"Early" Master

Seventh Master
Main aliases:	see list
Species:	Time Lord
Job:	Personal assistant
Affiliated with:	Serf Systems
Place of origin:	Gallifrey
First mentioned in:	CIA File Extracts
First appearance:	The Man Who Never Was
Appearances:	see list
Main actor:	James Dreyfus
Other voice actors:	David Bradley

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Incarnations of the Master
First cycle
Between cycles
Second cycle
Third cycle
Other universes
More ambiguous

Sometime after leaving Gallifrey, the Master found himself being confronted by various incarnations of the Doctor on Destination, the Repository, Segonax and a human colony planet, and also faced Sarah Jane Smith while controlling Serf Systems as "John Harrison".

Biography

Post-regeneration

After regenerating into his seventh incarnation, the Time Lord became more ruthless and began to use the name of "the Master" (PROSE: CIA File Extracts) for the first time since leaving the Academy. (AUDIO: The Destination Wars) He visited the Scoundrels Club to recover from the regeneration in comfort. (PROSE: Dismemberment)

Early exploits

The Master poses as "the Inventor". (AUDIO: The Destination Wars)

Under unknown circumstances, the Master stole a Type-45 TARDIS from Gallifrey before the Quadriggers had the chance to "overhaul" it, which resulted in his TARDIS falling apart around him almost instantly. In "an experiment gone wrong", the Master crash-landed his ship on Destination, a planet in "the farthest arm of the galaxy, in the earliest Segments of Time", and was left with "the bare minimum of components."

The Master took charge of Destination, assuming the title of "the Inventor", and developed the planet's technology for his own ends. He pitted the human colonists against the Dalmari, so that the colonists would develop the nuclear technology he planned to use to refuel his TARDIS's engines. When the First Doctor arrived, he changed his plans and tried to steal the Doctor's TARDIS to escape. He was able to trick Ian Chesterton and Barbara Wright into leading him to the ship, but they were able to overpower him and use the fast return switch to take the TARDIS back to Destination. The Master ultimately became trapped in his own laboratory after the Doctor had rerouted its power to help Destination to rebuild. (AUDIO: The Destination Wars)

Facing a future Doctor

Deciding to revisit the construction of a Parenthesis Clock that would allow him to indiscriminately alter timelines without suffering the consequences, the Master infiltrated the Repository, and convinced his former teacher, Eminent Sedanya, as well as other residents, to help him, and they built the Clock near the library of the Repository in order to better gain access to the Matrix and use its power to fuel the Clock, with Master using the power of the Matrix to summon the fabled Mandlebrot to keep intruders away. When the Clock was completed, the Master began using a temporal extractor to rewind the timelines of some of the residents so that the Clock could be fuelled with their experiences in stellar engineering, only for the the Fourth Doctor to arrive at the Repository to bring back the Discord Grimoire.

The Master tried to frame the Doctor for the murders by extracting from him a false confession under the Time Winds, but when this failed, he instead tricked the Doctor and assistant librarian Elanora into becoming victims of the Mandelbroth, and then manipulated the following trial in order to have the blame for the murders placed on Ansillon. When the Doctor survived the Mandelbroth and discovered his identity, the Master was convinced by Sedanya not to kill him on the spot and to instead have the Doctor and Elanora dying in the explosion of his TARDIS, as the Master didn't think he needed it anymore. The Master finally managed to activate the Clock, but his miscalculations only resulted in the device malfunctioning, and, in desperation, the Master encouraged the Doctor to use the Discord Grimoire to deactivate the Clock, and disappeared before the Doctor used the Clock to undo his actions. (AUDIO: Blood of the Time Lords)

Controlling Serf Systems

The Master poses as "John Harrison". (TV: The Man Who Never Was)

Under the alias "John Harrison", the Master began using a hologram of Joseph Serf to run Serf Systems, while he posed as the PR of the company, after the real Serf died in a skiing accident in Val d'Isère during 2007. "Harrison" accessed the black market of alien species, paying millions to gain a group of Skullions, who crash-landed in central Asia, as slaves. "Harrison" controlled them using neck collars which would electrify when he activated his pen, which would kill them at "level 10", and forced them to maintain the hologram of Serf.

"Harrison" wanted to make profit by selling the SerfBoard to everyone using Serf's hypnotic ability. The fake Serf said that the SerfBoard was revolutionary, while in reality it was "rubbish". His plot was foiled by Sarah Jane Smith after Lionel Carson was hypnotised by Serf into destroying "Harrison's" pen, and Luke Smith made the hologram convince people to not care about the SerfBoard. Sarah Jane had a ship sent from Skultos to rescue the Skullions. However, "Harrison" advanced on the Skullions as they were transported to the ship, resulting in him being transported as well. The ship then left Earth, and Luke hoped that the Skullions would make "Harrison" work for them as retaliation for their enslavement. (TV: The Man Who Never Was)

Later deeds

After arriving on a planet where human colonists had settled in a fictional recreation of an English village during the Second World War to live in peace away from Earth, the Master took control of the environment, organised a home guard and armed the original population of the planet to entice a conflict and demonstrate that an outgunned and outnumbered group of people could resist against a much greater enemy when properly motivated. When the Second Doctor arrived with Ben Jackson, Polly Wright and Jamie McCrimmon, the Master hypnotised them into joining his experiment. The Doctor, however, immersed himself too deep in his role of commander of the home guard and made contact with the aliens to reach a peaceful solution, resulting in the aliens attacking earlier than the Master had anticipated. In the ensuing battle, the Master escaped in his TARDIS, with the intent of returning to look on the results of the conflict. However, when he returned, the Doctor had already set a trap for him after persuading the fighters into a peace. The Master was captured and put on trial for illegal use of mind control, while his TARDIS was confiscated. (AUDIO: The Home Guard)

Still trapped, the Master managed to ally himself with the Gods of Ragnarok on Segonax, and used a pendant they gave him to contact a street artist on Zamyatin named Kingpin and use Kingpin's free spirited energy to cause a psychic storm, which caused a revolution on Zamyatin. The Master then persuaded Kingpin to organise a collective of various artists and bring them to Segonax to become the Psychic Circus. The Master then persuaded the Chief clown to organise a talent contest so that new energy could be acquired. When Kingpin managed to contact the Seventh Doctor, the Master used his abilities to stop him from reaching the Circus, first creating an illusion of him landing on Zamyatin, and then one of him returning to Paradise Towers. When the Doctor eventually came to the Circus, he and the Master confronted each other on a psychic plane, where the Doctor exploited the Gods' curiosity to buy time to steal the pendant from the Master and pass it to Kingpin. Kingpin then used the pendant to free the Circus from the Master and the Gods' influence, and the Master was left at the mercy of the Gods of Ragnarok. (AUDIO: The Psychic Circus)

Post-mortem

When the Tremas Master was stripped of his Trakenite body by the Time Lords, and after his plot to steal the Fifth Doctor's regenerations failed, he found himself confronting mental projections of all his past incarnations, and was able to steal a bit of life energy from each of them, allowing him to regenerate back into his Trakenite body. (PROSE: The Velvet Dark)

Psychological profile

Personality

The "Early" Master was a cold-hearted and self-centred individual, willing to influence a whole planet's development to refuel his craft, and equally willing to abandon his plans just to steal the Doctor's TARDIS. He found amusement in shaping a culture to his benefit and looked down on others as his inferiors, claiming to have "longed for a mind equal to [his] own" when confronting the Doctor on Destination. He particularly disregarded humans as "ape-descended primitives". (AUDIO: The Destination Wars)

He believed that the exchange of money for services and goods, even goods such as slaves, were the way of the world. He was only interested in making profit from the SerfBoards. He didn't care about the Skullions' pain and, when Plark told him that they were thirsty, sadistically sprayed water, which burned Skullions, on them, indicating that they were not to stop working. (TV: The Man Who Never Was)

The Fourth Doctor once observed that the Master was "unscrupulous", and a pragmatist who destroy anything in his way, but was also quick to make extreme reactions to offense. He would often kill his allies the the moment he no longer had any use for them just for the sake of doing it. (AUDIO: Blood of the Time Lords)

Skills

He used his hypnotic abilities regularly, subjugating even adept minds such as Susan Foreman with ease. (AUDIO: The Destination Wars)

Appearance and clothing

The Master on Segonax. (AUDIO: The Psychic Circus)

When he met the Doctor, Susan, Ian and Barbara on Destination, the Master had short hair and a beard, both of which were almost completely grey, save for some dark patches. His eyes were brown in colour. He wore an asymmetrical black coat with a large white lined collar on the left-hand side. (AUDIO: The Destination Wars)

He later adopted a black Nehru jacket. (AUDIO: The Home Guard)

Behind the scenes

The Master as seen on the cover of Solo.

• The "Early" Master was first created for Blood of the Time Lords, where an uncertain Fourth Doctor asked him whether he was in his second or third "regeneration", but the Master, angered by the Doctor's forgetfulness, refused to confirm or deny his guesses. It was David Richardson who proposed they "introduce the First Master" during the production of The Destination Wars, and, while Dreyfus was initially promoted by Big Finish Productions as portraying the "first incarnation" of the Master, or "the first Master", writer John Dorney has stated that none of that made it in any of the scripts, and that, if anything, it was contradicted. Dorney also noted that the name "First Master" could be interpreted multiple ways, as meaning either "first incarnation, first to call himself Master or first the Doctor meets in continuity." When asked whether Dreyfus portrayed the Master as he originally was before he ever regenerated, Nicholas Briggs replied that that's intentionally left unanswered and open for interpretation.
• According to James Dreyfus, the "Early" Master was intended to appear in the anniversary audio story Masterful, but was removed due to a series of transphobic remarks he made being posted on Twitter. Dreyfus would later claim that he had "no idea" why Big Finish cut ties with him.
• James Dreyfus's credit was removed from the cover of The Psychic Circus following controversy over transphobic remarks he had posted on Twitter.
• As a result of the aforementioned controversy, a composite of George Pravda as Spandrell and Anthony Ainley as the Tremas Master was used to provide the likeness of the "Early" Master on the cover artwork of Solo, the anthology which Blood of the Time Lords was part of.