YMMV / Doctor Who S18 E6 "The Keeper of Traken"

• Badass Decay: Despite still being, you know, a living corpse, the Master is a much less serious villain this time around compared to "The Deadly Assassin", being considerably closer to the stock Who antagonism seen in Roger Delgado's original take on the character than the brooding political schemer seen in his last appearance. This ends up making this take on the character an interesting transitionary figure between the bleakness of Peter Pratt's portrayal and the sheer campiness of Anthony Ainley's. All things said though, he does manage to get the final victory at the end of this serial, so it's not like he's a complete joke compared to before, but it's certainly a considerable step down from the far more intimidating Pratt version.
• No Yay: The Master's seemingly sexual fascination with the Doctor (here gently twiddling his fingers through the ends of the Doctor's curly hair) would be business as usual if he wasn't a foul, rotting, seeping monstrosity at the time.
• Special Effects Failure:
  • When Kassia is shown under the influence of the Melkur, her possessed eyes are obviously just painted onto her eyelids with a Chroma Key effect applied; the result looks like felt or cardboard, and really ruins the scene.
  • For this story, John Nathan-Turner opted to have Geoffery Beevers don prosthetic makeup for the overcooked Master rather than have him don a rubber mask like the one in "The Deadly Assassin". The reason for this was because the mask was physically restrictive to Peter Pratt, muffling his voice (infamously resulting in his line "I wear the sash of Rassilon" being nigh-unintelligible) and forcing him to act almost exclusively with his body due to him not being able to move his face on-camera. However, Beevers' makeup was amateurish-looking at best; he looks more like he's wearing a mud mask than like an animated corpse, and his "teeth" are very obviously painted onto his lips, a fact that becomes even more painfully noticeable when he talks. The end result looks more like a parody of Pratt's rendition of the Master than like the genuine article. In the future, Big Finish would avoid this pitfall by giving visual depictions of Beevers' Master a look more akin to that of Freddy Krueger, rather than trying to emulate the appearance of Pratt's version, though the effect in execution more closely resembles an old man in green face paint.

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