7. Brotherly Love?
The Doctor's ongoing feud with the Master is one of the oldest rivalries in televisual history but nobody really knows for sure what they're even arguing about anymore. Everybody knows that they used to be the best of friends during their formative years on Gallifrey, of course, before the Master looked into the Untempered Schism and seemingly went mad to the point of no return. He spent the rest of his life being haunted by those formidable four knocks and driven by an unfathomable desire to take over the world. He probably would've got there, too, had the Doctor not always been around to stand in his way of becoming King of the Entire Universe. Suffice to say, their relationship is confusing at best (just take the Series 8 finale, for example, in which the Master, in her new female incarnation as Missy, gave the Twelfth Doctor a whole army of Cybermen for his birthday) so you can't really blame Martha Jones for assuming that it was a case of blood running thicker than water. Believe it or not, though, but there was a time in which the producers actually were planning on revealing the Doctor and Master as secret brothers. In the Fifth Doctor 1984 serial Planet of Fire, the renegade Time Lord, as then portrayed by Anthony Ainley, originally asked his arch nemesis, "How could you do this to your own... brother?", but the line was ultimately cut when the writers got cold feet at the last minute. It's probably just as well, really, because a revelation such as that would've no doubt ripped the entire stratosphere of the Doctor Who fandom apart. What's next? Davros is the Doctor's biological father?! Well, stranger things have happened...
Dan Butler
Doctor Who Editor
Dan Butler is the Doctor Who Editor at WhatCulture.com. When he isn't writing his own articles or editing other people's, he can be found trawling the internet for gifs of Steven Moffat laughing. Contact him via dan.butler@whatculture.co.uk.
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