Hi, Ric here with a small lore speculation video on the identity of the Master and where
he fits in the timeline of his history as well as the numerous deaths of the Master.
Spoilers for Series 12 of Doctor Who and everything that has come before to be honest, by the
way. So, the first two episodes of series 12 of
Dr Who have introduced a new regeneration of the Master, the Time Lord antagonist to
the Doctor, childhood friend then colleague gone bad and constant foil. But, due to the
Whoniverse’s nature as a time travel show, there’s been a lot of speculation on where
this Master fits into the lore. Is he a pre or post Missy regeneration? Could “O”
even be the earliest Master we’ve yet seen, even before the classic portrayals of Ainley
and Delgado? Well the BBC seems to be treating the latest Master as a linier continuation
off of the last one but there’s still a little room for interpretation which I’ll
get to in a minute. Being a previously unseen early Master is
unlikely however and an examination of the Master’s Timeline will help to explain why,
even though there is plenty of room to fit in 12 more actors. Also while I’m going
to mention forms of the Master that were incorporated into materials outside of the shows, I’m
going to be including mostly information from the Classic and Revival series to paint out
where the “O” Master fits. Chronologically, the Master’s story began
in a similar way to the Doctor’s, being taken at the age of 8 to the untempered schism
on Gallifrey to peer into its depths. While at the Academy, the Master was in the same
chapter as the Doctor, the Prydonian Chapter and they shared a love of exploration, distaste
for Timelord authority and occasionally sabotaged each other’s studies in jovial rivalry.
The first time we, the viewer encounter the Master is when he was played by Roger Delgado
in the episode, “Terror of the Autons” . At this time, the Master is trying to ally
with himself with the Nestene, the living plastic consciousness in control of the Autons.
It’s never revealed what regeneration of the Master this is, it could be his first
form or final. However, the Master, in much the same way as the Doctor, had abandoned
Gallifrey and struck out on his own as a renegade Time Lord. Why exactly he left is not certain
but alluded to in several other stories and include notions that he was originally searching
for his friend and rival, the Doctor or that he had killed another Time Lord and was fleeing
repercussion. But what can be seen is that he spent a not
insubstantial amount of his time searching for ways to prolong his life beyond the natural
limit of 12 regenerations, 13 lives. Cut off from the Time Lord society, the gifting of
a new regenerative cycle was seemingly out the window meaning if he wanted to live on,
he’d have to find a work around. Unwilling to allow himself to perish, a mentality
shared by Rassilon, the Master seems to have acquired numerous tricks or technologies to
grant him abilities beyond that of a normal Time Lord or Gallifreyan. Not the least of
which was his advanced psychic powers, something all Time Lords had, but the Master excelled
at. After clashing with several of the Doctor’s lives, the Master’s final body, his 13th
form was beginning to decay. As opposed to simply ageing to death and passing as is natural
for a final Time Lord, his body and mind persisted long after it should have expired giving him
a zombified and rotten appearance which he shrouded beneath a cloak. Seeing no alternative,
he wound up on Tersurus until an ambitious Time Lord found the Master and returned him
to Gallifrey to aid in a political assassination with the promise of a fresh life.
This was the form of the Master seen in the Deadly Assassin but it’s not clear if this
is supposed to be the same body as Delgado’s or a later one. While he was foiled by the
Fourth Doctor, the Decayed Master had been attempting to usurp his conspirators and grant
himself a new regeneration cycle. This failed but the Master managed to flee from Gallifrey
in his own Tardis (whose chameleon circuit still works) and travelled to Traken to try
to utilise the Keeper’s powers to rejuvenate his decayed body. Eventually he is stopped
once again by the 4th Doctor, but not before he manages to possess the body of the Traken
native, Consul Tremas, father to the Doctor’s newest companion, Nyssa.
Which shows us two things. Along his travels, the Master has learned how to literally possess
someone and that he’s pretty messed up as he’s now basically piloting the father of
the Doctor’s friend just to add insult to injury. This possession was still not the
outcome the Master wanted and was only a stall for time as Tremas was mortal and would still
age naturally. This version of the Master would also go on
to clash with the Doctor frequently and even drop the Fourth Doctor from Project Pharos’
radio telescope on Earth. While Pharos is a fictional project, it was basically Jodrell
Bank, which is referenced by “O” atop the Eifel Tower in the meeting between 13
and the Master. In this same conversation, he also references his assassination of MI6
head, C. Here he claims to have used a Mandraffian Laser Rifle and that he still has an eye for
it. This clearly is a nod to his assassination of the Gallifreyan President in the Deadly
Assassin, dating the “O” Master as definitely post Tremas as I find it doubtful that he
would be referencing events that he had not taken part in.
His final appearance in Tremas’ body was when he was stranded after a confrontation
with the 7th Doctor. This clash left the Master contaminated with a virus that would eventually
kill him so a new body or regeneration would still be a priority for him. Anyway, we then
have an open period in the Master’s timeline where he could have been up to anything really,
as the next appearance of the Master was in the TV Movie where he had been executed by
the Daleks on Skaro. Thing is, we can’t clearly see the body that was disintegrated
by the Daleks but the Master had made one final request, that it be the Doctor who ferries
his remains back to Gallifrey. It seems however that whatever power allowed
the Master to transcend his decayed 13th form also allowed him to persist after disintegration
with his mind adopting the form of a Deathworm Morphant. According to outside sources, this
strange creature was a symbiotic lifeform that the Master fused his mind with, a creature
that was not destroyed by the Dalek’s execution. Instead the Morphant Master managed to sabotage
the Doctor’s Tardis and crash it in 1999 Earth where he then possessed an Ambulance
Operator, called Bruce. Poor guy was killed by the possession but through the Morphant,
the Master was able to puppeteer Bruce’s body around, even as it began to decay. Still
in search of a fresh lease on life, the Master Bruce attempted to seize the 8th Doctor’s
remaining regenerations but was pulled into the Eye of Harmony on the Tardis, being sucked
into its engines. It’s unclear if he truly perished after
this or the Doctor managed to return him to Gallifrey, but some stories say that he was
left stranded in the Time Vortex until the Time War. There are also a whole myriad of
stories that add in new forms and escape attempts from the Master but what is known for certain
is that when the Time War began, the Time Lords reached back to resurrect the Master,
meaning that for all intents and purposes, the renegade Time Lord had fully died by this
point. There are some stories that try to flesh out
the events of the Time War and hey, as the whole thing is a jumbled mess of inconsistent
timelines and a collapse of linearity of hellish proportions, who knows if any are true. Or
all of them are. Doesn’t matter but in this conflict the Master is rumoured to have been
in the form of a child for the most of it. What is canon, is that this was a new set
of lives, granted by the Time Lords, a fresh regeneration cycle just as the Master had
been chasing since his decayed form, several bodies back. However, the Time War proved
too much for the Master, who, convinced that he was witnessing the end of everything, fled
to the end of the universe and used a chameleon arch to render himself human to hide from
the reaches of the Last Great Time War. Here, bereft of his memories, he grew into the kindly
Professor Yana and tried to help humanity survive the end of the universe.
It’s worth noting that he remembers being discovered as a small child, but this was
likely the cover story added by the Chameleon Arch. Either way, as we can see, any regenerations
between his new cycle and Yana were operating for the Time Lords at part of the temporally
locked Time War. No incarnation of the Master from this time should be able to escape the
Time War after the Moment was activated by the War Doctor to seal it all away and we
see Yana regenerate into the Harold Saxon Master. This new Master returns to Earth and
creating a Paradox, attempts to take control of the human race using the human race from
Yana’s time. Thwarted once again, this master chooses not to regenerate to spite the 10th
Doctor, but as he has many times before, he had a backup plan. He went a bit Sauron and
once again, disengaged his consciousness from his body and had it stored in a Gallifreyan
ring which was then recovered by his followers. They sacrificed their life essence to build
him a new body based on the bio data stored within his wife Lucy and his mind within the
ring. This was interrupted however by a vengeful Lucy and the Master returned in an incomplete
state, constantly needing to consume energy from food or anything really as he was leaking
his own life energies constantly. Although this did allow him to perform several superhuman-
uh, super-gallifreyan feats, it was not a good state to be in as it was burning his
energy up quicker than he could consume more. When Rassilon’s Master plan (see what I
did there?) came to fruition and he almost brought Gallifrey back, the Saxon Master intervened
and fell back into the Time War with his kin. Apparently during this time, he was committed
by the Time Lords to Gomer’s Asylum to be repaired. The Time Lords couldn’t very well
allow him to run around shooting lightening so I guess fixing him was more of a side effect
of stabilizing his energies. Rassilon however managed to bring Gallifrey out of the Time
War after the 13 Doctors saved it by shifting it into a pocket universe. The now stable
Saxon Master used this opportunity to escape Gallifrey once again where his next appearance
in his timeline was when he met the 12th Doctor on a Mondasian Colony ship and met his future
form of the Mistress. This encounter ended with the Mistress stabbing
the Saxon Master in the back and triggering his regeneration but the final change was
completed off-screen, leading to the potential theory that the “O” incarnation of the
Master actually preceded the Missy version. Certainly the personality of “O” fits
closer to the Saxon Master than Missy who sincerely made an attempt to reform. Secondly,
Missy was also blasted by the Saxon Master after his seeming betrayal and it seemed to
be fatal, like no regeneration fatal. From what we’ve seen so far, “O” is motivated
just as much by spite as Saxon was and arguably one of the most malevolent versions we’ve
seen in terms of his actions. This shift in personality, although certainly closer to
the Master of old than the Mistress was, doesn’t seem to flow naturally from Missy.
So narratively this “O” regeneration seems to better fit in the unseen regeneration between
Saxon and Missy, although a final point to note is that the Master has a habit of resurrection,
even beyond that of a typical Time Lord. While the Doctor has spent his millennia of travel
helping, the Master has spent all his time out there selfishly hoarding knowledge, ruling
societies and looking for a way to cheat death for ever. So, the survival of the Mistress
to regenerate is quite feasible, however some serious mental shift has seemingly occurred
if this is the case. Perhaps learning of the hidden truth of the Time Lords was enough
to push him back into his old ways or maybe there’s a multitude of other lives in between
the Missy and “O”. We’ll have to wait and see as this is a topic I plan on revisiting
in some form or another. There’s a lot of additional forms mentioned
in the books, audio novels and comics and while there’s still room of these to be
slotted in, as I said before we only ever see one Master from the original cycle of
regenerations the Master known as “O” could not be one of them. His referencing
events from the Tremas era make that clear. There are probably several Masters from the
Time War, but these, along with its events should be locked away and were acting loosely
in the service of Gallifrey at the time. So, I doubt “O” is a Time War era Master either.
Thank you for watching this video on the timeline of the Master and hopefully series 12 does
something cool with the old lore of Gallifrey and the Time Lords. They still haven’t cleared
up if Looms were a thing or not but it’s looking like there maybe never were canon?
Maybe I’ll do a video on the those next? Well, until the next video, thanks again for
watching and goodbye!