Peak fiction

The Monthly Adventures #049 - “Master" by Joseph Lidster

The Master is a character that divides me. On one hand, written well, they are possibly the best villain in Doctor Who, a twisted version of the Doctor if he had gone down the wrong path. An old friend and an old enemy in the same half breath, locked in a dance of wits and guile, pushing and pulling at a broken, cosmic friendship. And then sometimes we get quirky insane man who does funny quirky insane things for little rhyme or reason (*cough* *cough* Spy Master *cough* *cough*). Luckily for us, for the Master’s entry into the Villains Trilogy, we have none other than Joseph Lidster writing him for us, who, despite his fumble with The Rapture, is unmatched when it comes to characterisation in Doctor Who. So, as we end the Villains Trilogy and come to the end of the first block of the Main Range, it’s time to find out what exactly Lidster did with one of Doctor Who’s oldest enemies.

In a crooked old house on the outskirts of the human colony of Perfugium sits an old man, disfigured and missing half his memory, waiting for his two oldest friends to arrive. But with them comes a man from his forgotten past, and a game that will most certainly end in Death.

(CONTAINS SPOILERS)

I didn’t expect to love the Beavers Master as much as I did. The Keeper of Traken wasn’t exactly much to go off and god knows that story has escaped my memory since I watched it so booting up Dust Breeding early on in my marathon, I was shocked to find that the mad, conniving and spiteful portrayal of the Master, like the Delgado incarnation but consumed but hate and vitriol, was one of my favourites. And by god does this story just work to cement that, Beavers is an incredible performer and despite the Master barely being in the story, his presence is felt throughout the whole script, this ancient, chained beast ready to break forth and demolish countless lives. In fact, I think I’d call the Beavers Master my third favourite now, behind Delgado and Gomez, which was not the expected outcome of my trip through The Monthly Adventures. And all of this love mainly comes from just the scenes between the Doctor and the Master’s human alter ego - John Smith. The dialogue in this entire story is golden and pretty much every scene is made up of characters bouncing off each other to glorious effect but the conversations had by the Doctor and John are easily highlights of the audio, which is good, because it makes up about 90% of Part 2 (seriously, Part 2 is basically just dialogue). And then through this, we get to meet and know and fall in love with the character of John Smith. This is basically the Master’s Human Nature, his memories wiped, posing as a human being who has built up a reputation of a kind philanthropist, learnéd and generous to everybody he meets. Lidster really makes sure you adore this guy before you realise that he’s going to be ripped away, and a callous monster will come back in his place. It turns the entire story into a disturbing tragedy underpinned by a laden atmosphere from beginning to end. Master at times even becomes a bizarre horror story, a mix of a classic ghost tale and An Inspector Calls (which Master has an unnatural number of similarities too, perhaps it served as inspiration). It’s also hosted by a cast that, whilst pretty small with only four characters besides the Doctor, is wonderfully fleshed out and disturbed in their own ways, from the Inspector obsessed with good vs evil whilst committing a series of heinous murders, to the wealthy and snobby Jacqueline who runs a hostel to sooth her own guilt. And then there’s the meek housemaid Jade, who just so happens to be Death herself, having been playing every character like a chess game the whole time. It may surprise you that our main antagonist isn’t the Master but the Grim Reaper, brought back from the VNAs as an incredibly Seventh Doctor villain, if that makes sense: a chess playing god whose pieces are the characters, watching and mocking from afar, always smugly in control. She’s great - played wonderfully and written spectacularly; that Part 3 cliffhanger alone cements her as a worthy opponent.

Master isn’t perfect however and there were one or two things that held it back to me. For one, we’re lumped with a strange and ultimately confusing wrap-around narrative that oddly bookends the story. Basically, the Doctor is telling the story of John Smith and his turn back into the Master to a would-be-assassin, tasked with taking over the hitman’s role so as to pay back Death for going back on a deal they made. Only for it to be revealed the hitman was Death in disguise and was… testing him? It’s not really clear, Death’s actions don’t make a great deal of sense and in the end it was unnecessary. Not impactfully bad, just strange. On a more pertinent note, Master continues the trend of lending back story to its titular villain, this time around revealing what exactly made the Master the Master. And, lo and behold, instead of going down the same path as the Doctor, only for one to become enraged at his society and for the other to become dedicated at improving it, it was all because of Death. Turns out Death had marked the Doctor to become its advocate, but the Doctor had begged Death to take the Master instead, and their roles switched, the Master becoming tyrannical and evil and the Doctor becoming the great philanthropist. This rubs me the wrong way, it feels like a rewrite for the sake of it that is less interesting, nuanced and original than what came before (which kind of reminds of another uninteresting, endlessly damaging and bewildering plot twist involving the Master and the Doctor. And if you’re reminding me of that, you’ve f**ked up). Unlike Davros, where we’re simply given context for things we already know, Master works to introduce a new “origin story” so to speak that simply cannot compare to what came before. And this is all in service of a climax that I don’t like. The final moments, in a darkened version of John Smith’s house, where John is forced to choose between killing Victor and releasing the Master or letting Jacqueline die and remaining himself, are confusing. Between all the switching personalities and tricks and deceits and stoppages in time and trickery, things just become cumbersome and hard to follow, leaving me to wonder if only there was a simpler way of doing it.

Master is an excellent character study, no doubt. This is the sort of story that makes me love Joseph Lidster: dark and clever, twisted and tragic, it’s a tale of the psyche, the self and friendship. The relationship between the Doctor and the Master continues to be one of the most complex narratives in Doctor Who, and one that I will (almost) always enjoy. Here’s to more of these two old fools, and here’s to our next story, Zagreus, which will cap off the first fifty entries of the Main Range. Can’t wait.

9/10

Pros:

+ Pitch perfect portrayal of the Master with an excellent performance

+ Expert dialogue, especially between John and the Doctor

+ John is a morbidly sympathetic character

+ Great mystery with an unclear end throughout

+ Small but well developed cast

+ Death is a brilliantly acted and creepy antagonist.

+ Great, dread-inducing atmosphere

Cons:

- Unnecessary framing device

- Wasn’t keen on the reforms to the Master’s character

- Ending was somewhat of a let down

MR 049: Master

"Are people born wicked? Or do they have wickedness thrust upon them?"

That is the question that this story seeks to answer. Welcome to the last of three stories examining villains of classic who. Today our story is about The Master. The Doctor's equal, but also his opposite. Where the Doctor seeks to preserve life, save people, fight injustice, the Master seeks to kill, to destroy, to BE injustice in and of himself.

This is also the FIRST use of the Master in Big Finish and who else but Geoffrey Beevers could have pulled off this script. It's curious that they had him as the Master because Roger Delgado died in the 70s, they couldn't get Anthony Ainley (who would die a year later) or Eric Roberts, so the only Master left is the one that was there for five minutes, Geoffrey Beevers. His audio performances, including this one, solidify him as my favorite classic era Master. He has a silky smooth voice that works so well for audio, yet he is horrifying and mostrous in appearance. Perfect for the allegory of Jekyll and Hyde or Phantom of the Opera, a classic horror villain.

There is an interesting framing device here. The Doctor is telling this story to an assassin about to shoot somebody in a parade. We don't know who or why, but that is kind of irrelevant to the story. We'll talk more about it later at the end.

Geoffrey Beevers absolutely knocks it out of the park with his first performance on audio. We open on him having a dinner party with his two best friends in the world, Victor and Jacqueline Schaeffer for his ersatz birthday. They found him ten years ago wandering the streets with severe amnesia, not knowing who he was. Jacqueline took him into her hostal where she takes care of people who struggle to survive. He became Doctor John Smith, a medical doctor who inherited a mansion from one of his patients. His birthday isn't really his birthday, just the anniversary of when they found him. There is quite a lot of irony in the Master using the Doctor's nom de plume when he doesn't know who he is. That seems to be part of the point of the story: that the Doctor and the Master are not so different.

The only other person in the house is Jade, John Smith's live in servant who cooks and cleans for him. There is also a cat who came with the will who John doesn't particularly care for. Over the course of the dinner conversation we learn that there has been a series of gruesome murders recently against prostitutes, being investigated by Victor, the local adjudicator. The most recent murder was someone who wasn't a prostitute but was mistaken to be one, which ties into a story about the house. There is a legend of a curse. One of Jacqueline's ancestors was the black sheep of the family. He threw wild parties in this very house, hiring prostitutes. He mistook one of the guests to be a prostitute and got her drunk and had sex with her. Her father took revenge and violently murdered him so his ghost is said to walk the halls. It alll seems to be deliberately invoking Jack the Ripper's own hatred of prostitutes.

As the dinner party continues, the guests act strangely. Jacqueline verbally abuses Jade. Victor acuses John of being deceitful. Until a strange little man's face appears in the window contorted in agony, screaming. John being the man that he is goes out to help against Victor's and Jacqueline's protests, but John is not one to let someone die. He is everything the Master is not. He helps the strange little man, revives him, and they have a chat.

This is where we get some of the best material in this script. Like with Omega and Davros, we have some very strong back and forth conversations between our Doctor and our subject. McCoy and Beevers play off each other phenomenally well. John is an amateur psychologist, in addition to being a Doctor, obsessed with why people do what they do. Why do people commit such terrible acts of evil? What would drive someone to murder?

It is tempting to say that these people are just wicked monsters and dismiss it at that, because if you were to be able to come up with a motive, with some reason for their actions, that would be admitting that you perhaps have something in common with that monster. There's a good scene, a little later, where the Doctor does exactly this. He's asked what reason there could be for murdering all of these prostitutes and he comes up with several potential motives on the spot and it's a little creepy hearing him be able to just spout them off. As if he has thought of them himself?

John has come to the conclusion that perhaps some people really are just evil. Or is evil even a real concept? Perhaps their morality is so wildly different than everyone else's that it just has no way of making sense to everyone else? A psychopath is so removed from reality, from everyone else, that they're trying to get everyone else to understand their morality. Perhaps their red is different from your red and they're just trying to get everyone to see in their color red.

The Doctor hints in this conversation that there is perhaps more to John than he's letting on. He evien talks about how he once had a friend who he thought of as evil, the Master, who killed countless amounts of people, but doesn't say anything more than that. Or more than that he is looking for a friend of his. While John confesses that he sometimes hears voices telling him to kill and he wants to see if Jacqueline and Victor can hear them too. There's a very well done and disturbing scene where John suddenly gets possessed by some entity, the Master perhaps? And the Doctor is reminded that he must kill the Master. It's chilling and does a good job of setting up the rest of the story.

There is suddenly a scream. The cat has died in the same manner as the prostitutes, mutilated, heart removed. Jacqueline and Victor continue to snap. And then John pretends to take Jacqueline hostage, threatening to kill her if the Doctor doesn't tell him who he is. The Doctor refuses, saying that if he tells John then everyone will die, many more people will die. The Seventh Doctor's morality here is the opposite of Eighth Doctor's. When confronted with a person in danger, the Seventh calculates the potential cost down the line while the Eighth does whatever he can to save the people he can see in front of him. The Eighth absolutely would have told the Master his identity right then and there. But the charade is up, for both of them. John won't kill Jacqueline of course and the Doctor has already confirmed that he does know more than he's letting on.

He tells John about the Master, about the countless people he's killed, but also about a story from their childhood. When they were children, they were relentlessly bullied by another child named Torvic. Usually when they got bullied, they just stood by and watched and waited, unable to do anything. But this time was different. As Torvic held one boy's head in the water, drowning him, the other boy picked up a giant rock and smashed it over Torvic's head. They burned his body and never spoke of it again, but the guilt of the murder led the Master to become who he was, a psychopath, disconnected from the people he murders.

More recently, the Doctor made a deal with Death itself to give the Master ten years of a nice, normal life. He got to have love, friends, acceptance into a community, things he'd never felt before. But at the end of those ten years, the Doctor had to kill him. Naturally, the Doctor won't kill him and so Death herself has come to collect. Jade, the servant, is Death incarnate.

That's when all hell breaks lose. The pretension of the friendly dinner party is long gone. Death tells everyone that Victor is the murderer and Jacqueline is in love with John, not Victor. Death demands a murder victim. Someone must die, if not the Master. John pretends to hate Jacqueline to get her to run away, but she runs right into Victor, who holds her hostage. John kills her in a jealous rage, unable to live with the idea that she loves John and not him. Death's blood lust is satiated, the Master returns, and he is bitter. Geoffrey Beevers does a fantastic job of turning the Master back on. Filled with anger, hatred, resentment, bitterness. He is every bit the Jekyll to John Smith's Mr. Hyde.

But then the Doctor makes another deal. John can either kill Victor and save Jacqueline, which will bring back the Master. Or he can do nothing and simply leave, staying as John Smith. We end on the story resetting back to the beginning. Jacqueline and Victor come to the house for the dinner party while the Master holds a knife on Victor and we don't get to see what he chooses. Does he save himself or the woman he loves?

We don't know the answer and it doesn't matter. There is one last revelation. The Master was not the one to kill Torvic, it was actually the Doctor. The Doctor made his very first deal with Death that night, that the Master would have the memory of killing Torvic and not him, so that the Doctor would not be tormented with guilt. It's a devestating revelation and plays into the central theme. Was the Master just born evil? Or was he destined to always be evil? Or was it the result of his environment, the people he was around, the friends he kept. Same thing with the Doctor. Perhaps the Doctor was going to be the evil one, going around killing innocents, if not for this deal with Death.

In the framing device, the person the Doctor is telling the story to was, naturally, Death herself. The Doctor was supposed to kill an innocent, but of course he couldn't do it. He can no more escape his nature of wanting to preserve life than Death can of taking as much life as she can. The Master is her agent, her servant, while the Doctor is her eternal enemy. Indeed, even after all this, the Doctor still has hope that one day he can save his oldest friend, the Master.

This was very well done. Well written and well performed. The talk about psychology is fascinating. John holds this terrible secret deep inside that he doesn't want to hold. His friends hold their own secrets that Death allows them to show. Jacqueline, despite running a hostal, is actually judgemental and classist. Victor, despite being the adjudicator investigating the murders, is the real killer, filled with hatred for prostitutes. And the Doctor, despite doing everything he can to save life, passed on his guilt for accidentally kiilling someone onto his best friend, when he was a child.

Making it about the Master means that the Doctor is necessarily going to be heavily involved. They are best friends. Their rivalry runs deep. The Doctor wants so desperately to save him, but can't. For so long in this Geoffrey Beevers isn't even playing the Master. He's playing John Smith, but he does it so well. You can feel the creeping horror in his voice as he discovers more about who he is and what it means. And naturally Sylvester McCoy works so well here as the jaded, bitter grandmaster Doctor who no longer has fun and feels desperate and sad. This was a great examination of the Master and a fitting conclusion to this trilogy. It is easily the best Seventh Doctor story in the first fifty and shows the potential with the Seventh Doctor that these first fifty stories missed. It also makes me look forward to more Geoffrey Beevers who is absolutely phenomenal.

26.09.2022

Apart from some retroactive lore contradictions to stories which came later, I liked it. Out of the three "Doctor has a somber conversation with the villain" this worked the best.

That's because they Human Natured the Master. That's it. Plain and simple.

There are of course silly moments. The Master was created by Death itself, for example. The long conversations about nurture vs nature that are just one statement repeated over and over.

Yet I can't help but love these bittersweet conversations between the Doctor and John Smith. There's such a profound respect.
4/5