I don’t think there’s ever been any specific explanation – it’s just how he sees himself. He’s essentially your standard megalomaniac arch-villain – a cross between Fu Manchu, Moriarty and Dick Dastardly.
Looking at his schemes in the classic series suggests that he can’t quite decide whether he’d rather rule the universe, hold it to ransom or destroy it out of pure spite, and it’s difficult to avoid the conclusion that his main motivation is to piss off the Doctor.
I peeked just enough to clarify a couple of backstory points, and per Wiki the out-of-universe explanation is that it sounds supervillain-y but more importantly “Master,” like “Doctor,” has an academic connotation.
Ah! That makes more sense, although I realize it would still have the double meaning. Kind of funny to think of all the Timelords having academic names. Hmmm, maybe that would explain the lack of interest in women for the Professor on Gilligan’s Island…
He’s like the Doctor’s evil counterpart: another renegade Timelord who wanders the cosmos, except devoted to general villainy. They were boyhood friends, both of whom left Gallifrey because they found it pompous and boring, but whereas the Doctor became a crusader for good, the Master sought power.
He was best portrayed by Roger Delgado: dapper, Mephistophelean, urbane, suave, and sardonically witty. More self-contained than the Doctor, but just as charismatic, and almost the Doctor’s equal in brilliance: he frequently had to be enlisted to thwart some greater peril, which he’d always do to serve his own selfish ends.
He was one of the great SF villains, in that he thoroughly enjoyed his evil schemes, and approached being bad with such a zestful glee that you couldn’t help cheering for him: and he’d never quite be defeated; the Doctor might thwart this particular alliance with the Nestenes and plan to flood the world with murderous plastic devil dolls and killer armchairs, but he’d always escape in the final chaos, and you just knew he was out somewhere undaunted, planning another nefarious scheme for the sheer hell of it.
That was from, I think, The Terror Of The Autons. Remember the Nestenes from the first Christopher Ecclestone episode, the alien intelligence who could animate plastic and make shop dummies come to life? They had a few cracks at South West England in the early 70’s, allying themselves with the Master who, posing as a businessman, took over a struggling plastics factory with “revolutionary new methods” which involved infiltrating every home with evil plastic doohickeys which would come to life and kill the occupants.
The devil doll was one: this evil leering little mannikin which came to lurching life and murdered people - it was fucking scary, when you were 6 years old. Another product line was the plastic armchair, which would come to life when you sat in it, envelop you in its folds, then engulf you whole - probably traumatised a generation, that one did. The Master was nothing if not inventive when it came to being bad.
I’ve also remembered that he was big into mind control: he’d fix hapless humans with a burning mesmeric stare and intone “I am The Master and you will obey me”; and they’d promptly wander off and attempt to strangle Jon Pertwee. None but the strongest minded could resist his baleful influence.
He was also most satisfactorily sucker-punched, mid-triumphant rant, by the Brigadier at the end of The Five Doctors: “Hello, Master. {Boof!} Lovely to see you again.” I miss the Brigadier.
Why did Martha say “I know that voice” when she heard the new new Master speak? Was it just an in-joke referring to the actor having been in a popular TV show (e.g. “Life on Mars”?) or is it a hint of something to come?
From reading the wiki on Doctor Who (and from the School Reunion episode that I just saw), I think that this series is actually being treated as a continuation of the previous version. As I gather, the Doctor has the ability to regenerate 13 times. In that case, The Doctor can only regenerate 3 more times and then he is stuck. I wonder what plot device will be found to overcome this, since regeneration seems to be a staple of the series.
I would guess something to do with the Tardis itself. It apparently gave Rose the power to make Capt Jack incapable of dying. It would not take much to give the Doctor some additional regenerations. I am sure they would get it done quick and then not mentioned it again.
Or the great big face of Bo told him the secret to more regenerations or that time he fought the “Exabian Time Eel”* it gave him extra lives, or he found the cheat code for extra lives or etc.
We could even have him be another Doctor from a parallel universe.
Jim
Of course we never saw him fight an “Exabian Time Eel”, but that was when it could have happened.
For those who thought John Simm’s Master was a little too silly/manic, keep in mind that he has just regenerated, and that tends to make Time Lords notoriously wonky for a bit.
Vortex Manipulator - a device identical to the one the Doctor mentioned the Family of Blood had stolen in the two parter a couple weeks back.
It’s called a Vortex Manipulator – a type of time-travel device used by the Time Agency that Jack used to work for. It seems that it’s primitive technology compared to the Tardis: the Doctor said that if the Tardis were a sports car, Jack’s Vortex Manipulator would be a space hopper
