The Master (Doctor Who) performer Derek Jacobi
Audio plays
The Master has made regular appearances in various audio plays produced by Big Finish. Geoffrey Beevers, Derek Jacobi, Michelle Gomez, Eric Roberts, John Simm and Sacha Dhawan have all reprised the role from the television series. While Mark Gatiss, Alex Macqueen, Gina McKee, James Dreyfus and Milo Parker portray versions of the Master original to Big Finish. Jon Culshaw has performed as the Roger Delgado and Anthony Ainley incarnations of the Master.
The Master appears in the Big Finish Productions Dust Breeding, where Geoffrey Beevers reprised the role. The story reveals that at some point after Survival, the Master's Trakenite body is damaged when he attempts to take control of a psychic weapon trapped in the painting The Scream, which returns him to his walking corpse state once again. He is presented using the alias Mr Seta, another anagram of Master.In Master, the origin of the Master and the Doctor's enmity is explored. As children, a school bully attempted to drown the Master but was killed by the Doctor in defence. Unable to cope with the guilt and grief, the young Doctor made a deal with Death to take away his pain, inadvertently transferring the memories and guilt of the murder to the Master. In the main plot, the Seventh Doctor (Sylvester McCoy) has made another deal with Death to remove the Master's memory and let him live in peace for ten years, in exchange for the Master then becoming Death's Champion. Upon learning this, the Master absolves the Doctor of his actions as a child before having his memories restored and becoming Death's servant once again.An alternate-universe Master appears in the Big Finish audio play Sympathy for the Devil, voiced by Mark Gatiss, as part of the Doctor Who Unbound series. In this version of events, an alternate Third Doctor — now voiced by David Warner — does not arrive for his exile on Earth until 1997. Without the Doctor's help, UNIT was unable to cope with a series of extraterrestrial disasters, and the political landscape of the planet changed drastically. Stranded on Earth, the Master worked as an advisor to the United Nations. This version of the Master later appears in Big Finish's The New Adventures of Bernice Summerfield range, opposite Warner's Doctor, when Bernice Summerfield is temporarily pulled into the Unbound universe. He later escapes to Benny's universe and is recruited by the Daleks to stop a plan by the War Master that threatens to destroy the universe.
Beevers returned to Big Finish in April 2022 to play another Unbound alternate version of the Master, opposite Colin Baker's alternate Doctor known as The Warrior, in the Doctor Who Unbound release - Doctor of War: Genesis.The Master was set to appear in the television story The Hollows of Time, proposed for the show's 23rd season but ultimately never produced. When Big Finish adapted the story for their Lost Stories range, while Colin Baker and Nicola Bryant voiced their original roles as the Sixth Doctor and Peri, rights to the Master could not be obtained (and Anthony Ainley had died), so the role of Professor Stream (originally meant as the Master's alias—another anagram) was played by David Garfield and left ambiguous as to his true identity, the story presented as a semi-flashback with the Doctor and Peri's memories distorted so that they cannot clearly recall certain key details.The Master, played by Geoffrey Beevers, returns in the Fourth Doctor audio plays Trail of the White Worm, The Oseidon Adventure, The Evil One, Requiem for the Rocket Men and Death Match. Beevers also appears in the fiftieth anniversary story The Light at the End, where he attempts to erase the Doctor's travels by using an advanced weapon to erase the TARDIS from existence, and in the Companion Chronicle Mastermind, which looks at how he stole a new body in the early twentieth century after his essence escaped from the Eighth Doctor's TARDIS, and survived by possessing a series of human hosts until he tricked UNIT into helping him regain access to his TARDIS.
Alex Macqueen plays a new incarnation of the Master – existing after Eric Roberts' incarnation (and the subsequent corpse form played by Beevers) – in the Seventh Doctor release UNIT: Dominion pretending to be a future version of the Doctor before his true identity is revealed. He goes on to become a recurring antagonist in the Eighth Doctor's Dark Eyes series where it is explained that the Time Lords resurrected the Master to fight in an approaching conflict, implied to be the Time War. The events surrounding the Master's resurrection were depicted in the Ravenous series five years later.
Chris Finney plays a character named 'Keith Potter' in the story The End of the Line from the audio anthology The Sixth Doctor: The Last Adventure, later revealed to be an avatar under the control of the Master.
The Master, played again by Geoffrey Beevers, makes a cameo appearance in series 10 of the Doctor Who spin-off Jago & Litefoot, and later featured as the main villain for the eleventh series.To mark forty-five years since the Master's first appearance, Big Finish released a trilogy of stories featuring the Geoffrey Beevers and Alex Macqueen incarnations of the Master in 2016. And You Will Obey Me features the Beevers Master encountering the Fifth Doctor, while Vampire of the Mind pits the Sixth Doctor against Macqueen's Master. In both stories, the two Masters are characterized very differently from their previous appearances. In the final story of the trilogy – The Two Masters – it is explained that the two Masters swapped bodies after the Macqueen Master went back in time and caused the event that gave the Beevers Master his emaciated corpse form. This results in a universe-destroying paradox fixed by the Seventh Doctor, returning the two Masters to their rightful bodies and erasing their memories of the events.In December 2017, Derek Jacobi reprised his role as the Master for The War Master, an ongoing series of audios set during the Time War, having originally appeared in the 2007 episode "Utopia". The first series ends with the Master using a chameleon arch to turn himself into an infant human, setting up the events of "Utopia". Subsequent series occur earlier in the War Master's life and depict him getting involved with various battles in the Time War, sometimes at the behest of the Time Lords and sometimes for his own ends. Mark Gatiss made a guest appearance as the alternate-universe Master in series four. Paul McGann briefly plays the Master in series five. Jacobi has also appeared as the War Master in several other Big Finish ranges, including UNIT: Cyber-Reality and the first volume of Gallifrey: Time War.
James Dreyfus portrays an early incarnation of the Master opposite David Bradley as the First Doctor in Doctor Who: The First Doctor Adventures. Dreyfus also appears in the Second Doctor audio The Home Guard, the Fourth Doctor audio Solo and the Seventh Doctor audio The Psychic Circus.
In May 2018, it was announced that the fifth series of The Diary of River Song would feature the title character, River Song, encountering four incarnations of the Master. As well as Beevers and Jacobi returning, this release saw Eric Roberts and Michelle Gomez make their Big Finish debuts as their incarnations of the Master. This release explains how the Master (Roberts) was able to escape the Eye of Harmony, stuck in the time vortex until River's intervention enables him to escape back into the universe.
Like Jacobi, Michelle Gomez also performs her incarnation of the Master (renamed Missy) for an ongoing audio series. Missy premiered in February 2019 and featured The Monk played by Rufus Hound. The second series introduced a character known as The Lumiat – revealed to be the next incarnation of The Master, the immediate successor to Missy – played by Gina McKee. It is explained that, after her "poetic" death at the hands of her predecessor, Missy used an Elysian field to transfer her consciousness into a duplicate body created from her own dying cells and trigger regeneration. Motivated by her recent attempt at redemption, she edited the duplicate to remove all the negative aspects of her personality and became a benevolent force in the universe, adopting the title Lumiat. Missy encounters the Lumiat trying to undo some of her earlier incarnation's evil deeds. Sickened by her future self, Missy kills the Lumiat with a TCE and abandons her to regenerate, implying the process might cause them to return to evil. In the third volume, Gomez and Hound were joined by Gemma Whelan as the Meddling Nun – another incarnation of the Monk. Gomez returned for a story in Big Finish's The Eighth of March range, which saw Missy stranded in Earth's past and threatening a young Amy Pond (Caitlin Blackwood) in a bid to get the Doctor's attention.
Beevers, Jacobi, Roberts, and Gomez appeared in the fourth volume of the Eighth Doctor series Ravenous in October 2019. In Planet of Dust, the Doctor and his companions encounter the Burnt Master (Beevers) on the planet Parrak, where it is explained that he has once again returned to his emaciated corpse form following his time in the body of Bruce (Roberts) before being killed by the Ravenous. In Day of the Master, the Eighth Doctor encounters the Bruce Master. At the same time, his companions Liv Chenka and Helen Sinclair are confronted by the War Master (Jacobi) and Missy (Gomez), respectively. By the end of the story, the War Master, Missy, and the Bruce Master are sent by the Time Lords to the tomb where the Burnt Master is buried, using technology acquired earlier in the story to grant him a new regeneration cycle and, it is implied, turning him into the Alex Macqueen incarnation of the Master. The story also suggests the Bruce Master has his memory wiped and is flung into the time vortex by his future selves, ultimately leading him back to Parrak in his Burnt Master form to preserve the timeline.
As part of the Time Lord Victorious multi-platform storyline, a pair of Short Trips stories introduced the Roger Delgado and Anthony Ainley incarnations of the Master to Big Finish – Master Thief by Fio Trethewey and Lesser Evils by Simon Guerrier were released in October 2020 with Jon Culshaw serving as narrator and voicing both incarnations of the Master.
In January 2021, to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the Master's first television appearance, Big Finish released Masterful, a three-part special written by James Goss uniting every living television and audio incarnation of the Master (other than Sacha Dhawan due to licensing). It saw John Simm reprise his role as the Harold Saxon version of the Master and introduced Milo Parker as a young incarnation of the Master. Beevers, Gatiss, Jacobi, Macqueen, Roberts, and Gomez all reprised their roles. Gina McKee makes a cameo appearance as the Lumiat and Jon Culshaw voices Kamelion impersonating the Ainley Master. In the story, the Saxon Master has killed the Doctor and taken control of the universe using an entropy wave that has destabilized his body and threatens to destroy the universe. He summons his previous selves in an attempt to steal their lives and heal himself. The intervention of Missy, the alternate-universe Master and Jo Grant thwarts Saxon's plans and, after discovering that the entropy wave is a sentient manifestation of the Master from the future – their final incarnation, a being of pure rage and insanity – the War Master kills his other incarnations (including himself) to cause a paradox and return the universe to normal. The special edition release included an original audiobook Terror of the Master written by Trevor Baxendale, narrated by Jon Culshaw and featuring the Delgado Master and the Third Doctor. This story was given a standalone re-release in March 2023.Roberts returned as the Master once again in March 2021 for a three-part special release entitled Master!, featuring Chase Masterson as Vienna Salvatore. Following the events of Ravenous, the Master is rescued from the vortex by a scientist named Lila Kreeg (Laura Aikman) – whom the Master had manipulated using a psychic link into freeing him – and steals the identity of a business magnate on twenty-third century Earth. Vienna is hired by the Daleks to assassinate the Master but, with Kreeg's help, succeeds only in sending the Master back into the time vortex. Masterson and Roberts returned for a second series - Nemesis Express - released in October 2022.At Big Finish Day 2022, it was announced that Sacha Dhawan will reprise the role of The Master from the television series for a new audio series - Call Me Master.