10 Most Ridiculously Convoluted Plans By Doctor Who Villains

2. The Master, The Deadly Assassin

The President of the Time Lords is retiring and due to name his successor, widely thought to be Chancellor Goth. The Master €“ now a skeletal husk unable to regenerate - feeds the Doctor a premonition of the Doctor seemingly assassinating the President to lure him into a trap. Having already shot a Gallifreyan guard who was about to arrest the Doctor The Master has used Goth as a pawn, and places a rifle next to a camera on a gantry, ready for the Doctor to use. When Goth steps forward with a gun, the Doctor tries to stop him, but the sights have been fixed and it now looks as if the Doctor has killed the President. The Master anticipates that the Doctor will plead Article 17 €“ putting himself forward as a candidate for the Presidency, thus preventing him from being prosecuted immediately €“ and will be given time to clear himself. He has hidden the shrunken body of the cameraman in the camera by the rifle as a clue that he is behind the plot. Now they know it's him, the Master knows they will work out how he projected the assassination into the Doctor's mind €“ via the Matrix, the Time Lord data repository €“ and sends Goth into the Matrix to fight the Doctor, which kills him. He knows they will find his lair after this, and so fakes his own death so he can be put into the mortuary along with the dead President, and then steal his decorative sash and rod of office. These are actually keys to the Eye of Harmony, the power source that powers Gallifrey, which will rejuvenate the Master. This is his end goal, all these previous steps being the minimum course of action necessary to achieve it. All of which, no matter how convoluted, would have worked if the Master had framed anyone but the Doctor. A salutary lesson that being motivated entirely by hate is bad.