Character Highlight: The Beevers Master (Doctor Who)

*Some spoilers.*

Okay, so this write-up is here mainly at the behest of my completist nature. The Master’s thirteenth incarnation is only in, like, two serials, and in both of them, the fact that he’s even there is an eleventh-hour surprise reveal. What I’m saying is, while the Geoffrey Beevers Master appears to be involved in a surprising number of ancillary stories in other media, the show itself doesn’t gives us a whole lot to say about him. I’ll do my best.

I’ve talked before about the Master’s furious drive to stay alive at all costs, and this regeneration is where it starts. Clearly, something goes terrible wrong for the Master between the last time we see him in his Roger Delgado incarnation and where he debuts as the Geoffrey Beevers version. When we next see him pop up, his body is in a critical state of decay. It’s not really explained how this happened, or how it affects the Master physically (i.e. how much pain he’s in,) but we know that he’s on his last body—he can’t regenerate out of this one.

(Note: In real life, Delgado died unexpectedly, and rather than immediately bring the character back in a new regeneration, the show waited some time before giving us a new Master story with Beevers.)

So there he is, without any regeneration energy to get a new body, or even heal the one he currently has. But the Master clings to his existence any way he can. Gone are the days of trying to take over worlds and aligning himself with the most powerful baddies around (until he double-crosses them, naturally.) Instead, this Master is focused squarely on restoring his present body, and he concocts multiple schemes to try and do so. This is a slight variation on the Master’s typical survival-at-all-costs M.O.—his initial aim is to bring his body back to health and ride out his final regeneration for as long as possible. But when that fails, he turns to a new plan, one he’ll repeat later: if he can’t heal his own body, he’ll just have to take someone else’s.

Another noteworthy aspect of this Master is the fact that his present state forces him to change a lot of usual tactics. His decayed body stands out in a crowd, to say the least, so it’s much harder to assume an alias and deceive people out in the open. He has to stick to the shadows, pulling strings out of sight and biding his time until his moment comes. For someone who loves drama as much as the Master, that probably really burns him. But the Master has always been tenacious, and so he finds a way to keep going, no matter what.