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Some notes on O!Master
Apr. 22nd, 2021 11:10 pmThe Master is a character largely averse to change, which means each time we see them they have similar motivations, strengths and weaknesses which are inherent to the Master's self-identity, regardless of regeneration. But we've had a large Master turnover rate in New Who compared to Classic, which means that I'm starting to see some individual quirks between all the portrayals (including all three of Simm's turns). Here are some things that differentiate O!Master, portrayed by Sacha Dhawan, from the general mold, and some thoughts on how it happened.
To understand the Master you have to understand what their greatest fear is-- their real greatest fear. It's not death, it's not the Doctor. It's not being controlled and manipulated. I argue that their greatest fear, ultimately, is loss of self. If you never change, if you never grow, you stay the same. You are always you. Regeneration after regeneration, they stubbornly use the same tricks, have the same base personality, have the same goals, even dress similarly.
This explains why in End of Time the Master is so worried about what he'd be like 'without that sound' of the drums in his head. Like I've theorized before, the drums are so much a part of him now that getting rid of them terrifies him to some degree because it's a step into the unknown, a change of the self.
The Master's self is defined primarily in relation to the Doctor. Where the Doctor is good, they'll be bad. If the Doctor likes humanity, the Master will subvert it or destroy it. If the Doctor succeeds, the Master will undo that success. There's an unhealthy sense of competition set up between them, a constant rivalry that feeds and drives the Master. But there are also some other factors, most notably Gallifrey and the Time Lords and their innate sense of superiority from that quarter.
As far as we know right now, O picks up from where Missy left off. While she was well on her way to some form of redemption, her last act a declaration that she was finally ready to 'stand with the Doctor', we know that she'd likely never be 100% redeemed. Her declaration, after all, came in the form of literally killing one of her past selves. While this is arguably healthy as far as ego destruction might go, it still speaks to a tendency to violence and impulsivity that usually becomes the Master's downfall. Even to Missy, the ends justify the means.
She was close, though, to something, and that she even wanted to try to be 'good' seemed like progress. So what happened to make O take it all back? I think it was what he found in the Matrix that undid all that work.
In EOT, we see how close Wasteland Master was to accepting the Doctor's help and love. There were tears in his eyes, clear moments of doubt, and each of them in turn saved or spared the other. The Master we see in World Enough and Time/The Doctor Falls, however (let's call him Silver Fox), while in the same regeneration, is harsh, angry. This could be explained as a backlash from his previous period of intense vulnerability, something he never wants the Doctor to see. In other words he's being a complete dick because he wants to save face from the embarrassment of the last time they met. It's probable, and supported by the anthology The Missy Chronicles, that the Master was tortured and imprisoned for a while after his return to the Time War, a punishment for not only failing Rassilon but flat-out rebelling against him.
Bitter because of the reveal he was used by the Time Lords, plus his incarceration for a time on Gallifrey, plus the apparent absence of the drums, it makes sense that the Master would scramble a bit to salvage some of his lost identity, to rework it into something that made sense again. The Doctor is an easy scapegoat to fall back upon; he'd promised to 'fix' the Master and instead the Master ended up sacrificing himself for the Doctor. Typical, right? Thus the bitterness, the closed-off and straightforward, stubbornly insolent Silver Fox version of Simm!Master.
Missy goes a different route entirely. She convinces herself that she and the Doctor are the only two Time Lords worth saving, room enough in the universe for both of them, and romanticizes their relationship to a high degree. She conveniently ignores that when the Doctor saved Gallifrey from the Time War her own salvation was a by-product, considering it the main goal. However, in order to live in the same universe she and the Doctor must be aligned, and when we first see her in Dark Water/Death in Heaven she's fully bent on trying to make the Doctor become like her. Later, she decides that she should become like the Doctor. It isn't some pure yearning to be a better person that drives her; it's clearly unification with the Doctor that is her ultimate aim. He becomes her model for living. To be good, to have a place in this universe, she must be like the Doctor.
Now let's add in what O learned from the Matrix. Discovering that the person he grew up with, his first and best rival, is the equivalent of his ancestor and thus always will be in some way better, completely destroyed his sense of self. How can you continue to compete against someone who in effect created you? Honestly, how do you compete with that? As O says in The Timeless Children, what really bothers him about this new information is the knowledge that "a little piece of you is in me. All I am is somehow because of you, and believe me when I say, I cannot bear that." Learning that even the Doctor's presence in his life was a manipulation resulted in a kind of ego death for O. After all, aspiring to be good had been equated with aspiring to be like the Doctor, and now he's found the game to be rigged from the beginning he feels deceived.
Remember, the Master's biggest fear was never death but loss of self. Any change that would do that, even something as simple as changing their mind about the Doctor or their own role in the universe, any self-growth, any changes imposed on them such as rehabilitation or Cyber-conversion, would be worse than death to them and must be rejected and fought on every level.
The result of this total breakdown of ego is a return to the type of behavior we saw in EOT. There, the Master was similarly confronted by a loss of self, because his body refused to heal or regenerate and was stuck in an endless cycle of death. This made him weak and vulnerable, unable to do much more than survive. This change, this realization of his own limitations, made him desperate and nihilistic. And now as O he's feral again, King of the Wasteland.
Dhawan's portrayal of the Master has been criticized as 'Jokerish' but in a way that's just what he is: a villain created by the hero who knows it, and can't stand it to the point it drives him insane. He's returned to that bitter rebellious streak, the manic-depression of a child on the constant edge of tantrum or glee, unable or unwilling to self-regulate his behavior. And so he performed the ultimate act of rebellion, perhaps thinking it'd somehow set him free: he destroyed Gallifrey.
Instead of setting him free in any true sense, though, destroying Gallifrey completely broke the Master. He now sees himself as death incarnate and fancies killing is all he's good for:
This Master isn't just intent to kill everything around him. He now also no longer seems to care much if he survives either. In his dealings with Ashad in TTC he appears masochistic and suicidal, letting Ashad strangle him without a struggle and fully admitting he took a gamble on whether TCEing Ashad would activate the Death Particle: "I thought if he was compressed, the Death Particle would activate and all this would be over. I would've been okay with that." He's just done with it all. You could argue that with the message he left the Doctor at the end of Spyfall, the receival of which had to have been predicated on her surviving, he doesn't even expect his plans to work. He expects to be stopped and killed and he just doesn't care, he only wants to take as many people possible with him. Witness what he says at the end of TTC when the Doctor's dithering about activating the Death Particle:
O is not just goading the Doctor here, knowing she won't pull the trigger. He actually expects her to go through with it. He clearly still wants the Doctor to help him, even save him. But now he thinks the only way to be saved is to be put out of his misery. He knows too much, he can't reconcile it with his self-image, and therefore he'll go out with a bang.
Another interesting thing about this scene, though, is that even after he's rejected his previous goals and role in the universe, the connection to the Doctor, and his jockeying in relation to her, is still there. That bond runs so deep that you could argue even if he hates the idea and would rather die than live with it, the Master still largely defines himself by the Doctor. His aim is still to make the Doctor suffer, to hurt her as he's been hurt, to sow doubt in her mind about who she truly is. It's not just maximum carnage he wants in Spyfall, but specifically maximum carnage of humans, the Doctor's beloved pet race. It's mostly retribution now, but it's more than that. He still wants to win, to best her. "Got you, finally," he crows in Spyfall Pt. 1.
Clearly, in summary, this is a Master who truly does not give much of a shit. Everything is up for grabs, nothing is certain any longer. Except the Doctor. Always, somehow, the Doctor.
Some things really don't ever change.
To understand the Master you have to understand what their greatest fear is-- their real greatest fear. It's not death, it's not the Doctor. It's not being controlled and manipulated. I argue that their greatest fear, ultimately, is loss of self. If you never change, if you never grow, you stay the same. You are always you. Regeneration after regeneration, they stubbornly use the same tricks, have the same base personality, have the same goals, even dress similarly.
This explains why in End of Time the Master is so worried about what he'd be like 'without that sound' of the drums in his head. Like I've theorized before, the drums are so much a part of him now that getting rid of them terrifies him to some degree because it's a step into the unknown, a change of the self.
The Master's self is defined primarily in relation to the Doctor. Where the Doctor is good, they'll be bad. If the Doctor likes humanity, the Master will subvert it or destroy it. If the Doctor succeeds, the Master will undo that success. There's an unhealthy sense of competition set up between them, a constant rivalry that feeds and drives the Master. But there are also some other factors, most notably Gallifrey and the Time Lords and their innate sense of superiority from that quarter.
As far as we know right now, O picks up from where Missy left off. While she was well on her way to some form of redemption, her last act a declaration that she was finally ready to 'stand with the Doctor', we know that she'd likely never be 100% redeemed. Her declaration, after all, came in the form of literally killing one of her past selves. While this is arguably healthy as far as ego destruction might go, it still speaks to a tendency to violence and impulsivity that usually becomes the Master's downfall. Even to Missy, the ends justify the means.
She was close, though, to something, and that she even wanted to try to be 'good' seemed like progress. So what happened to make O take it all back? I think it was what he found in the Matrix that undid all that work.
In EOT, we see how close Wasteland Master was to accepting the Doctor's help and love. There were tears in his eyes, clear moments of doubt, and each of them in turn saved or spared the other. The Master we see in World Enough and Time/The Doctor Falls, however (let's call him Silver Fox), while in the same regeneration, is harsh, angry. This could be explained as a backlash from his previous period of intense vulnerability, something he never wants the Doctor to see. In other words he's being a complete dick because he wants to save face from the embarrassment of the last time they met. It's probable, and supported by the anthology The Missy Chronicles, that the Master was tortured and imprisoned for a while after his return to the Time War, a punishment for not only failing Rassilon but flat-out rebelling against him.
Bitter because of the reveal he was used by the Time Lords, plus his incarceration for a time on Gallifrey, plus the apparent absence of the drums, it makes sense that the Master would scramble a bit to salvage some of his lost identity, to rework it into something that made sense again. The Doctor is an easy scapegoat to fall back upon; he'd promised to 'fix' the Master and instead the Master ended up sacrificing himself for the Doctor. Typical, right? Thus the bitterness, the closed-off and straightforward, stubbornly insolent Silver Fox version of Simm!Master.
Missy goes a different route entirely. She convinces herself that she and the Doctor are the only two Time Lords worth saving, room enough in the universe for both of them, and romanticizes their relationship to a high degree. She conveniently ignores that when the Doctor saved Gallifrey from the Time War her own salvation was a by-product, considering it the main goal. However, in order to live in the same universe she and the Doctor must be aligned, and when we first see her in Dark Water/Death in Heaven she's fully bent on trying to make the Doctor become like her. Later, she decides that she should become like the Doctor. It isn't some pure yearning to be a better person that drives her; it's clearly unification with the Doctor that is her ultimate aim. He becomes her model for living. To be good, to have a place in this universe, she must be like the Doctor.
Now let's add in what O learned from the Matrix. Discovering that the person he grew up with, his first and best rival, is the equivalent of his ancestor and thus always will be in some way better, completely destroyed his sense of self. How can you continue to compete against someone who in effect created you? Honestly, how do you compete with that? As O says in The Timeless Children, what really bothers him about this new information is the knowledge that "a little piece of you is in me. All I am is somehow because of you, and believe me when I say, I cannot bear that." Learning that even the Doctor's presence in his life was a manipulation resulted in a kind of ego death for O. After all, aspiring to be good had been equated with aspiring to be like the Doctor, and now he's found the game to be rigged from the beginning he feels deceived.
Remember, the Master's biggest fear was never death but loss of self. Any change that would do that, even something as simple as changing their mind about the Doctor or their own role in the universe, any self-growth, any changes imposed on them such as rehabilitation or Cyber-conversion, would be worse than death to them and must be rejected and fought on every level.
The result of this total breakdown of ego is a return to the type of behavior we saw in EOT. There, the Master was similarly confronted by a loss of self, because his body refused to heal or regenerate and was stuck in an endless cycle of death. This made him weak and vulnerable, unable to do much more than survive. This change, this realization of his own limitations, made him desperate and nihilistic. And now as O he's feral again, King of the Wasteland.
Dhawan's portrayal of the Master has been criticized as 'Jokerish' but in a way that's just what he is: a villain created by the hero who knows it, and can't stand it to the point it drives him insane. He's returned to that bitter rebellious streak, the manic-depression of a child on the constant edge of tantrum or glee, unable or unwilling to self-regulate his behavior. And so he performed the ultimate act of rebellion, perhaps thinking it'd somehow set him free: he destroyed Gallifrey.
Instead of setting him free in any true sense, though, destroying Gallifrey completely broke the Master. He now sees himself as death incarnate and fancies killing is all he's good for:
"When I kill them, Doctor, it gives me a little buzz. Right here, in the hearts. It's like... How would I describe it? It's like... It's like knowing I'm in the right place, doing what I was made for."He's taken his previous sense of his place in the universe and twisted it, no longer bent on dominion but on total destruction. He states "maximum carnage" as his ultimate goal in Spyfall Part 2.
This Master isn't just intent to kill everything around him. He now also no longer seems to care much if he survives either. In his dealings with Ashad in TTC he appears masochistic and suicidal, letting Ashad strangle him without a struggle and fully admitting he took a gamble on whether TCEing Ashad would activate the Death Particle: "I thought if he was compressed, the Death Particle would activate and all this would be over. I would've been okay with that." He's just done with it all. You could argue that with the message he left the Doctor at the end of Spyfall, the receival of which had to have been predicated on her surviving, he doesn't even expect his plans to work. He expects to be stopped and killed and he just doesn't care, he only wants to take as many people possible with him. Witness what he says at the end of TTC when the Doctor's dithering about activating the Death Particle:
"Oh, good, very good. That's why I left it for you. Wondered if you would... take out me, take out these lifeforms, all those bodies still in the vaults, every organic cellular life form on this planet... forever. And yourself. Do that, would you?
...
Go on, then. You were the start of all of this, now finish it. Come on, come on. Come on! Come on, come on! What have you got left anyway? You don't even know your own life. Look how low I have brought you. I have won, Doctor. You may have made me, but I have destroyed you. Become death. Become me. Come on. Come on, come on!
...
For just a moment there, I thought maybe. Argh."
O is not just goading the Doctor here, knowing she won't pull the trigger. He actually expects her to go through with it. He clearly still wants the Doctor to help him, even save him. But now he thinks the only way to be saved is to be put out of his misery. He knows too much, he can't reconcile it with his self-image, and therefore he'll go out with a bang.
Another interesting thing about this scene, though, is that even after he's rejected his previous goals and role in the universe, the connection to the Doctor, and his jockeying in relation to her, is still there. That bond runs so deep that you could argue even if he hates the idea and would rather die than live with it, the Master still largely defines himself by the Doctor. His aim is still to make the Doctor suffer, to hurt her as he's been hurt, to sow doubt in her mind about who she truly is. It's not just maximum carnage he wants in Spyfall, but specifically maximum carnage of humans, the Doctor's beloved pet race. It's mostly retribution now, but it's more than that. He still wants to win, to best her. "Got you, finally," he crows in Spyfall Pt. 1.
Clearly, in summary, this is a Master who truly does not give much of a shit. Everything is up for grabs, nothing is certain any longer. Except the Doctor. Always, somehow, the Doctor.
Some things really don't ever change.
