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Posted in: BBC, Doctor Who, TV | Tagged: bbc, chris chibnall, doctor who, jodie whittaker, russell t davies, steven moffat, the master, tom baker
Doctor Who: A Celebration of The Master & Our Love for Hammy Villainy
It's time for another Doctor Who compilation video, and this time it's The Master's turn. The BBC released a supercut of The Master over the decades, the Joker to The Doctor's Batman.
The Master is a product of the James Bond and Avengers Cool Sixties genre trend. Like The Doctor, The Master changes with the times. The first Master, as played by Roger Delgado, set the template as a pastiche of a Bond villain and mad scientist type, forever plotting diabolical schemes to take over the world and kill the occasion innocent just because he could. You get the feeling he was in it for fun and socializing with the Doctor since Degado and Jon Pertwee were friends. The Master and the Doctor seemed to just enjoy bantering like a routine. The writers originally planned to reveal The Master was The Doctor's brother but that never came to be, partly because Delgado passed away.
As the show moved into the mid-1970s, The Master only made one more appearance in "The Deadly Assassin" as a decaying corpse (Peter Pratt), possibly the scariest and yuckiest monster ever on Doctor Who. He returned in 1981 played by Anthony Ainley and became quite prolific through the 1980s, menacing the Fourth (Tom Baker), Fifth (Peter Davison), Sixth (Colin Baker), and Seventh (Sylvester McCoy) Doctors before the show was cancelled in 1989. Ainley was the longest-running Master, playing him with a moustache-twirling hamminess that you expected him to start tying companions to train tracks if the writers ran out of ideas. He was the baddie in the Doctor Who TV Movie in 1996, played by Eric Roberts at his hammiest, and it's too bad a clip wasn't included in the supercut.
When Russell T. Davies brought back The Master (John Simm) for the 21st Century, he was overtly insane. His narcissism had taken a psychotic, murderous dimension. He wasn't just a scheming megalomaniac, he was a total nutcase with a petty childishness in his spite. That moment where he turns everyone on Earth into a clone of him is both nasty and goofy at the same time, which kind of sums up Doctor Who in a nutshell. Michelle Gomez played The Lady Master, or Missy, as a sexy, flirtatious psychopath. Showrunner Steven Moffat just could not resist introducing a sexual undertone to her relationship with The Doctor (Peter Capaldi). Chris Chibnall brought back The Master, this time played by Sacha Dhawan, one of the best decisions made on his run. Dhawan played The Master with a combination of spite and hurt and had great chemistry with Jodie Whittaker's Doctor. He also becomes the instrument of the Timeless Child reveal that fans have hated so much. Honestly, how many times can you destroy Gallifrey and bring it back only to destroy it again before it's just another Sunday? Dhawan's Master is almost certainly coming back in Whittaker's final story.
You can't complain about The Master. He's the archetypal archvillain to counter The Doctor. Every hero needs an arch-enemy, and The Master is the perfect default. There will be a new Master to go up against the Fourteenth Doctor at some point. That's just how it is.
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