Splitting the Master's page: Splitting the Master's page

Splitting the Master's page

Peoples of the universe, please attend carefully. The proposal that follows is vital to the future of you all… Given that this is the 51st anniversary of the Master, I think it is particularly appropriate that today be the day we finally address the long yearned re-split of The Master. We need a split. We need the Master-split.

It should be noted from the start that splitting the page is, in itself, non-controversial. We have a cacophony of precedent for splitting individual incarnations of a Time Lord (e.g., the Monk, the Rani, Romana) –but I suspect that won’t even be debated. There’s a fairly broad consensus on Talk:The Master which suggests to me that the Master-split is a question of when and how, not if. Indeed, User:CzechOut agreed as much when the matter was raised in the Discussions area some time back, merely arguing against doing so through a Discussions thread rather than a proper Forum debate. The reasons that the pages were merged back in 2010/2011 were that (1) there were remarkably few Master incarnations and thus it wouldn’t be confusing and (2) there aren’t narrative names for the various incarnations. Both of these reasons have aged rather poorly.

To the first, this simply isn’t true anymore. Even ignoring the fact that the overwhelming majority of sources now treat the ‘Delgado’ Master and the ‘Beevers/Pratt’ Master as separate incarnations — compare Doorway to Hell, The Two Masters, Masterful, which all hold that they are distinct incarnations, with Legacy of the Daleks, the sole source holding that the Decayed Master was a crispy Delgado — there are far more incarnations now than there were before. Since 2011, we’ve had two new televised incarnations (Michelle Gomez and Sacha Dhawan) both of whom have more appearances than either of the preceding NuWho incarnations on both TV and within the EU AND several EU incarnations (James Dreyfus, Milo Parker, Alex Macqueen, Gina McKee the so-called ‘War Child’ Master). Furthermore, the incarnation portrayed by Derek Jacobi is no longer limited to a singular episode, but now headline his own long-running spin-off. Having all of these incarnations on the same page has made it not only difficult for readers to parse, but difficult to load.

Back in 2011, we also had no multi-Master stories and thus no frame of reference for how to handle stolen bodies. Do they have distinct personalities? Or are they all the same incarnation with a different skin? Now, we know very explicitly that they are distinct. Masterful is fairly dispositive, explicitly distinguishing the two TV stolen bodies (Eric Roberts, Anthony Ainley) from the "original-flavour" Crispy Master (Geoffrey Beevers) and treating them as individual incarnations. Likewise, the I Am the Master blurb says that the book features “six incarnations”, which only tracks if the ‘Tremas’ Master and the Decayed Master are treated separately. Covering them on the same page would be disingenuous

As to the second, we should look to when this decision was made. This decision was made in 2011. This was before ‘the War Doctor’ and ‘the Fugitive Doctor’. These incarnations are named not on the basis of their numeric order or from a narrative title, but on the basis of external material. Even if we ignore that Michelle Gomez’s incarnation has a narrative name (“Missy”) and Gina McKee’s incarnation has a narrative name (“the Lumiat”), the other mainline incarnations have names that have either been used in behind-the-scenes materials (“Decayed Master”, “Old Master”, “Movie Master” [though I shudder at that one], “Reborn Master”, “War Master”, “Saxon Master”) or can easily be derived from their structure (“Tremas Master”, “Bruce Master”, “Spy Master”). Ironically, the only incarnation that would be difficult to name would be the ‘Delgado’ Master. Ultimately, however, I don’t think that naming the incarnations is necessary in the short term. We already have an in-text naming convention that will be used in the meanwhile, so story name dabs should be fine until individual pages can be agreed upon.

An additional sentiment has sometimes been discussed: that the Master's timeline being so confusing makes splitting them a bad idea. But the exact opposite is true! The more complex the timeline, the more useful it is to simply cover different Masters on different pages, without having to worry about putting it all in linear order.

What I suspect WILL be debated is along what lines will The Master be split. Here is what I propose:

1. Mastertemplate - I’ve put together a template for use on individual pages based on the one we use for other Time Lords.
2. The Master - A general landing page in the same vein as The Doctor.
3. The Master's early life - As per the current practice, we will cover ambiguous accounts of a “young Master” there, as well as the versions portrayed by Anthony Hughes and Milo Parker — so as to avoid taking a side on whether the latter two represent the same incarnation or not. Early Masters with their own pages, such as Dreyfus’s, will be mentioned briefly.
4. The Master (The Destination Wars) - Covering the incarnation portrayed by James Dreyfus.
5. The Master (Terror of the Autons) - Covering the incarnation portrayed by Roger Delgado.
6. Decayed Master - This covers the incarnation of the Master portrayed by Geoffrey Beevers and Peter Pratt. This would cover everything from ‘’The Deadly Assassin’’ through to ‘’Planet of Dust’’, with redirects for each of his possessed bodies.
7. The Master (The Keeper of Traken) - This covers the incarnation of the Master portrayed by Anthony Ainley.
8. Old Master - This page would cover the ‘Tzun’ Master.
9. The Master (The TV Movie) - This covers the incarnation of the Master portrayed by Eric Roberts.
10. The Master (The Fallen) - This covers the incarnation of the Master from the comics that looks like a preacher.
11. The Master (Scream of the Shalka) - This covers the incarnation of the Master from ‘’Scream of the Shalka’’ portrayed by Derek Jacobi. Under current policy, this would be invalid –but would still need to exist.
12. The Master (Dominion) - This covers the incarnation of the Master portrayed by Alex Macqueen.
13. [War Master - This covers the incarnation of the Master portrayed by Derek Jacobi.
14. The Master (Utopia) - This covers the incarnation of the Master portrayed by John Simm.
15. Missy - This covers the incarnation of the Master portrayed by Michelle Gomez.
16. The Lumiat - This covers the Lumiat.
17. Spy Master - This covers the incarnation of the Master portrayed by Sacha Dhawan.
18. The Master (The Curse of Fatal Death) - This covers the incarnation of the Master portrayed by Jonathan Pryce.
19. The Master (The Then and the Now) - This covers the "War Child" incarnation from the aborted timeline shown in the Titan comics.

As stated above, with respect to the names, I think the best approach is to split it using story name dabs (with exceptions made for those with clear-cut names), and hold debates on the names for individual incarnations on their respective talk pages (e.g., Talk:The Master (The Keeper of Traken)).

I have created sandboxes for all of these pages, as well as the main Master page. Content on these pages can (and should) be edited and amended, but the structure is what I think is most important. I would like to draw particular attention to the Decayed Master page, since it is (in my opinion) rather ingenious –but may end up being the most controversial. All recursions to the Geoffrey Beevers body have been kept on a single page, rather than being split — because they are referenced in-universe as explicitly the same incarnation and are discussed out-of-universe as the same incarnation (in contrast to the “Fourteenth Doctor”). However, should this be controversial, I would be comfortable splitting that page into its component parts – but I personally believe that would be silly.

In future, I propose that we “pull a T:ROMANA” and develop a naming convention for the Master incarnations – but I believe that doing so at present would delay a very necessary step. The Master, in its current form, is unreadable. I believe the best course of action is to split it using story name dabs (with exceptions made for those with clear cut names), and hold debates on the names for individual incarnations on their respective talk pages (e.g., Talk: The Master (Keeper of Traken)).

As regards the omnipresence of the linking templates: until they can be phased out, it will be trivial to change e.g. {{Gomez}} from pointing to The Master#As Missy to simply pointing to Missy. As such, with relatively few edits, all the current links will reremain functional. NoNotTheMemes ☎ 13:59, 2 January 2023 (UTC)