It would seem our latest showrunner has taken tips from his predecessors as Lord President of Doctor Who - The Timeless Children containing elements of prime Russilon T Davies & Steven Moffat thrown at the walls of Chris Chibnall's personal Panopticon to see if they stick!
First is the alliance between the Master & his new Cyber-buddies, as first tried by Moffat for the Dark Water/Death In Heaven two-parter. Where Rassimoff - as he possibly insisted on being called at the time - had Missy offer her new gentleman friends from Mondas all the dead they could want, Chibinon - having taken on Steven's mantle - takes it one step & indeed a whole world further...and so The Invasion Of Time is turned on its head, Gallifrey opened up to the sort of visitors it really doesn't need after its already been laid waste to.
Where human flesh of the sort the Cybermen are used to integrating into themselves can die, Time Lords have a handy little trick to cheat that particular technicality of mortality underneath those silly hats, collars & pomp & circumstance. A trick the Master gives them access to alongside metallic revisions of those same headpieces & collars in the course of revisiting an old scheme, the creation of a new Master Race (as also seen in Russilon's End Of Time) housed in metal bodies, but a part of the overall whole of this latest Master-plan.
Inside these is a sort of ultimate upgrade of the type John Lumic could only have dreamed. Underneath the “skin of metal” is an approximation of the ability to regenerate, a fearsome new weapon in their arsenal given to them by the new holder of the Cyberium.
And so to what the Master might do with all that new information swimming about inside him? He, of course, has reason aplenty to go after the flesh & blood Time Lords - his childhood blighted by a stare into the Untempered Schism driving him mad, his own people implanting a call to war into his mind.
“A simple task of four beats”Used then also to allude to the beating of his two hearts - but consider also the rhythm of metallic footsteps, a slow one-two-three-four as first reintroduced in the Rise Of The Cybermen/Age Of Steel double header. Put the two together & you have yourself quite the potential army - the Master as Cyber Lord President commanding hordes of his new soldiers, led on the ground by the fanatical Ashad, who can perhaps now be seen as a harbinger of their destiny.
Ascension to the lofty heights of the Time Lords after all perhaps having been what he meant when he talked of his own calling, potentially handed down to him through the man who was once said to have the bearing of a god by Queen Galleia of Atlantis? A calling which may take him to the front line as his new leader aims to finish what he started as far back as Last Of The Time Lords with the creation of the new Time Lord empire.
“It's good, isn't it? Isn't it good?”.Only now such a thing, should Chibnall decide to revisit it, isn't confined to Earth, the potential for however many Cyber-units their new commander sees fit to send flying through the Time Vortex in an attempt to subjugate the peoples of the universe to be able to do so surely too rich not to explore as part of his five year plan. While the implication is there that the Cyber Time Lords perish alongside the man who gave them life, we surely know better than to presume the Master's death is final!
And of course he has previous experience of skulking in the shadows, going so far as to taunt the Doctor with the memory of “assassinating Lord Presidents during his guided tour of the remains of their shared home.
Leaving at least some time open to escape the ruins of Gallifrey with the remnants of his new Master Race in tow to build his own take on the empire, the rest of the flesh & blood universe open to conversion & placement into that “Skin of metal and a body that will never age or die” in perpetual service of the Cyber Time Lords. The “never dying” part never more true thanks to Chibnall's Timeless Child & the unwitting gift she's implied to have given all those who came after her - including by implication those the man she had been three incarnations ago sent back into the rages of the Time War. Who you may recall had similar plans of transcending flesh in favour of an alogether different kind of existence....
The Master even manages to channel Rassilon in his speech to the first members of his new race, its central refrains similarly & even more chillingly repeated by his Cyber-versions of those who stood on the side of the resurrected then-Lord President at the hour of Gallifrey's attempted return to the universe
RASSILON: For Gallifrey!For now Chibbers remains unpunished for his breach of the strict “non-nicking off those who sat in the showrunner's chair before you” policy of the Head Writing Lords. Perhaps Davies & Moffat wait in deliberation as a two man High Council in anticipation of what he might do with the promise offered by words he in effect stole from the venerable Russilon, having first had chance to at least mentally size things up while penning the likes of 42, The Hungry Earth/Cold Blood - not entirely coincidentally also featuring the return of a race previously presumed long dead - & The Power Of Three before getting chance to complete his own ascension & have the first Doctor of his own casting speak the first words he wrote for her immediately post-regeneration at the conclusion of Twice Upon A Time.
RASSILON: For victory!
TIME LORDS: For victory!
RASSILON: For the end of time itself!
TIME LORDS: For the end of time itself!
Chibinon will surely hope he doesn't get the gauntlet before Series Thirteen begins!
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