Tony Fyler proposes a
Master theory, and pays tribute to John Simm’s performance.
There are two types of
Master: there’s the natural Master, who comes by his body by the
normal process of regeneration, and the unnatural Master, either
disembodied or forced to steal an existence in order to survive. The
first tends to play the role for character, the second, mostly for
plot.
There’s also a loose
correlation between the ‘type’ of Master and the success with
which he has been historically played, and also with his ‘fit’ to
a particular Doctor.
Roger Delgado, despite
being in real life a very pleasant and amiable man, could have been
born to play the dead-eyed gentleman psychopath of the universe, and
he rarely, if ever, looked forced on-screen. He was chosen
specifically to be the Anti-Pertwee.
The two ‘crispy
critter’ Masters – Peter Pratt and Geoffrey Beevers – were not
chosen specifically to play the Anti-Baker, and such was their
emaciation they were forced to play the role largely on plot, to find
their way back to a body. Anthony Ainley’s Master was not
Doctor-specific either, and having stolen his body, he was forced
from the beginning to be a Masteralike of Delgado’s version; it was
more important that he looked like what had come before than it was
to let him be his own villain. While little is ever heard from the
CGI-snake Master, Eric Roberts (bless him, what did he think
he was doing up there?) played the Master, again having stolen a body
in his outing, purely driven by the plot to get more bodies,
rather than as any kind of appropriate Anti-McGann.
When the series became
a hit again in 2005, it was more or less certain that the Doctor
would face off with his ultimate adversary again. But which Master
would it be? Another re-tread of the Delgado Imprimatur, all beard
and convoluted plans and gloating? Or someone new and naturalistic,
someone that would be genuinely fearsome and scary and funny and dark
and aimed squarely at providing the antithesis of whichever Doctor he
encountered?
John Simm blew the
doors off the part within the first five minutes.
Having had just about that long of Sir Derek Jacobi delivering the Anti-Hartnell, the Simm Master exploded on screen and began immediately matching David Tennant’s Doctor, trait for trait. There was the post-regenerative chattiness, there was the techno-skill, flying the Tardis with gusto, there was the glint of mad humour and the smile. And there – right there at the end of Utopia – was something new and modern. When the Doctor says “I’m sorry”, Simm’s spitting of “Tough!” is visceral and dangerous, it’s a boot to the Doctor’s face, and a note of the savagery behind Delgado’s suavity, Ainley’s chuckle and Roberts’s…whatever-that-was.
Simm went on to imitate
Delgado not in any of the trappings of his Master (though the
red-lined jacket was a nice touch), but in the fundamental philosophy
of what a ‘natural’ Master was. This time, he was absolutely the
Anti-Tennant, and the terrifying thing about the script of The Sound
of Drums and The Last of the Time Lords is that it’s the ultimate
version of the Pertwee scripts – disguise, hypnosis, cunning plans
and world domination – but given a brave new twist. Simm’s is the
Master who won. This is a devastating proposition, because the
Master is no ordinary villain – he’s the philosophical opposite
of everything the Doctor stands for, embodied in an equal, who can
argue his corner and make the viewer question the Doctor’s
position. It’s the combination of the scale of what the Master does
to the Earth once he’s won it – “the only person to get out of
Japan alive…”, and the unbridled glee with which Simm delivers
his ‘stark raving bonkers’ Master, complete with dancing, disco
and decimation, that make his Master something fresh and vibrant in
those two episodes.
And then of course, the
production team, having well and truly had its cake with a fantastic,
energised Anti-Tennant Master, decided to eat it too, and gave us
Simm as the body-snatching Master, the ‘other’ Master. And like
disembodied Masters before him, Simm had no option but to play the
character subsumed by plot, this time knowing his body was ‘born to
die’ but multiplying almost endlessly and aiming to stop the
drumming in his head. The End of Time is a busy script, but Simm
manages to deliver the furious need of a disembodied Master more
effectively in the burger-chomping scene than either Pratt or Beevers
were allowed, because he keeps (largely) his own face and delivers
the performance through his own interpretation of the Master as a
creature propped up and kept sane by nothing more than ravenous
consumption. Again, the Master is victorious in this story, though it
feels (like the character himself) more hollow and reversible this
time, and when events spin out of his control, the Master falls back
on another old trope – the idea of joining forces with the Doctor
to confront the greater threat. What is unique in the Master’s long
on-screen history though is what Simm does in his final moments –
he makes us sympathise with the Master, driven mad by
‘grown-ups’ who abused his mind if not his body; he is the child
who never stood a chance, and grew up determined to be noticed.
Simm’s exit might be a cliché, but it’s arguably the best and
most worthwhile cliché in fifty years of Doctor Who.
If – as begins to
seem inevitable given the rushing whisper of fan-gibber – the
Master is to be reborn again in Peter Capaldi’s first series, it
can only be hoped he will at least at first be a ‘natural’
Master, delivered as the Anti-Capaldi. And he will have a lot of
history to live up to – much of it very recent. The ghost of John
Simm’s Master will not be easy to erase. But that of course is what
rebirth is all about.
Tony Fyler lives in a cave of wall-to-wall DVDs and Blu-Rays somewhere fairly
nondescript in Wales, and never goes out to meet the "Real People". By
day, he
runs an editing house, largely as an
excuse not to have to work for a living. He will soon be writing A Book.
With Pages and everything.
