The Two Masters

Main Range #213

Released: 13 June 2016

Listened: 3/20/21

This is the final “five-six-seven” trilogy for this project, but it’s more about the Master than it is about the Doctors. The big surprise is that the “crispy” Master and the “bald” Master swapped bodies before the trilogy started, which explains why he’s acting out of character in “And You Will Obey Me” and “Vampire of the Mind.” The ruse continues through the first couple of parts of this story, and it’s clear Geoffrey Beevers and Alex MacQueen are loving every minute of it. Alex MacQueen had appeared in several sets of “Dark Eyes” by this point, but the Seventh Doctor knows him only from “Dominion.” The story is written by John Dorney, so you can expect a heaping helping of timey-wimey, which mostly takes place in flashbacks, so you can see how the mind-swap was set up. As a bonus, you also find out how the Master got crispy-fried before “The Deadly Assassin” (or at least one version of that story), and what the “bald” Master was up to at the beginning of his life. And Dorney throws in his creations the Rocket Men, but at a very down-on-their-luck point in their history, so they’re not really significant to the story. Of course, a major paradox like this threatens the existence of the entire universe, and of course the Masters want to take advantage of that and take over. And even more of course, they can’t get along for long enough to pull it off, at least not once the Doctor sticks his nose in. Which is kind of obvious, especially if you’ve heard the “Masterful” boxed set or seen “The Doctor Falls,” but multi-Master stories were still pretty uncommon in 2016. Alex MacQueen once again demonstrates why he’s a great Master for audio, with lots of variations in his line delivery, pitched all over the place. His Master also seems to be having such fun, which makes a great contrast to Geoffrey Beevers’ Master (who’s in constant pain, so I can’t really blame him). The only disappointment is that the Doctor wraps it all up fairly easily and neatly, which is perhaps normal for the Seventh Doctor at this point, but you’d think it should be trickier to defeat the Doctor’s greatest enemy.