#the two masters

[reachingforthevoid]

Doctor Who: World Enough and Time/The Doctor Falls

I rewatched this serial on 25 September 2023.

We begin with the TARDIS arriving in a snowstorm. The Doctor’s regenerating and not wanting to.  We crash into the opening credits and reverse a bit. Time travel, eh. There’s a lot of stuff about temporal differences, used to a good effect.

We really begin on a giant spaceship. The Doctor, Nardole and Bill, plus Missy, are responding to a distress call. There’s a ginormous black hole that the ship is trying to escape from.

Heh. I love Missy, and she works well with Bill as they discuss the Doctor’s real name.

Then a man in blue arrives and in a panic hunts for the human. It’s Bill. The man in blue shoots her…

We really begin back at the university with the Doctor and Bill discussing the Doctor’s attempt to rehabilitate the Master/Missy. They discuss Time Lord gender… about time, too. Bill confesses her fear of Missy. A well-placed fear. And then we get two Masters…

On board the ship, strange people take Bill’s body away. They sound familiar…Bill wakes up in a weirdly old-fashioned hospital. She’s got something in her chest. World Enough and Time makes Cybermen truly horrific for the first time in the show’s history. There are a few near misses in the past, but this story distils it all into true horror. It’s because at their heart are humans, in this case Bill Potts.

Smutty ending for Bill with Heather the Pilot saying she can fly anything, even a differently living Bill Potts. That little kiss is rather lovely, though. Be still my lesbian heart…

Observation: there are cycles of repetition in the seasons from 2006, like the two show runners up to this point try out ideas, and redo them to better effect, and redo them to better effect. Like what happened to Danny Pink, cyber-soldier, happens again to Bill Potts… (Why are they the Black characters, though?) What happens to Clara living such a long, long time with Ashildr in the moment before she dies and Bill getting a second chance with Heather… Yeah, I'd probably watch that series, too.

Cue the longest regeneration story to date as we loop back to the beginning of World Enough and Time… and the Doctor quotes himself quoting himself as the first Doctor stumbles across the twelfth… What's a bit of recursion between friends?

[thatonestoreguy]

The Two Masters

Time is very sick and the Master is the disease. Not just one Master either, but two different incarnations in conflict with each other. Into this all stumbles the Seventh Doctor. While investigating missing moments in time, he finds himself instead in the middle of the Masters’ war. Soon he will discover, the only thing worse than two Masters at war is two Masters united.

The story begins with the Geoffrey Beevers incarnation of the Master essentially kidnapping the Doctor to aid him in his mission to take on the Alex Macqueen incarnation. We get some flashbacks to explain where this hostility is coming from and explain away what might feel like inconsistencies in this and the previous two adventures. There’s an ancient cult with Gallifreyan origins whose goal is to regenerate the universe. The Master (that is to say Macqueen’s Master) makes a deal with this cult to aid them in their mission provided they ensure the universe regenerates in his image. They agree with just one request, the Master must kill himself. So begins a twisting series of double- and triple-crosses as the cult manipulates the two Masters. First, the Macqueen Master causes the Beever’s Master's accident which leaves him burnt and decaying. Then the cult swaps the Masters’ minds and sends them on their way to act as the catalyst for their scheme. It’s complicated and full of backstabbing as any good Master story should be. The cult also adds a nice third party for the Masters and the Doctor to play off of as both allies and adversaries.

Beevers and Macqueen both do an amazing job with their respective Masters. Both not only play themselves, but also play each other in a very fun way. It’s great to hear Macqueen be creepy and conniving and to hear Beevers be manic and unhinged. Beevers even gets to very briefly play a pre-accident version of his own Master. He does just enough with it to suggest he could have been very different if he didn’t spend most of his existence trying to extend his life. Of course this is still Doctor Who and Slyvester McCoy is a fantastic choice to take on these two versions of his greatest enemy. He starts off without a clue as to what’s going on, but this version of the Doctor is just as good at scheming and playing both sides as any version of the Master. By the end, he’s managed to orchestrate everything to defeat them both and set the universe right in a very satisfying way.

This is actually the very first performed multi-Master story. At the time, it was a big task for Big Finish to put together and I think they’ve done an extraordinary job. They’ve managed to tell a complete and interesting story while highlighting not only what makes two versions of the same character different, but what makes them the same. It does everything a great multi-Doctor story does, but with a lot more schemes and inevitable betrayal. 

[jakeperalta]

I'm curious. what job would you do if money was no object (you just automatically had an income you could live comfortably on)? including work like volunteering, studying etc. please share in the tags :)

[szczurherbacany]

yeah

print

[kataangoogie]

Master Katara and her beloved Avatar Aang 💙🧡

[unpretty]

How did you get so good at writing??? Did you take classes? I feel like you should get paid all the money for this! (I subscribe to your website!)

after i dropped out of high school i found a torrent of like 5GB of OCRd romance novels and i read like 3 romance novels a day for a while

read enough romance novels and you will realize that they live or die entirely on technical skill. if you are new to romance novels then even bad ones can dazzle you with novelty but by the time you are on your 30th historical fake engagement between a bluestocking and a rakish duke you can grade them and you know when they've failed. when two books have what should be the same main characters hitting the same plot beats, but one of those books is delightful and the other fucking sucks, you learn some things. some books are bad and still delightful. other books are good but they just don't hit. you start to see the seams in the bad ones. 'oh, this is a weird out of character moment because she wanted to have the kabedon moment and didn't know how to get there'. 'she didn't want the ust to end but couldn't think of a better reason than this deus ex cockblock.' that kind of thing.

you could probably do this with other genres but i like romance because the plot is two people fall in love. that's it. everything else is set dressing. if you can figure out how to make that work you can carry it over into whatever other genre you feel like. mysteries would give you a different skillset around plotting that i don't have.

anyway after that i wrote a lot.

[egophiliac]

crossing my fingers and wishing upon every star that chapter 10 finally brings us the tweel cards 🤞🤞

[wigglybunfish]

ALL ABOARD FOR THE MASTER EIJI FAN CLUB

inspired by this post. Immaculate, @aye-of-newt

Best father and son-daughter-stupid-lost-boy duo. that’s her Dad of Steel your honor.

ID by @princess-of-purple-prose

[ID: Blue Eye Samurai fanart of Eiji and Mizu. Eiji is smiling and wearing a shirt that says "I'm not the step father, I'm the father that stepped up." Mizu smiles and does a thumbs-up. End ID]

[nipuni]

These two 🥰

[heyitsspaceace]

don't let their seemingly straight-passing tension fool you, they are still very gay and dysfunctional

[ninjautizm]

I had to draw the spinjitzu brothers in that one raining Goku drawing that everyone was drawing their characters with 😭

[trustymikh]

the sibling havers

[sunderwight]

Bingqiu AU where Luo Binghe's the chosen village sacrifice to the evil deity who lives up the mountain.

Normally the village sends maidens, but they've more or less run out of expendable girls of the right age and, ahem, "virtues". So of course Luo Binghe's early life bad luck kicks in. In the wake of his mother's death there's no one to really care about what happens to him, he's fairly pretty, and the village leaders decide that if they dress him up like a girl the teenaged homeless kid should pass well enough. And hey, y'know, he's probably got a hard life ahead for him anyway -- dying in a brothel of some venereal disease or on the streets of exposure or starvation. At least as a sacrifice, everyone else gets to benefit from his loss! And the kid will get added to a shrine and be remembered as a hero! If anything, he should be happy about this!

Binghe is not happy about this.

But he's also a skinny underfed nobody who is easily overpowered, dressed up like a bride, and tied to a post. So. Not much he can do but wait for the evil deity to come and do whatever horrible thing he's gonna do to him.

Meanwhile, Shen Yuan is pretty sure he's been isekai'd into the over-powered hero of some kind of supernatural adventure story? He's not totally sure because he doesn't recognize the setting, but the signs are there. He's got a shrine-like base of operations (though it seems to have become corrupted/ruined, probably he has to restore it somehow), he has a very resilient and handsome new body with spiritual energy of some kind flowing through him, and a very clearly magical sword. Plus lots of neat starter powers! Though it feels like he has other abilities that have been blocked somehow? Probably he has to level up in order to access them.

When he treks out of his "base" and finds what seems to be a distressed maiden, he takes it for his beginner hero mission. The girl claims that she's been doomed to be sacrificed to an evil god. That sounds a little above Shen Yuan's pay grade for dealing with, so he unties her and decides that they had better just get out of the whole region altogether. He already packed up anything useful from his base, anticipating he might get caught up in an adventure once he left, so they follow the river away from the settlement until they reach another one.

While they travel, Luo Binghe tells Shen Yuan about the cursed deity, Shen Qingqiu, who was cast out of the heavens for slaughtering one of his brethren and has apparently being do-who-knows what to maidens from the local village in exchange for his "protection" ever since. Sounds like a real asshole! And also mid-level boss type bad guy at least. Shen Yuan hopes he doesn't have to fight him, but he probably will.

Thank goodness he found Binghe, though! Clearly the helpful little sister type! He's definitely going to require her assistance if he's going to figure out how to navigate this world and level up his skills enough to take on a god.

[morgan-n-cheese-91]

old Obi-Wan is so funny to me because his sass and overall bitchiness is like the last thing he's got and I'm so proud it survived the great depression of his 40s.

[stompandhollar]

reminding everyone that the in-universe problem with The Doctor and The Master isn’t “ooo horrible nasty enemies who hate each other and don’t get along and fight all the time but are also in love”

the problem is that they get along. the problem is that they can’t stop themselves from falling naturally into a rhythm of riffing off one another and enjoying the other’s company. THAT is the problem. the problem is that it works and that’s the thing that caused all their issues. they like one another. they just click.

[spkyart]

Dandadan???