You may be wondering how this story gets included on the list when The Five Doctors doesn't, and it comes down to the fact that the Master is meant to play a much more significant part in the plot - such as it is. True, he initially acts only as an info dump ex machina, but then he's given slightly more to do, with "slightly" being the definitive word. There's actually very little to complain about in Ainley's performance here - but then, there's so little of it to begin with. The Master is sidelined here in ways that he simply isn't in Mark of the Rani, playing second-fiddle to the Valeyard (and even Glitz!) for most of the story. It was nice to see the interior of his swank TARDIS again, but if that's all that's on offer, then what's he actually doing here? Such a shame, too. It might even have been preferable for fans to have discovered that the Valeyard was the Master the entire time, albeit in a much better disguise than usual. As it is, viewers instead discovered that it's the Doctor himself, somewhere between his twelfth and thirteenth incarnations... ...Hey!
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.
