Derek Jacobi is the
Master, and Tony will obey him.
Looking for the Big Finish
release of 2017?
You can stop looking now –
it’s The War Master – Only The Good.
The original return of the
Master to New Who was very much a case of ‘Get a good actor, and let them fly.’
Sir Derek Jacobi, not by any means a Who-fan, had no real idea who the Master
was when he stepped onto the set of Utopia. But when the moment of his
revelations comes, the Utopia Master is fully formed in an instant, and the
switch that’s flipped is astounding. Affable Professor Yana is gone in a
handful of heartbeats, and the Master’s eyes are dark, so dark, his gaze
malevolent, his rage explosive, his pleasure disturbing, seductive, sadistic –
And then he’s gone. Killed
by an insect. Forced to regenerate, and forcing a generation of Who-fans to
imagine what a cosmos with this Master in it would have been like.
We don’t have to imagine
any more.
Big Finish has put
together four stories in a box set that actually helps flesh out the Jacobi
Master – his nature, his philosophy, his fundamental character, and then, in an
initially controversial move, the company has put him back in the Time War.
Many fans, apparently
including Russell T Davies, hadn’t really made the connection that the Jacobi
Master was the Master that John Simm later talked about, the one who was
‘resurrected’ by the Time Lords to fight the Time War. They’re supported in not
making that connection by a line of dialogue, which claims that Yana was found
as a baby with a pocket watch, on the shores of the Silver Desolation.
Big Finish has found a way
around that, and the Jacobi Master will now be known as the War Master forever.
The scope of the story arc
is enormous but intimate, and it makes you trust in it early on, so as each of
the four episodes goes along, there’s never a sense, as there’s sometimes
allowed to be with Doctor stories, that the ending will be improvised out of
string and exposition at the end. Ohhhh no – the Master is better than that.
You sense a progression early, but it’s the progression of a predator. The War
Master box set makes you empathise with malevolence, makes you thrill at
patient, dripping, venom, and even lets you nod when characters are killed,
because they were doomed from the moment they crossed the path of the War
Master.
Nicholas Briggs kicks off
proceedings with Beneath The Viscoid,
which takes traditional Doctor Who tropes and examines their sometimes
ridiculousness – the instant trust the Doctor often inspires, the authority he
assumes, the brilliant man offering to help the oppressed, and the faith the
oppressed have little option but to place in him. Imagine all that, with a
scheming psychopath in the central role. It’s unnerving and gorgeous and it
makes you want more.
The Gardezzans live
beneath the surface of a stinking, viscous sea-world, a world which perversely
slows down the firepower of the Daleks, and allows an otherwise hopelessly
outclassed race of prey a chance to fight back.
Then ‘The Doctor’ arrives,
all politeness and appreciation and offers of help in their fight against the
Daleks. Jacobi’s Master is superbly suited to this kind of story, because of
course what we the audience know of him going in is so little – we know he had
a persona that was affable and helpful, and we know that turned on a dime to
reveal the raging drumbeat-darkness at its core. There’s some of that in this
first story, a little ranting about the pathetic insignificance of the
Gardezzans in private, while appearing always helpful and flustered on the
surface. It’s a story for anyone who likes that inevitable sense of eventual
reveal, who likes stories of how far liars can go before their fictions
collapse in on themselves. Jacobi’s Master is scarily perfect, playing the
Daleks and the Gardezzans off against each other, while pursuing his own
agenda. With support from the likes of Jacqueline King as Nius, leader of the
Gardezzans, and Deirdre Mullins as Osen, their chief scientist, Jacobi flexes
his muscles in a story that never lacks for pace, getting your heart racing,
with the imminence of destruction by the Daleks powering you through this
opening act.
Janine H Jones gives us a
medical drama with some sci-fi clout in the provocatively-named The Good Master. The War Master, under
an assumed name that will make long-term fans cheer, is working as an actual Doctor on the planet Arcking – a
sanctuary for the sick and injured on the fringes of the Time War. He hasn’t
been there long, but he’s made a big difference, diligently saving lives and
patching up those scarred by the war.
Naturally, there’s more to
it than that, and when pilot Cole Jarnish is brought in after his ship is
almost destroyed by Dalek firepower, we begin to learn the secrets of this unusual
planet. The Master is on the hunt for one of those secrets, but the Daleks have
found him, and demand that the Master be handed over to them or the planet will
be exterminated. A race against time, in the middle of a time war? Absolutely –
can the Master find what he needs before the Daleks can hunt him down, and if
he does, what hope does the universe have then? Jones gives us an unusual
story, in which things are not what they first appear. Again, the cast is
littered with solid support for Jacobi’s performance, in particular from Hannah
Barker as Phila, his assistant, and Jonny Green as Cole, a character determined
to put his own mark on the universe, and eager to take any opportunity to do
so. Listen out especially for a chilling line of explanation of how the Master
knows what’s going on on Arcking, and a glorious anti-Dalek rant worthy of
David Tennant’s or Peter Capaldi’s Doctors. It’ll make you laugh, and cheer,
and give you an appreciation of what the Master does when there’s no meddling
Doctor around to cramp his style.
James Goss hates nice people.
That’s the only conclusion
one can safely draw from his contribution to this box set, The Sky Man.
If ‘pacey’ is the keyword
of Beneath The Viscoid, and ‘deceptive’ is the keyword of The Good Master,
‘poisonous’ is probably the best available keyword for The Sky Man.
Be aware, this is
absolutely a compliment. Goss’ story is the most jaw-dropping, the most
patient, the most fundamentally eeeeevil story of the set, because it deals in
hope. The Master is on holiday, deciding to learn the art and science of
viticulture, or wine-making to you and me, on a planet he knows is doomed.
Throughout the course of the story, he does very little but sit in a cottage
and make wine. But he knows the world is doomed, and after his arrival, the
people of the world know it’s doomed too. But who believes a world is doomed
when the skies are blue and the harvest’s good? When babies are born and lovers
bill and coo, who dares to believe it can end?
One man does. One man
determined to change the fate of the world, while the Master makes his wine.
The steady progression towards an inevitable yet utterly horrifying fate drags
you with it, feet dawdling, and your pulse will thrum in this one – there are
only a few moments of high tension, but the sustained
tension is a killer. The Master’s presence is everywhere, his handprint of
death on everyone. Goss’ script will delight anyone who loves The Daemons,
because of that sense of the Master’s dark presence, simply waiting out the
inevitable, and busying himself in the meantime. It’s that slowness of
progression and the increasingly inescapable truth of the Master’s point of
view, that makes Goss’ script the high-point on the release of the year.
And then there’s Guy
Adams. Pleasingly, there’s increasingly Guy Adams at Big Finish, and here, with
The Heavenly Paradigm, he shows this
Master’s philosophy of self-interest and pragmatism while threading the
previous stories together, and raising the stakes in a gambit to end the Time War, to write reality
according to this Master’s will. Plus, there’s Nerys Hughes in suburbia to
boot! The Heavenly Paradigm shows us, more than any other story in the set,
what makes this Master tick. He’s not
an agent of chaos, but of control, his
control, and the way the stories all feed together into Adams’ idea here is –
oh, damn the clichés! – masterful. And in case that wasn’t enough, Adams also
delivers that solution to the Silver Devastation problem.
The way these four stories
knit together, and the way Adams takes them to the dawn on the on-screen War
Master, suggests that any more stories with this glorious incarnation will have
to go backwards, rather than forwards in his timeline. Listen to this box set
and you won’t care. You’ll be waving flags and placards demanding more from the
War Master in 2018.
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