on the Doctor's role of a lone hero saving a group of innocents, (AUDIO: The Death of Hope) and even replacing the Doctor with himself in Molly O'Sullivan's memories. (AUDIO: Rule of the Eminence)
His plans were meticulous, and like his degenerated incarnation, this Master liked to plan for every possible obstacle, but instead of waiting for the contingency to be activated by his opponents, he openly went out of his way to close off those obstacles beforehand. (AUDIO: Masterplan)
This Master was more willing to go into dangerous situations than his other incarnations, not only making deals with the Eminence and the Daleks for universal domination, but also showed signs of extreme anti-obedience and arrogance, openly mocking his allies while fully aware that they could kill him anytime they wanted. (AUDIO: Master of the Daleks) He was also known for making quips and enjoying himself as he carried out his schemes, which allowed the Seventh Doctor to realise what had happened when the Cult of the Heretic caused this Master to switch bodies with his decayed past self as the decayed Master was having far more fun than he usually would (AUDIO: The Two Masters).
While the Master had always displayed a degree of disrespect for the laws and workings of time travel, this incarnation was especially brazen in this attitude, stating that he could simply use his TARDIS to cross his own timeline and attempt to achieve a failed plan without any concern for the paradoxes or personal dangers involved in doing so. (AUDIO: Dominion) So disregarding to paradoxes was he that he even attacked a past incarnation of himself to further his own agenda- although he claimed in hindsight that this was actually done to ensure that history worked out as it should- (AUDIO: The Two Masters), and had no qualms about attempting to kill the Seventh Doctor, despite already being involved in the circumstances behind his regeneration. (AUDIO: Dominion)
A slightly lazier incarnation, this Master liked the idea of having an army, but didn't enjoy the prospect of building one up himself.[source needed]
Seeing his subordinates as possessions instead of people, this Master had no compunctions towards demeaning, mind controlling or even killing subordinates who caught him the wrong way, sparing only the most important ones to his plan until they were no longer of importance.[source needed] However, he praised hard work and good results, and was genuinely fond of Sally Armstrong, telling the Doctor that Sally was brilliant enough to fly his TARDIS on her own, and even briefly mourned for her after her death. (AUDIO: Masterplan)
This Master would go to great depths to involve the Doctor in his schemes, claiming that he did so simply because he enjoyed the Doctor's company.[source needed] He was pleased to see the Eighth Doctor in 1970s London, and expressed concern about his health after noticing his had hair been cut. (AUDIO: Eyes of the Master)
Raine Creevy characterised this Master as a "cocky smart-arse". (AUDIO: Dominion)
"War" incarnation
While fighting in the Last Great Time War, this incarnation of the Master delighted in the prospect of committing genocide. He saw people as resources, and that teaming up with the War Doctor was a worthwhile option during wartime. He also had a fondness for paradoxes. (COMIC: The Organ Grinder) The Master wanted to fight in the Time War, but seeing the hopelessness of his efforts with the Doctor he fled from their fight with the Cyclors. He concluded that he only enjoyed death and chaos only when it was fun for him. (COMIC: Kill God) At the moment of his regeneration, the Master held contempt for the Doctor and Alice Obiefune, declaring that he would have his revenge on them. (COMIC: Fast Asleep)
"Yana" incarnation
This Master started his life declaring vengeance, (COMIC: Fast Asleep) but soon became terrified by what he saw in the Last Great Time War, and when the Dalek Emperor took the Cruciform, he fled the end of the universe, (TV: The Sound of Drums) using a Chameleon Arch to turn himself into a human professor named "Yana", (TV: Utopia) and hide from the Time Lords. (TV: The Sound of Drums)
Under the Chameleon Arch, Professor Yana was a benign old man who had lost faith in the Utopia Project. His spirit was revitalised by the Tenth Doctor, and the two shared a mutual admiration. He was also somewhat scatterbrained and slightly lacking in self-confidence, at one point referring to himself as "a stupid old man." Also, like the Tenth Doctor with Martha Jones, Yana was oblivious to his assistant, Chantho's feelings for him.
This Master's true personality was cold, ruthless and vengeful. In contrast to his human identity, he was always serious and dignified, but also abusive and condescending, citing that he had the right to defend himself after he was the one provoked. He was extremely aggressive towards Chantho after regaining his memories, stating that her constant cultural ticks drove him "insane" during their time together.
This Master was a misogynist, considering it an embarrassment to have been killed by a girl, even considering it "inappropriate. Despite being in pain, he welcomed his regeneration in a grandiose fashion, declaring that "the Master [was] reborn." (TV: Utopia)
"Harold Saxon" incarnation
Immediately after his regeneration, the Master appeared to have gone more insane than ever, gleefully jumping round the Doctor's TARDIS' control console, while ecstatically laughing, and toying with his new voice. (TV: Utopia) By this point in his life, the Master was tormented more than ever by "the drums" in his head, (TV: The Sound of Drums) but, after his sabotaged resurrection, he admitted to seeing it as a central piece of his identity, convinced that something was calling to him through the drum beat. (TV: The End of Time) So much was he obsessed with them, that, on one occasion, "the drums" was all he would say. (COMIC: The Abominable Showmen, The Five Masters) On another occasion, however, the Master fearfully asked the Doctor if he thought "the drumming" would stop after he died. (TV: Last of the Time Lords)
Much like his previous incarnations, this Master was ostentatious; offering out jelly babies and grits, while also dancing to the Rogue Traders, (TV: The Sound of Drums) and the Scissor Sisters. (TV: Last of the Time Lords) He also enjoyed watching the Teletubbies, believing that the televisions in their stomachs was true evolution, (TV: The Sound of Drums) and thrived on chaos, describing the last day of the Last Great Time War as "[his] kind of world", (TV: The End of Time) and was exited about getting into fights. (COMIC: The Five Masters; TV: The Doctor Falls) He also admitted to loving disguises, (TV: World Enough and Time) and was particular outraged when he was "stuck looking like the old Prime Minister." (TV: The End of Time)
Behind his charismatic and charming demeanour, however, this Master was sadistic and childishly degrading, even going as far as to slip subtle and private jabs at the Doctor into his public speeches. When Francine, Clive and Tish were forcibly taken to the Valiant under armed guard, the Master shamelessly treated the ordeal like a school field trip, (TV: The Sound of Drums) and, during the Year That Never Was, he kept them as slaves, taking every opportunity he could to belittle them in the most childish ways possible, even goading Francine into murdering him, until the Doctor convinced her otherwise. (TV: Last of the Time Lords) He also made Bill Potts aware of his part in her Cyber-conversion to upset her, and was disappointed when his remarks seemed to have failed, stating that she had "took all the fun out of cruelty". (TV: The Doctor Falls)
He was extremely vain and narcissistic, with the Tenth Doctor noting that he would never destroy himself, even if he could destroy the Earth with him. During the Year That Never Was, he had monuments of himself built all over Earth, and, according to Martha Jones, had even sculptured himself onto Mount Rushmore. (TV: Last of the Time Lords) He also used the Immortality Gate to turn the human race into duplicates of himself, which he dubbed the "Master Race", and also threatened to do the same to the Time Lords, even asserting that Rassilon "[would] [look] better as [him]." (TV: The End of Time) His vanity was so vast that when the Tenth Doctor forgave him for his actions, the Master collapsed and wept out of shame. After he expressed revulsion at being "kept" by the Doctor, the Master was shot by Lucy and, to spite the Doctor, decided not to regenerate and die. (TV: Last of the Time Lords) After meeting his female successor, Missy, the Master admitted to being attracted to his future self, flirting and dancing with her. However, when he saw the possibility that Missy would aid the Twelfth Doctor, the Master killed her. (TV: The Doctor Falls)
This Master also had an exceptionally heightened sense of his own brilliance, even reciting a Bible-style verse of his own making to the Doctor as the Toclafane invasion began. (TV: The Sound of Drums) He also held Time Lords as the absolute superior race, automatically assuming the right to alter history on the principle of him being a Time Lord. (TV: Last of the Time Lords) However, when his plans were foiled, the Master would turn cowardly, resorting to more spiteful behavior and retreating at the first opportunity. (TV: Last of the Time Lords, The Doctor Falls). He stated that he would "rather die than beg" for the Doctor's help, feeling confident he could beat an entire city of Cybermen despite only being armed with his laser screwdriver. (TV: The Doctor Falls)
The Master still held the lives of others without thought, assassinating the Cabinet of the United Kingdom, setting the Toclafane on Vivien Rook, ordering Arthur Coleman Winters's execution as a show of power, commanding the decimation of the population of Earth to emphasise his new dominion, (TV: The Sound of Drums) destroying the islands of Japan when he learned that the Drast had been operating in Yokohama, (PROSE: The Story of Martha) siphoning the life forces of the people who resurrected him, and unceremoniously consuming Sarah, Tommo and Ginger, leaving them as skeletons. (TV: The End of Time) He also showed a sadistic glee when he resorted to murder, continuously listening in on Rook's dying screams, being excited by the prospect of killing the immortal Jack Harkness a second time, (TV: The Sound of Drums) and chuckling after casually killing Thomas Milligan. (TV: Last of the Time Lords) He was also known to kill those who brought him bad news. (PROSE: The Story of Martha)
This Master showed minimum affection for the Doctor. Even after he aged the Tenth Doctor to an elderly man, (TV: The Sound of Drums) the Master continued to humiliate him by having him live in a makeshift tent aboard the Valiant during the Year That Never Was, and then furthered the humiliation by ageing the Doctor until he morphed into an ancient dwarf-sized body, and then kept him locked up in a bird cage. (TV: Last of the Time Lords) When Missy told him of her plans to join forces with the Twelfth Doctor, the Master adamantly stated his refusal to stand with the Doctor and killed Missy with his laser screwdriver. (TV: The Doctor Falls)
However, this Master was not without his reservations, considering Rassilon's Ultimate Sanction to be suicidal, but was still willing to subject himself to it to appease Rassilon. He also had a sense of honour, as he sacrificed himself to save the Doctor from Rassilon after the Doctor chose not to kill either of them, also getting his revenge on Rassilon for implanting "the drumming" in his head, and for Rassilon trying to kill him for being "diseased". (TV: The End of Time)
While he originally avowed affection for his wife, Lucy Saxon, (TV: The Sound of Drums) the Master's vanity and overconfidence in his successful taking of Earth led him to forego such pretences, even teasing her with the possibility of replacing her with his masseuse. He was, however, unsurprised when she shot him, instead making a quip about it "always [being] the women". (TV: Last of the Time Lords)
After his sabotaged resurrection, the Master displayed a feral state that lead him to act like a predatory animal, plagued by an insatiable hunger. Despite this insanity, the Master was capable of lucid conversation, nostalgically discussing his childhood friendship with the Tenth Doctor. He was also still a cunning strategist, allowing himself to remain Joshua Naismith's prisoner so he could repair the Immortality Gate and use it to create his Master Race, all so he could turn the Earth into a warship, but then improvised a plan where he used his duplicates to locate the source of "the drumming". (TV: The End of Time)
To the end, the Master refused to stand with the Doctor and, even when mortally wounded, permanently killed his future self rather than let her help the Doctor. (TV: The Doctor Falls)
The Master made a habit of saying, "Oh, no you don't", saying it when the Doctor was locking the TARDIS's coordinates, (TV: Utopia) when avoiding a conversation with the Doctor, and when the Doctor restored his youthful physiognomy with the Archangel Network's telepathic link. (TV: Last of the Time Lords)
The Master shared the Tenth Doctor's technical knowledge, as he was able to construct his laser screwdriver from Earth components, cannibalising the Doctor's TARDIS and turning it into a Paradox machine, miniaturise Richard Lazarus' genetic manipulation technology, (TV: The Sound of Drums) and was able to repair the Immortality Gate for Joshua Naismith. (TV: The End of Time) He also designed the Archangel Network and the Valiant. (TV: The Sound of Drums)
Like his degenerated and bald incarnations, this Master had dangerous foresight, and knew it was a mistake to give the Doctor hints about his plans while he could intervene. (TV: Utopia) His methods for dealing with the Doctor during his reign as prime minister showed an efficient and simple mindset; framing the Doctor for murder to send the police after him, arresting Martha's family for insurance, and luring Torchwood Three away to the Himalayas to prevent Jack from recruiting their aide. (TV: The Sound of Drums) He was likewise straight to the point when explaining how the time differentials were affecting the Mondasian Colony ship to Bill Potts. (TV: World Enough and Time)
As "Missy"
Though he had previously preferred a male form, (PROSE: The Novel of the Film) the Master was indifferent when he learnt he would regenerate into a woman, (TV: The Doctor Falls) and, fully embracing her new gender, the Master changed her title to "Mistress", shortening it to "Missy", and, considering herself to be "old fashioned", insisted on being addressed as Time Lady, (TV: Dark Water, The Witch's Familiar) while nicknaming herself the "Queen of Evil". (TV: Death in Heaven) She also adopted a Scottish accent, claiming she would keep it after taking a liking to the Twelfth Doctor's accent, (TV: Deep Breath) occasionally utilising other accents when she felt the need. (TV: Death in Heaven, The Witch's Familiar)
No longer choosing to hide behind a rational persona, Missy openly described herself as "bananas", but took offence when Danny Pink called her a "lunatic". (TV: Death in Heaven) She also displayed tendencies of being a show-off, such as when vastly enlarging her face on a UNIT monitor in a comical manner to show UNIT than she could, (TV: The Magician's Apprentice) and enjoyed having information that others did not, such as having knowledge of the Doctor's past that others could not argue with. (TV: The Magician's Apprentice, World Enough and Time)
Though she adopted a bubblier personality with a welcoming and sociable façade, (TV: Deep Breath, Into the Dalek, Dark Water, Death in Heaven) and more choreographic movements, (TV: Deep Breath, Dark Water, Death in Heaven, The Witch's Familiar, World Enough and Time) Missy was more open about her loneliness, and willingly to show when she was afraid and remorseful. (TV: Death in Heaven, The Magician's Apprentice, The Lie of the Land, The Eaters of Light)
Believing that the Doctors saving of Gallifrey was meant to save only her, (TV: Death in Heaven) Missy became enamoured with the Doctor, telling the Half-Face Man that, while the Doctor could be mean to others, he would not be with her because he "loved [her] so much". She openly referred to him as her "boyfriend", (TV: Deep Breath) tracked his movements across time and space, (TV: Flatline, In the Forest of the Night, Death in Heaven) and mockingly professed that her hearts "belonged to [the Doctor]" after passionately kissing him. (TV: Dark Water) Despite these implications of their relationship being romantic, Missy adamantly denied that she loved the Doctor, even showing disgust at the thought, insisting it to be a complicated friendship, though expressed irritation when the Doctor called Davros his "arch-enemy", (TV: The Magician's Apprentice) and would become upset and querulous when he did not show interest in her plans. (COMIC: The Five Masters; PROSE: Dr. Twelfth)
Viewing everything as being born to die, Missy held no regrets when it came to murder, describing her urge to kill as akin to a child wanting to pop a balloon, (TV: Death in Heaven) and having a preference for killing "clever-clogs" because they "[made] the best faces". (TV: The Witch's Familiar) When building up to a murder, Missy would insisted that her victim "say something nice" to her, and would wait patiently for them to reply. (TV: Dark Water, Death in Heaven, The Magician's Apprentice) She also insisted that anyone aiming to kill her do the same with her, (TV: Death in Heaven) and would take offence if a threat to kill her was not carried out. (TV: The Witch's Familiar)
Missy retained her predecessors' sadistic tendencies, demonstrating cruel pleasure at taunting her victims before she killed them, such as telling Dr. Chang she would miss him and promising to always keep a picture of him "looking so sweet" before she murdered him. (TV: Dark Water) She also encouraged Osgood to have more self-confidence, while counting down to her death to torment her. However, she atomised Seb without a second glance for no reason other than that the AI was annoying her. (TV: Death in Heaven) Missy also held no respect for the dead, using dead human bodies to create a Cyberman army, (TV: Dark Water) as well as crushing Osgood's glasses under her heel while posthumously thanking her for being "yummy". (TV: Death in Heaven)
Missy could be needlessly cruel in her interactions with others, such as taunting Clara Oswald about her dead boyfriend, (TV: The Magician's Apprentice) and pushing Clara down a hole to test its depth. (TV: The Witch's Familiar) She also ordered the death of Belgians for no reason, (TV: Death in Heaven) vaporised UNIT personnel to prove she had "not gone good," (TV: The Magician's Apprentice) and was believed by Ashildr to have united Clara and the Doctor together just to see what chaos would result from their clashing personalities. (TV: Hell Bent) However, when Missy learnt that the Doctor had departed Darillium to leave River Song to her fate, she offered her sincere condolences for his loss. (TV: Extremis)
During her imprisonment in the vault, Missy went "cold turkey" on being evil as the Doctor tried to rehabilitate her into bring good, which first worked to the extend that she grew remorseful for her actions, (TV: The Lie of the Land) and then to the point that Nardole trusted her enough to retrieve the Doctor and Bill from Mars, (TV: Empress of Mars) which in turn resulted in the Doctor trusting she enough to do "maintenance" on his TARDIS. (TV: The Eaters of Light)
Though she continued to show progress with her rehabilitation and made an effort to do good on the Mondasian colony ship, when she was approached by her past incarnation, she relapsed back to being bad by allying with him, (TV: World Enough and Time) but continued to be conflicted with her allegiance, admitting to the Doctor that she was "in two minds" about what she wanted. However, after being moved by the Doctor's speech on kindness and request for her help, Missy stabbed her younger incarnation so that he would regenerate into her and she could stand with the Doctor, only for the Master to shoot her beyond regeneration, leading to her death, though she shared the amusement in her "perfect ending" being shot in the back by her past incarnation. (TV: The Doctor Falls)
Missy showed a liking for singing, substituting her name in with "Mickey" in the song "Mickey" while in UNIT custody, and singing a verse from "Happy Birthday, Mr President" when giving the Doctor control of a Cyberman army. (TV: Death in Heaven) She pulled a similar stunt involving "Mickey" lyrics via text communication when she announced her presence to UNIT by halting all aeroplane traffic, and, when imprisoned by Colony Sarff, she passed the time by partaking in opera singing. (TV: The Magician's Apprentice) Missy was also good at playing the piano, and passed her time in the vault playing Für Elise, Pop Goes The Weasel, (TV: Knock Knock) and The Entertainer. (TV: The Lie of the Land)
Missy was a devious planner and skilled manipulator, able to manoeuvre others into place with ease by exploiting their desires. (TV: Death in Heaven) While trapped on Skaro with Clara Oswald, Missy demonstrated fluid planning as her desires changed from wanting to ally with the Daleks, (TV: The Magician's Apprentice) to wanting to help the Doctor, to then wanting the Doctor to unintentionally kill Clara. (TV: The Witch's Familiar) She was also a convincing liar, especially when using her talent for manipulative reasons. (TV: Dark Water, Death in Heaven) However, Missy would often opted for one solitary scheme with virtually no contingencies or back-up plans in place to help steer events back towards her favour like her previous incarnations employed, instead opting to give the Doctor false hope of reaching Gallifrey after she was beaten, (TV: Death in Heaven) and walking away with nothing but taunts to say when the Doctor didn't kill Clara. (TV: The Witch's Familiar)
Sharing the Doctor's observational skills, Missy could tell a man she had killed was a married father by the ring on his finger and the detection of "baby leakage" on his jacket. (TV: The Magician's Apprentice)
Appearance and clothing
First incarnation
As an eight-year-old boy, the Master had dark hair and bright blue eyes. (TV: The Sound of Drums)
"UNIT enemy" incarnation
The incarnation that fought the Third Doctor and UNIT resembled a mature, elegant man, with a swarthy complexion, brown eyes, and mild streaks of grey in his hair. He had a goatee beard, which also had white skunk stripe. (TV: Terror of the Autons)
He generally wore a black Cardin-Nehru jacket, with dark trousers, black leather boots and gloves, and a white cuff-linked shirt. (TV: Terror of the Autons) On occasion, he would wear a suit, with either an orange, a grey or a blue tie. (TV: Terror of the Autons, The Mind of Evil, The Time Monster)
While imprisoned on Fortress Island, the Master wore a black cape over a white turtle-neck jumper, with black trousers. He wore a naval officer's uniform while secretly infiltrating HMS Seaspite as a prisoner. During his return and subsequent escape from Fortress Island, he changed back into his black Nehru jacket and trousers. (TV: The Sea Devils)
Degenerated body
Either because Susan Foreman used the TCE against him while he was holding a matter transmuter, (PROSE: Legacy of the Daleks) or because he was burnt in an energy net by a future incarnation, (AUDIO: The Two Masters) the Master came to resemble a deformed corpse, (TV: The Deadly Assassin) with brown eyes. (TV: The Keeper of Traken) However, after absorbing some energy from the Eye of Harmony, (TV: The Deadly Assassin) he became less "putrescent". (AUDIO: Trail of the White Worm) With his decayed body, the Master would experienced almost unendurable pain. (AUDIO: The Two Masters)
To hide his disfigurement, the Master took to wearing a rotting hooded cloak. (TV: The Deadly Assassin) Whilst in Victorian London, he wore a mask in public to conceal his decaying appearance, and also used a cane to aid his frail body. (AUDIO: Maurice)
He was described by Spandrell as being "emaciated", (TV: The Deadly Assassin) with Bob Dovie describing him as looking "burned." (AUDIO: The Light at the End) The Fourth Doctor described him as "a cowled cadaver". (AUDIO: Requiem for the Rocket Men)
"Tremas" incarnation
After the Master used the power of the Source to steal Tremas's body, the Trakenite's body was also rejuvenated, with his grey hair becoming a dark brown, and his white bushy beard turning into a black goatee beard. (TV: The Keeper of Traken) The Fifth Doctor didn't think much of the beard, calling it "rubbish" when he met his tenth incarnation. (TV: Time Crash)
After the Master stole his body, Tremas's robes inexplicably changed into a black velveteen high collared tunic with puffed sleeves and long tails, (TV: The Keeper of Traken) black trousers, dark leather boots, and black velvet gloves. (TV: Logopolis) The Master would also utilise a cloak with a large collar. (TV: The Five Doctors)
While stranded on Cheetah World, the Master opted to change his usual attire for a black coat with a white collar, with a white collared dark blue shirt and bow tie, black trousers and shoes, a silver waistcoat, and a belt with a dragon shaped buckle. (TV: Survival)
In an account that depicted this Master with greying hair, he wore a red velvet jacket, a white waistcoat with a black jumper, and a pair of dark trousers, with leather gloves and shoes, with various rings decorating his gloves. Completing the ensemble was a black cloak with a huge collar and white lining, (GAME: Destiny of the Doctors) which the Master had also worn during his alliance with Adam Mitchell. (COMIC: Cat and Mouse)
While combating the Graak in the Determinant, the Master adopted many costume changes to suit the situation he found himself in; wearing an a conductor hat with an "M"-insignia at a platform station, a bowler hat while on a train taunting the Graak, a Dalek Trooper helmet while commanding a rocker launcher, and a plastic crown at a medieval themed festival. (GAME: Destiny of the Doctors)
"Tzun" incarnation
The Master had a high forehead, glossy moustache, neat beard, aristocratic nose and a lean face, and spoke in a rich cultured voice. (PROSE: First Frontier) He wore a Vandyke beard, a dark Italian-designed suit, a silk shirt, and a cravat with a silver bird-of-prey tiepin. (PROSE: Housewarming)
"John Smith" incarnation
When the Master was robbed of his Trakenite body by the Warp Core, he regained his disfigured appearance, which Ace described as resembling Freddy Krueger and "a dropped pizza". To hide his disfigurement, the Master took to wearing a golden mask with diamonds encrusted inside it. (AUDIO: Dust Breeding)
After becoming John Smith, the Master did not hide his disfigurement and wore a suit instead. (AUDIO: Master)
While body-jumping
As a Deathworm Morphant, the Master resembled a snake. (TV: Doctor Who)
While within Bruce's body, the Master looked like a young American man, but his eyes appeared reptilian, forcing him to wear sunglasses to remain inconspicuous. (TV: Doctor Who) He decided to have his new hair gelled (PROSE: The Novel of the Film) into a slick backcomb style, (TV: Doctor Who) as opposed to Bruce's messy style. (PROSE: The Novel of the Film) While searching the Doctor, the Master wore denim jeans and a check shirt with Bruce's leather jacket and light boots. When his plan neared completion, the Master changed his into traditional extravagant Gallifreyan robes, citing that he "always dress[ed] for the occasion". (TV: Doctor Who)
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After gaining a new body, the Master resembled a black street preacher with a balding head. (COMIC: The Fallen) After revealing himself, he replaced his clothes with a more regal outfit. (COMIC: The Glorious Dead)
When trapped on Earth in the 20th Century, the Master wore whatever his hosts wore normally, to avoid detection. (AUDIO: Mastermind)
"Bald" incarnation
This Master had brown eyes and was bald, (AUDIO: Dominion) with many commenting on his lack of hair. (AUDIO: Dominion, Eyes of the Master)
He wore a plain suit with a velvet jacket, (AUDIO: Eyes of the Master) and a striped tie. (AUDIO: Masterplan) On one occasion, he wore a white Stetson hat. (AUDIO: The Death of Hope)
While posing as the "Other Doctor," the Master wore a black overcoat, with black trousers, a dark blazer, white shirt and dark green cravat. (AUDIO: Dominion)
"War" incarnation
During the Time War, the Master's body was that of a small child. (COMIC: The Organ Grinder) On Veestrax he had short hair, and wore a white shirt with a black jacket. (COMIC: Outrun) By the time he and the Doctor had arrived on Golgauth, the Master's hair was longer, and he sported a red shirt under his jacket. (COMIC: The Organ Grinder)
"Yana" incarnation
As Professor Yana, the Master looked like an elderly man with white hair and blue eyes. He wore a white stiff-collard shirt with a dark red waistcoat and a black cravat, and black trousers. In his waist coat, he housed a Chameleon Arch, disguised as an ordinary fob watch. (TV: Utopia)
"Harold Saxon" incarnation
In this incarnation, the Master was young, with light brown hair, and dark brown eyes. (TV: Utopia) According to the Twelfth Doctor, he had a "round face". (TV: The Doctor Falls) As "Harold Saxon", the Master would wear a black suit with a white shirt and black tie. While meeting President Arthur Coleman Winters, he wore a black coat with a crimson lined interior. (TV: The Sound of Drums)
When the Third Doctor saw this Master in Sild captivity, he described what he saw as "a young man in a business suit, beardless, with a mop of boyish hair," and that his face "seemed friendly and plausible", overall thinking him "the kind of man people would find easy to trust." (PROSE: Harvest of Time)
After his botched resurrection, the Master's hair was bleached light blond, and he gained some stubble. To remain inconspicuous, he wore a black hooded sweatshirt over a red T-shirt with dark combat trousers and black boots.
Due to the corruption of his life force, the Master's outer skin would fade away and reveal the translucent blue life energy encasing his body, exposing his skeleton and internal organs, with each fluctuation making an unsettling primal roar. (TV: The End of Time)
When encountered again by the Twelfth Doctor, he had been repaired by the Time Lords, no longer occasionally distorting into the translucent blue energy. (TV: The Doctor Falls) He had aged somewhat, now having grey hair and a beard. He also wore a suit similar to the Doctor's. (TV: World Enough and Time)
As "Missy"
In her female incarnation, the Mistress looked like a mature woman with pronounced cheek bones, and light blue eyes. Her black hair was wild and free, but held in place in an up-do. She also adopted a Scottish accent like the Twelfth Doctor. (TV: Deep Breath) Her immediate predecessor admitted to finding her attractive and wondered if it was wrong to do so, which Missy believed was. (TV: The Doctor Falls)
Fashioning herself in Victorian-styled garb, Missy wore a starched collared blouse (TV: Deep Breath) with cameo brooch made of Dark star alloy under her throat, (TV: The Witch's Familiar) along with a high waisted skirt that cut to ankle length, and a croak lengthen jacket which puffed up at the shoulders and dark lapels. She also wore black ankle boots with a sharp toe and tapered heels. Completing the ensemble was a black boater hat worn at a rakish angle, with an arrangement of black and red berries on the brim and a black veil over the top.
For further accessories, Missy wore a spiked bracelet on her left wrist, carried around a black umbrella, and wore two rings on her right hand, and one ring on her left hand. (TV: Deep Breath)
Missy varied the colours of her clothes, with the design coming in black, (TV: Deep Breath) bottle green, (TV: Into the Dalek) a shade of dark orange, (TV: The Caretaker) plum, (TV: Flatline, Dark Water/Death in Heaven) and violet. (TV: The Magician's Apprentice/The Witch's Familiar, COMIC: The Five Masters)
Imprisoned in the Vault, Missy was unable to have her hair cut, leading to it growing and looking messier than before. (TV: The Lie of the Land)
Other information
Relationship with the Doctor
The Master's relationship with the Doctor was one of the most complex known between the two Time Lords. (TV: The Magician's Apprentice) He respected the Doctor as a worthy opponent, once offering to use a recently recovered weapon to take control of the universe while offering to share it with the Doctor. (TV: Colony in Space) As time went on, however, the Master became increasingly obsessed with proving his personal superiority, causing him to view the Doctor both as his greatest friend and his worst enemy. He expressed deep anger toward the Doctor, along with a desire for vengeance, (TV: Last of the Time Lords) and accusing the Doctor of causing him to waste his regenerations. (TV: Doctor Who)
Although initially willing to work with the Doctor when the situation required it, (TV: Terror of the Autons, The Claws of Axos) after the Last Great Time War, the Master absolutely refused to listen to the Doctor on any occasion. He evinced his vanity when the Doctor confronted him with the words "I forgive you", which he had been terrified of hearing because it significantly dented his pride. (TV: Last of the Time Lords)
The Master enjoyed making playful flirtations towards the Tenth Doctor while speaking on the phone, even asking him if the Doctor was asking him out on a date. (TV: The Sound of Drums) When the Doctor harnessed the psychic energy of the entire human race and effectively became a god, the Master was reduced to sobbing against a wall. (TV: Last of the Time Lords)
After regenerating into a female incarnation, the Master took her sexual innuendos to a new level by referring to him as her "boyfriend" and holding him responsible for her fate. (TV: Deep Breath, Death in Heaven) Upon meeting the Doctor in his twelfth incarnation, she pretended to be an android and passionately kissed him. (TV: Dark Water) She later wanted to give him control of her army of Cybermen, attempting to force him to recognise that they were the same, but he refused and gave it to Danny Pink instead, who stopped her plans. While surprised, Missy didn't try to stop the Doctor as he prepared to kill her to spare Clara Oswald from doing it, but was spared from killing her by the Brigadier who, while Cyber-converted, retained his humanity and shot her. (TV: Death in Heaven) When searching for the Doctor, Missy challenged Clara's scepticism about her concern about him by claiming to have cared about the Doctor "since always" (TV: The Magicians Apprentice) and even begged the Doctor to find out about her plans. (COMIC: The Five Masters)
Companions
Unlike the Doctor, the Master usually worked and travelled alone. On rare occasion, he was seen with companions. Examples included Ailla the Time Lord spy; (PROSE: The Dark Path) Mother Finsey, a woman who was fascinated by the Master's evilness and would follow his track afterwards; (AUDIO: The Transcendence of Ephros) Chang Lee, a young human whom the Master met in San Francisco; (TV: Doctor Who) Katsura Sato, an immortal Japanese samurai who helped the Master in his quest for Glory; (COMIC: The Glorious Dead) Sally Armstrong, who helped him to use the Eminence; (AUDIO: Time's Horizon) Chantho, a female assistant and companion to the Master in his Professor Yana identity; (TV: Utopia) and Lucy Saxon, his wife, who was described as having travelled with the Master in the TARDIS in the same fashion as the Doctor and his companions. (TV: The Sound of Drums)
Clara also temporarily became Missy's companion when they both teleported out of the Dalek city together. Missy treated Clara as her "canary", forcing her to act as bait for the Daleks and test the safety of their situations first. She also made her get inside a Dalek casing so they would be able to sneak back into the city convincingly. (TV: The Witch's Familiar)
Behind the scenes
Character conception and development
Barry Letts and Terrance Dicks often discussed that the relationship between the Third Doctor and the Brigadier is similar to Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson. Inevitably, this led them to a question: where is Moriarty? They envisioned a counterpart of the Doctor, a character that became the Master. (DOC: The Doctor's Moriarty)
In a way, the Doctor himself was the model of the Master. At first, the Doctor Who production team thought of the Master as the evil half of a single personality. The Master's name was dreamed up as another counterpart to the Doctor's — like that of his enemy, "Master" is an academic title.[source needed] But this does not mean that the Master has a lesser academic degree than the Doctor, as in a master's degree. Both being Time Lords, they have the same level of education and are graduates of the Time Lord Academy. In The Sound of Drums, we learn that both had chosen their names because of what they meant — the Doctor as a healer of wrongs, the Master because of his desire for conquest and dominance.
In the Third Doctor's original final episode concept, Roger Delgado's incarnation of the Master would have redeemed himself and given his life to save the Doctor, after which the Doctor would have regenerated; however, this story was never developed due to the accidental death of Roger Delgado. Over thirty years later, this idea was reused in The End of Time, with John Simm's incarnation of the Master sacrificing himself to save the Tenth Doctor from Rassilon.
In The Deadly Assassin, writer Robert Holmes deliberately chose to show the Master in a "transitional" form, in case future production teams wanted to bring back the character. This transitional form was also used in The Keeper of Traken.
The Master was the villain in the early drafts of the 1977 television story The Talons of Weng-Chiang. [1]
Is "Koschei" his true name?
The name "Koschei" has been developed in various novels. However, like the Doctor's name, the Master's actual moniker has never been revealed in performed Doctor Who. It should also be noted that none of these various novels says Koschei was his original name, in the same vein that "Theta Sigma" is not the Doctor's original name.
Still, the name has a befitting Russian heritage. Koschei (rus.Коще́й or Коще́й Бессме́ртный, "Koschei The Deathless") is an antagonist in Russian folklore. He is an immortal who hides his soul inside a needle, which is inside an egg, in a duck, inside a hare, in an iron chest which is buried under a tree on the island of Buyan. As long as his soul is safe, he cannot die.
How many Masters?
It has never been firmly established on screen how many incarnations of the Master have existed. The only number explicitly given by any narrative is that found in TV: The Deadly Assassin, where the Master is said to be near the end of his thirteenth and final life. In PROSE: Legacy of the Daleks, it's unambiguously established that Susan Foreman uses a combination of the Master's Tissue Compression Eliminator and her knowledge of the TARDIS to wreak devastating physical damage on the Roger Delgado Master, and the form portrayed by Geoffrey Beevers and Peter Pratt is merely the degenerated form of Delgado and not a wholly different incarnation.
The comic Doorway to Hell contradicts this fully, showing the Delgado incarnation being forced into a regeneration. In AUDIO: The Two Masters, the Beevers Master appears pre-disfigurement and sounds the same before and after the accident.
Afterwards, Anthony Ainley's version of the Master takes over Tremas' body and goes on to plague the Doctor until the original series' end. Despite no actual regeneration, it's technically a different form.
There are no narratives whatsoever which unambiguously define the relationship between the Ainley Master and those that follow him, meaning that it's impossible to assign numbers to the Master's forms, in the same way that we would with incarnations of the Doctor.
That hasn't stopped at least one non-narrative source from trying, though. The 2010 edition of Doctor Who: The Visual Dictionary indicates that the Master played by John Simm is the seventeenth form. However, there's no narrative evidence to support any of the Visual Dictionary claims.
Indeed, it is up to each fan to decide which incarnations of the Master they "count" and how many there truly are.
Off-screen relationships
Although they played antagonists on screen, in real life Roger Delgado and Jon Pertwee were actually close friends. In interviews and convention Q&A sessions, Pertwee often cited the death of Delgado as one of the factors that led him to give up the role. (DOC: PanoptiCon 93, MM VHS 15)
Long before Tom Baker met Anthony Ainley during the filming of his last episode, he had lived with his brother, Richard Ainley, an acting instructor. Tom often saw Anthony, who would come over to play with Richard's children, but always thought of him as mysterious. [2]
Other matters
- Missy's appearance is based upon that of the Julie Andrews version of Mary Poppins. For example, when first introduced in the stage directions from the script of Deep Breath, Missy was physically described thus: "She's dressed a little like Mary Poppins." Furthermore, Missy imitates the style of Mary's arrival (floating down from the sky using an umbrella) in Death in Heaven.
- The Master was dubbed in German by Reinhard Glemnitz and Klaus Kindler as the Ainley incarnation, Wolfgang Jürgen as the Roberts incarnation, Hans-Gerd Kilbinger as the Jacobi incarnation, Michael Deffert as the Simm incarnation, and Katharina Koschny as the Gomez incarnation.
Feature
Casting
Television
| Actor | Tenure | First story | Last story | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Roger Delgado | 1971-1973 | Terror of the Autons | Frontier in Space | Roger Delgado would have also appeared in the final story of Jon Pertwee's tenure, had not his death intervened. |
| Norman Stanley | 1971 | Terror of the Autons | Terror of the Autons | Stanley, credited as "Telephone Mechanic" in episode three of Terror of the Autons, portrays the Delgado Master disguised by a mask while he infiltrates UNIT and installs a Nestene telephone. |
| Peter Pratt | 1976 | The Deadly Assassin | The Deadly Assassin | Peter Pratt was the first actor to portray the Master's cadaverous body. |
| Geoffrey Beevers | 1981 | The Keeper of Traken | The Keeper of Traken | Geoffrey Beevers became the primary vocal performer of the Master for Big Finish |
| Anthony Ainley | 1981-1989 | The Keeper of Traken | Survival | Anthony Ainley also appeared in the specially shot full motion video that accompanied 1997's Destiny of the Doctors |
| Gordon Tipple | 1996 | Doctor Who | Doctor Who | Tipple played the Master whom the Daleks exterminate at the start of the 1996 telemovie. Virtually all of his footage was cut from the finished film. |
| Eric Roberts | 1996 | Doctor Who | Doctor Who | The first and, so far, only American actor to play the role. |
| Derek Jacobi | 2007 | Utopia | Utopia | Derek Jacobi had earlier played another version of the Master in the Scream of the Shalka webcast. |
| John Simm | 2007-2010 | Utopia | The Doctor Falls | John Simm's version of the character was the first incarnation of Master to ever be shown as the product of a proper regeneration shown onscreen, and was also the first Master to return to the role on television after being replaced by another performer. |
| William Hughes | 2007 | The Sound of Drums | The End of Time | William Hughes was the Master as a child in a dialogue-free flashback which was repeated in The End of Time. |
| Michelle Gomez | 2014-2017 | Deep Breath | The Doctor Falls | Michelle Gomez was a character introduced as Missy, later revealed to be short for "Mistress" in Dark Water, as she could no longer be known as "Master". Michelle Gomez is notable for being the first female performer to portray the character, and marked the first time in a TV story that a Time Lord had been seen to change gender due to regeneration. |
Audio
Geoffrey Beevers is the main portrayer of the character in Big Finish audio dramas. Sometimes, as in Fourth Doctor Adventures, he's merely reprising the pre-Tremas Master seen in The Keeper of Traken. On other occasions, he has portrayed a post-Survival Master that has had the Tremas layer peeled away. On yet another occasion, in Mastermind, he played a post-TV movie Master, who switched bodies yet again using the Deathworm.
Alex Macqueen has portrayed the Master in the audio dramas UNIT Dominion, Time's Horizon, Eyes of the Master, The Death of Hope, The Reviled, Masterplan and Rule of the Eminence, set at a time where the Master is given a new regeneration cycle by the Time Lords and is set to work on their behalf.
Additionally, in The Hollows of Time, an audio adaptation of an unrealised 1980s Sixth Doctor script made as part of The Lost Stories range, a character called Professor Stream appears, played by David Garfield. While he was supposed to be revealed as the Ainley incarnation of the Master in the original script, he was not identified as the Master in the audio version.
Anagrams
During Anthony Ainley's tenure as the Master, pseudonyms made from anagrams of the actor's name were often used in the credits for the Master's disguises, such as Neil Toynay for the Portreeve in TV: Castrovalva. Tremas is itself an anagram of Master.
The tradition has continued in the BBC Wales version of the show. During Series 3, the Master takes on two new identities, Professor Yana in TV: Utopia, and Mr Harold Saxon in TV: The Sound of Drums and TV: Last of the Time Lords. Yana is an intentional acronym of You Are Not Alone, the final words of the Face of Boe, which led the Doctor to discover that Yana was a Time Lord. "Mister Saxon", as the character was mysteriously referred to throughout series 3, is an anagram of "Master No. Six" - John Simm's rendition being the sixth on-screen version of the character. However, Russell T Davies has claimed that this anagram was unintentional.
External links
Footnotes
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