Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor and the Master – The story so far…

The Eighth Doctor and the Master have had many encounters, particularly on audio. Here’s the story so far on this particular Doctor’s battles with his old enemy…

(Image credit: Doctor Who/Big Finish. Image Courtesy Big Finish Productions)

The Doctor’s eighth incarnation has faced the Master many times across his long life. But which meetings were the most important? Which Master was the most significant for McGann’s Doctor? And why did it take so long for the Eighth Doctor to meet the Master after the TV movie? Find out, as we go through each and every major Doctor Who story featuring the Eighth Doctor against his oldest enemy…

Last month saw the release of a very special story for Doctor Who. Day of the Master – arguably the biggest multi-Master story we’ve had yet – featured four incarnations of the Doctor’s oldest enemy. At the same time, it also acted as the finale to the most recent Eighth Doctor audio series Ravenous, and so resolved a great deal of many major threads.

As many fans surely know, or at least, won’t be surprised about, this wasn’t the first time that Paul McGann’s Doctor had encountered his oldest enemy, even in the expanded universe. While the Eighth Doctor has had very few stories on television, he’s had a huge life in books, comics, and of course, audios.

But perhaps what is surprising is how, up until just a few years ago, the Eighth Doctor hardly encountered his archenemy at all, at least directly. There were a few cameo appearances, short stories and even a comic strip or two, but not much else.

However, that changed five years ago, when the Master became a major force in the Eighth Doctor’s life once more. What changed? How did the Master become a threat again? And which Master in particular has become the most definitive to McGann’s Doctor?

Find out now, as we go through each of the Eighth Doctor’s major encounters with his greatest enemy. Starting with…

The Movie (the beginning of the Eighth Doctor)

The Eighth Doctor didn’t get the easiest of beginnings in Doctor Who: The Movie. Waking up in a morgue with no memory of who he was, he quickly discovered that was the very least of his problems. Because, as he eventually remembered, the Master was on Earth, too. And while he had a new body – one through possession rather than regeneration – he was much more interested in stealing the Doctor’s…

This particular story began with the Doctor’s previous incarnation. After the Master had been executed by the Daleks on Skaro, the Doctor had picked up his remains to bring them to Gallifrey – at the Master’s request, no less. Even the Doctor had found this “curious”, to say the least. Of course, it didn’t take too long before he found out why the Master had wanted the Doctor to do the job…

His surviving consciousness now in the form of a Deathworm Morphant, the Master caused the Doctor’s TARDIS to crash-land on Earth. It was most likely his original plan to steal the Doctor’s body almost immediately, but when the Doctor walked into a hail of bullets and was taken to a hospital, the Master had to improvise to survive.

Stealing the body of Bruce, a local paramedic, the Master aimed to take possession of the Doctor’s body, using the Eye of Harmony to do so. However, the Master was sucked into the Eye of Harmony and we never heard from this incarnation again. Well, not on television, at least…

A divisive start

I think most of us know how divisive this movie is, to say the least. It was a radically different take on Doctor Who, especially at the time, when the New Series was still nine years away. A story set in America? A big budget that could actually afford decent effects? The Doctor kissing?!? These kinds of things had never even been heard of before in Doctor Who!

While I’ll hardly deny that the TV movie isn’t without its problems, (especially the mess of a continuity it makes, which confused both new and old viewers alike,) it wasn’t too bad either, especially as a precursor to the New Series. While McGann’s Doctor didn’t appear on TV again until seventeen years later, he did at least help to revive the expanded universe in a big way. Across many books, comics and audios, the Eighth Doctor has had many lives. But how often did he meet the Master across each of those?

Surprisingly, it took a long time for the Eighth Doctor to face his enemy once more. And even then, in The Light at the End, it was completely out of order!

(Photo credit: Doctor Who/Big Finish Productions.

Image obtained from: Big Finish Productions.)

Brief encounters – books and short stories

From 1997 to 2005, BBC Books published over seventy novels in The Eighth Doctor Adventures. And yet surprisingly, only one of them – Legacy of the Daleks – features a major confrontation between the Doctor and the Master. Perhaps even more surprisingly, they didn’t even meet in the right order, as he was reunited with the incarnation originally played by Roger Delgado! This novel provided an explanation for how the Master became so scarred and decayed in The Deadly Assassin. (Well, one explanation, anyway.)

There had been other hints and suggestions, of course. Characters appearing who may or may not have been the Master. But Legacy is the only full-on story in the novels that features the Eighth Doctor with his old enemy.

There is one other literary encounter they have that’s significant, however. In the short story Forgotten by Joseph Lidster – published by Big Finish as part of the collection Short Trips: The Centenarian – the Master is freed from the Eye of Harmony and escapes into twentieth-century England. The aftermath of this rather brief encounter is further explored in Mastermind, a mostly solo story for the Master that explores what he did after the TV movie, when the Doctor wasn’t around to stop him.

The comics

But Forgotten wasn’t the only story to explore what happened to the Master after the movie. We also had the comic story The Glorious Dead, too. This time in the body of a preacher, the Doctor and the Master fought for the power of “the Glory” – the focal point of the Omniverse. The Master had seemingly won his battle against the Doctor – only to discover that neither he nor the Doctor were the participants, but their companions.

The Doctor’s companion, Kroton (a “Cyberman with a soul”) won the battle, and sent the Master to somewhere unknown. We never saw this incarnation of the Master ever again, so the tidiest explanation would be that he was sent back to the Eye of Harmony, before the events of Forgotten and Mastermind.

The audios: 2001 – 2013

As you can see, the Eighth Doctor had surprisingly few encounters with his old friend/enemy, even in the expanded media. The audios have somewhat made up for that, but it took a long time for that to happen. Well over a decade, in fact.

For a long time, despite so many stories being given to him, the Eighth Doctor didn’t encounter the Master at all on audio. This technically changed in 2013, during Doctor Who‘s fiftieth anniversary, at least. In the multi-Doctor story The Light at the End, the Doctor’s entire history was at risk thanks to the Master. Together, the Doctor’s multiple incarnations had to find out what the Master had done and how they could undo it.

For the Eighth Doctor, this doesn’t feel like a major moment. For one thing, there’s the multi-Doctor aspect, so the focus on the story is rather divided already. But on top of that, the version of Geoffrey Beevers’s horrifically scarred Master that he encounters is distinctly from before the events of the movie, and indeed, before The Keeper of Traken. So while The Light at the End is significant as a multi-Doctor story, in terms of the Eighth Doctor’s history with the Master, it’s not particularly major. Certainly, not as major as the story released just a few months later…

Eyes of the Master was a huge moment for both the Eighth Doctor and the Master, as it was the first time Eight had truly met a version of the Master after the events of the movie.

(Image credit: Doctor Who/Big Finish Productions. Image Courtesy Big Finish Productions.)

Dark Eyes 2: Eyes of the Master (a long-awaited reunion)

2014 was a major year for the Eighth Doctor. Because – almost 18 years after the TV movie – we finally had a story with Paul McGann’s Doctor facing the Master, one that was distinctly set after those events for both characters.

What was also significant was who he was facing in the box set Dark Eyes 2. Alex Macqueen’s Master had originally been introduced – naturally, as a huge surprise – in 2012’s Seventh Doctor box set UNIT: Dominion. Originally pretending to be the Doctor, this Master came across as a rather playful incarnation. He was also sadistic and insane. In many ways, he was very much a Master of the “new” era – one that would get along well with both Simm’s and Gomez’s incarnations.

Naturally, this made him a great fit for the Eighth Doctor, whose style and adventures were generally closer to the New Series in spirit than the Classic. And indeed, McGann and Macqueen, right from their first story together, were clearly a great match. When they actually meet, there’s a lot of great banter between the two, making their adversarial relationship a joy to hear.

The Resurrected Master

On top of that, we got to find out a lot more about this particular Master in this episode. When he was introduced in UNIT: Dominion, neither the Doctor nor the audience found out much about where Macqueen’s Master came from. That changes in the episode Eyes of the Master, when the Doctor stumbles across one of his insane plans. Of course, there’s one major difference with the Master’s scheme – this time, he’s working for the Time Lords.

Tensions between the Daleks and the Time Lords have been increasing. The Time Lords are desperate to stop the Daleks at any cost. Maybe not open warfare, at least not at this point. But they’re not above using other methods…

What’s great about this episode is how it explores something we had only heard about in the TV series, but not much else: the Master’s resurrection. While the exact details of how this happened still aren’t clear (at least, at this point), we do learn that the Time Lords are preparing him for “something”. Although the Master doesn’t know what, the implication to the audience is clear: the Time War is coming, and the Time Lords not only know this, but are doing everything they can to prevent it.

One of the methods they plan to use is the Eminence. A dangerous force that seeks to control and dominate all other life – usually, through possession – the Time Lords want to use it to wipe the Daleks out. And they’ve decided to use the Master’s help to do it. In short, they’ve trusted control of a powerful and dangerous force to one of Gallifrey’s most evil and insane criminals.

You can probably guess where this is going, leading us to…

While Dark Eyes 2 gave us one quick story of the two facing each other again, Dark Eyes 3 was entirely focused on them.

(Image credit: Doctor Who/Big Finish Productions. Image Courtesy Big Finish Productions.)

Dark Eyes 3 (basically, the whole of it)

While the Doctor stopped the Master’s initial plan involving the Eminence, that didn’t stop the villain from kidnapping the Doctor’s companion Molly O’Sullivan – someone rather crucial in his original scheme – and seeking to use the Eminence for his own ends.

When the Time Lords find out that he’s gone rogue, they ask the Doctor’s help to stop him. With the Daleks temporarily out of the picture, Dark Eyes 3 is essentially about the Doctor and the Master – both about their battle for control over the Eminence, and about their relationship.

The best example of this is Masterplan, which is one of my favorite stories featuring the Doctor and the Master on audio, despite the fact that they don’t actually do much. Or perhaps even because of it. When they find themselves trapped in a room on a crashing ship, they find that they have nothing to do but talk. Talk about old times, where they are now, and what lead them to this point.

There is so much great dialogue in this story that explores both the Doctor and the Master brilliantly. Masterplan really gets inside their heads, about why they do the things they do. You get the sense of them being old friends – at least, once upon a time – just as much as them being old enemies. While it’s extremely small-scale, it really is a fantastic story.

The rest of the box set is also enjoyable, and tells an interesting story itself within the Dark Eyes saga. While both the Master and the Eminence are apparently defeated in the final episode Rule of the Eminence, the Dark Eyes story isn’t completely over. And the Master has one more scheme to play…

The Eighth Doctor and the Master’s last encounter for a long while was Dark Eyes’s penultimate episode Master of the Daleks.

(Image credit: Doctor Who/Big Finish Productions. Image Courtesy Big Finish Productions.)

Dark Eyes 4: Master of the Daleks (you read that right)

While Masterplan was entirely focused on the Eighth Doctor and the Master, Master of the Daleks radically shifts that focus . Set in the middle of Dark Eyes 4 – the final volume in the series – the Eighth Doctor has a surprisingly small role, finding himself in alternate timeline with hardly any idea of who he is.

Instead, the story focuses much more on the Master and the Daleks working together. And it has to be said, it’s an incredibly effective team that they make. While they clearly don’t trust each other – no, more than that, they know that one will betray the other at some point – they are at least very effective at changing history, in a big way. The Master and the Daleks have taken over the planet Earth in the twentieth century, changing so much of the world we know in the process.

Master of the Daleks is the final episode to feature Alex Macqueen’s Master in the Dark Eyes saga. In fact, it’s the last episode of The Eighth Doctor Adventures to feature his Master for a good long while. So it’s interesting that the Eighth Doctor has a relatively small role in this episode, especially when the finale is so close.

Still, writer John Dorney clearly has a lot of fun with both the Master and the Daleks, particularly with leaving the audience guessing as to who will betray who first. And while the Eighth Doctor hardly interacts with the Master at all in this episode, there is one key scene where they do meet towards the end, when the Doctor is naturally saving the day. However, he thinks he just has the Daleks to worry about, so when he bumps into his old enemy once more, we get this fantastic exchange:

"Master: I should have known you’d have tried to stop me!Doctor: Tried to stop you? I didn’t even know you were involved!Master: That’s no excuse!"

The last time the Doctor saw this particular Master, he left him stranded in this alternative version of the twentieth century, with a war happening between two factions of Daleks and Sontarans. It would be a long time before the Doctor would see the Master again – and when he did, he wouldn’t even be meeting him in the right order…

For almost two full series, the Eighth Doctor didn’t meet the Master for a long time. When they finally were reunited, once again, it wasn’t exactly in the right order…

(Image credit: Doctor Who/Big Finish Productions. Image Courtesy Big Finish Productions)

Ravenous 4: Planet of Dust (the Master’s final hour?)

After a long gap of four years and almost two full series – namely, Doom Coalition and Ravenous – the Eighth Doctor met his archenemy again on the planet Parrak in Planet of Dust. However, this Master was from a point in time a little earlier than Alex Macqueen’s.

Once again, the Eighth Doctor encountered Geoffrey Beevers’s Master. But this was from a point long after the events of The Keeper of Traken, or even the movie. For a long time, the Master had been on his last life, possessing multiple bodies and using various other techniques in order to extend his life. But now, none of them are working anymore. He has very little time left. To survive – truly survive – he has only one option left: regeneration…

As you can probably imagine, this is a huge story in terms of the Master’s mythology. We really get the sense that Beevers’s Master is coming to an end, one way or another, and it’s interesting to explore the Master when he’s at his most vulnerable.

It’s even more satisfying that this story begins to resolve an arc that really began all the way back in 2001 with Dust Breeding, which was further developed with Mastermind. In fact, in some ways, the arc of the Master’s survival really started all the way back in 1976 with The Deadly Assassin. Planet of Dust doesn’t resolve that story, not completely. But it does push it towards its inevitable conclusion.

There’s also a rather shocking moment towards the end that not only sets up the very next story. It also makes it clear just how significant the mythology we’re dealing with is. This is the end for the Master – but not the final end…

The Eighth Doctor and his friends met three more Masters – all out of order – in Day of the Master. But when will he meet his old foe next?

(Image credit: Doctor Who/Big Finish Productions. Image Courtesy Big Finish Productions)

Ravenous 4: Day of the Master (three Masters, one Doctor)

If Planet of Dust dealt with some major history for the Master, then Day of the Master expands on that far more. Not only does it focus on three separate incarnations of the Doctor’s archenemy. It also sets up a new beginning for them, too…

What’s particularly clever about this story is that, while the three Masters interact with each other, the Eighth Doctor only meets one of them. However, it’s still one that he never expected to see again: the Master that we saw in the TV movie, as played by Eric Roberts.

As we mentioned, the last time he had seen him, the Master was sucked into the Eye of Harmony. But, rather than completely destroying him, it instead gave his body a fresh burst of energy. He escaped elsewhere in the TARDIS into one of the ship’s old rooms – a room that was quickly jettisoned by the TARDIS itself. (While the Eighth Doctor was surprised to learn about this, listeners got to find out much earlier in The Diary of River Song: Series Five.)

This version of the Master was about as fun and colorful as he was in the TV movie – well, up until he “dressed for the occasion”, anyway. He was up to an insane scheme (as he always is), and essentially, puts the events of Day of the Master into motion – as well as the whole of the Ravenous arc itself…

Avoiding future Masters

As for the other two Masters, specifically Derek Jacobi’s War Master and Michelle Gomez’s Missy? How do they fulfill their roles in this story? Very nicely, as they’re paired up with the Doctor’s companions, Liv and Helen. When they reunite later, Liv’s description of the Master as someone urbane and with a beard doesn’t particularly stand out to the Doctor, at least as far as the Master’s concerned. And regarding Missy, considering she doesn’t even give Helen her name, neither the Doctor nor his friends have any clue who she really is.

Released just last month, Ravenous 4 is the last time we’ve heard the Eighth Doctor encounter the Master. But there is one more encounter that we haven’t talked about yet, one set much, much later. One that doesn’t even take place in the Eighth Doctor’s own series, but the Master’s…

The latest encounter the Eighth Doctor has with his old enemy is in The War Master: Rage of the Time Lords.

(Image credit: War Master/Doctor Who/Big Finish Productions.

Image obtained from: Big Finish Productions.)

The War Master: Rage of the Time Lords (when Eight met War)

Earlier this year, Rage of the Time Lords – the third volume of The War Master – was released, with a very special guest star. In the last two episodes, The Missing Link and Darkness and Light, the Eighth Doctor is reunited with his old enemy once more – a face he has never seen before, but at least one of his companions has.

Not that it matters. The events of Ravenous 4 are long behind the Eighth Doctor by this point. Liv and Helen are long gone, and across the whole of time and space, the Time War rages between the Daleks and the Time Lords. The Doctor is surprised to see his old enemy with a new face, but not as shocked when he discovers what his latest scheme is.

This is a particularly interesting take on the Doctor’s and the Master’s relationship, since it’s explored in a series where the Master is the protagonist. He’s just as evil as he always was, but we get a better idea of how grand his schemes can be, and the planning and the work that goes into each of them.

Not that the Doctor’s impressed, of course. On the contrary, he’s rather horrified when he finds out what the Master’s done this time. By the end of the story, he promises to track down his old enemy for the crimes he’s committed. However, the Master works a way around that by erasing the Eighth Doctor’s mind of everything he had learned about his latest scheme – including what he now looks like…

A strong pairing

That last part is pretty obvious in how much it aims to fit in with Utopia, when the Tenth Doctor meets the War Master in disguise and fails to recognize him. While it was obvious from the start that something like this was going to happen – at least, from the moment the Eighth Doctor sees this particular face of the Master – it’s still wonderful to hear these two interact.

Not only is it great for Derek Jacobi’s Master to have a full story where he interacts with the Doctor properly. (Unlike in Utopia, where they only briefly see each other as they truly are for just a fleeting glimpse.)

But it’s also fantastic to hear two great actors like McGann and Jacobi working with each other. When Ravenous 4 was released later, I’m glad they didn’t meet so that they didn’t just give us another amnesia cop-out. But at least in this case, just this one time, it doesn’t feel too bad, mainly because it’s good to have a story with the Doctor and this particular Master.

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What next?

While it’s not likely that we’ll have stories of the Eighth Doctor and the Master set after Rage of the Time Lords, it’s definitely possible that we’ll have more stories of the two in general. Particularly due to the huge gap between his adventures with Liv and Helen in sagas such as Doom Coalition and Ravenous, and his much later travels during the Time War.

In fact, if the strong hints in Ravenous 4 are anything to go by, it’s looking extremely likely that we’ll hear more stories of the Doctor and his friends facing the Master again eventually. Here’s hoping that it’s Macqueen’s Master that they meet next – as a brilliant incarnation that we haven’t heard since 2016, a return appearance of this Master is long overdue. But when will we hear them face each other again? Only time will tell…

Have you enjoyed reading about the extensive history of the Eighth Doctor’s many battles with his archenemy? Have you enjoyed any of the stories we’ve mentioned? Are there any that you’re more curious about? Let us know in the comments below.