Given that the Doctor is one of the most maddeningly inconsistent characters in science fiction – moral and upstanding, but with occasional bouts of cruelty and manipulation – it is entirely fitting that his polar opposite should be rotten to the core, but with moments of honor and even decency.
This isn’t a list of those moments. Here is where we find the Master doing what he/she does best. These are terrible, awful things that would, had they been done by Daleks, result in the Doctor trying to wipe all trace of them from the universe. But because they’re frenemies, that never seems to happen.
1. The Death of Chantho – “Utopia”
We all know the Master has a black, black heart, and that he’d destroy whole civilizations at the drop of a hat. But somehow it’s those intimate betrayals, where he casually kills someone whose trust he has worked hard to earn, that really mark him out as rotten.
The death of loyal Chantho with the immaculate manners is even worse because he kills her as his very first act after recovering his identity, but not before he tells her off for being annoying. As bumbling Professor Yana he valued her support enormously, but as the Master, well, she just became more cannon fodder for his skyrocketing ego.
2. The Tissue Compression Eliminator
It’s not enough for the Master to kill people, although he does that all the time. What really makes him squeal with delight is to shrink them down to the size of tin soldiers using his tissue compression eliminator. His most recent incarnation has happily gone back to the weapon that came to define his most camp, cackling pantomime villain persona thus far (the Master we would call the Second, as played by
Anthony Ainley
, although he was technically the 13th incarnation.)
Anyway, the spite in this particular weapon comes from that extra jolt of humiliation at the diminutive stature of his foes, and the giggles that come with it when he picks them up off the floor to gloat.
3. Killing a Man with an Inflatable Chair – “Terror of the Autons”
Oh sure, it looks comical to get some hapless fool to sit in an inflatable chair, knowing that the sentient plastic it is made from will eat him. And in a sense it’s the preposterousness of the situation that makes it so appealing for a crazy baddie like the Master. If he had the free time, he’d make a perfect prank YouTuber.
“Terror of the Autons” is also notable for a nasty moment where a cornered Master tricks Rex Farrel to dress up as him, and wave a gun in the direction of UNIT soldiers. They shoot him, then realize they’ve got the wrong man, and the Master hightails it out of there like the rotten swine he is.
4. Killing Osgood – “Death in Heaven”
Missy represents the Master at his/her most theatrical, which is some feat given the Second incarnation’s cackling laugh. And when she decides to be bad, that cartoonish confidence can cause her opponents to make simple mistakes.
Take this terrifying exchange, in which Missy tells Osgood she’s about to kill her, and then proceeds to count down the seconds – with a bit of cheating – before she fulfills her own prophecy. It’s like watching a cat play with a tiny and terrified mouse, and you know she’s only doing it for the fun. Those two guards she also kills? Nowhere near as enjoyable.
5. Destroying Whole Chunks of the Universe – “Logopolis”
“Logopolis” is a story in which the Master’s inherent sense of entitlement and spite is in overdrive. He’s just taken over the body of Tremas (the father of the Fourth Doctor’s new companion Nyssa and a man whose name is, coincidentally, an anagram of Master) and he’s on the warpath. Tegan Jovanka’s aunt gets the shrink-ray treatment, then he causes the causal nexus to unravel on Logopolis, which unleashes a wave of entropy that destroys several galaxies.
For an encore he tricks the Doctor into helping him blackmail the universe, saying he’ll only stop the entropy if they become his slaves. Then, when he’s thwarted, he knocks the Doctor off a radio telescope, causing him to regenerate.
6. Inventing the Cybermen – “World Enough and Time”
Having arrived on a time dilated spaceship on the edge of a black hole, the Master decides to put on a disguise and start some medical experiments. One of his subjects is Bill Potts, who has a big hole in her chest. Somehow – and the cause/effect is a bit hazy here given that the Master has definitely met the Cybermen before, in the future – he ends up creating the first Cybermen that the Doctor will ever meet.
So in a sense, he’s directly responsible for everything the Cybermen ever do, and created a template in which human pain and suffering is to be eradicated in the cause of the ultimate upgrade.
7. Enabling the Daleks – “Frontier in Space”
Ever the manipulative swine, the Master forged an alliance with the Daleks — on Skaro, no less — in which he would escalate tensions between humanity and the Draconian Empire and provoke them into a war, all so that the Daleks could sweep in and destroy everyone.
To do this, he gave some face-changing technology to the Ogrons so that they could pretend to be either human or Draconian and attack their opponents. The fact that these plans would result in massive amounts of death and destruction and would allow the Daleks to seize even more power gave him precisely no pause for thought whatsoever.
8. Taking Over the Earth – “Last of the Time Lords”
This time, the transformation of humans using machines had already taken place by the time the Master found the Toclafane at the end of time, but he does bring them back and set them loose across the Earth. He orders them to kill one tenth of the population, almost on a whim, then enslaves everyone else and makes the Doctor — who he has artificially aged and slightly shrunk — watch from a bird cage.
9. Destroying Gallifrey – “The Timeless Children”
While it’s understandable that the Master may have been really, really angry when he found out the Time Lord race is in some way based upon the interdimensional being he now knows as the Doctor, what he does next is off the scale. First he destroys Gallifrey, completing a task that even the Daleks couldn’t quite manage. Then he takes the bodies of the Time Lords and puts them into Cyber-hardware, making an army that cannot die.
It’s a sick perversion of what happened to create the Time Lords in the first place, which, to be fair, is exactly the sort of thing you’d expect him to do.
What moment made you despise the Master the most?!
