Characters / Doctor Who Expanded Universe Masters

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Tropes concerning the Doctor Who Expanded Universe portrayals of the Master, as well as their associates.

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Tropes associated with the New Adventures continuity

The New Adventures Master

The "Tzun" Master (Seventh Doctor)

The Master was given a new regeneration cycle by the Tzun, which allowed him to regenerate after being shot by a vengeful Ace. May or may not be the body exterminated in the TV Movie.

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• Comic-Book Fantasy Casting: His appearance was based off of actor Basil Rathbone.
• Failed a Spot Check: Doesn't, at first, understand why no one recognises him as "Major Kreer", forgetting that Kreer had his previous incarnation's face, and that the regeneration has changed that. After all, he only just got a new regeneration cycle.

Tropes associated with the Missing Adventures continuity

The Missing Adventures Master

Koschei (Second Doctor)

Before he adopted his infamous title, Koschei was a more benevolent individual, until a chain of events led to him vowing to take control of the universe.

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• Anti-Hero: Koschei initially presents himself as a more ruthless version of the Doctor, only killing if he has to and regarding it as an example of sloppy planning.
• The Corrupter: At least appeared to be considering this approach, subtly suggesting to Victoria that destroying a planet didn't have to be an evil act in itself, citing the possibility that he could kill the Daleks before they left Skaro and killed her father.
• Fate Worse than Death: His efforts conclude with him being trapped in the event horizon of a black hole; some sources speculate that this event cost him most of his lives, explaining how the Master was on his last life by the time that the Doctor was only on his fourth.
• A God Am I: Koschei intended to use the Darkheart to make himself this.
• Ignorant of Their Own Ignorance: Needs to explicitly be told by Alia that people will conclude the two of them have been having sex if they use their cover story of going over the mission details in his cabin for the whole trip so far.
• My God, What Have I Done?: Koschei had this moment when he realised that Alia wasn't dead and he just destroyed the Terileptil homeworld for no reason... before he convinces himself that this is just everyone else's fault for not telling him the truth of the situation earlier.
• Never My Fault: Part of Koschei's fall from grace is him blaming other people for not telling him everything.
• Sanity Slippage: A chain of betrayals- both comparatively deliberate and exaggerated in his own mind- lead to him vowing to take over the universe and adopting his more familiar title.

Tropes associated with the Eighth Doctor Adventures continuity

The Eighth Doctor Adventures Master

The Master (Eighth Doctor)

Despite his apparent death in the Eighth Doctor's debut, the Master still returned to plague the Doctor on a few occasions, albeit often through the Doctor facing a past Master.

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• Have We Met Yet?: In Legacy of the Daleks, the Eighth Doctor faces the incarnation of the Master who often fought the Doctor during his exile on Earth in his third incarnation.
• Ignorant of Their Own Ignorance: The 'regeneration' of the "Delgado" Master occurred because he didn't know that Susan Campbell was a native of Gallifrey when he took her hostage, allowing her to expel him from his own TARDIS and destroy his equipment.
• Timey-Wimey Ball: In The Eighth Doctors and Legacy of the Daleks, the Eighth Doctor faces past versions of the Master; he saves the Third Doctor from an attack by the "Delgado" Master, talks with the "Ainley" Master during the Sixth Doctor's trial, and has a run-in with the "Delgado" Master when trying to save Susan.

Tropes associated with Doctor Who Magazine

The Doctor Who Magazine Master

The "Preacher" Master (Eighth Doctor)

This Master was one of the most coolly manipulative and patient versions seen so far, simultaneously juggling a grand plan to achieve divine power with a pettier plan to morally humiliate the Doctor and turn his favourite species into the kind of culture he's spent his life fighting. Rescued from the Time Vortex after the TV Movie, he was granted the body of an old, balding human vagrant, which he suspects was a kind of punishment.

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• Bad Habits: First appears posing as a street preacher in twenty-first-century South London, and his later plan to corrupt Earth involves setting up his own religion.
• The Chessmaster: Of all the versions of the Master, probably the one who is best at long-term planning.
• Comic-Book Fantasy Casting: Possibly coincidental, but he has some resemblance to Samuel L. Jackson.
• Cosmic Keystone: What he's trying to get control of, the Glory.
• Decoy Protagonist: It turns out that the conflict between him and the Doctor was just a sideshow, and the real Good and Evil contenders for the Cosmic Keystone were the Doctor's companion Kroton and the Master's chief minion Katsura Sato.
• Demonic Possession: Pulls a very subtle form on the Doctor's TARDIS, guiding her to the exact points in history where the Doctor's presence will cause the most harm. After he fails to take control of the Glory, his remaining influence is purged.
• First Law of Resurrection: What his explanation of how he survived the end of the TV Movie boils down to.
• Godhood Seeker: What he hopes for.
• It's All About Me: Arrogantly assumes the battle for control of the Glory is between him and the Doctor. It's actually between his minion Katsura Sato and the Doctor's Cyberman companion Kroton.
• Manipulative Bastard: Manipulated the whole human race into villainy, and the Doctor into self-doubt.
• Mirror Character: His plan revolves around destroying the Doctor's moral authority by setting up situations where his flaws will damage people he interacts with.
• Path of Inspiration: Sets one up to corrupt the human race into Suicide Attack-ing Omnicidal Maniacs.
• Racial Transformation: This version of the Master happens to be black in human ethnic terms, although little is made of it. This is due to his mind being placed in the body of a human vagrant.

Tropes associated with Scream of the Shalka

The Scream of the Shalka Master

The "Shalka" Master

Voiced by: Sir Derek Jacobi

Trying to repent after making an off-screen Heel–Face Turn, the Master is confined to the TARDIS in an android body and trying to get used to life with the Doctor as his companion.

• Always Save the Girl: Defied. He has standing orders to 'leave the girl behind', possibly due to prior events hinted at but never fully revealed.
• Brain Uploading: The Master has had his mind put into a robot body.
• Heel–Face Turn: Used to be the Doctor's nemesis; is now trying to repent after the Doctor saved his life.
• Morality Chain: He and the Doctor provide one for each other. The Doctor makes sure the Master doesn't try to turn evil again, and the Master tries to make sure the Doctor doesn't get overly attached to young Earth girls anymore. (He fails.)
• Ridiculously Human Robot: Although of course he's a Time Lord, not a human.
• Robot Buddy
• Sarcastic Devotee: Very much so.

Tropes associated with the Big Finish continuity

In General

• Hidden Depths: Big Finish has a tendency to portray all the incarnations of the Master as being more capable of redemption and nobility than the show.
• Other Me Annoys Me: Much like the Doctor with their incarnations, the different incarnations of the Master don't get along. However, unlike the Doctor who does usually come to accept their past and future selves, the Master always ends up hating and usually tries to betray their other incarnations.
• The Unchosen One: "Master" reveals that the Master was made Death's champion after the Doctor as a child convinced Death to choose him instead, with Death having wanted the Doctor because he killed their childhood bully Torvic to save the Master. As part of the deal, their memories were also altered so that both believed that the Master killed Torvic to save the Doctor. The Doctor is rather horrified to learn this.
• Villain Protagonist: Many incarnations, such as Missy and the War Master, have gotten their own ranges released.

Anthony Ainley's Master

The "Tremas" Master (Fifth & Sixth Doctors)

Voiced by: Chris Finney (2015), Jon Culshaw (2020-Present)

Despite Anthony Ainley never recording a Big Finish play before his death in 2004, his incarnation of the Master has managed to find his way into their audios, either by remaining as a background threat in Circular Time: Winter, by having his part in narration during Destiny of the Doctors: Smoke and Mirrors, or by having him use an avatar in the Reality nexus during The Sixth Doctor: The Last Adventure — The End of the Line. He is technically the same incarnation as the Decayed Master, and would eventually be reduced to that form once again after losing Tremas' body.

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• Dressing as the Enemy: In "Forty 2 - The Auton Infinity", the Master spends the first third of the storyline disguised as the Brigadier.
• Evil Is Petty: In Forty 2 - The Auton Infinity, not only does the Master claim to have attended the birth of a UNIT soldier just to suggest a name that would allow him to play a sick joke (he posed as the Brigadier and killed Captain Edward "Ted" Mears on the grounds that "T. Mears" was an anagram of "Master"), but he also creates an Auton duplicate of the Doctor to leave in the Brigadier's cell in the hope that the Brigadier will think the real Doctor is dead.
• The Nth Doctor: Due to Ainley's passing in 2004, another actor does the Master's voice. The reason given in-universe is that the Master is using an avatar in a simulation or Kamelion disguised as the Master. Culshaw finally appears as the "true" Ainley Master in person in "Lesser Evils" and "Forty 2 - The Auton Infinity".
• Nice Job Fixing It, Villain: A key reason for the Master's loss in "Forty 2 - The Auton Infinity" is that he created an Auton copy of the Fifth Doctor, giving the displaced consciousness of the younger Doctor a new body to inhabit so that he could help disrupt the Master's plans.
• Underestimating Badassery: In "Forty 2 - The Auton Infinity", the Master lures the Brigadier to the dimensional crux of the time portals created by the vortex driller in the belief that the Brigadier will be unable to follow him. However, the Brigadier notes that he's become practical enough in his old age to recognise that it's just as dangerous for the Master to be there as it is for him, so all he has to do stand back and let the currently unstable situation force the Master to fall into one of the portals himself.

Geoffrey Beevers' Master

The "Decayed" Master (Fourth, Sixth, Seventh & Eighth Doctors)

Voiced by: Geoffrey Beevers (2001, 2003, 2012–Present), Alex Macqueen^note while in the body of the Bald Master (2016)

The Big Finish continuity has more or less solidified the Geoffrey Beevers Master as a default form of sorts for the Master during stories taking place in the "classic era", that he occasionally and always unwillingly reverts back to whenever one of his misbegotten bodies are taken from him for one reason or the other.^note Even after getting a new regeneration cycle, he ends up getting trapped inside his burnt incarnation's body at least one more time. Depending on where in the timeline a story is set, he is either still cooling his heels after confronting the Doctor in "The Deadly Assassin", having been forced out of his Tremas body after having messed with the wrong Eldritch Abomination off-screen, or having lost his Bruce body after having made his escape from the Eye of Harmony following the events of the TV Movie.

Being Out of Regenerations, stuck in the decaying remains of his last incarnation, and kept alive only by his will and burning hatred, this Master is often searching for a way to restore his Time Lord body, and shows a capacity to be notably more vicious and destructive than any other of his incarnations. Being faced with his own mortality also gives him plenty of poetic and calm moments.

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• Applied Phlebotinum: "Trail of the White Worm" offers an explanation for the difference in appearance between the rotten and skeletal Pratt-Master and the comparably less decayed Beevers-Master despite them being the same form of the Master; the Master managed to harvest just a bit of energy from the Eye of Harmony in "The Deadly Assassin". Though it was not enough to completely restore himself, it was still enough to partially reverse his deformity.
• Axe-Crazy: "The Two Masters" has him just after getting burnt to a crisp, and he's unbelievably unhinged, even by his low standards. One of the Cult of the Heretic notes the damage isn't just to his appearance, his brain's taken a hit as well, which might have something to do with it.
• Becoming the Mask: He tried hard to defy this during the time he was forced to live by possessing humans, as he noticed he would invariably take on minor personality traits and quirks from the people whose bodies he possessed. As a result, he started to fear that his "essence" would eventually become too diluted if he were to Body Surf too frequently, so he began to go to great pains to make sure the bodies lasted as long as possible and stuck to only possessing members of the same bloodline. He would later admit that as the years went by he still couldn't help but begin to somewhat enjoy the experience of being human and even frequently toyed with the idea of dropping his plans of restoring his Time Lord body and just keep on body hopping forever.
• Been There, Shaped History: "Mastermind" helps explain a few events that took place before and after the Daleks' trial of the Master. Before the trial, the Master was captured in an Egyptian tomb, where his TARDIS was left behind and found by UNIT. After being trapped in the Eye of Harmony, the Master escaped in a gaseous state and began a long string of possessions (see Grand Theft Me below). During this time, the Master got into many parts of history. Careful to not become part of the history books, lest he attract the Doctor's attention, he became the head of the Hudson Dusters, the majority of the casinos in Las Vegas and even controlled part of the mafia.
  • Amusingly, he started his rise to power by getting on the Titanic without knowing its fate.
    "I am not a native of this world. You cannot expect me to remember the name of every ship that sinks."
• Being Evil Sucks: Gets hit with a hard case of this in "Masterful". He's spent centuries in constant agony committing atrocity after atrocity for nothing and he's ready to put it all behind him. He doesn't get to.
• Cool Mask: A gold one with facial markings made of jewels worn in "Dust Breeding", to hide his appearance from the populace on the planet he was on.
• Cruel and Unusual Death: His death at the jaws of the Ravenous sounds prolonged and painful.
• Death Is Cheap: Seemingly dies for good in Planet of Dust, but Day of the Master ends with his earlier self and two of his future incarnations giving him a new regeneration cycle as part of a deal with the Time Lords.
• Defiant to the End: When he is being devoured alive by the Ravenous his last act is to throw the Doctor his TARDIS key and demand they find a way to avenge his death.
• Evil Cannot Comprehend Good: During "Planet of Dust", he assumes the Eighth Doctor's being silly when he tries sacrificing himself to the Ravenous. The idea the Doctor is just legitimately trying to save his former friend doesn't click.
• Evil Cripple: Several of the stories featuring this Master make reference to the constant agony he feels in this state, explaining his more humorless disposition, and his drive to commit greater atrocities as he tries to find a way to restore himself to a form of health.
• For the Evulz: In the "Short Trips" audio play "I Am the Master", the Beevers-Master muses on how much more fun and faster it is to destroy something than to create it. For an example, he tells the story of how he spent about a century single-handedly twisting the values of an eco-conscious interplanetary civilization until its actions drove most of the native species on its home planet extinct, subjected the cattle that provided their main meat supply to hellish underground pens, and ruined the entire society's quality of life and morality, making it possible for him to become the brutal ruler of a slowly and painfully dying empire. Why? For the "challenge".
• The Fourth Wall Will Not Protect You: In "I Am the Master", the Master tells the listener that he's perfected the art of planting "earworms" so much he can actually get someone who hears a recording of his voice to teleport to him across space and time. It's still very unlikely it will happen, of course, but who knows, maybe while listening to "I Am the Master" you'll, as the Master puts it, "win the lottery".
• Grand Theft Me:
  • The Two Masters reveals that he did this to himself when the Cult of the Heretic transferred him into the body of his future self after the other him reduced him to his burnt state, although the younger Master was unaware of the identity of his attacker.
  • After his essence was expelled from Bruce's body, the Master escaped to Earth and began possessing bodies to re-establish himself. However, the process had also transformed him into "the embodiment of entropy", and anyone he possessed expired quickly. The longest his bodies lasted, after various chemical treatments and becoming a hermit to avoid infection, was around forty years.
• Heel–Face Door-Slam: After waking up on an uknown planet in the middle of nowhere, found by a stranger who cannot see his horrific burns, this Master actually comes close to a form of a romantic redemption. It is slam shut for him by his oncoming Body Surf incarnation, the "Bruce" Master played by Eric Roberts, who disables his perception filter he unbeknownst was wearing, and makes his romantic interest recoil in horror.
• Hereditary Curse: Became one, of a sort. To ensure he had a succession of bodies that he could adjust well to, the Master possessed a line of men from a family he became involved in, passing from father to son once there was a grandson alive and well to inherit later on. He even referred to himself as a "family heirloom" during this time. It went well for him, until one of his successors figured everything out and locked the Master in his sealed penthouse suite.
• Hidden Depths: Of all the Masters he is the only one to in any way pass Missy's Secret Test of Character. He does this just by living on an island with a woman and enjoying it. While he is tempted at first to go out and commit evil again, his desire to do so graudually fades away with time, and in the end he simply doesn't feel a need for it any more. It's ruined by the machinations of the Eric Roberts Master.
• Hoist by Their Own Petard: His many, many attempts to keep his cadaverous body alive mean that he's the perfect smorgasbord to a horde of hungry Ravenous.
• Kick the Dog: While the Master has always had a tendency to wantonly kill innocents who got in his way for little to no reason, this version seems to do it especially frequently, purely as a way to momentary distract himself from the constant pain his condition has left him in.
  "There are few things more satisfying than taking the life of an innocent. If not victory, then REVENGE!"
• Lazy Alias: When in hiding in his future self's body he takes on the name "Malgrove". Which, in the local language, means... well.
  Seventh Doctor: Tell me, do you have any originality at all?
• Loss of Identity: In the audio "Master".
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business: His acting much more campier and Faux Affably Evil in the first half of "The Two Masters" should be a hint something's not right. Because there's a "Freaky Friday" Flip going on, and the Macqueen Master is stuck in his past self's body.
• Other Me Annoys Me: His team-up with the Macqueen Master was already off to a bad start with his future self being responsible for his "condition", but spending time together makes it worse. Crispy considers his future self a blithering idiot more fond of making stupid puns than just killing everyone everywhere.
• Personal Hate Before Common Goals: In "The Two Masters", the Doctor tries talking the Masters out of killing or abandoning him because he's the only one who can pilot the TARDIS without destroying it. This version refuses because he just hates the Doctor that much.
• Possession Burnout: A frequent problem for him during his time on Earth ("Mastermind"). The human bodies he possess originally tended to wear out over the course of a few years, and even though he eventually discovered a way of prolonging their life, he still had to find a new host around every forty years.
• Real Life Writes the Plot: Geoffrey Beevers is the only surviving actor to play the Master in the original run of the television series^note indeed, his first audio appearance in "Dust Breeding" resulted from Big Finish being unable to agree terms with Anthony Ainley, and hence has become the "regular" Master for the Fourth Doctor Adventures and many other appearances in spite of only playing the role for a single television serial.
• Retired Monster: Briefly becomes this in "Masterful" when he finds himself stuck on an island with Kitty, a woman with her own checkered past. Whilst he initially plans on returning to action he actually finds that he enjoys living a quiet life for once. Of course it ends tragically.
• Significant Anagram: Why of course. At one point hid himself as an aristocrat named Mr. Seta.
• Stable Time Loop: In "The Two Masters", his existence as the "Burnt Master" seems to be a result of this. The Macqueen Master travels back in time to his arrival on Terserus, traps him in an energy net and severely burns him as part of a plan to fake his death. The Macqueen Master of course only did this because he knows it happened to him in his own past.
• Tomato in the Mirror: In "Master". It's a Foregone Conclusion from the start, and the episode isn't so much about The Reveal as it is about its consequences.
• Unholy Matrimony: His relationship with Kitty is a surprisingly heartfelt version of this since she let herself get bribed into letting who knows how many people die and he's... well, the Master. But the reason they fall for each other is because they both just want to stop being evil and live a simple but fulfilling life.
• Yank the Dog's Chain: On the receiving end, from one of his other selves no less, in "Masterful". After his who knows how many centuries of constant pain and evil he finally finds a measure of peace living with Kitty. Then the Eric Roberts Master arrives and, at first, it seems like he is trying to charm Kitty away but instead he reveals that Kitty loves poor old Crispy and that her feelings aren't entirely unreciprocated. The one problem is that he's been wearing a perception filter the whole time so Kitty has never seen his true, decayed face. He decides to show it to her, at the urging of the Roberts Master, to finally have no more lies between them. The last we hear of the two of them together is Kitty screaming in horror while Crispy cries in despair and Roberts observes it's time to leave.
• Your Days Are Numbered: By "Planet of Dust", his body is finally running out of steam for good, and he can no longer think of any tricks or finagles to save his life. Even the constant physical pain he's in is dying down, because those parts of him are shutting down bit by bit. He's still every bit as vicious, even though he's wrapping himself up like a mummy just to stay alive a little longer.

Alex Macqueen's Master

The "Reborn" Master (Fifth, Seventh & Eighth Doctors)

"Please, please! I'm only your humble Master."

Voiced by: Alex Macqueen (2012, 2014–2016, 2021), Geoffrey Beevers^note while in the body of the Burnt Master (2016)

"Shut up or I'll kill you! In fact... yes. I think I'll kill you anyway."

A very Affably Evil incarnation, rescued by the Time Lords from his "predicament" and granted a new Time Lord body and a set of regenerations. He's a Wicked Cultured Sharp-Dressed Man who yearns for the Doctor's attention. Having a brand new regeneration cycle, this Master is no longer haunted by the fear of death, and as such he shows a greater willingness to attempt especially dangerous and audacious schemes, and has no problems with getting up close and personal with the people he's manipulating.

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• Affably Evil: To the point that he has to dial it back when impersonating the Doctor.
• Assimilation Plot: Something this Master strives to accomplish. He rather likes the idea of having an army, but he doesn't enjoy the prospects of building one up himself.
• Bad Boss: He has no compunctions towards demeaning, mind controlling or even killing subordinates who catch him the wrong way, sparing only death from the most important ones to his plan until they're no longer of importance. He just sees them as his possessions, not people. Liv Chenka points out to the Master's latest Dragon, Sally Armstrong, that he would think little of disposing of her when she's outlived her usefulness.
  • To be fair, he has his moments where he's almost a Benevolent Boss, praising hard work and good results, and he seemed genuinely fond of Sally Armstrong, even claiming to Eight in private that Sally was brilliant enough she could fly his TARDIS on her own. These moments are few and sandwiched very deeply between his Bad Boss moments though. Even his actions towards taking revenge on Sally's murderer are closer to someone killing someone for destroying a possession than taking revenge for a loved one. To be fair, he did give her death some respect, however brief.
  • Played straight in"UNIT: Dominion". He's shocked that his henchmen aren't okay with the idea of their loved ones dying as part of his schemes.
• Bald of Evil: UNIT just calls him the bald one.
  The Master: Whatever did you do to your hair?
  The Eighth Doctor: (with extra thick sarcasm) I'll give you the name of my barber.
  The Master: (genuinely amused) Oh, touché!
• Big Bad: Of "Dark Eyes 3", and "UNIT: Dominion".
• Boxed Crook: In "Eyes of the Master", the Master claims the Time Lords resurrected him and gave him a new regeneration cycle to help them against the Daleks. Suffice to say, things go progressively, horribly wrong from there.
• Camp: He's even more theatrical and "look-at-me"-ish than Six. The Seventh Doctor mentions to his companion if he's ever found shouting "Later!", to shoot him between the eyes.
• Character Catchphrase: "Hello, you!"
• The Chessmaster: A fan of setting up dominos and then watching them fall.
• Cold Reading: Revisiting UNIT: Dominion reveals he's excellent at this.
• The Corrupter: Though the other Masters weren't above using hypnosis or bribery to get others on their side, this Master practically revels in it. People, events, populations and timelines, he will stick his hands in and work it to his own advantage.
• Creative Sterility: Is accused of this by the Eighth Doctor in "Masterplan"; it inspires the Master to make a new plan on the spot in the ruins of his old one.
• Disproportionate Retribution: When Jo (not knowing she is surrounded by various Masters) says that he and some of his other selves look like bank managers he immediately reaches for a battleaxe.
• Enemy Mine: Teams up with the Eminence and the Dalek Time Controller to try and rule the cosmos together (before he deposes them anyways), which the Doctor points out are rather insane ideas on all counts. Though the plans go exceedingly well in the execution, they inevitably and dramatically backfire on him. Surprisingly, he manages to get the better of the Dalek Time Controller, but was so focused on doing so that the Doctor manages to completely blindside him without even trying.
• Eye Scream: In order to track down Molly O'Sullivan and her dark eyes, he spends some time posing as an optometrist. Do we really need to say how it goes?.
• Faux Affably Evil:
  • In "UNIT: Dominion", his cheery disposition doesn't drop even slightly after he reveals himself to be the Master. He just gets hammier.
  • During "The Two Masters", with such delights as mockingly claiming the Tissue Compression Eliminator is malfunctioning as he slaughters his way through some Rocketmen.
• Foil: For Eight. His fancy dress and Bald of Evil contrast the more rugged look Eight sports in the "Dark Eyes" series (and even if he's gotten a hair cut, he still has hair, something he pithily comments on). And Macqueen's Master is outwardly Keet and cheery while cruel and disloyal at heart, in contrast to Eight who is much more cynical and jaded in his exterior, but still retains his wanderlust and Romanticism at his core.
• Future Me Scares Me: Invoked when he pretends to be a future regeneration of the Doctor.
  • The Fog of Ages: Invoked in the same story, as an excuse for why he supposedly can't remember a lot of important things.
• Grand Theft Me: Is subjected to this in "The Two Masters" when the Cult of the Heretic switch him with his own past self, leaving him trapped once again in his burnt body and fighting to get back to his original form.
• I Hate Past Me: In "The Two Masters" he is extremely unhappy with the fact that, of all his incarnations, he had to end up with the Burned Master as his partner, as he considers him a "kill joy" with no sense of humour or fun, and states that he would have preferred "the snake" (Eric Roberts), or "Mr. Velveteen" (the Tremas version) and talks about how fun it was when it was all "pointy beards and Nehru jackets" (the original Delgado version).
• It's All About Me: Already a problem with the Master to begin with, but he's willing to try and kill his past self because, hey, those losers aren't him. If they don't have the stuff to last, they deserve to die.
• Keet: In "UNIT: Dominion", he's excitable, enthusiastic and, most importantly, loud.
• Kick the Dog: During "The Two Masters", he kills a young woman the Doctor's just taken along for no real reason beyond finding her annoying.
• Large Ham: After his incredibly hammy turn in his debut "UNIT: Dominion", the Master is notably more restrained in "Dark Eyes 2".
• Let's Get Dangerous!: Though the Master was never one to stand on the lines of safety, this Master seems particularly more willing to go into obscenely dangerous territory. This includes making deals with the Eminence and the Daleks for universal domination, not to mention his actions in "UNIT: Dominion". It may help that, unlike his earlier incarnations, he doesn't have any particular issues regarding his body's physical state nor his future reincarnations to worry about. Unfortunately for him, these events keep blowing up in his face, and yet he still finds ways to top himself in scale.
• Louis Cypher: Posing as a "Dr. Harcourt De'Ath" may have been a bit overdramatic.
• Morally Ambiguous Doctorate: Adopts the disguise of a doctor in "Dark Eyes 2". And no, he's not a benign one.
• Nothing Personal: Says this to his Geoffrey Beevers incarnation when he realizes that he himself was the reason he turned into the Burned Master in the first place.
• Mirror Character: From Seven. Played entirely for horror once it's revealed to what extent this trope is in effect. This is in direct contrast to his relationship with Eight.
• An Offer You Can't Refuse: He outright calls the deal the Time Lords made with him this.
• Other Me Annoys Me: During his team-up with the Beevers Master, regarding him as a psychotic, grumpy killjoy who won't let him have any fun, stealing kills before he can even crack off a pun.
• Pungeon Master: He likes cracking puns as he horribly murders people.
• Sharp-Dressed Man: This incarnation combines a simple, classic suit with a velvet jacket, and prides himself on his fashion sense.
• Shout-Out to Shakespeare: In "Eyes of the Master" he seems fond of this.
• The Starscream: If it was ever in doubt, never trust a deal with the Master to go well for you. No matter how aware you are of the coming betrayal, he will make it happen and he will make it work.
• The Unfettered: While all the Master's incarnations are quite disrespectful in their attitude towards the workings and laws of time travel, he is perhaps the most brazen and blatant about it of them all. He will gleefully cross his own timeline several times to carry out his plans without any concern for the paradoxes or personal dangers involved in doing so. He has, for instance, no problems with attempting to kill the Seventh Doctor after already coming off of a fight with the Eighth Doctor. Even when meeting his past and future selves in Masterful, the first thing he does is joke about killing them.
• What Happened to the Mouse?: It's never mentioned what happened to Chancellor Goth's TARDIS in "UNIT: Dominion".
• Wicked Cultured: Oh yes.

Eric Roberts' Master

The "Deathworm Morphant" Master (Eighth Doctor)

Voiced by: Geoffrey Beevers (2013, 2019), Yee Jee Tso^note when in possession of the Maestro family's bodies (2013), Eric Roberts (2019, 2021)

"Oh, Doctor, I've missed this. All our conversations, the subtlety, the oneupmanship. It's been too long. It's good to be back."

Following the events of the TV Movie, the Master was once again left in a severely weakened state, being trapped as an insubstantial gaseous form inside the Eye of Harmony in the Doctor's TARDIS. He would be freed and go through some more adventures before losing his human body. He eventually managed to stage his escape, landing on Earth with no TARDIS and forced to possess the body of several humans through time while looking for a way to restore his Time Lord body and in general keeping a low profile to keep the Doctor from discovering him.

Like the Tremas Master, this is technically the same incarnation as the Decayed Master. Eventually, he would be reduced back into that state where he would die at the hands of the Ravenous, but then be given a new regeneration cycle thanks to his other selves.

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• Continuity Snarl: His appearance in The Diary of River Song's "The Lifeboat and the Deathboat" — which marked the first time Eric Roberts had played the character since the 1996 movie — completely contradicts "Mastermind", stating that he was able to ride the energy wave from the Eye of Harmony into a spare room of the TARDIS, which the TARDIS then jettisoned into the time vortex to get rid of him, leaving him stranded. "Mastermind" author Jonathan Morris subsequently suggested that it may have been a case of Unreliable Narrator.
  • Explained in Day of the Master; he was expelled from the TARDIS, drifted through the vortex, encountered River, and then crash-landed on a planet in Gallifrey's distant past and met a renowned Gallifreyian scientist. Following his alliance with his future selves against the Ravenous, he was expelled back into the Vortex, his memory apparently erased by his future selves to preserve their timeline, which thus led into the events of "Mastermind".
• Disability Immunity: In Day of the Master, his current condition in a stolen human body tainted his remaining regeneration energy so that the Ravenous, who naturally 'eat' Time Lords, found him unpalatable.
• Even Evil Has Loved Ones: Zig-Zagged and heavily down-played with Lila in Master! While he does show some signs of having a genuine soft-spot for Lila, and even offers to take her off earth before destroying it because he enjoys her company without any strings attached, he is not above manipulating her or putting her in harms way if it benefits him.
• Even Evil Has Standards: Is hesitant about creating time paradoxes messing with his future self's body, but the War Master assures him it's not a problem.
• Evil Cannot Comprehend Good: In "Master!" this is ultimately what drives a wedge between him and Lila, culminating in her betraying him. Despite his legitimate offer to take her off earth and travel with him, she can't abide the fact he was going to destroy the earth after they left.
• Faux Affably Evil: "Masterful" proves that he can switch on the charm with the best of them when he wants to. Especially with Kitty. The 'faux' part being due to him only doing it to make his other self jealous.
• Fate Worse than Death: In Nemesis Express, he claims he is still dealing one to Bruce Gerhart, keeping him imprisoned and screaming powerlessly at the Master.
• For the Evulz: Shoots Liv Chenka on sight during Day of the Master, before the War Master can stop him (not out of pragmatism, but just because he already knows it won't take).
• Help Yourself in the Future: Day of the Master ends with this Master assisting the War Master and Missy in stopping the Ravenous, and later directly accompanies them as they give the Burned Master, from a point in the "Deathworm" Master's immediate future, a new regeneration cycle.
• Stable Time Loop: Day of the Master sees him contribute to a chain of events set up by his future selves that end with him being expelled into the Time Vortex so that he can revert to the Burnt Master and get given a new cycle of regenerations.
• Toxic Friend Influence: Becomes this to Lila in Master!
• Yank the Dog's Chain: When he sees that the Beevers Master seems to have happily retired with a woman called Kitty who is in love with him he decides to ruin it all by tricking his other self into showing Kitty his real face.

Sir Derek Jacobi's Master

The "War" Master (Eighth & Tenth Doctors)

"Things die. It's just what they do."

Voiced by: Sir Derek Jacobi (2017-Present), Paul McGann (2020)

Time Lord Agent: I'm pointing a stazer pointed at your hearts. It is set to maximum. There will be no regeneration for you when I pull the trigger. And what do you have? [mockingly] A cup of tea!
The Master: [smugly] Yes... [calmly puts down the cup] Are you scared yet?

The incarnation of the Master active during the Last Great Time War, before he went AWOL and fled to the end of the universe to become "Professor Yana". With his actual screen-time as the Master being ultimately quite limited on the TV show, Big Finish gives Derek Jacobi a chance to expand upon this incarnation of the character, allowing this Master to not only show off his glorious villainous hamminess, but also some of the more low-key sides of his personality. His portrayal presents him to be both quite charming, polite, and poetic; but also thoroughly ruthless, diabolic, and very, very patient.

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• Actually Pretty Funny: When the Master lands in the suburbs of Stamford Bridge in the 1970s, his TARDIS decides to disguise itself as a red police box. Upon seeing the visage, the Master gives a hearty laugh and comments that he rather appreciates the fact that his TARDIS' chameleon circuit has a sense of humor.
• Affably Evil: Perhaps one of the most polite Masters around, to the point that he can come off as a genuinely nice person without any hypnosis involved. He's also incredibly vicious and unable to truly empathize with others, being so unengaged by a mother's drive to save her race being born from her dead husband and her son he plays off his yawning from exhaustion.
• All-Powerful Bystander: He exploits the fact that Time Lords are somewhat infamous for refusing to get involved in local affairs as an excuse for why he will not help Cole saving the population of a peaceful farming planet from slowly dying from an environmental catastrophe caused by the Time War. As anyone familiar with the Master knows, this is Blatant Lies on his behalf, as he holds absolutely no regards whatsoever for the Time Lords' laws and rules, and even constantly gleefully breaks them without a second thought whenever he gets the chance. His refusal to interfere is a part of one of his plans.
• The Bad Guy Wins: Despite some minor hiccups, his efforts on Callous are an unambiguous success.
• Bad Habits: Disguises himself as a country priest once again.
• Batman Gambit: He knew that Cole, despite his good intentions, was not only going to completely screw up his attempt to save the population of the peaceful farming planet, but also do something awful to the timeline in the process; in fact his whole plan to use the Heavenly Paradigm hinged on it and it worked perfectly!
  • This Master has a penchant for these, but most notably in Rage of the Time Lords he manages to trick a practically omniscient being by correctly anticipating its actions and those of two other individuals, including the Eighth Doctor. Further, at the same time, he manages to foil the Doctor twice. Once by orchestrating a fake crisis that would force the Doctor to "team up" with him and predicting what the Doctor's plan would be, and then again by having a back-up plan that would result in the Doctor losing any memory of his encounter with this incarnation.
• Beard of Evil: In classic Master tradition, he sports a Delgado/Ainley goatee in contrast to his clean-shaven and good-natured "Professor Yana" alter-ego.
• Break the Haughty:
  • It's minor but this is an incarnation who is very used to having absolute control over any given situation and people, and as a consequence being shot by Liv Chenka clearly throws him off his game causing his Faux Affably Evil mask to drop and to just angrily insult her before doing what he's forced to do. He doesn't even manage to fully turn the tables and is forced to summon Missy for help.
  • When his attempt to take control of an ancient super-weapon brings him to the attention of Bilis Manger, he is completely terrified to the point of coming across as a helpless old man having a delusional breakdown to outside observers. Even when the Master regains his composure, it is clear he is out of his league with Bilis.
• Call to Agriculture: In "The Sky Man", he decides to take a backseat to Cole's attempt to save the population of a farming planet, and spends his downtime cultivating his own vineyard as he thought learning a bit about the nitty-gritty of the making of wine could be interesting.
• Chronic Villainy: Seems to believe this for himself and his other selves. When he learns that Missy was putting them all through a Secret Test of Character to see if there was 'another way of being the Master' beyond being evil, he bitterly claims that there isn't.
• Corrupt Bureaucrat: Have you ever really thought about how much power a bureaucrat in charge of a vaccination campaign in the middle of a pandemic has? The Master did.
• Cultured Badass: What does he do in The Sky Man while Cole attempts to save the population of a farming planet? He decides to cultivate his own vineyard because he thought learning how to make wine could be fun. He seems to genuinely enjoy it.
• The Corrupter: Plays this role to his "companion", Cole. He exploits both Cole's well-meaning nature and his past trauma to mold him into exactly the kind of Well-Intentioned Extremist who can help him to further his schemes.
• The Dreaded: River Song, who flirts and banters with every other Master incarnation she meets, reacts with nothing but genuine terror and disgust when this incarnation shows up.
• Even Evil Has Standards: During "Day of the Master", the Master reveals that he is aware of the Doctor's house at Baker Street, but has made it a rule not to attack the Doctor and his companions while they're resting there, albeit justifying it as attacking them while they're relaxing wouldn't be fun.
  • Missy planning on letting the universe die 'for funsies' disgusts him. He says he's glad to have stopped her even though doing this required poisoning her, himself and three other Masters.
• Evil Counterpart: While the War Doctor is at the heart of the Time War, desperately trying to stop it without endangering innocents, the War Master is trying to end the war without caring who he has to step on to do so. In a dark twist, the War Doctor considers himself a monster, whereas the War Master is simply doing what he thinks is right even while being an unrepentant Card-Carrying Villain.
• Evil Gloating: Is fond of this. Memorably, in The Missing Link he taunts the sole survivor of a species he has otherwise wiped out by saying he's only keeping her alive because the pain of her continuing existence is more fun than 'just' committing genocide.
• Evil Laugh: He shows off a bone-chilling cackle in the teaser trailer.
• Evil Old Folks: He is among the cruelest incarnations of the Master, and more than once exploits the fact that people tend to underestimate him because of his elderly appearance.
• Evilutionary Biologist: Takes up this role in "Rage of the Time Lords", gathering useful genetic abnormalities from across all of time and space to combine together into an extremely powerful living weapon that is as equally savage and merciless as the Daleks he plans to unleash it upon.
• Evil Wears Black: "The Good Master" sees him having to wear a space suit, not too much unlike the orange one the Doctor always ends up in for various space adventures. But the difference is that his space suit is, of course, black.
• Fake Memories: Goes to town on poor Jo Grant with this trope. He alters her memory so she will remember him as the uncle who got her a job at UNIT, as a means to pump her for information and retrieving certain samples he lost in his Delgado days, though he's definitely gleeful as he keeps prodding and pushing her to realize her cheery old uncle is actually the monstrous alien genius, and leaves her in despair unable to remember her actual uncle, just the modified memories the Master gave her.
• The Fettered: Well, relatively speaking, but Leela notices that he is definitely much more calm and controlled that the angry and vengeful Decayed Master she is used to dealing with.
• For the Evulz: Still every bit of capable of pointless sadism as any others. Liv Chenka shoots down his claim that he shot her For Science! by pointing out he did it twice, and before he knew she'd survive. After this, he declares that since she can't technically die, he'll just shove her out into space, where she'll potentially suffer and die and revive and die again for eternity.
  Liv: That's pure sadism!
  Master: My dear, I think you forget who you're dealing with.
• Fountain of Youth: As a part of his attempt to hide himself from the Time War and the Time Lords after everything has Gone Horribly Wrong, he uses his Chameleon Arch not only to camouflage himself as a human but also to regress his physical age back into that of a baby.
• "Freaky Friday" Flip: Forces one with the Eighth Doctor in "Hearts of Darkness". Even after the Doctor gets his body back, the Master gloats that during that time, he's committed countless atrocities, leaving the Doctor a persona non grata in many worlds.
• A Glass of Chianti: He is quite found of wine and when he finds himself with some downtime in "The Sky Man", he decides to spend it learning how to make his own, including how to grow grapes and the finer points of how the fermentation process works. It certainly goes quite well and he genuinely seems to enjoy it.
• Gone Horribly Wrong: The Time Lords brought him back to fight on their side; it backfires horribly as he goes rogue, and then goes AWOL when the conflict gets too much even for him.
  • Surprisingly, this Master actually does try to save the universe from the Time War and make it better, though unlike the Doctor he's thinking large-scale rather than small-scale. Unsurprisingly, the device that will rewrite the universe to do it will not affect him, leaving him in a prime position to take over. Even less surprisingly, he overestimated the device's capability and things become even worse than before, to the point that he flees to the edge of the universe to try and ride the disaster out.
    "Typical, really. The one time I try to make the universe a better place, this is what happens."
• Good Is Boring: In-Universe. When the Gardezzan start extolling their righteous struggle against the Daleks, the Master's reaction makes it clear that he would rather have a tooth pulled than listen to it.
• Heroic Sacrifice: In Masterful, this Master chooses to prevent the destruction of the universe caused by his future self by poisoning himself and his other selves to negate the timeline where their actions unleased the entropy wave that is currently threatening existence.
• Icy Blue Eyes: Jacobi's natural bright blue eyes are used to underline the Master's inscrutable, but ultimately ruthless nature on the covers.
• Impersonation Gambit: A villainous inversion. "Beneath the Viscoid" sees him pretending to be the Doctor to win the trust of the locals. It requires him playing up his Faux Affably Evilness for all its worth.
• It's All About Me: The Master not only describes himself this way, but asserts that everyone in the universe really thinks this way. He's just honest about it. Whether or not he's really that selfish explicitly comes into question, however.
• Irony: The Heart of Arcking implies the Master might have some good in him, which he denies profusely. He's also the only incarnation that's able to make the moral choice to poison his other selves to end the Entropy Wave timeline in ''Masterful''.
• Kick the Dog: Some things never change. When he has the chance and motive to do so, he gleefully engages in brutal mind games with both Jo Grant and Nyssa.
• Lack of Empathy:
  • One of his victims tries to flee, and his manipulations drive her to suicide even without him physically present. By the time he catches up, he regards the corpse with mild annoyance - now there's nobody to move the loot he's after to his ship and he'll have to do it himself.
  • After wiping out a city during one of his missions in the Time War, he "rescues" a sole survivor, but only after he forces her to choose between her own survival and abandoning her sister. It turns out he just keeps her around because he finds her grief and hate for him interesting, and he promptly abandons her once she deadens her emotions.
• Large Ham: For the most part he's rather calm and affable... and then he opens up a viewing port with a squad of Daleks on the other side and taunts them jovially simply because he knows their weapons aren't working. Once the port is closed, he's right back to his usual collected self.
• Long Game: This Master has a propensity for slow-working plans, and has no problem with waiting around for prolonged period of times for everything to fall in place. In fact, he makes it very clear that he rather savours the process of watching his deviousness unfold in slow motion.
• Man of Wealth and Taste: In addition to his Waistcoat of Style from the TV series, he's also sometimes depicted as wearing a full three-piece suit.
• Mistaken Age: Basically applies in Day of the Master, after he meets the Eighth Doctor's companion Liv Chenka; while Liv realises he's the Master, the Doctor doesn't meet this Master directly, so he never realizes that he's older than the Masters he's familiar with.
• Mistaken for Special Guest: In Day of the Master, Liv initially assumes that this Master is a Time Lord agent responding to her distress call, unaware that she's currently on a Time Lord space station that the Master claimed for himself.
• Morality Pet: Subverted with his "companion" Cole. When the Master needs to sacrifice Cole in order to complete his plan, he has spend quite some time with him and the two have been through quite a few life-threatening situations together and have by then cultivated a bit of a friendly student-mentor relationship. You'd almost expect there to be a moment of the Master hesitating, thinking the whole thing over, and wistfully realizing that he has come to care for Cole; but there isn't. He just gleefully and immediately sacrifices him without a second thought, and when Cole attempts to protest against getting obliterated, the Master coldly reminds him that he had agreed to make "any" sacrifice in exchange for the Master's help.
• Mugging the Monster: A group of desperate, sick and starving farmers tries to rob his temporary vineyard estate for food and supplies. Big mistake.
  Farmer: We may not be able to climb your fence! But we can still set fire to your vines!
  Other farmer: Yeah, we'll burn your vineyard down!
  The Master: [opens the front door] Now, gentlemen, I'd rather you didn't! It promises to be a lovely vintage!
  Farmer: How're you gonna stop us, old man? Look at you. Standing there in nothing but your bare 'ands. What you gonna do to us, 'ey? Tear us limb from limb?
  The Master: [sinisterly] ... Now, that's an invitation I cannot possibly refuse.
• Mythology Gag: He's back to calling himself Dr. Keller.
• My God, What Have I Done?: The Master's plan to use the Heavenly Paradigm to alter the timeline in his favor backfires spectacularly, as ripple effects from his alternations eventually effect the events of the Time War, leading to several of the battles of the war that Daleks had originally lost instead turning into victories for them, culminating with the Dalek Emperor taking control of the Cruciform. The Master is appropriately horrified when he discovers this as he realizes that his actions may very well have cost the Time Lords any chance of victory in the war.
  "WHAT HAVE I DONE?! ENOUGH! IT'S LOST! IT'S ALL LOST!!!"
• Mirror Character: In the introduction to his audio range, he makes heavy use of From a Certain Point of View and Exact Words to make himself sound like the Doctor.
• Pragmatic Evil: Saving the universe really has less to do with being nice and more to do with actually having a universe to live in (or, as he puts it, a universe to enjoy his victory in), considering the Time War will inevitably cause the universe to be destroyed. That said, he does state that he's doing what he thinks is right and that he doesn't actually take pleasure in the deaths in his wake.
• Pragmatic Villain: In “Master of Worlds”, when circumstances force him to work with Kate Stewart against an army of pan-dimensional Cybermen, he generally keeps his word about his plans focusing on defeating the Cybermen because he needs UNIT’s aid to get his TARDIS back. That doesn't stop him from leaving a little present behind when he does leave... Wirrn spores.
  • In general, this is what defines him. Unlike the other Masters he's usually focused and sensible enough for his plans to succeed, as fits someone fighting a time war. James Goss even refers to him in the "Masterful" extras as the only Master who is in any way competent at being the Master.
• Politically Incorrect Villain: In true Master tradition. He views the various "backwaters" races he has to interact with during the course of his plan with a mix of barely contained condescension and contempt.
  Glortz: Do not sleep for too long, Time Lord. The fate of my people cannot wait forever.
  The Master: [under his breath] "The fate of your people"? As if I cared one jot for a race of skulking, amphibian bores!
• Resurrected for a Job: The Time Lords brought him back to fight in the Time War; it didn't work.
• Sdrawkcab Name: When infiltrating the Skaro elite and passing himself as the slain Davros' father, the uses the alias Sorvad. He passes it off as a family tradition.
• Soft-Spoken Sadist: He owns a soothing, calm voice that works well to put others at ease, and he keeps that tone even when he's about to kill you so he can continue on his way.
  • Surprisingly, he considers himself an aversion; he claims he takes no pleasure from killing people or causing pain. He's simply doing what he thinks is right. Of course, considering what he does before and after this claim, what he considers "right" takes a whole heaping of salt.
• Shoo the Dog: He reluctantly sends his TARDIS away as he goes into hiding at the far end of time to avoid being tracked.
• Spotlight-Stealing Squad: Since Big Finish acquired Sir Derek's services, they have certainly made the most of him as the War Master continually makes surprise appearances in several different audio ranges and boxsets on top of starring in his own ongoing series.
• Suspect Is Hatless: Invoked when Liv tries to describe this Master to the Eighth Doctor; the Doctor notes that the description of an older man with a beard is vague enough to apply to multiple incarnations of his old friend, so there's no way for him to know which Master Liv met.
• Too Kinky to Torture: Spends days being brutally interrogated and doesn't seem the slightest bit put off by it, cackling with laughter in between screams and jovially chatting with the goons performing the torture like an old friend offering career advice. During his last chance conversation with the now frustrated Corrupt Corporate Executive responsible, he maintains total control of the conversation and by the end she's answering his questions.
• Trapped in TV Land: In Escape from Reality, while under Dalek pursuit, he gets trapped in the Land of Fiction. He milks the opportunity for all it's worth, plundering technology that cannot exist in the real Universe.
• Underestimating Badassery: Due to his elderly appearence, people who are unaware of his true identity tend to dismiss him as just some harmless, slightly foppish, older gentleman. It is usually the last mistake they make.
• Villain Protagonist: Of his own six-volume (to date) spin-off series, no less!
• Villainous Breakdown: His realization that his plan to use the Heavenly Paradigm have backfired spectacularily and has given the Daleks the advantage in the Time War, horrifies him and causes him to have a major My God, What Have I Done? moment. Though he quickly regains his composure, it is only because he knows he needs a relatively cool head to make an effective escape plan.
• What You Are in the Dark: In "Masterful", when it becomes clear that the only way to save the universe is to undo his timeline he poisons himself and four of his other incarnations. An act his other selves were all either too selfish (Macqueen and Simm) or too disillusioned (Beevers and Missy) to do. He notes while dying that the Doctor would be proud.
• You Are Better Than You Think You Are: The Heart of Arcking, which is telepathic and read his mind, tells him this. This being the Master, the idea triggers a minor existential crisis in him.
  • The ending of "Masterful", as well as his eventual transformation into Missy and the Lumiat, would seem to suggest it wasn't wrong.
• You Will Be Beethoven: His plan in Anti-Genesis is one of the most audacious and horrifying he's ever pulled, inserting himself in the Skaro elite pre-Genesis of the Daleks and supplanting Davros as the Daleks' creator and master. The Daleks themselves are furious, and go to extreme lengths to restore their history by allying themselves with the Kisgart Master to get rid of the impostor.
• You Wouldn't Shoot Me: Ends up being held at gunpoint by Liv Chenka and makes a speech along these lines. He's very surprised when she does do it (although non-lethally) and realises she will definitely kill him if he's not careful.

Milo Parker's Master

The "Young" Master

Voiced by: Milo Parker (2021)

"When I considered rebellion against our people, looking out into the universe, I thought when I finally left, I'd have a vision, a grand plan..."

Debuting in Masterful, this is the youngest incarnation of the Master seen yet, apart from the child who briefly appeared in The Sound of Drums, which may have been the same incarnation as this one. Younger than the "Inventor" Master who first began using the name on a regular basis, this is the Master as he was before he developed his taste for cruelty and hadn’t even left Gallifrey yet.^note James Dreyfus' Master was believed to be the original incarnation, with Parker being a much younger version of him, but the Fourth Doctor indicates Dreyfus was actually the Second or Third Master.

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• Future Me Scares Me: At the very least, he is definitely disconcerted by the actions and attitudes of his future selves, not wanting to take part.
• Start of Darkness: At this point, the Master has no taste for cruelty, and is disgusted by Axe-Crazy and For the Evulz behaviour. Quite like the Doctor, he just wants to see the universe, be involved in something greater, and will intervene in a situation to help people. However, he definitely believes the ends justify the means, even if you have to kill well-meaning people who try to stop your own plans for the greater good.
• The Stoic: He's very cool and reserved, even in potential danger or faced with a situation he strongly disapproves of.

James Dreyfus' Master

The "Inventor" Master (First, Second, Fourth & Seventh Doctors)

Voiced by: James Dreyfus (2018-2020, 2022)

"You remembered what I called myself when I started honing my talents? That is the name I use now."

An early incarnation who fled Gallifrey, and the one to permanently start calling himself the Master.

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• Aborted Arc: This incarnation of the Master was quietly brushed under the carpet between his first and second appearances when James Dreyfus was dropped by Big Finish for behind-the-scenes reasons. There were several stories already recorded which were quietly released, with Dreyfus' involvement in them being downplayed as much as possible.
• Beard of Evil: Sports a nicely-groomed full beard, showing that even at the beginning of his career the Master had an affinity for beards.
• Berserk Button: The Fourth Doctor quickly becomes this for him. That Doctor's habit of treating his enemies as jokes and not taking things seriously quickly gets on this Master's nerves.
• Character Development: While he is defiantly an amoral person he is nowhere near the psychopathic monster his later incarnations will become. He's more reliant on hypnosis rather than directly manipulating someone, remains calm and collected rather than a Large Ham, prefers to use others to kill rather than do it himself, and when he does, it's for practical reasons instead of For the Evulz (that doesn't stop it from being unjustified). He even has a few seemingly Pet the Dog moments. That said, his chronologically latest appearance (Blood of the Time Lords) sees him more willing to kill his allies when they have outlived their use to him just because he finds them annoying. It's unlikely (see above) we'll ever see the full extent of his development.
• Dragon-in-Chief: Served as this in Blood of the Time Lords, where he pretended to be subservient to other Time Lords to gain access to their resources to complete his current plan.
• Evil Is Petty: The Fourth Doctor described this incarnation as comparatively less pragmatic than other selves, more willing to kill because he was annoyed even if it might have been beneficial to keep people alive for later.
• Ignorant of Their Own Ignorance: In Psychic Circus, he appears to be unaware that the Seventh Doctor is from his personal future, which helps the Doctor outmanoeuvre him (particularly since the Doctor already knows the general details of how the Master's current scheme will work out).
• It's All About Me: Even this early on, the Master has no problem manipulating an entire planet into a war just to help ensure the necessary technological development for him to acquire the technology to repair his TARDIS. On another occasion, when he met a Doctor he realised was from his future (Blood of the Time Lords), he assumed that the only reason the Doctor could be so self-satisfied at the moment was because he had just defeated a future version of the Master, rather than assume his old foe was just in a good mood.
• Noodle Incident: In The Home Guard, while it’s only our second time hearing him it’s made clear that the Master and the Doctor had many more encounters between the aforementioned story and The Destination Wars. The Doctor even says (possibly the first of soon to be many times) he thought the Master was dead.
• Sealed Evil in a Can: The Destination Wars ends with the First Doctor trapping the Master in his own laboratory. He somehow got free between then and his next appearance.
• Underestimating Badassery: His attempt to use Ian and Barbara as hostages while he steals the Doctor's TARDIS backfires when they manage to overpower him and take the TARDIS back to Destination.
• Villain with Good Publicity: In The Destination War, the people of the space colony Destination revere him as "the Inventor" for helping to fend off the planet's native Dalmari... not knowing that the Master has been instigating the conflict between them so they'll develop the technology needed to fix his TARDIS.

John Simm's Master

See Doctor Who — John Simm's Master

Michelle Gomez's Mistress

See Doctor Who – Missy.

Gina McKee's Lumiat (MAJOR SPOILERS)

The Lumiat (Unbound & Ninth Doctors)

Voiced by: Gina McKee (2020-2021, 2023)

"You want what every sentient creature wants, but you don't know it yet. You just want to be loved."

Following Missy's death at the hands of her previous incarnation, she managed to use an Elysian field to reconstruct herself with a new regeneration cycle and removed her negative personality traits. The new incarnation, the Lumiat, decided to abandon the name of the Master and set out to do good in the universe like the Doctor. Unfortunately, an encounter with a younger Missy would cause her to regenerate once more.

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• The Atoner: The Lumiat is not only doing this, but is trying to stop her past self from killing.
• Enemy Within: Inverted. The Lumiat is the incarnation of the Master after Missy, who is unambiguously good, and the result of a regeneration process specifically designed to only retain the good within the Master.
• Evil Cannot Comprehend Good: Missy refuses to believe that she would ever consciously choose to become someone like the Lumiat, and instead convinces herself that she must have been trying to purge the goodness from her essence, but there was an accident that brought about the opposite result.
• Evil Laugh: Even when doing acts of good, the Lumiat still occasionally manages to have this. Given who she really was, it's no surprise.
• Foreshadowing: Given that the Lumiat arms herself with a tissue compression eliminator, Missy teases her for getting a "kick" from wanting to kill her, and she refers to the Doctor with female pronouns, it is heavily implied that the Lumiat will regenerate into the Sacha Dhawan Master.^note This is a coincidence, as the script was written and recorded long before the existence of the Dhawan Master was known; it is pure serendipity that the episode fits with the character's return to TV so well.
  • The Lumiat also tries to reason with Missy by strongly hinting at her own future Heel–Face Turn while travelling with her. It backfires badly.

Missy: "How good will you be in your next life?"

• Good Counterpart: To every other incarnation of the Master, to the point Missy claims the Lumiat is actually more good than the Doctor. The Lumiat also compares herself to the Valeyard. By the end, Missy gleefully calls into question how good she really is, however.
  • At the same time, the Lumiat questions this, insisting that the difference between her and Missy/the Master is not that she has been purged of evil per se, but rather of her rage and sadness. Also it is implied that, unlike Missy/the Master, she has come to terms with her true feelings for the Doctor.
• Phrase Catcher: In a roundabout sense that seems only natural for Time Lords, she is responsible for implanting the phrase "say something nice" into Missy's vocabulary. It was meant as a genuine attempt to get Missy to express some minor altruism to a baby animal, which Missy found hilarious. Even if she doesn't remember her encounter with the Lumiat due to overlapping timelines, Missy almost assuredly says this constantly to mock the Lumiat.
• Walking Spoiler: It's impossible to discuss who she is without spoiling Missy: Series Two. Funny enough, she manages to also be this in-universe.

Multiverse

Sam Kisgart's Master

The "Unbound" Master (Unbound Doctor)

Voiced by: Sam Kisgart (2003, 2016, 2019, 2021), Johnathan Clements^note as the Delgado Master (2003)

"Abbot, I would tell you to say your prayers, but you've been doing that for long enough."

A "What If?" incarnation, who would have existed had the Doctor not joined UNIT in the 70's (or was it the 80's?). Comes back with a vengeance to face Bernice Summerfield.

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• Alternate Self: An alternate version of the Master from another universe, who regenerated from the Delgado Master of this reality.
• Alternate Universe: One that's accessible from the "main" timeline.
• Assimilation Plot: To pass the time, and have some method of sustaining himself while his TARDIS is out of bounds, he helps China set up the Ke Le SuperSoldier divisions with a group of mind controlling "soul stealer" parasites, under the guise of Ke Le. The plot comes to a halt, however, as the parasites have a limit to how many minds they control, and there is a select number of them.
  • The problem is, all the Ke Le soldiers were ex-convicts. This makes him directly responsible for the disaster that happens once the parasites are destroyed via a nuke, and the Ke Le divisions go berserk. He tries very hard to get out of China before this happens. He fails.
• Bad Boss: He takes control of Gallifrey during the events of Masterful, and arranges for a massive wave of Battle TARDISes to sally out against the incoming entropy wave... and detonates them and sacrifices Gallifrey before they can even engage in an attempt to destroy the wave before he comes into danger. To make it worse, it doesn’t work.
• Character Development: After killing everyone else in the universe, he is left alone for a long time and realizes how pointless his life is without people to rule over or a Doctor to oppose him.
• Chronic Backstabbing Disorder: Without any Doctor to stop him, he's allowed to do this as he pleases, making deals with both the United Nations and China. It turns into a noose for him without his TARDIS to fall back on.
• Crapsack World: By the time he arrives in the story, he has lived through the plastic purges, the Probe 7 disaster, the My Lai and East Timor massacres and Rwandan genocide, has at least two governments on a manhunt for him and has just come out of a plane crash and regenerated. Suffice to say, he's not having a good time.
• Deal with the Devil: Is the devil in the deal the Doctor strikes up, to be rid of the mind parasites and to remove the inhibitor on the Doctor's TARDIS. Unsurprisingly, he attempts to go back on the deal and just steal the TARDIS. The Doctor counted on this.
• Enemy Mine: Is forced to work with the Daleks in Anti-Genesis to remove the interloping Jacobi Master from his attempt to co-opt the Daleks as his creations and servants.
• Large Ham: Though he's among the most restrained out of any incarnation of the Master created, he does have his moments.
  "Stand aside or I shall lay your soul to waste! Thank you so much."
• Last of His Kind: Along with the Doctor, as the Time Lords get permanently wiped out in his universe's version of the Time War.
• Mugged for Disguise: Kills a random English soldier who happened to be near the crash site just after he regenerated, and spends the rest of the adventure wearing the man's clothes.
• Out-Gambitted: At one point plots to conquer the universe by summoning a race of Eldritch Abominations to do his bidding. A plot which would have failed spectacularly anyway, but then it's revealed the Doctor had predicted all of that would happen, and so the Doctor promptly deals with the monsters by using the energy meant to bring them back to life to take himself and Bernice back to her universe, leaving the Master in the Doctor's former position of President of the Universe. Because the Mother Superior and leader of the Parliament was in on the plan she knows to keep the Master in check, so it looks like he will hate the job even more than the Doctor did. Sadly he reverses this.
• The Slow Path: When his TARDIS is "put out of [his] reach", the Master is forced into this, stuck wading through the various disasters the Doctor never averted. He has been trying to attract the attention of the Doctor for a good while. He endures this again when he kills everyone in his home universe and is left all by himself for thousands of years until the Daleks get his distress signal.
• Unexpected Successor: Ends up President of the Universe; however, he's in no position to do anything "out of line" because of a very formidable Mother Superior.
• Unexplained Recovery: He gets thrown into a portal come disintegration ray in The Emporium at the End and it's almost Played for Laughs how everyone just accepts that he's still alive when he turns up later. When Bernice eventually gets around to asking him about it he tells her not to be boring.
• Villainous Breakdown: Suffers two in the space of five minutes! His first one is when he discovers a pub isn't the Doctor's TARDIS, and his second is when said TARDIS leaves him behind, minutes before the Ke Le forces are set loose.
• What Happened to the Mouse?: It's never explained what happened to his TARDIS, just that it was out of the Master's ability to get it back.
• What the Hell, Hero?: Throws one at the Doctor when they meet for not interfering in the various disasters Earth suffers, and doesn't stop until he lets slip that he was stuck on Earth and that his TARDIS was out of his reach. He doesn't retract it when he learns the Doctor didn't exactly have a choice in the matter.

The Warrior's Master

The Alternate War Master (The Warrior)

Voiced by: Geoffrey Beevers (2022)

An incarnation of the Master active in the another universe, created when the Fourth Doctor accidentally caused the Time War to kickstart early and became the Warrior.

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• Alternate Self: To the Decayed Master.
• Chronic Backstabbing Disorder: Even in a Time War completely destroying history, the Master still makes plans to betray the former Doctor for power.
• Composite Character: Of the Decayed Master and the War Master. He's the same incarnation as the Decayed Master, but never suffered the same injuries due to the Time War starting earlier and forcing him into the fray.
• The Corruptor: Where the Doctor's role in Xoanon's creation was an accident, the Master deliberately manipulates the civilisation of this planet as part of a long-term agenda.
• Ink-Suit Actor: Beevers finally gets to play a Master who looks like his normal self, rather than scarred and burned.

Tropes associated with Titan Comics

Roger Delgado's Master

The "UNIT Years" Master

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• The Cameo: In the Eleventh Doctor comics, the "Child" Master temporarily turned back into his Delgado incarnation to explain how time worked differently in the Time War.
• False Prophet: He managed to set himself up as a messianic figure on a Sontaran colony planet, with the Sontarans who worshipped him even having beards and faces shaped like his.
• Future Me Scares Me: During an adventure involving Missy where they observed many of their other incarnations, the "UNIT" Master was disturbed by the man-eating Saxon Master, and was very disappointed upon noticing Missy's budding Heel–Face Turn and relationship with the Twelfth Doctor. He did approve of the Spy Master, though.

The Child Master

The "Child" Master (War Doctor)

The incarnation of the Master who accompanied the War Doctor for a time during the Time War, and also abandoned his old title. In "Fast Asleep", he seems to regenerate into Derek Jacobi's War Master, or at least morph in a way indicating that he will someday do so.^note  It should be noted that the intent of Rob Williams was that this incarnation was a successor to the War Master, with the paradox he was involved in erasing this incarnation from existence.

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• Creepy Child: He is apparently a prepubescent boy, but has all the intellect and cynicism of his other incarnations.
• Dirty Coward: He abandons the Doctor when things start to go really south after Alice arrives.
• Enemy Mine: He and the Doctor have agreed to co-operate during the Time War with minimal emotional game-playing.
• Psycho Sidekick: The War Doctor regrets the horrible things they do during the War, but the Master doesn't even pretend to.
• Racial Transformation: He appears East Asian by Earth racial definition.
• Ret-Gone: The intended fate of this Master, according to Word of God, as he is erased by the paradox he created.
• Walking Spoiler: The presence of an entirely new incarnation of the Master during the Time War is a big surprise.

Missy

See Doctor Who – Missy.

Tropes associated with the Master’s “companions”

Unlike in the TV series, the Master in the Expanded Universe is not above taking on companions. However rather than the warm friendships the Doctor has, the Master often treats his companions like pieces of property or tools to be disposed of when they are no longer useful.

Delgado Master

Ailla

• The Mole: She's actually an agent from the Celestial Intervention Agency posing as a 28th century human in order to spy on Koschei. Learning that she'd been deceiving him is the final straw that destroys the remaining bit of good in Koschei and completes his transformation into the Master.
• Unwitting Instigator of Doom: While Ailla lying to Koschei was only one of the factors that contributed to him becoming the Master, it nevertheless played a significant role in his anger at the rest of the universe and his desire for control.

Finsey

Voiced by: Richenda Carey (2016)

• Bastard Understudy: No sign that she was actually intended to replace the Master, but she was certainly a willing student.
• Eye Scream: Her final confrontation with the Master ended with her losing her vision, although it is unclear if she actually lost her eyes or they were just damaged.
• God Guise: Finsey's most common scam is to create a false religion, trick most of the people involved in it into giving her all their worldly possessions, and then leaving them to die in a "religious event".
• Hypnotic Eyes: Her natural eyes have been lost, but the lenses she uses to help her see instead have some hypnotic ability on their own.
• Token Evil Teammate: In terms of The Master's other Big Finish associates. Whereas most of the others are Unwitting Pawns of the Time Lord's schemes in some form, Finsey is a wicked opportunist not unlike the man she's travelling with. When he inevitably turns on her, she not only expected it but was satisfied; she'd've been insulted if he hadn't backstabbed her.

Roberts Master

“Alison”

Voiced by: Lucy Heath (2019)

Doctor Who Magazine Master

Sato Katsura

• I Cannot Self-Terminate: A Japanese samurai who blames the Doctor for cheating him of an honourable death by basically making him immortal.
• Who Wants to Live Forever?: Resented the Doctor for depriving him of an honourable death.

Macqueen Master

Sally Armstrong

Voiced by: Natalie Burt (2012–2014)

An inventor from the 1970s and almost-companion of the Eighth Doctor, until she got blown up by Daleks in an aborted timeline. In the restored timeline, she was supposed to be hit by a car instead, but got rescued — by the Master, of all people, who promptly took her on as his brainwashed companion.

• Brainwashed and Crazy: As the Master's puppet/assistant. Though she's more than willing to assist him, he has left her with a few triggers should she step even a little out of line for him.
• Came Back Wrong: After dying in "Dark Eyes", a change in timeline resurrects her. The Master gets to her before the Doctor can.
• Eye Scream: The Master uses her as his assistant when he's posing as an optometrist, and merrily collecting people's eyes.
• Face Death with Dignity: Averted.
• For Science!: Though her scientific curiosity was innocent enough, it was the same aspect which lead to Sally being manipulated twice by Time Lord parties, the Master in particular corrupting her through it.
• Gadgeteer Genius: For the Ides Scientific Institute.
• Green-Eyed Monster: As brilliant as she is, Sally is, deep down, aware of just how replaceable she is in the grand scheme of things to the Master. The fact that Molly, some random girl from an old age, isn't really doesn't do well for her, although she knows better than to act on any jealousy she has.
• Have We Met Yet?: She first hears of the Doctor when he sends a message back into the past for her, long after he's met her, and in a timeline that never happened anyway.
• More than Mind Control: Although regular-timeline Sally was a good woman, the Master only had to tap into her ambitious nature to turn her into his companion. A smidge of hypnotism was all it took to make her evil.
• Pet the Dog: Going back to see if Molly has a cure or not to the Eternal Warriors just before she left in the Master's TARDIS in "The Death of Hope" stands out as one.
• The Resenter: Towards Molly.
• What Measure Is a Mook?: Liv points out that Molly, a working class nurse, is more important to the Master than Sally's educated, loyal self, and that the Master is a Bad Boss who'd dispose of her without a second thought. Surprisingly, this is untrue — the Master appears genuinely fond of Sally, and is upset at her death. While he doesn't stop to grieve, it's implied he's hunting her killer for revenge.

Jacobi Master

Cole Jarnish

Voiced by: Jonny Green (2017)

A pilot that the Master met on Arcking and became his companion while escaping the planet.

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• Heroic Sacrifice: Exploited. The Master straps Cole to the The Heavenly Paradigm so he can serve as its battery, knowing this will erase him from existence. Cole protests, but The Master states that Cole agreed to help end the Time War at any cost.
• The Man Behind the Monsters: Accidentally becomes this in "The Sky Man". Wanting to save a race of people on a planet doomed to die from the Time War, he decided to create a suit that would prevent the sickness killing them and their world. However the suits can't be removed and also manages their panic so they can better adapt to their situation, which slowly removes their emotions except for hatred and a need for revenge against those responsible for their situation, with the Master explaining they end up declaring war on all alien life. Essentially Cole created a race similar to both the Cybermen and the Daleks, and much like with the latter and their own creator the new race turned against Cole.
• Morality Pet: Subverted; the Master chooses Cole as his companion just to make him the focus of an escalating paradox to try and use him as the power source for a means of changing the outcome of the Time War, and never shows any sign of being particularly attached to Cole as a person.
• My Greatest Failure: His actions on the agrarian planet create a species of what can only be described as Dalek / Cyberman hybrids, which would've done untold damage to The Web Of Time if The Master hadn't dealt with them later. Cole spends the entirety of the last installment of "Only The Good" angsting about it.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: Due to the manipulations of the Master, Cole's attempt to save a species he accidentally turns into a race of monsters ends up making the Time War worse.
• Unwitting Pawn: Of The Master, very much so. Cole surviving the events of Arcking inspires The Master to have the boy interfere on another planet, knowing his actions will cause more paradoxes, eventually allowing the Master to use Cole to power The Heavenly Paradigm.

Cassandra King

Voiced by: Maeve Blue Wells (2018)

An ambitious young business woman who wants to succeed in mining Swenyo where her father failed, with "help" from "Mr. Orman".

Alice Pritchard

Voiced by: Katherine Pearce (2019)

Crazlus

Voiced by: Galvin Swift (2019)

Gomez Mistress

Oliver and Lucy Davis

Voiced by: Oliver Clement and Bonnie Kingston (2019–20)

Two children that Missy becomes the governess of while trapped on Earth in the 19th century.

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• Expy: They are based on Michael and Jane Banks from Mary Poppins.

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