10 Doctor Who Answers Given YEARS Later

Even by Doctor Who standards, the Master is completely insane.

Characters like Davros, John Lumic, or Sutekh all fit comfortably into the 'evil madman' category, but they also all have clear motivations for their insanity. These motivations are usually pretty insane themselves, but still.

For the Master though, it wasn't always so clear.

They might do a lot of monologuing about “ultimate power,” and they’re always on the hunt to extend their ever-shortening lifespan, but a lot of the time it felt like their actions were driven by nothing more than a love of being evil (and an obsession with making the Doctor’s life as inconvenient as possible).

But the interesting thing is, this was meant to be explained. The 1974 season was originally going to end with a story called The Final Game, where it would've been revealed that the Master was essentially the Doctor’s brother – another aspect of the Doctor’s personality that had been split off into a different person. However, this story was shelved due to the tragic death of original Master actor Roger Delgado in a car crash in 1973.

As a result, the Master’s backstory remained unexplored for the rest of the classic series, and it wasn’t until The Sound of Drums in 2007 that we finally got an explanation for his madness, with the Doctor describing how the Master was driven mad by staring into the Untempered Schism as a child.

A much more reasonable backstory than simply having the pettiest grudge in the universe.