Character Highlight: The Gomez Master (Doctor Who)

*Series 8-10 spoilers.*

a.k.a. Missy. Before we got the Thirteenth Doctor, we got this incarnation of the Master. As with John Simm’s version, the Michelle Gomez incarnation features a talented actor and frequently-hamstrung writing, although Gomez’s acting usually keeps Missy on the right side of salvageable.

Nearly every new Who Master is introduced to us under a guise – even after we see Simm immediately post-regeneration, the next question becomes who he’s masquerading as when he escape to Earth. This isn’t a stretch, by any means. The classic series Masters are always donning one disguise or another, so it’s fitting that their new Who successors similarly keep the Doctor guessing. But while Missy does briefly pretend to be an android, she’s not precisely in disguise through most of her series 8 appearances. We simply don’t know who she is. She’s the series 8 mystery, the dangling participle who appears at the end of nearly every episode to welcome the recently-deceased to what she claims is Heaven. She’s kooky, enigmatic, and has just a touch of menace to her. But it’s not until the penultimate episode of series 8 that she explains to the Doctor that “Missy” is short for “Mistress.” “I couldn’t very well keep calling myself the Master, could I?” she purrs in his ear (I would argue why not, but whatever.)

It’s at that point that we’re introduced to Missy proper, in all her Mary-Poppins-on-a-murder-lark instability. She’s flamboyant, flippant, and super-violent, often seeming to kill for the pure fun of it rather than for any practical purpose. Missy and the Simm Master both lean heavily into the character’s unhinged mental state, with Missy especially tending toward a “You never know what she’s gonna do next, bitch is crazy!!” characterization. That’s where she typically loses me. It’s a bit too tropey, not an original enough take on the mercurial maniac to move her from a lightly entertaining baddie into a compelling, engaging antagonist.

She is still portrayed as highly intelligent, which any Master should be. She’s less focused on world domination and general-purpose power accumulation than her predecessors and instead applies her intellect to more personal matters. These can be darkly twisted, of course – I maintain that Missy “gifting” the Doctor a Cyber army composed of his dead friends and people he failed to save might be one of the sickest things that any Master has ever done, and trying to trick him into killing Clara while she’s inside a Dalek casing is stone cold. But as time goes on, her interests grow softer.

The idea of attempting to rehabilitate the Master is an interesting one, although the way the show goes about it with Missy leaves a lot to be desired. Once again, Missy becomes the mystery of the season, the answer to series 10’s, “What’s in the vault?” She is – locked inside while the Doctor is tasked with guarding it for 1000 years, the vault is meant to survive as a kind of “evil rehab” for her. The Doctor lets Missy ruminate for decades(?) on their past actions, tries to teach her about compassion, and, when he thinks she’s sufficiently changed, volunteers Bill and Nardole as her stand-in companions for a do-gooder test run. To the extent that this storyline works, it’s all down to Gomez’s acting, along with Peter Capaldi’s.

But it is a little uncomfortable that this, the first earnest attempt to reform the Master, comes when the Master is a woman. After the big shows of violence in her earlier stories, we’re shown that Missy is softer, more emotional, and perhaps more moldable than the Masters who came before her. She’s not the first Master who’s been unable to quit the Doctor, but she is the first to fall to her knees of her own volition and beg him for her life, promising to be “good.” Yeah – uncomfortable. It’s in places like this that Missy doesn’t feel characterized simply as the Master but instead the Woman Master, not a great look for her.

Missy was new territory for the show, bringing with her new challenges. On the whole, I’d say Gomez was up for those challenges but the show itself was not.