There are some fans who may have thought that this one would've been included much higher on the list. No such luck. There are far, far worse Master stories than this one, though, as it turns out, not that many. Thematically, in fact, this is one of the better ones, as it treads in the same territory as The Deadly Assassin and The Keeper of Traken in that the Master is presented as a desperate man nearing the end of his existence, fighting for survival. The Doctor even points this out to Grace. Slowly rotting corpse and weirdly processed voice aside, however, you wouldn't really know it from Eric Roberts' campy performance. And that's really what dooms this story as a Master story. The camp. Roberts rarely taps into the sheer menace that's available in the Master's character. We get an all but brief instance of it when he kills off Bruce's wife (actually, Eric Roberts' wife) in the most brutal way possible, but, apart from that, he seems content to ham it up for most of the proceedings, cranking it up to 11 with his "I always... dress for the occasion" line. He's not even responsible for the real threat in this story, which is from the Eye of Harmony itself. But that's just way too confusing to go into here. Up until then, Roberts' was arguably the most over-the-top performance that fans had seen from an actor as the Master. Little did they know what was to come...
Tony Whitt has previously written TV, DVD, and comic reviews for CINESCAPE, NOW PLAYING, and iF MAGAZINE. His weekly COMICSCAPE columns from the early 2000s can still be found archived on Mania.com. He has also written a book of gay-themed short stories titled CRESCENT CITY CONNECTIONS, available on Amazon.com in both paperback and Kindle format. Whitt currently lives and works in Chicago, Illinois.
