Doctor Who: EVERY Version Of The Master Explained

Nobody would have criticised Doctor Who for choosing not to recast the Master after Roger Delgado's death, but three years later, it did just that when the Master returned as the primary villain in the 1976 serial The Deadly Assassin.

This time facing off against Tom Baker's Fourth Doctor, this version of the Master (played by Peter Pratt) was at the end of his regeneration cycle, and existed as a decaying husk of a Time Lord.

We are never told exactly what happened to the Master between the First Master's life and this one, merely that he was found on the planet Terserus, dying, with no regeneration possible, and was then brought to Gallifrey. Here, he planned to use the energy from the Eye of Harmony – a stabilised black hole beneath Gallifrey – to renew himself. Though not fully successful in this plan, he did enough to prolong his life and escaped in his TARDIS, which was disguised as a clock.

Returning five years later in the 1981 serial The Keeper of Traken (this time played by Geoffrey Beevers), the Decayed Master was once again trying to restore himself, and this time, he succeeded, taking over the body of the Traken governor Tremas.

Where the First Master had been suave and debonair, the Decayed Master was scheming and desperate. This added a harsher edge to the character that really fitted the horror-inflected Doctor Who era of the 1970s. The Master was no longer Moriarty – he was the Phantom of the Opera.

With a new body at last, the Master was properly back, and it wouldn't be long before the Doctor encountered him again.