1. The Master (John Simm, Utopia, The Sound of Drums Two-Parter, The End Of Time Two-Parter)
I could write reams on John Simm's take on the Master, what went oh-so-wrong and what went oh-so-right and the missed opportunities and of course, how he's totally coming back. I've got money on it. Simm's Master was conceived as the dark mirror of Ten's Doctor; a younger guy, quirky, bouncy, with pop-culture references, a penchant for blondes (leading to further questions about his dye job in the End of Time). In the Sound of Drums and Last of the Time Lords, Simm is brilliant at conveying both the insanity of the Master and the longstanding relationship between the Doctor and the Master. Two immortal enemies, but they're the last of the race; where do you go from there? Of course, one of the great tragedies of those episodes is that for a good chunk of them the Doctor is buried under layers of old-age makeup and then CGI. One of the other great tragedies is how the Master was brought back, but it did show off Simm's sublime acting skills. The Master was brought back half-intact and half-insane after his attempt at regeneration went wrong. The next logical step in his characterization was of course to overlay a CGI skull on John Simm's face during his rampages, have him cackle, shoot energy out of his hands, leap hundreds of metres into the air and tear apart a turkey and eat it with his bare hands. Despite this, Simm managed, in his brief snatches of dialogue and especially with Tennant to bring across more subtleties of the character we'd seen in The Sound of Drums. The sequence where he speaks with the Doctor after shooting him in the quarry, flicking between his starving psychosis terrifies the Doctor and the viewer. The sense of his desperation and the strange connection between the two last Time Lords is strong, and this culminates in the scene where the Master takes down President Rassilon to save the Doctor. Simm himself criticized the characterization of the Master in the End of Time and it's not hard to see why. That said, he still managed to bring a fantastic performance that carried the weight of nearly forty years of Doctor-Master interaction and gave genuine emotional weight to his final sacrifice. So that's my top six revival Doctor Who villain performances did I miss someone, or skip over someone who actually deserved it? What about the Classic Series, who do you reckon would make up a top six list? Let me know in the comments below!