welcome back (i love you) i have missed you (i love you) why don't you come with me? (i love you) i'd hate for you to come to any harm, you know (i love you) nothing I ever do is pointless, not when it comes to you (i love you) it seems we always meet again, eternally bound together (i love you) you mustn't die (i love you) our lives have been irrevocably linked (i love you) have we been enemies for so long that you've forgotten what we used to be like? (i love you) you are my life (i love you) perhaps one day you'll consider destroying the universe, then i'll be in the awkward position of saving it (i love you) i know you, and in one of your hearts, there burns a darker flame (i love you) we've always been two sides of the same coin (i love you) there’s nothing else to save me in this life but you (i love you) you will always try to see the good in me when no one else could (i love you) i want you to stay. and witness my fate (i love you) get out of the way (i love you) both of them yours (i love you) i need my friend back (i love you) without hope, without witness, without reward, i am your friend (i love you)
In 2007′s Last of the Time Lords, Russell T. Davies drew our attention to the Master’s distinctive signet ring, inset with silver Gallifreyan writing, which was plucked from his funeral pyre by the hand of a mysterious woman who, in 2009′s The End of Time, would turn out to be one of the ‘Disciples of Saxon’, a cult formed by the Master in expectation of his death with the aim of enacting a ritual to resurrect him, still in the same incarnation at that.
This was a pleasant twist, and a fun tip of the hat to the method of Count Dracula’s resurrection in multiple Hammer Dracula films. (This is only fitting: as per The Book of the War, the Time Lords adapted their powers of regeneration from the Yssgaroth’s…)
However, I think there are two startling facts about this plot point which have been just-as-startlingly under-discussed in canon-welding spaces.
Follow me after the cut to find out the truth about the Rings of the Time Lords — or should I say the Time Lords of the Rings? (This was terrible and I do not apologise.)
Fact #1: This pays off a Chekhov’s gun going all the way back to An Unearthly Child.
Much as it is sometimes entertaining to ponder the days when Dr Who might have been a lone human scientist, there is also a distinctive corpus of early implications about The Doctor’s Mysterious People as a distinct and mysterious civilisation with dominion over space and time. It started with the Doctor himself, but was followed through with other characters implied to hail from that same civilisation: I speak of course of the Meddling Monk and the Toymaker (who, I note in passing, is not actually meant to be Celestial with a capital C).
What did the Monk have in common with the Doctor, besides a TARDIS?
A conspicuous ring.
As you can glimpse in the top left photograph, the Doctor’s ring was, to be exact, a sapphire ring.
The Toymaker did not wear a ring in the TV story as broadcast — but he did use one in the novelisation, which brought back many elements that had to be cut from the TV version due to rushed production. There, he used it to manipulate the environment of his suspiciously TARDIS-like “Celestial Toyroom”.
Not coincidentally, in The Web Planet, the Doctor’s ring was revealed to have the ability to interface with the Ship, with the Doctor gleefully declaring that “this is not merely a decorative object”, without elaboration.
The concept seems to have persisted past The War Games. Sure, the Time Lords seen therein lacked the ring — including Edward Brayshaw’s Renegade. And Roger Delgado’s subsequent regeneration of the character also lacked the ring when we first saw him in Terror of the Autons. And it’s rare that we get the chance to check thereafter, owing to the Master’s predilection for gloves. But by The Time Monster…
…he is wearing the very flat, green, gleaming ring to which RTD attached such significance in Last of the Time Lords and The End of Time.
The idea experienced a last, potentially-coincidental gasp with Kate O’Mara’s Rani, though she was similarly prone to glove-wearing.
But the point is: throughout the first half of Classics, all the interesting Time Lords had Large Conspicuous Rings. These Rings clearly did some things, but the full extent of their power and cultural significance was kept artfully obscured.
And this is what Davies is coming back to with Simm’s all-important ring. The Doctor recognises it on sight as “the Master’s Ring”, and knows what it does. He fascinatingly describes it as “part of him”, setting all kinds of biodata-related alarm bells ringing. Given that the Rings are also related to the bond between pilot and TARDIS, could they be some kind of locus of the Rassilon Imprimatur? The thrill is of course in the asking…
Fact #2: This may not be the first time it’s happened.
A shorter but equally interesting observation:
the Master has possessed this same green ring at least since his Delgado days.
the Doctor instantly jumps from “his Ring survived” to “his disciples must be arranging a ritual to resurrect him in the same incarnation”. This is something he knows Rings do and is relatively casual about.
at many points during Classic Who the Master was seemingly killed off for good, only to show up intact because “I’m indestructible… the whole Universe knows that”. (Or, as Missy later put it, “death is for other people”.)
Am I the only one who thinks that somewhere in Davies’s brain, he may have conceived of this as the secret way the Master had survived at least some of those past exterminations? Sure, the Disciples of Saxon were something set up by ol’Harold (the clue’s in the name), but it would be child’s play for a Time Lord with a working TARDIS to set up convenient cults for himself on a dozen worlds, just to be on the safe side.
I’mt thinking, particularly, of the Tremas Master’s annihilation on Sarn in my beloved Planet of Fire, which seems particularly conclusive. We see him burn away on-screen; it’s not as simple as saying he teleported to safety in the nick of time. Either time was rewritten, or he was resurrected by… means unknown.
And here’s the thing, despite his panic, the Master does seem to assume he’ll survive. What does he say to express it?
Oh yes… “I’LL PLAGUE YOU TO THE END OF TIME FOR THIS!”
Full circle, eh what? (Yes, that’s a cheap one, but fun nonetheless.)
And on that note, look at the imagery! Of course, having gone down in a column of flame, he would be reconstituted in the same way.
“I had people who were clever enough… to calculate the opposite.”
I do think people who view Dhawan!Master as more submissive/receptive than his other incarnations.... should probably think about why that is. Because it's not like he's the only version of the Master that lends themself well to that interpretation. Ainley's favorite hobby was putting himself in dangerous and degrading situations for literally no reason other than to mess with Five. Jacobi gets uncomfortably into being tortured in the audio dramas. Even Delgado has those big pleading eyes in The Time Monster, and if you don't think Simm is at least a bit of a brat... how?
Like, if you want to read them as a sub, there's a lot of material to work with there! But if the only version of them that you read as submissive is the one played by an actor of color, maybe think about why that is.
The Master: Stopping me won't bring Traken back, you know.
Nyssa: True, and if I was driven solely by revenge, that might give me pause – but I’m also driven by the fact that you’re just generally a terrible person.
The “Merlin” Master of the 1980s Doctor Who Annuals
I’ve found him: the most obscure Master incarnation of them all. Someone even some Gordon Tipple and Edward Brayshaw devotees say “doesn’t count”. And best of all, this isn’t some sort of War King or Professor Stream situation, a character who’s only the Master through the backdoor: he appeared in fully licensed Doctor Who stories, under the name of “the Master”.
Details under the cut.
I.
The year was 1983. World Distributors were nearing the end of their commendably steadfast run of Doctor Who Annuals, but for now they were still going strong, and the Doctor Who Annual 1983 was set to feature a lovely historical story with the Fifth Doctor, The Creation of Camelot, where the Doctor would stumble into the events of Arthurian legend, with the customary sci-fi twist. This was before Battlefield decided to inject the idea of an equivalence between the Doctor and Merlin in the water supply, so the anonymous writer took a different tack: the Doctor and Tegan, much to their horror, recognised the “Merlin” of this King Arthur’s Court as a guise of… the Master!
It was well that they recognised him, because it’s not clear the readers would have: he looked like this.
(Dig the skull carving on the clasp of his cape!)
Not exactly the spitting image of Anthony Ainley, is it? And it’s not Roger Delgado either. Granted, the likenesses in the Annual illustrations could sometimes be a little haphazard — witness that Tegan in the bottom left, looking somewhat more like a Charley Pollard who’s dyed her hair — but something more is going on here.
The “something” is that Anthony Ainley was a touchy man when it came to the rights to his likeness, and World Distributors apparently decided it wasn’t worth the trouble to strike an agreement when they could simply have their artist create an all-new design, sharing a quintessential Mastery quality with Ainley and Delgado’s Masters, but distinct from either of them.
The Essential Doctor Who #4 refers to our handsome fellow as a “generic Master”; a part of me also wants to call him the “BBV Master”. But the custom, such as it is, is to refer to him as “the Merlin Master”, as per the alias under which he is introduced — by analogy to the convention of referring to John Simm’s Master as “the Saxon Master”.
II.
The Merlin Master could easily have remained a one-off curio; the Master was absent from the 1984 Annual, and the 1985 Annual’s one Master story, The Time Savers, carefully avoided illustrating him, leaving readers free to imagine the Master of the story as Anthony Ainley’s TV portrayal. But the Doctor Who Annual 1986, the final such publication in the Classic era, featured not one but two Master stories: The Fellowship of Quan and The Radio Waves, and both of them illustrated their antagonist with the likeness created in The Creation of Camelot, despite being, by all appearances, the work of a different artist. Compare with the second of the two Camelot illustrations in Part I.
Here is The Fellowship of Quan, where the “Merlin” Master menaces the Sixth Doctor and Peri under the guise of “the Sentinel”.
And here is The Radio Waves, finally giving readers a glimpse of this Master’s twist on the classic Delgado Nehru jacket — in customary Merlin Master fashion, similar to but distinct from Ainley’s Traken-inspired getup. (Yes, yes, there are three of them… threeeee! Just a little bit of artistic license to convey the experience of being hypnotised by the man.)
The Radio Waves holds the distinction of being the final story in the final Doctor Who Annual of the Classic era. Not bad, for such an “obscure” figure!
Not long ago, the great Paul Hanley, as part of a Master retrospective, created an additional artpiece of the Merlin Master — fanart, if you want to be technical about it, but Paul Hanley’s Doctor Who art has always seemed to be a class apart. With characteristic humour, he dubbed him the “For Legal Purposes, Not Anthony Ainley” Master.
III.
So who the hell is he?
With no offence to Jacob Keith, who insists otherwise, I think all fun-loving canon-welders in the audience will agree it’d be too dull for words to simply jot him down as the Ainley Master and move on.
Yes, unless you bring clones or parallel universes into it, the alternative means that he is meeting the Doctor out of order in those Annuals stories, given Ainley is clearly the Fifth and Sixth Doctors’ sole contemporary Master; but I think the delightful goofiness of his existence is worth a little bit of Protocols-of-Linearity tomfoolery. It’s not as though Big Finish haven’t done much worse in their endless quest to pit every possible Master against every possible surviving Doctor, and River Song for good measure.
At one stage, before calcifying into a dreadful Merlin-skeptic, Jacob Keith suggested that he might be the ‘Tzun’ Master, the restored Time Lord Master into whom Anthony Ainley’s Master regenerates in First Frontier.
However, while the above description can perhaps be matched to the Annuals artwork, it is difficult to construe these illustrations as depicting Gordon Tipple; yet the novelisations of The TV Movie both give indications that the ‘Tzun’ Master, and the Old Master played by Tipple and executed by the Daleks at the start of the movie in question, are one and the same. Foiled again!
It is, of course, also possible to read the Merlin Master as one of the Geoffrey Beevers Decayed Master’s many, many ephemeral possessed bodies. Possibly, possibly, although Beevers’ single-minded drive to survive sits ill-at-ease with the Merlin Master’s somewhat lackadaisical mayhem, more in line with Delgado and Ainley’s characters than the latter-day Classic Master, perpetually at his wits’ end.
Perhaps the solution lies in Battlefield after all. Notwithstanding baffling retcons, the conventional interpretation is that the Merlin whose shadow hangs over Battlefield is a far-off incarnation of the Doctor, somewhere in the same area as Colin Salmon and the Curator. Does this Doctor, perchance, have a Master? Is this that Doctor’s contemporary, lying far, far ahead in the Fifth and Sixth Doctors’ futures? Isn’t it fun to think so?
…
Or, you know. Maybe he’s between John Simm and Michelle Gomez or something. Who can say…
