The Tertiary Console Room: Review - Doctor Who

"I must have read a thousand or more books in an attempt to jog my memory. I've visited hypnotists and specialists and only the Empress knows who else, and yet still I found no way to light the darkness in my mind…"

It is a fictional convention for heroes of continuing series to gain an archenemy, their equal and opposite, the darkness to their light. In Doctor Who, the role of the Doctor's nemesis has always - well since 1971 anyway - been the Master, which meant that he was an obvious choice for Big Finish's thematic 'villains' trilogy. But unlike both Omega and Davros, who featured in only a handful of stories each, the Master appeared many, many times in the television series to the point where you could argue he was overused - which begs the question of whether there is anything new to say about him that hasn't been said before?

Joseph Lidster's Master takes place on the colony world of Perfugium and sees the Master living as the amnesiac Doctor John Smith, with no memory of who he was. He has invited his friends, Victor and Jacqueline Schaeffer, to dine with him to mark the anniversary of his arrival ten years ago this very night. Smith is a placid, refined individual who deeply values the friendship he shares with the Schaeffers but is troubled by his mysterious background, which has lead him to seek answers in texts both factual and fictional in a bid to discover who he really is.

This scenario certainly subverts our expectations because what we have here is essentially a story that examines the nature of evil without actually featuring the character of the Master in a significant way. In his author notes, Lidster claims that "the Master doesn't really have that much of a character. He's just Evil." While there's a small degree of truth there, if taken as a reference to the general characterisation of the Ainley Master, it's a rather fatuous statement to make because Lidster uses the idea that the Master is some characterless, one-dimensional villain as a justification for basically ejecting the true Master and replacing him with the rather witless Doctor John Smith instead.

Given the way the story develops, this is an evasion of Lidster's responsibility as a writer because surely the more interesting and apposite approach is to take someone who's portrayed as being "just Evil" and giving them the character and depth previous stories have failed to develop? That was an approach that certainly worked for Lance Parkin with Davros and the result was that it enabled Terry Molloy to give the most incredible performance, demonstrating levels you'd never have thought were in the character based on the way he was portrayed on television. And considering Big Finish have generally been very good in adding substance to characters which the television series failed - most significantly the Sixth Doctor and Melanie - Lidster's unwillingness to even try and depict a Master with depth is all the more disappointing.

As the play progresses, it becomes clear that the theme at the heart of Master is rumination upon the nature of evil. Lidster has clearly researched this topic thoroughly, as he uses the characters as a way to espouse many familiar theories such as the concept of nature versus nurture, and nowhere is this truer than during the second episode which is almost entirely devoted to a discussion of evil between the Doctor and John Smith.

In the Master's replacement we have a man who seems to be the epitome of decency, an honest and kind individual who is well respected amongst the community for his work as a physician. He is effectively the antithesis of who the Master was before and yet we, the listener, know who he really is - or at least was - and that it is his history that are the source of his own darker thoughts. Therefore the crucial question becomes why? Why has this evil "with a capital 'E'" renegade become the good Doctor John Smith? Unfortunately, Lidster's answer to this undermines the entire play.

Whether evil is ingrained through nature or nurtured through prevalent social conditions is an age old debate, and one that we're unlikely to find decisive answers to in a Doctor Who play, but in relation to the Master the question is whether he was inherently evil or whether it stems from something external which influenced him into turning to the dark side. We've already had one explanation as to how the Master became the Doctor's arch nemesis in a different medium, with David A. McIntee's Missing Adventure novel The Dark Path (1997) suggesting that it was an act of betrayal that pushed him into taking the mantle of the Master. Lidster's explanation for the Master's villainy is shamelessly melodramatic in that it goes back to a single incident in his childhood, where he and his boyhood friend, who would eventually become the Doctor, were involved in an incident with a bully who one of them killed to save the other from the cruelty.

The reasonable inference to be drawn from this story when first recounted is that the Master killed the bully and that act defined him, but Lidster clumsily telegraphs his lurid twist that it was in fact the Doctor who murdered the bully and then gave the Master to Death in order to save himself from the guilt of the act. So with this one revelation, Lidster not only demeans the Master to a character with no real will of his own because everything he has done subsequently was the result of Death's influence over him; he is her instrument of darkness bringing murder and pain to satisfy her wherever he goes, but he has also cheapened the character of the Doctor in the process, reducing him to the level of a murderer and a coward, who would condemn his friend to a life of darkness and depravity to save his own pathetic hide. Lidster compounds this blunder by suggesting that the guilt the Doctor feels from this betrayal has been his prime motivation for all of his actions - that the good the Doctor does stems from this incident and is performed as a form of penance. This kind of revisionist thinking, that the hero must be a tortured soul atoning for his bleak past, may be currently fashionable in contemporary genre shows but in the context of Doctor Who it sits uneasily with what we know about the character of the Doctor.

While this unnecessarily melodramatic sensationalism regarding both the origins of the Master and the Doctor is dubious, Lidster's rationale for the existence of Doctor John Smith destroys the play's credibility because it renders any emotional investment in the character null and void. It transpires that Smith's whole life in Perfugium is a fiction, created by the Doctor and Death at the bequest of the former, to see who the Master could have been had his life not been the victim of the Doctor's manipulation. The implication of this is that Smith is not the Master, he is merely a romanticised ideal of perfect good (a notion the script emphasises when Jacqueline describes him as "the closest thing to perfection in this room") which makes him just as stereotypical and one-dimensional as Lidster views the Master, and thus, no better. The Doctor's hand in Smith's creation is further shown by the use of his own nom-de-plume of choice for the Master's new name, implying that the Doctor's purpose in this is to appease his own guilt by remoulding the Master into someone more like himself.

Master is frustrating because the Master has not changed to become this 'good' individual, he has had it forced upon him against his will. Until the revelation of the Doctor's involvement, there is still the hope that the Master consciously decided to become Smith, that he chose out of his own free will a path that would make him a better person and show a real redemption for the character. It also eliminates the possibility that the amnesiac Master defined his own personality, as the Eighth Doctor did in the BBC's novel range post The Ancestor Cell, which would have shown that he could escape his nature through autonomy, that nurture could triumph over nature. As it is, John Smith's goodness is as inherent to him as evil was to the Master and so when Smith talks of darker thoughts, we know he cannot act upon them because evil is abhorrent to his programmed nature. There is no element of tragedy in how Lidster portrays the Master's inception, merely dissatisfaction at how obvious and unnecessary it is. It seems Lidster's intention was to contrast these two individuals, the Master as the victim of nurture and Smith the result of a programmed nature, but he lacks the skill to pull it off successfully because they are ideas founded upon the false premise that the Master is not a character and just a force for evil.

In structuring Master, Lidster adopts the same kind of framing device that made Jacqueline Rayner's Doctor Who and the Pirates so successful, where the main plot of the narrative is recounted to a secondary character, in this case by the Doctor to a mysterious man who is implied to be a professional assassin. Whereas Rayner used this technique to subvert and experiment with storytelling techniques, Lidster's attempt is less successful because his approach is far too straightforward. Aside from the fact that the suspicions of the listener are immediately aroused by the implausible idea that a specialised killer, who is ostensibly preparing to kill the British Head Of State, would sit down and have a cup of tea with a mysterious stranger who appears out of nowhere wanting to tell him a story, the half-hearted attempts to cast the Doctor as an unreliable narrator fail.

Lidster is clearly influenced by the New Adventures series of novels and this permeates the whole of Master from the ultra-manipulative stance of the Doctor to the identity of the story's real villain, so much so in fact that this adventure feels more deserving of the "side-step" tag than the last bona-fide audio set during the New Adventures, Trevor Baxendale's generic The Dark Flame. Paul Cornell's seminal novel Timewyrm: Revelation (1991) defined the direction and style of the New Adventures, but it was also the first book to suggest that universal concepts such as Death and Time could be personified and hinted at their position as the gods of the Time Lords. Lidster heavy-handedly foreshadows the unmasking of Death as Master's villain through the over-emphasis as green as the colour of death on Perfugium and while he acknowledges this weakness in a post-modern manner, the irony just comes across as irritating. Strangely, Lidster seems to share a similar outlook on the New Adventures as Baxendale, as both take the opportunity to comment upon how the Doctor's adventures are less fun or innocent at this point in his lifetimes with Death's comments on this remarkably reminiscent of the conversation the Doctor had with Remnex in the earlier play.

As Master is a very melodramatic story it is appropriate that Lidster has constructed it in a very staged manner, with lots of long, drawn out scenes but because the story suffers from an absence of sustained tension emanating from the fact that it is has no real sense of narrative direction, the script lacks the verve to truly engage the listener. The first two episodes both suffer from a lack of momentum with the Doctor's failure to materialise in the main thrust of the drama until the final seconds coming across as awkward rather than mysterious particularly given that very little intrigue is provoked from the conversation of the dinner party. The second part consists almost solely of a debate between the Doctor and Smith on the nature of evil. While this raises interesting questions - most of which go unanswered - the verbose quality of Lidster's script is its undoing. The second half is an improvement as the plot finally begins to build towards its conclusion, but without any real sense of suspense or horror generated, it's too little too late.

The approach to continuity is rather curious too. By the very nature of the theme of the 'villains trilogy' references to the character's past are inevitable but Lidster chooses to only allude to the Master's past in very general terms yet needlessly crams in a huge number of mentions to other elements of Doctor Who right across its media spectrum. Some of this works, like the idea of making Victor into an Adjudicator, but much of it comes across as self-indulgent - which is also true of the blatant Zagreus portents, which make little sense in the context of the revelation regarding Jade and her knowledge of the Doctor's future.

Master's most successful aspect is its performances, where director Gary Russell has assembled an accomplished cast. As with the previous two 'villains' stories the two leads turn in the best performances but because the script is so low-key, Sylvester McCoy and Geoffrey Beevers aren't as immediately impressive as their predecessors in Omega and Davros. McCoy shows a great deal of restraint which suits both him and the darker tone of the play but because the Doctor is basically a peripheral figure for much of the story, he doesn't get a lot of prime material. What he does have are some superb moments of subtlety, such as the moment when he tells Smith he's standing over him with the dinner knife, but because of the transparency of the script his big speeches lack the emotional impact intended. From his performance in Dust Breeding (2001) we know that Geoffrey Beevers can be absolutely superb as the Master, possessing the most perfect voice for playing the part on audio and yet his performance here is less imposing. While he figures prominently throughout Master, Beevers is always playing Smith which lends the production a sense of being muted somehow as while his performance is honest, the script conspires against him to rob it of its value through intrinsic plot weaknesses. While the real Master only emerges briefly near the conclusion to the drama - in a scene which Beevers clearly relishes - the occasional slips into his Master's voice as Smith gives the story some of its few genuine moments of horror. As Doctor John Smith Beevers is good, but it's a shame he isn't allowed to play the part he's great as for more than a couple of minutes.

The theatrical effect is enhanced by the limited cast. Philip Madoc, veteran of many television Doctor Who appearances, provides sterling support as Victor Schaeffer with his rich voice perfect for audio. In the first episode he conveys Victor's troubled mind at the spate of murders brilliantly but as the story advances he veers perilously close to going over the top in his depiction of his own madness. The part of Jacqueline is taken by Anne Ridler and while she isn't bad, her performance is undermined by her inability to scream convincingly - something which Master requires her to do quite often - and this tends to break the reality of the drama. Daniel Barzotti's Italian accent certainly causes him to stand out from the rest of the cast, but his scenes as the man are underwritten and lack plausibility leaving Charlie Hayes as the most impressive of the guest stars as Jade. As the maid, Hayes shows a timidity which helps to stave off the notion she is more than she seems but when she is revealed as Death she adopts a confident, seductive tone that marks her out as a most formidable villain and one that will hopefully return in future stories. Although, it is somewhat strange to have the character of Death interacting with the others in such a direct way she does here which lends the final episode a slight sense of the surreal.

At a basic level Master is an exploration of what makes a person evil but because it fails to offer any real insights or conclusions, its message is chaotic. As a story exploring the eponymous character Master fails because Lidster offers a character study into a potential version of who the Master might have been, rather than who he actually is, and while Smith learns about who he was, the revelations add nothing real to the character. And that is Master's greatest flaw, the fact that it could have been the story to give the Master the profundity he never had but because of the author's narrow-minded view of the character as "just Evil", the interesting idea that an individual like the Master could defy their own nature and gain true redemption through their own will is wasted. Joseph Lidster's first audio for Big Finish - the hedonistic The Rapture - was notable for its ambition, but sadly this is something his second lacks in abundance.