Character Highlight: The Simm Master (Doctor Who)

*Spoilers.*

Swapping News Satire Roundup with the Sunday Who Review today. I officiated a friend’s wedding this week and am still catching up on The Daily Show – I should have that write-up ready by tomorrow.

I’ve gotten through Favorite Characters or Character Highlight posts on every companion and Doctor of both the new and classic series (not counting the ones who are currently still on the show – I’m holding off on them until they make their exits.) Since I’ve also covered the major characters on all the spinoffs, I was looking around for other Whoniverse characters to write about and realized I haven’t given any of the Masters a full write-up. I’ll be jumping around in the chronology a bit, and because there isn’t a clear numbering system for the Master like there is with the Doctor, I’ll be labeling each regeneration according to their actor’s last name. Today, we’re looking at the Master as played by John Simm.

This wasn’t quite the first Master I saw, since his debut episode, series 3’s “Utopia,” includes the regeneration into him. By that point, I still hadn’t seen any classic Who but had interacted with the fandom enough to have a general idea of who the Master was. Fellow renegade Time Lord, long-standing enemy of the Doctor, evil mastermind, etc. I maintain that the Master regenerating into John Simm (who was fantastic in State of Play, the chief project I recognized him from at the time,) stealing the TARDIS, and leaving the Doctor, Martha, and Jack stranded at the end of the universe is one of the most thrilling cliffhangers the show has ever done.

Unfortunately, for my money, the show squanders a lot of that suspense and “omg what will our heroes do now?”-ness, and even more unfortunately, the Master himself plays a major role in that. Throughout the final episodes of series 3, and again in the Tenth Doctor’s concluding specials “The End of Time,” this Master is marked chiefly by being Too Damn Much. From his evil plans to his comedic beats to his ripping a turkey carcass apart with his bare hands (sigh, yes,) the Master is cranked up to eleven most of the time. I’m not a fan of him accelerating the Doctor’s life cycle to turn him into a wizened little elf, I have absolutely no need for him demonstrating joking/serious faces for his cabinet after he finangles his way into becoming prime minister, and I get no enjoyment seeing him completely lose his shit all across “The End of Time.” It’s a lot, and it’s just way too over-the-top for me.

Which is a shame, because Simm is obviously a good actor, and in the Master’s less overbaked moments, he shows what sort of compelling Master he could really be. When the wacky antics and scenery-chewing villainy are put aside for a bit, I really like the charged dynamic between him and Ten. This was my first full-on opportunity to see, not just the Master, but what the Doctor and the Master are like together, and the brief moments in these episodes where the story gets out of its own way make me understand why the Master is a well the show keeps returning to. The pair are lives-long nemeses, friends-to-enemies who can’t quite quit one another. This feels especially true in the aftermath of the Time War. At this point, the Doctor has spent years thinking he’s the last of the Time Lords, and finding out there’s another one out there makes him grasp for a connection, even if it’s the Master. It’s just the two of them now, and while the Doctor knows the Master has to be stopped, he doesn’t want to do it in such a way that removes the Master from his life.

And for all his evil plotting and villainous grandstanding, the Master doesn’t want to let the Doctor go either, not really. It’s like the Master can’t fully get a handle on who he is without the Doctor there to react to him – it isn’t enough to bring Earth to its knees if the Doctor isn’t there to see it. As much as I hate the whole wizened-elf-Doctor thing, there’s a moment where, just for a second, the Master thinks he might have accidentally killed the Doctor, and you can read the panic in his eyes. That moment of, “Did I take it too far? No! Doctor, it’s no fun if you’re not there.” New Who has maintained this fraught relationship between the Doctor and the Master across several regenerations now, but the seeds of it are here.

And okay, some of the scenery-chewing is fun. It’s the Master, after all, and while the earliest incarnation of him in the classic series is a pretty smooth criminal, the character has been varying degrees of bonkers ever since. The Master cueing up a soundtrack for the end of the world is everything – I just adore watching him groove to “Voodoo Child” as the skies open and the Toclafane rain down on the planet.

For me, this Master’s return near the end of the Twelfth Doctor’s era strikes a much better tonal balance with him, although I take some issue with how he’s portrayed in relation to Missy. In “World Enough and Time” and “The Doctor Falls,” he’s able to be cracked and dramatic while also being genuinely menacing. The long-game restraint he shows in gaining Bill’s trust, luring her to eventually be taken by the Cybermen, isn’t something I couldn’t have pictured him managing during his Tenth Doctor episodes. We also get a bit of that classic Who dynamic of the Master being both dangerously competent and egotistical to his own downfall. He’s a legitimate opponent who can execute dangerous plans well, but he also thinks so highly of himself that he rarely sees the cracks appearing in his plots until it’s a bit too late to stop it.

On the whole, not the best introduction to the Master, and a rather disappointing misuse of John Simm’s talents. This is a Master that doesn’t get enough opportunity to be his best sinister self, but within his appearances on the show, there are enough flashes of better characterization to realize what he could’ve been, given the chance.