Christopher Morley takes a look at the Second Doctor's meetings with a Time Lord once known as Koschei.
Think of the Master in a classic Who context & your mind probably jumps straight to the battle of wills between his first incarnation (Roger Delgado) & the Third Doctor. But to skip straight ahead would be to forget a larger than you'd think chunk of his early life- he wasn't even always the Master! Before he made cunning, charming evil a full-time concern he was Koschei, a renegade Time Lord whose modus operandi was something of an inversion of the Doctor's ( while both were renegades, even then Koschei had far too much potential interest in things he shouldn't meddle with).
Think of the Master in a classic Who context & your mind probably jumps straight to the battle of wills between his first incarnation (Roger Delgado) & the Third Doctor. But to skip straight ahead would be to forget a larger than you'd think chunk of his early life- he wasn't even always the Master! Before he made cunning, charming evil a full-time concern he was Koschei, a renegade Time Lord whose modus operandi was something of an inversion of the Doctor's ( while both were renegades, even then Koschei had far too much potential interest in things he shouldn't meddle with).
One of his earliest meetings with his old friend/ foe, by then in his Second incarnation, occurs in the novel The Dark Path (
by David A.McIntee). They've not set eyes on each other in 200 years,
& Doctor Two's initial suspicion upon hearing that his old nemesis
is present on Darkheart ( a planet which can also be turned into a
weapon should it fall into the wrong hands) is that he's about to be
hunted down on behalf of the Time Lords in a direct foreshadowing of the
events of The War Games. And if you believe/support the Season
6B timeline, that could lead directly into his service as a Celestial
Intervention Agent ( World Game, Players, The Two Doctors).
Before
all that though, he's got to deal with Koschei's rapidly developing
evil. His grander plan is to put Darkheart to nefarious use- in the
midst of the chaos of the switchover of a future Earth from Empire to
Federation. Why does he want it? It can be used to change time! Its
residents haven't aged in 300 years, & the man who will become the
Master is intrigued by the possibilities it offers him. Far from being
an agent of the Time Lords, he's actually being spied on- they're
keeping an eye on his activities by placing a spy as his companion!
Travelling with him in his Type 45 TARDIS ( a slight improvement on the
Doctor's own Type 40, with the inbuilt ability to remotely control other
TARDISes- Two himself taking advantage of this at one stage) is Ailla.
He believes her to be human.....
Indeed,
the revelation that she isn't who she's told him she was all along is
one of the seismic events that causes him to become the Master in the
first place! A second concerns the fate of Terileptus, which he
persuades Terrell, the Adjudicator of Darkheart, to destroy. His
hypnotic power is also evident even then- he uses it on Victoria
Waterfield, no less. She's gone by the time of his next encounter with
the 'cosmic hobo', though. Only Jamie remains as 'Sexy' is drawn into
the heart of an ancient grudge between the Time Lords & the Archons
in The Nameless City, Michael Scott's contribution to the Eleven Doctors, Eleven Stories anthology. If you're a fan of one Howard Phillips Lovecraft, the title may be familiar!
That's
because it is- H.P used it for his own tale, of the ruins of a city in
the middle of the desert, built by a pre-humanity reptilian race of
Earth-dwellers. The Necronomicon ( another Lovecraftian device, & also the name of a well-known anthology of his collected Cthulhu Mythos works
), an ancient tome of arcane knowledge- put simply, the most evil of
relics of the time of the Great Old Ones ( the Archons being the last
remaining vestige of them)- comes in handy as a means of delivering the
TARDIS right into the heart of Scott's own Nameless City. And who's the
instrument of its deliverance? That's right. The Master!
Posing
as the elderly bookseller Professor Thascalos, he engineers a ' theft'.
Taking advantage of Jamie, who sees him as a victim, he presents
McCrimmon with the Necronomicon as a gift for his help. Of
course, the book finds its way to the Doctor- opening it quickly proves
one of the worst decisions Two will ever make. Why has the Master sold
one of his own kind out to the Archons so readily? They've promised him
the sort of power he craves in return for him gifting them a TARDIS, the
roots of the prime mode of Gallifreyan transport lying in ' seeds'
grown by the Archons & stolen by the Time Lords earlier in their
history. The famous old Type 40 is thusly drawn out of the known
universe.
Not
surprising perhaps. Why would the Master want to give up his own, after
all? If we look elsewhere in the Second Doctor's timeline, there's
another Master to grapple with, too! This one's slightly different,
though- he oversees the Land of Fiction ( The Mind Robber).
As
the name implies, it doesn't exactly obey real-world laws. Among its
residents are Princess Rapunzel & Lemuel Gulliver ( later revealed
in the novel Future Imperfect to be an undercover Goth, then a Celestial Intervention Agent- some time later he'll rise to become Chancellor in The Deadly Assassin. It's he who sends Two off to meet his past & future selves in The Three Doctors just in time to thwart Omega). Escaping from the volcanic chaos of Dulkis ( The Dominators), the Doctor is forced to take the TARDIS out of normal time & space into the White Void...
Which
explains how he, Jamie & Zoe Heriot could end up in such a Land.
Its clear things won't exactly be plain sailing from the start...
Hunted by clockwork soldiers, somebody's after them & its all joyously surreal. Who is this Master? He's a writer headhunted from Earth at some point during 1926 from his own perspective, enslaved to the Master Brain- a very nasty computer..& perhaps understandably he wants out from the job, eyeing up the Doctor as his replacement with a little help from a guard of White Robots.
Hunted by clockwork soldiers, somebody's after them & its all joyously surreal. Who is this Master? He's a writer headhunted from Earth at some point during 1926 from his own perspective, enslaved to the Master Brain- a very nasty computer..& perhaps understandably he wants out from the job, eyeing up the Doctor as his replacement with a little help from a guard of White Robots.
The
Brain has bigger ideas, though- it wants Earth! And so begins quite
possibly the most wonderfully absurd adventure the Doctor will ever
face. He rises to it with aplomb, though...
If he can survive a ruthless pinching by a gang of children, he can get through anything, he most likely tells himself! Rather embarrassingly he does, though, manage to get Jamie's face a bit wrong when challenged to rearrange it...the indignity, eh? Still, at least he gets a close-quarters meeting with the lovely Princess later on! Makes up for his disappointment upon finding out he's not actually back home in the Scotland he left behind ( The Highlanders), the simulation of such created by the Land.
If he can survive a ruthless pinching by a gang of children, he can get through anything, he most likely tells himself! Rather embarrassingly he does, though, manage to get Jamie's face a bit wrong when challenged to rearrange it...the indignity, eh? Still, at least he gets a close-quarters meeting with the lovely Princess later on! Makes up for his disappointment upon finding out he's not actually back home in the Scotland he left behind ( The Highlanders), the simulation of such created by the Land.
A
similar dirty trick lures Zoe out- where Jamie sees Scotland on the
TARDIS scanner screen, Zoe sees her own home, in her own time ( The Wheel In Space).
Naturally curiosity gets the better of the both of them, forcing the
Doctor's hand somewhat. It does at least teach the valuable life lesson
that you can will away any threat whatsoever by declaring that it
doesn't exist! A fine pearl of wisdom from a fine Doctor, that. All of
which sets him in fine stead for more regular dealings with the Master-
not of the Land, unless the Twelfth Doctor is planning a return visit-
following his regeneration into his Third self!
