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Doctor Who theory: How did the Master escape one of his biggest on-screen deaths?

By James Aggas

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The Master has cheated death many times in Doctor Who. But what about the time when he seemingly died on-screen?

Image credit: Doctor Who/BBC.

Image obtained from: official Doctor Who website.

Arch-enemy the Master has died or come close to death on-screen many times in Doctor Who. But there’s one major death he’s come back from that remains unexplained…

Over the years, the Master has cheated death many times in Doctor Who. He/she’s come close to being defeated for good, but always comes back somehow. Even Steven Moffat said as much for Doctor Who Extra:

"He would get killed, definitively, at the end of every encounter with Peter Davison and Colin Baker. And then he’d turn up at the start of the next Master story with roughly this explanation: ‘I escaped!’ Suits me, I’m fine with that!"

Although, it has to be said, that isn’t quite true. Yes, in most Eighties stories, the Master would be in quite the predicament, to say the least. Whether it was becoming trapped in a collapsing reality in Castrovalva, or trapped in a room with a growing T-Rex in The Mark of the Rani, Anthony Ainley’s Master always faced the worst predicaments at the end of his stories.

However, across even these stories, there was always a hint that the character survived somehow. Yes, he would be trapped, perhaps with no clear way to escape. But we never actually saw his Master die on-screen for good.

Except once. In a very definitive way, too.

The Master cheated death in Planet of Fire. But how? (Seriously, HOW?) (Photo credit: Doctor Who/BBC.

Image obtained from: official Doctor Who website.)

Planet of Fire

Planet of Fire is a bit of an odd story. It features a miniature version of the Master, Lanzarote doubling as an alien world, and magical fire. This last one is actually key to a huge moment in the story.

After experimenting with his Tissue Compression Eliminator, the Master has been miniaturized. The planet Sarn has numismaton gas, which can alter the effect of fire from burning to restoring. Naturally, the Master wants to use it to restore himself to his own size (and of course make him more powerful than ever).

Towards the end of the story, it looks like he succeeds when he steps into the fire and grows back to his old self…until the Doctor adds calorific gas, and the flames become deadly. The Master, suddenly trapped, begs the Doctor to change it back. Instead, the Doctor watches on, and sees his old enemy apparently vaporized by the flames.

So, unlike so many other times, the Master wasn’t simply trapped, or had even the slightest hint of escaping. He was burned alive. So what was the explanation for his return in the next story, The Mark of the Rani? Oddly enough, there wasn’t one.

Oh, the fact that he “died” was acknowledged. Even the Doctor believed his arch-enemy was dead. But there was absolutely zero explanation for his resurrection. (Interestingly, there originally was supposed to be an explanation, but script editor Eric Saward, for some reason, decided to cut it out.)

So how did he escape?

Between The King’s Demons and Planet of Fire, the Master encountered the Five Doctors. Or did he…?

(Image credit: Doctor Who/BBC. Image obtained from: official Doctor Who website.)

The Five Doctors

It was when I was re-watching The King’s Demons that something occurred to me. There’s a scene during that earlier story where the Doctor leaves the TCE on in the Master’s TARDIS. The Doctor says it won’t do his “dimension circuits much good”. But what if it didn’t do the TCE any good, either?

It’s funny to think that the Master appears in between The King’s Demons and Planet of Fire in the twentieth anniversary special, The Five Doctors. Because there are a lot of things that carry over between Demons and Fire, specifically. The Master regains control of Kamelion, for example, and he’s clearly still traveling in his TARDIS. Oddly enough, this is something that we don’t see happen in The Five Doctors, as he’s summoned by the Time Lords.

You also have to wonder why he needed to experiment with the TCE in the first place. Was it a result of the Doctor’s tampering with it in The King’s Demons? But then again, it seemed to be working perfectly in The Five Doctors.

The wrong order?

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Of course, that’s assuming that we’re seeing Ainley’s incarnation in the “right” order. The same order as the Doctor meets him. And that does seem to be true, at least generally.

But what if The Five Doctors is an exception? What if it takes place after Planet of Fire for Ainley’s Master?

How does this answer the question of how he survived? Maybe he wasn’t being vaporized at the end of the later story, but teleported? Summoned by the Time Lords to help rescue the Doctor and his past selves.

It would explain why he’s seen without a TARDIS in the story. And where Rassilon sends him back to at the end of the special – in this case, Sarn. (Ideally, without the flames burning him, this time.)

We also know that Time Lords can bump into each other in the wrong order occasionally. This has not only been done regularly with Big Finish, but World Enough and Time even had Missy meet her previous self! Entirely by accident, too!

And, of course, there’s River Song’s story. So we know it’s certainly possible for the Doctor and the Master to have met in the wrong order at some point on television

This is only one theory, and I certainly doubt it was the writers’ intention for the story to be told this way. But it does provide an interesting angle for The Five Doctors, at least, and serves as one possible answer to one of the show’s many lingering questions.

Next. The top ten greatest Fourth Doctor stories. dark

Do you have your own theory on how the Master survived the flames? What’s your favorite on-screen “death” for the character? What’s your favorite escape? Let us know in the comments below.

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