Official Synopsis: “On the ocean planet Gardezza, deep beneath the Viscoid, a mysterious capsule is recovered from the Time War, and an equally mysterious stranger found within. The Doctor’s reputation precedes him, even here...But can he be trusted?”
Summary:
A Dalek invasion force tries to plunder the depths of the ocean-planet Gardezza; but even for these invincible murder-machines the water-pressure is simply too much. The comm-line slowly fizzles away as the scouting party is pressurized like sardine cans.
Meanwhile, the Gardezzan war-party is on-the-run and trying to think of solutions to their Dalek infestation. A pod is found in a crater and the Chief chooses to investigate it. Osen believes it’s a Dalek weapon (Why else would creatures of war invade a planet if not for war purposes?), but Chief Nilis pries the object open despite her misgivings. Inside the pod is a man who quickly introduces himself as “The Doctor.”
One shaky introduction later, Nilis is convinced and beckons for The Doctor to follow them to a special room. On the way, The Doctor (Who isn’t really The Doctor but in fact The Master; Sort of in the title) is regaled with tales of Gardezza’s technological advancements; of which he’s most definitely impressed by and not whatsoever disinterested in. They reach their destination and he’s shown an alien artifact the group dug up while digging new tunnels. The Master curiously wonders how it got here. (While also remembering in his head that his TARDIS was assaulted by a group of Daleks some time ago, causing it to warp him out as a failsafe. What a coincidence!) Osen and Nilis explain that the “Artifact’s” power is slowly building.....And they want to use it as a bomb to destroy the Dalek Command Ship. The Time Lord tries and fails to stifle his laughter at the idea of them firing the artifact through the tunnel leading to the Daleks without even knowing what its power-source is or how to measure what it can do. After all, if it doesn’t explode it’ll just provoke the Daleks further.
But if nothing else, he finds their courage admirable. In fact, The Master is so enamored with Gardezza’s traditions and the honor-bound family-codes they take pride in that all of the fatigue from watching his comrades die at the hands of the Daleks just...hits him at once and he lets out a great yawn. He was exhausted, you understand. He figures a bit of rest should jog his memory of what this thing is. Nilis prepares a room (per his request, on the lower level) for the Time Lord to sleep in and leaves her second-hand Glortz to guard it. After a brief nap, (In which he dreams of the encounter he had with the Daleks that intercepted him and proposed to help him locate the TARDIS in exchange for its secrets) The Master calls Glortz into his room and proceeds to enslave his mind with his hypnotic gaze.
Meanwhile, Osen is investigating the “artifact” on her own. It’s power-output is up and it’s time-stamps are going absolutely bananas. Getting too close to it causes the tissue on her hand to rapidly shrivel. Panicked, she contacts Nilis. She needs The Doctor now. Sadly for her, “The Doctor” is nowhere to be seen. He’s been escorted by his new mind-slave to the shaft beneath the Dalek Command Ship he’s secretly sending low-level transmissions to. He couldn’t bring them his TARDIS if he wanted to: It’s damaged and leaking temporal energy. If The Daleks try to destroy Gardezza before it’s repaired, they’ll just open a hole in reality. Nobody wants that. Begrudgingly, they allow The Master time to repair his TARDIS. The Master re-assures them the best he can. After all, they’re ‘natural allies’ now...Right?
The Master and Glortz make it back to his room just as Chief Nilis and some guards start assuming foul play. While The Master and Glortz are awkwardly lying their way out of trouble, The Daleks begin putting together a new attack force. They’re after The TARDIS, and the Time Lord’s heart-beats will lead them right to it. As for The Master? He can’t be trusted. After all:
“ALL-TIME-LORDS-ARE-THE-ENEMIES-OF-THE-DALEKS.”
Right as they reach Osen’s lab, the Dalek attack-force begins advancing from the seabed to The Master’s secretive chagrin. Chief Nilis goes off to spearhead a counter-force, leaving The Master alone with Osen and two guards. Osen shows him her hand, which he confirms has been prematurely aged by this artifact. This...“time transmitter.”Nilis and Glortz begin readying their counterattack, despite Glortz’ sudden headache. The Daleks meanwhile manage to locate the TARDIS, but can’t extract it. The Temporal leakage is too strong. Exasperated, the Dalek Commander decides to just take it by force. The Dalek forces, already routing other Gardezzan forces near a trench chokepoint, manage to breach the base; forcing Glortz and Nilis to flood the base by sections. This decision is related to Osen and The Master, who’ve discovered that they can short out the time-distortion and overload the artifact afterward. Glortz notices something about The Doctor’s voice that bothers him. He called himself The Master, not The Doctor. He was communicating with the Daleks!
Nilis rushes off to warn Osen of the traitor while Glortz starts flooding the base. Out of options, The Master orders the two braves assigned to them to aim their weapons at the artifact and approach it for a controlled burst. After all, precise timing was key. The two braves end up consumed by the time-distortion instead and are aged to dust. Sure, The Master ‘got the timing a little wrong,’ but it fixed the problem! The distortion is waning! Osen’s radio begins chirping, but the comms are compromised. Glortz prepares to take a squad to the lab, but Nilis forbids it; He’s needed for the defense.
The distortion weakening, The Master takes out his key and unlocks the TARDIS to Osen’s absolute shock. Panicked, she draws her weapon and aims it at The Master. While The Daleks and Nilis both prepare attempts to reach the device, Osen finally makes her distrust of the Time Lord known. One word broke through the disrupted communication: ‘Betrayed.’ The Master insists she’s imagining things and acting crazy but when she refuses to relent, he reveals the artifact’s nature as a time-travelling TARDIS...and that it can indeed destroy the Dalek Command Ship. Nilis arrives, badly wounded by a blast she was hit with en-route. She reveals the identity of The Master and encourages Osen to kill the man that was working with The Daleks. The Master protests, clarifying he planned to betray them the moment he could. Glortz interjects with good news from comms: The flooding was working! The Master isn’t as confident, however. For the Daleks have finally managed to trans-mat their way into the outside. Osen tries to begin the launching sequence, but the distortion is still active and jamming the controls. Two Daleks burst into the lab and start shooting. Osen is dragged into the TARDIS by The Master as Nilis dies in agony; screaming pleadingly for Osen to save them all. The launching program finally activates, consuming the Dalek assailants in temporal engine-fire.
Alongside The Daleks panicking as The TARDIS heads toward their ship, The Master (finally fed up with Osen’s constant complaining), cites Osen’s son Kyia as an excuse to let him commence with the de-materialization. After all, she’ll need to be there for him when the Dalek occupation ends and Gardezza is rebuilding. She finally relents and the TARDIS is whisked away, demolishing the Command Ship in the process.
The Master finishes his repairs, confirming the destruction of the Dalek Ship and the re-activation of the on-board defenses that render Osen’s gun useless. The Master finally explains the overall situation: That The Daleks helped him locate the TARDIS on Gardezza and deposited him in the pod they found, but that he was never working for them and always planned to betray The Daleks the moment he found what he was here for. Osen figures that The Master helping them meant he wasn’t that different from The Doctor but he shoots that down quickly; reinforcing that his aims were just as selfish as the cosmos he sees as the same. As they talk, he receives an emergency summons from his home planet.....which Osen isn’t allowed to accompany him for. There was one last thing to take care of before he sends her home: He simply needs her to activate the console next to her. As soon as she does so, she begins screaming in agony. The TARDIS just needed that last bit of “bad temporal energy” from her. Osen is consumed by the TARDIS, screaming for Kyia before crumpling to dust.
Now, about that emergency beacon....
Tropes:
- Action Bomb: The Gardezzans want to fire the alien artifact they’ve found into the Dalek Command Chamber in the hopes it is one. The Master is....skeptical, to say the least.
- Alien Sea: The Viscoid.
- Anyone Can Die: The Master is the final survivor of the story. Everyone else he met on Gardezza is dead or assumed so.
- Artifact of Doom: The Master’s TARDIS is one pre-restoration. Anyone caught up in the TARDIS’ temporal distortion-leak is rapidly aged to death, as two braves find out trying to fix the thing.
- Heck, the TARDIS even being on Gardezza is what led the Daleks to invade in the first place.
- Awesome Underwater World: Why, Gardezza itself. It has no dry landmasses and the only established society is a mass-transit system deep below the Viscoid's surface.
- Chronic Backstabbing Disorder: The Master betrays just about everyone at the earliest convenience. So do the Daleks. The only side ‘’without’’ an agenda is the Gardezzan one.Osen: “Whose side are you really on?”The Master: ‘’Mine.’’
- Bad "Bad Acting": The Master’s empty praise and platitudes barely mask his absolute disregard for the Gardezzans and their plight. It gets so bad, he yawns mid-way through a heartfelt sentence and has to blame it on exhaustion. Once he’s found out, he stops bothering.
- Blatant Lies: The Master and The Daleks both agree to help the other. Cue internal scheming immediately thereafter.
- Cassandra Truth: While posing as The Doctor, the Master labels the "artifact" found on Gardezza as a Time Lord “Time Transmitter.” It is a Time Lord device, can send out transmissions and to the Gardezzans is most definitely an artifact. Pity The Master never bothered to tell them it was a time-travel machine until they had no time left.
- Chekhov's Gun: Osen’s hand coming into physical contact with the TARDIS' time-leak allows The Master to funnel said temporal energy into the TARDIS and do away with Osen later.
- Enemy Mine: Cited by The Master when telling the Daleks his hatred for the Time Lords and the Doctor in particular make them natural allies. The only thing both sides are is natural backstabbers.
- Evil vs. Evil: The Daleks and The Master both fight over the TARDIS. The Gardezzans were just unfortunate enough to be housing the thing.
- Expy: Honor-based amphibian race in tunnels plagued by internal politicking as well as an outside enemy force? We’re not talking about the Silurians, are we?
- Family Honor: The Gardezzans operate on it.
- Flat Character: Other than being Lizard Folk that live underwater and fight for Family Honor, we learn nothing about the Gardezzans whatsoever.
- Godzilla Threshold:
- The Gardezzan chief knows that even with their ocean protecting them, they don’t stand a chance against the Dalek invasion force and thus throws all caution to the wind to trust "The Doctor" to defeat the Daleks.
- At the drama's conclusion, The Master is surprised that Gallifrey is so desperate they're resorting to summoning him, one of their known enemies.
- Heroic Sacrifice: Fed up with The Master’s lies and seeing no other option, Osen holds The Master at gunpoint so that the TARDIS smashes directly into the Dalek Command Ship. The Master manages to talk her into a more sensible option.
- Hope Spot:
- The Gardezzans are on a living one. The Viscoid's water-pressure is so strong even the Daleks, one of the strongest species in the universe, can't resist it. The Daleks manage to breach the base anyway.
- The Gardezzans flood the base to destroy the Dalek invaders. It works....until the Daleks manage to just teleport further inside.
- The Master convinces Osen to let him finish de-materializng the TARDIS and promises that her survival would allow her to return to her son and assist in Gardezza’s rebuilding. Once the TARDIS is repaired, he tricks the engineer into pooling her temporal energy back into the TARDIS, killing her.
- Human Resources: The Master tricks Osen’s two guards into approaching the time-leaking TARDIS with their weapons active. They’re both aged to dust by the time-distortion...which also fixes it. Osen is also fed to the TARDIS later on in the same way.
- Hypocrite: Discussed. The Master berates the Time War for being a fruitless war over self-interest. He immediately notes that it’s a wonderful opportunity for his own self-interest. Not that he bothers hiding that.
- Ignored Expert: Discussed. Osen’s mistrust of “The Doctor” is disregarded by everyone she brings it up to. Her chief argues that their extenuating circumstances justify the risks.
- Averted once The Master’s brainwashing of Glortz wears off.
- Impersonation Gambit: Villainous inversion. The Master impersonates The Doctor to stay on the Gardezzans' good side. The only one not fully buying it is Osen.
- Inciting Incident: An offhand comment by The Master implies that Osen’s death warps her son Kyia into “an awful man.”
- Irony: For all their talk of “family honor,” the Gardezzans don’t treat each other like family until it’s too late. Osen in particular is dismissed by basically everyone.
- I Surrender, Suckers: How The Master ended up on Gardezza in the first place. The Master pretended to submit to the Daleks and agreed to give up the secrets of his TARDIS in exchange for the Daleks’ help in finding it. Once he finds it, he disregards them completely. Not that the Daleks weren’t going to do the same, anyway.
- Kick the Dog: Shortly after Osen makes a "Not So Different" Remark regarding The Doctor and The Master, the latter demonstrates the crucial difference by feeding her to his TARDIS.
- Kill It with Water: Once the Daleks manage to breach the Gardezzan base, Glortz suggests flooding the tunnels with pressurized water from The Viscoid.
- Large Ham: The Master exaggerates everything he says and does while pretending to be The Doctor.
- Last Words:
- Nilis: “SAVE US, OSEN!”
- Osen: “Myyyy sooooonnnn! KYIAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!”
- MacGuffin: The “artifact” the Gardezzans discovered was none other than The Master’s TARDIS.
- Mind Control: The Master uses his hypnotic powers to force Glortz into taking him under the Dalek Command Ship, where he can communicate with them discretely.
- Noodle Incident: The Doctor has helped the Gardezzans before though we never learn when or why.
- Politically Incorrect Villain: The Master looks down on the Gardezzans with scrutiny and disgust; barely managing to hide it while in the Doctor persona. According to him, “Lesser species” like Osen’s are not allowed on Gallifrey.
- Properly Paranoid: The Daleks don’t even bother pretending they trust The Master and launch a premature attack on Gardezza’s seabed after his report. He was planning to betray them, after all.
- Pyrrhic Victory: For the Gardezzans. The Master does destroy the Dalek Command Ship like “The Doctor” was asked, but every established authority figure in the Gardezzan war-government is dead, Osen’s son grows up into a terrible person without his mother and the planet's overall fate remains ambiguous.
- Rapid Aging: The TARDIS' temporal leak induces this in anyone caught in it, reducing them to decomposed dust in the span of a second.
- Rousing Speech: To convince Osen to put down her gun and let him de-materialize the TARDIS safely instead of pull off a Heroic Sacrifice, The Master pulls one. It works.Osen: (Infuriated, Resigned) “I don’t trust you! The only important thing is that we slam into that Dalek ship and destroy it! Nothing else matters!”The Master: (Disgruntled) “Not even Kyia, your son? I guarantee I can de-materialize the TARDIS and discharge enough temporal energy to destroy the Daleks! I guarantee it!”Osen: “Why should I believe you?”The Master: “Do you want to die and defeat the Daleks or defeat the Daleks and live!? Be a mother to your son, hmm? He’ll need a mother to care for him as Gardezza is rebuilt after the Dalek occupation is over.”
- Sarcasm Mode: The Master’s in it the entire time he’s impersonating The Doctor.
- The Bad Guy Wins: The Master successfully locates his TARDIS and escapes the planet despite Osen’s constant interference. The Master then does away with her before leaving the planet to its fate.
- To Be Continued: The final scene is The Master responding to an emergency recall from Gallifrey. This isn't actually picked up in the next story, it's implied this leads into The Master's part in one of the Gallifrey: Time War audios, which itself leads into the next story in this series.
- Villain Protagonist: Were you expecting The Master to save the day?
- We ARE Struggling Together: The Gardezzans aren’t particularly united and question each other over just about everything.
- World Of Jerk Ass: The Master sees the entire universe as one, using the Time War as an example.The Master: (After being asked the difference between him and The Doctor) “...I have none of his delusions of self-importance. I’m a realist; I see the cosmos as it really is.”Osen: (Confused) “And...What’s that?”The Master: "A festering pit of self-interest currently ripping itself apart in a fruitless war. Rich pickings for one with the intelligence to exploit it!”
- Why Don't You Just Shoot Him?: Osen is repeatedly talked out of this by The Master despite her war-chief and her own intuition both telling her otherwise. The consequences end up fatal.
- You Have to Believe Me!: Osen is suspicious of “The Doctor” from the moment he’s excavated from his pod and questions Nilis' trustful nature. She’s very right to do so. The Time Lord in the Gardezzans’ care isn't The Doctor and isn't planning on helping them.
