Doctor Who review: Master Pieces - 21 stories of the Master

A charity anthology has recently been released covering many of the Master’s lives.

Photo Credit: James Pardon/BBC Studios/BBC America

The Wilderness Years gave us so many great Doctor Who books, and it’s not like that stopped during the years after the show returned. So is charity anthology Master Pieces one of them? I’ve got 21 answers for you.

Here it is after honestly not much fanfare despite how fun this concept is for a Doctor Who book. The big unofficial 2019 Master anthology book written in aid of The Stroke Association. Boldly declaring on the back of the book “21 stories, 19 authors, and 14 Masters, and not a single Doctor in sight?” A statement broken in the very first story where the Second Doctor appears playing his recorder. Uh…

Let’s go about this in a different way from a normal book review. Rather than a vague overall impression that doesn’t really help anyone outside of knowing the book, I’ll give you 21 mini-reviews about all the stories it contains. Because you deserve it, and possibly because I’m a glutton for punishment.

So, let’s get started! You open the book, already comfortable with this purchase – because even if it’s bad, at least the profits go to charity. But then, bam: “In Memory of Terrance Dicks” (among others). Ouch, oh yeah, that happened. Still hurts you know. Anyway, onto the first story.

Bandages by Chris McKeon

For a few reasons, this is the story people tend to pick on when reviewing this book the most, I’ve seen it called pretentious by other reviewers, but I personally disliked it going with the long out of favor “the War Chief was the Master” fan theory that even Terrance Dicks went out of his way to disprove, more than any supposed pretentiousness within.

Regardless, this first story, written by a possible Dragon Ball Z fan, is a rather strange place for this to start. Taking place in some sort of Time Lord hallucination (maybe? Kinda? Sorta? It also might tie into the final story in this book), the War Chief who is the Master and also a corpse encounters a Clown who later turns into a Dandy and, eventually after going back a bit, a grandfather (I guess this is why there was a question mark after the “and not a Doctor in sight” blurb on the back of the book, in retrospect).

Still, the very first sentence is “The dark cocoon hung at the end of a dry string of stardust beneath a necropolis of hollow stars”, which tells you exactly what the next 17 pages will be like.

The House on McQueen Street by Scott Claringbold

The second story handles itself much better. What is either the baby Master from The Sound of Drums off for a lark while going insane (RIP William Hughes), the child Master from the comics that the War Doctor encountered, or maybe even a previously unseen child version of the Master, decides to help a thirteen-year-old boy find out who did a hit-and-run on him. Allowing him to get revenge before taking him on a trip through time and space for two pages before the ending sequence happens and it’s all rather quick and satisfying.

Also, the story leads you to think the Master has his own version of the Doctor’s Smithwood Manor, but it’s just his TARDIS. A shame, as I always liked that concept. Not to mention as it’s hardly important to the story, so it’s strange to focus on it for the title, but calling it “My Buddy the Master” would have given the game away too fast, I suppose.

The decayed incarnation played by Geoffrey Beevers – who’s appeared in not just The Keeper of Traken but many of Big Finish’s stories – appears in Conversion Therapy.

(Image credit: Doctor Who/Big Finish Productions. Image Courtesy Big Finish Productions)

Everything He Ever Wanted by Mike Morgan

From the title I was expecting something like “The Last Temptation of Koschei”, but instead – and this will sound a bit similar to you Big Finish listeners – the Master ends up on an alien planet and is mistaken for the Doctor. These aliens are being nuked by a planet nearby, and surely the Doctor will help save them, it’s what the Doctor would do after all.

The Master, since he needs a certain something from this planet, decides to help out, pretending to be the Doctor the whole time, slowly becomes a sort of shadow ruler of this mysteriously always under attack planet. It ends about as much as you’d expect, but it’s also good! Great 13 or so pages of a standard Master adventure. Standard might be too mean, but it’s like, you could point to it and go, “That’s the Master, right there, he’s like that officer”.

Master Chef by Lee Rawlings

The Master speaks in the third person and killed Trump to wear his skin, which is less politically confused than Arachnids in the UK, at least. Actually, while impersonating the president would be enough content for a story in itself, that’s actually just the first two pages and barely mattered, because this is a comedy chapter!

Remember the internet comedy that came about when Invader Zim was popular that you would see on DeviantArt or in fan fiction, kind of around the late 90s or early 2000s? The pure stream of consciousness with random wacky words? That’s what the comedy is like in this. If you like that humor, and the idea of the Master monologuing to himself about all the crazy ways he could kill the Doctor while eating and drinking various things and contemplating dressing up in new disguises, you’ll like this. Spork.

Conversion Therapy by Paul Driscoll

Taking place shortly after certain events in The Two Masters, (or Legacy of the Daleks if you hate yourself,) the newly crispy Peter Pratt/Geoffrey Beevers Master travels to an Earth colony in hopes of removing his horrible pain, and this Earth colony has had itself something of a dog plague. A certain scientist has found a way to preserve his daughters’ dog from the culling by encasing him in a cyber shell that covers the dog’s whole body. See if you can guess where this goes.

There are good twists and you’re actually wondering where this fits in in the grand scheme of things right up until the final page, which leaves you with plenty of continuity on the side. Really, the only negative I can come up with is that the writing style is a bit off, feeling sometimes like an AI wrote it (which is appropriate). It’s also not very good at being descriptive and you have to paint the pictures in your head yourself, but besides that, it’s fine.

Fallen Angel by Dan Barratt

Now this is more like it. The same Master form the last story, well, not the same one from the last story but the same incarnation. The crispy one, after being shot down and still reeling from the mess that ruined his body in the first place, lands in a nice quiet village churchyard where the Reverend and his wife mistake him for a fallen angel.

The story then quickly jackknifes off the road and it suddenly becomes something completely different when, if you’ll allow a quick spoiler, it turns out this village is filled with retired CIA (if you don’t want to click that link I mean the Doctor Who version, not the kind monitoring your computer right now version) Time Ladies, excited to have one final mission bringing in a renegade Time Lord. It’s needless to say highly entertaining, even if with them going up against the Master they… well… you can guess what happens…

Pulling Wings Off Flies by Jon Arnold

A really short, but nice, story about the Master traveling with Sabalom Glitz (I honestly completely forgot this was ever a thing, those Sixth Doctor Blu-Rays can’t come out fast enough) and tells the final story of them traveling together.

Well, it’s really more a story about the Master changing events on a planet’s history to achieve an end goal, and Glitz just leaves at the end, and there’s no satisfying “and here’s why this will affect the grand scheme of the universe”. But it’s short, it’s cute, it has annotations for some reason, and it’s a good way to spend a few minutes.

The Greater of Two Evils by Mark McManus

The Greater of Two Evils takes place entirely during the ending of The Mark of the Rani, where the Master and the Rani are stuck against the walls of the Rani’s TARDIS as a Tyrannosaurus Rex grows to full adulthood in front of them. That’s it. How they get out of that mess is the whole story, and it’s great.

It features both Gallifreyans frequently retreating into their own “Mind-TARDIS”, (because why shouldn’t one of the best parts of Heaven Sent be explored and developed further,) to try and find a way out of this predicament. For 12 pages. 12 pages of two huge egos trying to save themselves from being eaten, and maybe kill the other person in the room while they’re at it, with varying results.

It’s also pretty lighthearted at times too despite that, such as a comparison between the Sixth Doctors coat with the Untempered Schism, and “he noticed another section dedicated to disguises and nodded appreciatively”. It works, and I don’t have a bad thing to say about it.

An Alien Aspect by Richard Gurl

In an alternate universe, a coffin appears out of the sky, with burnt corpses wrapped around it. This world’s version of UNIT, recovering from an alien invasion that devastated the human population, is now determined to investigate this mysterious coffin and the dead bodies that came with it.

This one is a bit hard to talk about, mostly because of the writing style, what I already wrote describes six of the seventeen pages of this story. What I will say is this: it takes place before the events of the TV movie, and has some nice misdirection with the Master which would be better suited if this anthology didn’t place all the stories in roughly chronological order. It also provides an origin story for something you never really thought about needing an origin story, and it is also quite good. This book had a rough start but now we’re getting into the swing of things and… wait, how did the next story end again?

Plaything by Tim Gambrell

Written by someone who really likes the idea of Eric Roberts nude, this story goes into detail about how the TV Movie Master survived the Eye of Harmony. For two pages before an Eternal just plucks him out and places him in her own separate reality pocket, well, alright.

But then things become clearer. The Eternal starts gaining pleasure from torturing and disrobing the Eric Roberts Master, electrifying him or making him fight and kill alternate universe versions of himself, like one that was in the body of a female Ogron or one that had possessed everyone’s favorite Keeper of Traken character, Consul Luvic, instead of Nyssa’s papa. She is doing all this because she’s in love with him in her own sick Eternal way, and now the Master has to figure out how to escape her.

Or at least that’s where you’d expect it to go, but instead goes in a completely different direction with the Master once again in the Eye of Harmony trying to not die and then ANOTHER all-powerful character from Doctor Who (who isn’t Esterath) shows up and… while its written well and the ending is intriguing, two deus ex machinas in the same story to save the Master is a little much for this reviewer. I didn’t like how the Doctor found his TARDIS in The Satan Pit either so if that didn’t bother you, this probably won’t either.

Parental Controls by Daniel Wealands

This one is a little hard, as it has to do with the (spoilers because it isn’t revealed till around the end) Scream of the Shalka version of the Master and how he became the “man” he was in that, which I am unfamiliar with. I promise I’ll get around to watching it one day, I’m sure it’s good but I’m not in a convenient space to view it now (when I did have a chance to watch it, I had a choice of either Shalka or Dreamland, and I went with the one I knew less about). But, besides that from what little I can say with authority is that yeah, this one’s fine. Probably even better if I had watched Shalka though.

Like Big Finish audio Sympathy for the Devil, which introduced Mark Gatiss’s Master, The Devil You Know takes place in another universe.

(Photo: Doctor Who: Unbound – Sympathy for the Devil. Image Courtesy Big Finish Productions.)

Splinter of Eternity by Iain McLaughlin

Speaking of, here’s another odd pull from a spinoff I have no knowledge of. The story takes place in the Erimem series – a book spinoff set-in modern-day London featuring the former Big Finish character. Also, this might be canon to the Erimem book series as it’s by the original creator and writer of most of the books. In this story, the Master breaks into a university exhibition to menace our established-in-their-own-books tribe of characters, for two pages before HEY IT’S THE DOCTOR!

Yes, this is surely the Doctor, looking in his forties with his purple waistcoat (but black undershirt?), talking about how he reads The Beano and Time Lords and he would really rather be given the artifact the Master was trying to steal earlier. For safekeeping, it could destroy the universe you know. It goes about how you expect it to, and makes you rather interested in reading more of the Erimem book series. A nice stealth advertisement in this charity book.

The Devil You Know by Daniel Tessier

1999, Halloween, Reverend Masters (don’t worry about it) and Olive Hawthorne (who has her own spinoff) set off to stop the Devil’s Hump from being opened AGAIN live on BBC4 and… wait… that doesn’t seem right… UNIT disbanded after the Hong Kong disaster? And what’s that jar holding Hastur doing here?

YES, it’s an ALTERNATE UNIVERSE STORY. Well I mean, it didn’t have to be, if there was a mention of “a wheezing, groaning sound” in the final sentence of the story you could easily set this into the main universe, or maybe this takes place in another spinoff I’m not aware of (a possible frequent problem of this book).

(Site Expert’s note: this quite possibly takes place in the same universe as Sympathy for the Devil, which explores what would have happened if the Doctor never became UNIT’s scientific adviser.)

Still, it’s pretty good! It even has a nice monster mash in it. I wouldn’t have minded if it went on a bit longer than it did though, the ideas it brings up could have easily become a nice 100-page Quick Reads type thing.

One Night in Wartime by Stephen Hatcher

The Roger Delgado Master is strapped to a chair with Jo Grant strapped next to him, a Dalek comes in, it doesn’t end well. The Anthony Ainley Master and Nyssa are in a room together, the Daleks come in, it doesn’t end well. Eric Roberts appears fully dressed this time only to have his fingers fall off as soon as he materializes, it doesn’t start before it can end not well.

Two Time Lords watch on, not even bringing up the Alex Macqueen Master as if out of spite for those who enjoy him, trying to find a Master that can fight in the Time War. None of the past ones work, but they really could use a renegade that doesn’t have such a Doctor-sized moral code. They think it’s time to try something different. Something that ignores the comics, Big Finish, and has stranger implications for every regeneration the Master has afterwards. Something seven pages long, and good if those previously mentioned things don’t bother you.

As made popular by Big Finish’s excellent audio series, the War Master features in The Patient.

(Photo credit: Doctor Who/Big Finish Productions.

Image obtained from: Big Finish Productions.)

The Patient by Tim Gambrell

In an anthology novel where the Master has already made two inhabited worlds full of cute creatures ping-pong into each other so he could harvest the kinetic energy, The Patient manages to be one of the evilest stories in the whole gosh dang book. It’s the War Master during the Time War, crash landing on a low technology human colony, and needing to be nursed back to health.

You know exactly where it’s going to go the entire time, (in fact I think several Big Finish audios have this same plot,) but the build-up to it is wonderfully set up, before you get to the cruel end. The Tissue Compression Eliminator is used throughout the book, but this is by far the best use of it so far.

Quod Periit, Periit by Simon A Brett

All the non-Master characters act a bit Simpsons in this one if you know what I mean. But even if you don’t, here Harold Saxon is large and in charge, no Doctor in sight, and abusing his wife while vandalizing as many portraits of previous Prime Ministers as possible. Throwing Rubik’s cubes at politicians and promising the title of Chancellor to whoever solves it first.

As if to not to step on RTD’s toes, we get the character Henry Somerton to interact with the Master, both noticing a strange door that people don’t really see unless someone points it out to them, almost as if it has a Time Lord Perception Filter on it, or an Attention Deflector from the heavily inspired by Doctor Who Transformers comics, or the Somebody Else’s Problem Field from T he Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which we should ignore since that came first. Both Harold and Henry (thanks) then discover this door holds a secret that… honestly probably wouldn’t have mattered much to the Master’s plans overall, but well, since the Master is there already, he might as well do something about it you know? Story’s fine.

Cheese, Beans, and Toast by Sami Kelsh

Wait this ISN’T about the Master meeting Christina de Souza? Oh whatever. Take the absurdity and random humor of Master Chef and dial it from 569 to 5 and you have the tone of this story, a funny simple yarn about the Master befriending a Jewel Thief and just kind of, you know, hanging out. While also stealing a part needed for the Master’s TARDIS by breaking into a place that might as well be UNIT but isn’t named as such. (In retrospect, maybe this is supposed to be Christina and this author was just trying not to use BBC copywritten names, not getting the memo that everyone else was gonna do it).

They bond, they talk about breakups, they even laugh. Oh, to read a story where the Master has fun and enjoys himself WITHOUT killing anyone. It’s nice once in a while. Wait, the Master is a monster: he doesn’t deserve this happiness! Curse you Sami Kelsh!

Auntie Mary by Kara Dennison

Matilda is sick of her parents ragging on her for bad grades, so she goes to a mysterious meet up with one of her friends at a terrible pizza parlor, where the strangest woman Matilda has ever met is having teenagers fetch things for her, things that most teenagers wouldn’t have access to. But Matilda does.

If it wasn’t clear, this is a story featuring the Missy incarnation of the Master and it’s all good fun. Leaning more towards Series 8 over Series 10, the Missy in this story is highly manipulative, murderous, and in character.

Although – and this is the same problem Patrick Troughton and Matt Smith have – while this prose version is CLOSE to how she was on screen, the back of your brain is telling you it’s incomplete. A lot of Missy came in through her actress, more than any other Master, so something is a bit lost here. Still, it’s one of the best stories in the book, so thank God it’s also one of the longest.

The Diamond of the Gods by Nathan Mullins

The planet Adamentem’s riches spark the interest of various races, said to contain the Diamond of the Gods which was a rock allegedly owned by the owner of the universe and placed there by a hero with an umbrella. Its mere existence is enough to cause a full-scale intergalactic war (although mention is made of Daleks, Ice Warriors, Cybermen, and Zygons not being bothered enough to participate. Well, “wouldn’t stand a chance” but come on, get real)!

Fearing this will cause another Time War (for some reason), the Time Lords first attempt to contact the Doctor, but he doesn’t answer, so they go with the next best thing, Missy (??). Despite initial objections from Rassilon, the Time Lords summon Missy, who accepts the mission to end this before it escalates. But not before kidnapping a few Time Lords to hang BDSM style in her TARDIS for reasons.

Seen possibly as a lead in for Series 10, this story much like the last one is both one of the longest in the book, and with the exception of part of the final page (the four paragraphs in question aren’t nearly enough to justify what they’re saying considering everything before it) very enjoyable. Missy manipulating two different alien races, along with absurd amounts of flirting, is a joy to read. While having the same problem of her characterization as the last story it remains gratifying, Missy is two for two so far. Maybe I should do The Missy Chronicles one of these days…

Master Pieces has given us many stories with many Masters. How well do the final two stories round off the anthology?

The Shell Game by Rachel Redhead

Part of… Let me just check the TARDIS wiki here… Jesus Christ, Faction Paradox? Or… the author’s own series of books? Maybe? This anthology could use an appendix.

Okay anyway, taking place in one or both of those two things, Judy Collins and the Master (going through his Al Pacino phase) set off for a heist that will take down a company from the inside out for reasons disclosed later (sort of). What follows is corporate deception, wanton murder, gross misuses of company budgets, a paragraph of the Master torturing a Dalek for some reason, and a dehydrated machine gun.

This one’s a bit strange, I have no experience with Faction Paradox, so there’s a lot here that makes me feel like I missed the boat a bit. But it could just be this stuff is explored in the author’s previous work, which is the same problem. To say nothing of the tone, which while more restrained is still similar to Master Chef if I’m being honest. Well if you like that story, you’ll like this. If you like Faction Paradox, it’s possible you’ll like this. It’s hard to say, but unlike Splinter of Eternity, I don’t think it stands on its own as well, so keep that in mind.

Viva La Vera by Paul Driscoll

Derek (Doctor Who writers, please stop using this name, it’s too close to Dalek and if that’s the joke it’s been done ten thousand times already) is planning to get married to his loving former stalker girlfriend. He also has a great job as the personal assistant (although the job title was listed as Companion) for wannabe VP and party-leader Vera Daly. Until she gets shot in the chest and pronounced dead right in front of him.

Distraught, he returns back to the office, only to find Vera Daly alive and well, talking about how her two hearts saved her and it was all a ruse. You see Vera Daly has a plan, a plan that involves Derek taking her place in the 2071 elections. Because by dying, Vera Daly will become master of all.

The story quickly becomes very absurd, but in a way that I could actually see happening in the early days of the revived show (at least until they go to Gallifrey), as despite how none of this would ever happen in the real world it’s still written in a serious way that wouldn’t feel out-of-place in, I dunno, after The Doctor’s Daughter or a random late season of The Sarah Jane Adventures.

A different style

Speaking of writing, it’s almost as if this was written by a different person than the one who wrote Conversion Therapy – this is almost a complete one-eighty in terms of quality. Not that Conversion Therapy was bad but your mind often wondered while reading it, it didn’t grip you much, but this does.

While the way Missy died on TV at the time this story was written could be seen as a truly fitting, ultimate death for the character (oops Series 12 happened after I wrote this), this final story in this book can be seen as a nice alternate continuation of the character, but in a way you would never fully expect despite all the hints until the book finally spells it out to you in one low-key OH OF COURSE moment. It’s something we may or may not ever get officially, but here, it’s more than welcome, just like the story. Even IF it implies the Doctor is a failed Time Lord experiment.

And that’s it. 21 stories, and 21 long answers about their overall quality. Except for that one time where I just said: “Story’s fine”. But is it worth your time? I would say yes, never mind that some unmentioned amount of the profits will be going to charity (possibly all?) because that shouldn’t be an incentive to buy something. But the fact that by the end of the book, the majority of it was well written and engaging, that’s what really matters. It’s absolutely, unofficially, worth your time.

Wait, now that I think about it, there wasn’t a single Alex Macqueen Master story in the book. Never mind everything good I said: zero out of ten.

Next. Why the Timeless Child was just the beginning. dark

So, which one of these stories was your favorite? Are there any other Doctor Who characters you would like an anthology series about? Should I next write about Doctor Who: The Official Cookbook, where you can learn how to make a pizza that looks like Cassandra’s stretched out flesh, or a Fish Fingers and Custard recipe that isn’t as good as the Alton Brown version? Let us know in the comments below.

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Doctor Who review: Master Pieces – 21 stories of the Doctor’s greatest enemy

By Robert Daniel | Mar 12, 2020