*A few Doctor-Master spoilers.*
I’ve now done write-ups for nearly all the Masters—I’m holding off on the Dhawan Master, as I am with Thirteen, since I don’t like to do a full Favorite Characters/Character Highlight post on a Time Lord until their regeneration is “in the can,” so to speak. There will be some Master-related Top Fives trickling in gradually as well, but for now, let’s talk about the Doctor and their “best enemy.”
Note: the pronouns will be a little all over the place here. I’ll use “he/him” and “she/her” as fits when I’m talking about specific regenerations, and “they/them” when talking about the characters as a whole. Gotta love Time Lord gender dynamics!
It's weird to think about, but pre-“The Timeless Children,” the Master is probably the Doctor’s oldest acquaintance on the show, excepting possibly Borusa. The Doctor knew the Master before they stole the TARDIS, before Susan. The two were at the Academy together, childhood friends. They were both different in a Time Lord society that valued rules and staid tradition, so that naturally brought them together, two outsiders with a distaste for non-interference. But somewhere along the line, it went sour. As Twelve explains to Bill, "We had a pact. Every star in the universe, we were going to see them all—but he was so busy burning them, I don't think she ever saw anything."
That’s the split. Both grow up to be renegade Time Lords who flout the rules and run away from their stuffy culture. But as the Doctor gradually breaks from his learned values of studying other planets in a detached manner, his companions teaching him the value of getting involved and helping others, the Master sets off into the universe with dreams of conquering and/or destroying. The next time we see them meet, Three and the Delgado Master already have an established antagonism that’s somewhere between Bond-and-villain and Holmes-and-Moriarty.
And yet, despite their now diametrically opposed views, despite all the terrible things the Master does across their lifetimes, the two can’t fully quit each other as friends. As the saying goes, hatred is too strong an emotion for someone you don’t care about. The Master lusts for power, but they’re also specifically obsessed with blowing up the Doctor’s spot, going after targets the Doctor is going to take personally and prompting yet another titanic clash between them. Even though the Master’s villainy is all very real and countless people get killed in the process of their exploits, there’s often this slight sense that the Master is performing for an audience of one, that on some level, the whole thing is a never-ending game they’re playing across the cosmos.
For the Doctor’s part, they can’t bring themselves to end it once and for all with the Master, either. This is especially true after the Time War. For a long time, the Doctor thinks that he’s the only Time Lord left, and to discover that another survived, even if it’s the Master, makes him paradoxically desperate to hang onto their fractured friendship. “Don’t you see?” Ten begs the Simm Master. “All we’ve got is each other.”
The Doctor-Master relationship was always intense, but from this point forward, it’s even more charged. For as much as the Master provokes the Doctor and the Doctor fights against the Master’s evil schemes, they still need each other in some way. There’s a moment where the Simm Master panics when he thinks he might’ve actually killed the Doctor, a moment where Missy alternately taunts and pleads with Twelve when it looks like he might have no choice but to kill her. These two are tangled up with each other in ways that no one else can really understand.
For a time, Twelve tries to rehabilitate Missy, attempting to instill her with a conscience as he guards over her in the vault. This season is probably when their relationship feels the closest to romantic, and even though it’s no coincidence that it’s also the first time we see the Doctor and the Master in regenerations of different genders, there’s always been just a hint of that in there. The dynamic tends to shift a little from one regeneration to the next, and changes in gender are a part of that, but at the core, the relationship stays the same. Missy seems to genuinely change for the better during this period, even as she teeters on the brink of being pulled back in by one of her previous regenerations, and even though her move to stand with the Doctor in the end is thwarted, the fact that she was going to do that right thing can’t be discounted.
At present, the Dhawan Master has rejected those past efforts to reform, throwing himself back into wholeheartedly villainy, but the tug and pull between him and Thirteen remains. I love the scene where she reaches out to him over the telegraph in occupied Paris, using the four-beat pattern they both know so well. This latest Doctor-Master dynamic almost buzzes with the twists and turns of the long history between them, and I love to see it.
There are showrunners who play at teasing game-changing moments, claiming the Master is about to die with no chance of regeneration. But that’s never been true, no more so than the idea of the Doctor dying for good. Even though we didn’t meet the Master until the Third Doctor era, they’re now utterly entwined with the series. There may be seasons where we don’t see them, long stretches before the next regeneration shows their face. But I’m confident that, for as long as the Doctor travels through the universe trying to make it better, the Master will be out there too, causing trouble and trying to get their attention.
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