Who is the most evil Master in all of Space and Time?

Post Reply New Topic

While I personally prefer the Delgado and Ainley Masters, the John Simm Master is in some ways the most menacing of all in my opinion, hyperactivity and odd glimses of childlike or childish behaviour and occasional sympathetic moments not withstanding. Where the Delgado Master was the walking embodiment of the old cliché about the Devil being a gentleman, the corpse-like Thirteenth Master an unstable megalomaniac (alright, to varying degrees they all were) Anthony Ainley's Trakenite Master, quite unfairly (in my view) accused of over acting; a trifle more given to gloating and with a neat set of delightfully clichéd evil phrases like, "Oh, my dear Doctor, you have been naive," more seriously while still motivated by overweening lust for power, his vendetta with Doctor becomes increasingly more personal while ever since the final incarnation of his original regeneration cycle he has become increasingly preoccupied with survival; Erik Robertson's camply evil "Bruce" Master (now he did overact) the initially benevolent and selfless servant of humanity Professor Yana who transforms to his admiring assistant Chantho of the Malmooth's dismay into a Master who is alternately softly spoken menace and strident bully, the John Simm/Harold Saxon Master has become completely unhinged. The strong vein of cruelty, whether of the personal twisting the knife in the soul variety or the cosmic world-destroying or enslaving kind, which ran through his previous lives, has seldom been equalled, though Delgado in The Time Monster (I have missed a number of Delgado episodes due partially to only joining in viewing the recent ABC airing of survivors from the BBC for The Dæmons, a good episode to reintroduce me to both Time Lords, as well as toUNIT and Jo Grant, and partially to Frontier in Space) and by Ainley in Logopolis, Planet of Fire, Survival, and to a lesser extent the Mark of the Rani.

Anthony Ainley... He pulled a fast one on us in "The Five Doctors."

But for most of that story he was only trying to help, and even at the end he is felled quite easily by the Brigadier. Presumably had the latter not intervened the Master rather than Borusa would have been eternally imprisoned and the course of history would have been very different. His betrayal of the Cybermen was fairly ruthless, though, as noted by Tegan.

I will agree though that Ainley had some of the most brilliantly evil moments in the series. In Logopolis and Planet of Fire his evil runs the full gamut from his spiteful tormenting respectively of Nyssa and Peri, in both cases pretending initially to be her father, to possibly his grandest scheme ever, holding the Universe to ransom and actually destroying a number of planets including Logopolis itself and Traken, Nyssa's home.

Roger Delgado. You actually felt that he had some respect for the Doctor, and could just hypnotise someone with a look. I mean, in his very first scene in Terror of the Autons, he hypnotises bullying circus owner Luigi Rossini (or rather Lewis Russel) with just a look. He seems to be a lot more restrained than later Masters as well.

That being said, John Simm's version comes second (his danger comes from him being as unpredictable as the Doctor), then Ainley. I'm not sure whether to count the other three, as Peter Pratt and Geoffrey Beevers were only in one story each, and Derek Jacobi is only in his Master persona in Utopia for a few minutes before regenerating, although he does a decent enough turn as the Master android in the animated webcast Scream of the Shalka.

No Beard No Master ... sorry.

And Roger Delgado was my favourite with Anthony Ainley a close second.

I'd have liked to see John Simm do a few more masterly tricks... have a bit more grudging respect for the doctor and be more inclined to use hypnosis.

Also - what happened to John Simm's TCE???? Laser Screwdriver indeed.

I liked the fact that Ainley was so easily felled by the Brigadier... Roger was always under-estimating the Brig.... and it was nice to have the Brig sound "familiar" to him. "Nice to see you again old chap".

Granted, it is not entirely a fair contest; I just included all options in case anyone was convinced that Jacobi managed to cram more evil into those few minutes than the rest of the Masters had into years; while that scene with Chantho was memorable, I do not myself believe this to be the case.

Quatermass: If the poll had been about the best Master, Delgado would probably win hands down followed by Ainley, but while hypnotic powers and restraint may be variables in favour of evil, respect for adversaries is not.

Koschei must have initially had an incredibly strong mind and will, if he has had that drumming in his head since the age of eight and still managed to maintain a semblance of sanity by the time of his Delgado incarnation.

I am not being stupid but last time i watched doctor she was sitting there and then there was this pulse pulse sound, like pulsating and she had this horny look on her face and she was looking at those things that say i will exterminate you.
I rarely watch television and wonder why has doctor who changed so much?
Its like it has turned into porn. I have mild autism and bpd diagnosis and i can get delusional but i dont think i was being delusional about this.
Anyone?
I like the old doctor who better.

Then you are in good company; most of us, myself included, prefer Classic Doctor Who. Delgado seems to be by consensus the most masterful of the Masters.

I can only assume you are referring to the scene when Gwen Cooper and Ianto are defending Torchwood against the Daleks in The Stolen Planet/Journey's End. I think that was battle frenzy, not sexual arousal, though she is in Torchwood, where they probably keep the two close together; that spinoff series appears directed at an adult audience (though I am personally confused as to why our society considers the sexually obsessed to be more mature, when there are plenty of adolescents and even a few children who display this preoccuption) just as the Sarah Jane Adventures (has Elizabeth Sladen been drinking some of that Elixir from Kaan? She does not appear to have aged a day) is targeted at children.

Personally, while I agree that our era overindulges in mass sexualisation, your concerns appear to be misplaced; you would have a better case with the scene late in the Classic Series when Chockeye of the Androgum (feel free to remind us which Grieg he belonged to, Quatermass) is chasing Peri with a knife muttering "Pretty, pretty," (Two Doctors, 1984, Sixth Doctor/Colin - NOT Tom - Baker - though Troughton reprises the Second Doctor yet again) - that was not only pornography but sick, twisted porn at that, though I liked Chesene the augmented Androgum - or even (albeit laughably) with the fact that the costumes of, of all companions, the virtuous, demure, and feminine Nyssa of Traken (but also brilliant at bioelectronics and cybernetics, hence her raport with the apparently younger, male and at times slightly chauvinistic mathematician Adric of Alzarius*) she is also an orphan and an exile from a destroyed utopia, becoming between her velvet Trakenite "fairy princess" costume in the Keeper of Traken and lace night gown in Terminus more "racy" in a shameless appeal by the BBC to an alleged "Dads" demographic; despite being slightly in love with Nyssa (she reminded me of one of the objects of my unrequited affection, who has since married) and not exactly immune to lust, this all rather passed me by.

Perhaps, albeit far subtler, the most disturbing incident of sexualisation is when the sixteen-year old juvenille delinquent Ace, having declared "I am not a child," proceeds to manipulate a soldier by an implied and admittedly false, but nevertheless rather chilling, offer of sexual favours (The Curse of Fenric, 1989, Seventh Doctor/Sylvester McCoy). To a much lesser extent, the other main candidate for censorship that I can think of is the scene in the 1996 telemovie, called by some fans "The Enemy Within," when the Master, using the odious Bruce the Paramedic's body as a host for the Death worm housing his preserved consciousness at the time, drains the fragment of his essence out of the possessed Dr. Grace Holloway by "French-kissing" her in order to restore her to a purely human state so he can use her to open the Eye of Harmony (presumably a safeguard against suicidal and homicidal Time Lords deciding to take a whole world with them). This is the same incident in which he has been saying

* NB we do not know much about ageing or lifespan in Alzarians or Trakenites; the former are from a world parallel to Gallifrey but are in origin hybrids of Marshmen and humans; they can heal quickly - compare the origin of the Wraith from Arratis bugs in Stargate Atlantis; Traken appears in some sources to have been originally a Gallifreyan colony like Logopolis in distant antiquity before the Gallifreyans became the Time Lords hence the compatibility of the Thirteenth Master's and Consul Tremas' bodies and the apparently indestructible fusion that resulted; coupled with the admittedly Source-augmented longevity of the Keepers, Trakenites appear to be made of exceedingly tough matter.

Back in Planet of Fire the Master was working on modifying his beloved Tissue Compression Eliminator, seeking to improve its efficiency. Despite the setbacks his experiments led to, it would appear that by the time of the Mark of the Rani he had succeeded; instead of reducing people to doll stature, they were compressed out of sight all together. Maybe when he could no longer leave human dolls as calling cards, he decided to begin inventing a new weapon; at some stage it may have occurred to him that accelerating age and in the case of fellow Time Lords, suspending regeneration, would enable him to partially imitate the effects of his TCE, i.e. in reducing size.

I think John Simm would've looked good with a goatee.

Oh well.

Delgado all the way for me! Partly because he originated the role, and partly because he and Pertwee were just *brilliant* together!