At least since Tom Baker left the starring role of Doctor Who back in 1981, fans have wondered if the time-traveling eccentric could ever become a woman. And the show’s producers, over the years, have enjoyed trolling the fans by hinting that it might be possible this time, or by making extreme statements about why the Doctor must always be a bloke. (And then there’s Joanna Lumley…)
But meanwhile, for the past few years, one of Doctor Who’s most important characters, the Master, has been female-bodied. As fans know, she now goes by Missy, and as played by Michelle Gomez, she’s like Mary Poppins crossed with the Joker. And this year’s series has turned out to revolve around Missy, and whether she’s finally on her way to becoming a good person.
And I have to say, I vastly prefer Missy when she’s being bad.
Spoilers for recent episodes follow…
The main reason to enjoy Doctor Who season 10, without question, has been Bill (Pearl Mackie), the new companion who’s brought a wonderful snark and curiosity to the role. At first, the Doctor and Bill had a lovely Educating Rita dynamic, as the Doctor takes her on as his student at St. Luke’s University. Bill has helped bring a new energy to the venerable show, and she powered the season’s best episode, “Thin Ice.”
But this season’s slow-burn arc involves Missy, who has been locked in a vault in the basement of a university on Earth for decades. (It’s become a motif of Doctor Who in recent years that decades or even centuries pass, largely offscreen, for these nigh-immortal characters.) It turns out the Doctor was supposed to execute Missy on some alien planet, but rescued her instead, because she pled for clemency and he believes she can change. Ever since then, the Doctor has kept her locked up, and has been guarding her with his life. Except when he gets bored.
(Does the Doctor still remember the thing where Missy nearly tricked him into murdering his companion Clara, by trapping Clara inside a Dalek? Or was that wiped along with his other memories of Clara? We’ll probably never know.)
The business of the Doctor keeping Missy in a vault has suffered a bit from too much build-up, not enough story. We didn’t actually see much of Missy until halfway through the season, and since then it’s been full speed ahead on the question of her redemption. Meanwhile, only the Doctor’s friend Nardole seems to take the responsibility to guard Missy seriously—probably because Nardole will be the first to die if she gets free.
The key signposts of Missy’s redemption arc have been her tears, as well as some scenes where she talks about remorse for all the countless people she’s murdered. Plus, when the Doctor chooses to spare her life on the executioner planet, she asks him to teach her to be good, and maybe he’s been doing that offscreen. (She also rescues the Doctor from Mars in “Empress of Mars”, but she’s rescued the Doctor countless times before, including in last season’s Dalek two-parter.)
Meanwhile, though, there are reasons for doubt. Missy is still willing to sacrifice Bill’s life to put an end to another alien invasion, the threat this time coming from monks who created a virtual-reality version of Earth, and then ruled the real world for six months by means of love and historical revisionism (don’t ask.) Missy even gets in one of her best jabs at the Doctor, telling him that his version of “good” is vain and arrogant.
The question of the Master’s redemption is one that has popped up quite a bit over the long history of the character. The very first time we meet the Master, he switches sides to help the Doctor save the world from the Autons, and the fractured friendship between the two has always been a major focus of the show. Many fans already know that the Third Doctor’s era was supposed to end, not with Buddhism and giant spiders, but with the Master sacrificing his life to save the Doctor once and for all.
But there’s always been a somewhat clear distinction between the Master’s fondness for the Doctor (which borders on obsession) and the evil Time Lord’s inability to change. Russell T. Davies muddied the waters by introducing a new backstory in which the Time Lords had turned the young Master evil on purpose, so he could save them during the Time War—making the Master’s crimes, in some sense, not his fault. For his part, the Doctor has always seemed to be convinced that his arch-nemesis can never really change. Notably, in 1984’s “Planet of Fire,” the Doctor watches the Master plead for his life…and then just lets him die.
One of the most interesting Master stories is the 2013 novel Harvest of Time by Alastair Reynolds, in which, among other things, we meet countless potential incarnations of the Master, including men, women, and aliens. (Spoilers for Harvest of Time follow, sorry.)
At one point, the Third Doctor and the Master are taken outside of time, and suddenly the Master is free of his madness. He tries to convince the Doctor that he finally has the potential to be a good person…and the Doctor refuses to believe that this is anything but another ruse. The Master warns that if the Doctor returns them to normal time/space, he’ll become evil once again, and the Doctor will be, in essence, destroying him. On his knees, the Master begs, “We were friends once. Let me live. Don’t make me become that thing again.” But the Doctor just says, “It was a nice try,” and then restores them to normal space/time. Soon, the Master is exulting that he’s been freed once again from his pathetic weakness, and the Doctor realizes he’s made “the gravest error in judgement in all his years.”
As for the current storyline, I get that the Twelfth Doctor still wants to save his old friend, and that he’ll clutch at any hint that Missy might have changed—but at this point in the season, Doctor Who hasn’t shown me any reason to believe in Missy’s change of hearts. And I think we’re supposed to have at least some hope that she’s miraculously reformed.
It doesn’t help that we already went down this road last season with the Daleks’ creator Davros, who claimed at great length to be having a crisis of conscience—and then turned out to be just as unrepentant as you’d expect. (After all, Davros is a fascist mad scientist, clearly based on Josef Mengele, who experimented on countless innocent people and then unleashed an army that he knew would slaughter billions.)
Missy’s redemption will probably turn out to be just as illusory as Davros’, but we’ll find out soon enough. I’m more concerned, right now, with the way her redemption has been sold thus far. The set-up for the season-ending two-parter relies entirely on the audience at least believing that Missy may have changed—otherwise, our suspense is literally limited to just, “What evil scheme is she pulling this time?”
The final scene of this past weekend’s otherwise-good episode, “The Eaters of Light,” leans on a dramatic arc for Missy that the show has in no way earned. We see Missy listening to Celtic music and weeping, and she says that she doesn’t know why she keeps crying nowadays. Then the Doctor acknowledges that it’s probably just another devious scheme… but he can’t resist the hope that it’s real, and he can have his friend back. “That’s the trouble with hope. It’s hard to resist.” Then Missy cries some more. We already know from the “next episode” teasers that John Simm is coming back, as Missy’s utterly remorseless previous incarnation—and most likely, he’s either going to derail her redemption, or help her spring some trap.
So I’m just going to say it: We probably wouldn’t be spending this much time watching Missy cry and being told to wonder if she’s really changed if the Doctor’s arch-nemesis were still a man. Missy’s female body seems to be the main reason why this is even a dramatic point, as far as I can tell. Her tears, her insistence that her conscience is tormenting her, rely almost entirely on Michelle Gomez’s use of notes of feminine vulnerability and softness—like when she acts bashful after the Doctor says this is probably just another scheme. And meanwhile, there’s no question that Missy is a much better character when she’s indulging in total irresistible evil.
Gomez’s turn as Missy has been one of the best things about Doctor Who in recent years, and it’s been a joy to see this classic supervillain take on such a colorful, unpredictable persona. While the old Master occasionally busted out with a Scissor Sisters dance routine, Missy has torn through every scene, punching up the role of antagonist with a series of completely outrageous acts like her flirty murder of Osgood and the aforementioned death trap for Clara.
Apart from anything else, Gomez has proved conclusively that a female Doctor wouldn’t just be as good as any of the male versions—with the right actor, in many respects, she would be even better.
Missy starts out as a version of River Song—another sexually aggressive older woman with a complicated past—and in her very first scene with Peter Capaldi’s Doctor, she kisses him so hard that he’s stunned for a few minutes afterwards. But her sadism, her willingness to use the “little girl” voice right before doing something unspeakable, the louche decadence she infuses into her contempt for human life… her whole performance has become something more distinctive and startling.
Introducing Missy as a female version of the Master, from the beginning, was a way to take the latent sexual tension in the tortured Doctor-Master bromance and bring it to the surface. (Writer Steven Moffat notably stuck a joke into the “Time Crash” mini-episode about the Master’s abused wife, Lucy Saxon, being his “beard.”) Missy doesn’t just French kiss the Doctor, she macks on him constantly, and Gomez’s body language towards Capaldi is positively filthy at times.
All of which makes the stuff about the Doctor and Missy having a broken friendship—which is what drives Missy to create a Cyber-zombie-army to prove they’re not so different, and the Doctor to give her his “confession dial”—much more interesting. Even this week’s scene, where the Doctor says maybe they can be friends again, is played as if they’re ex-lovers: Gomez lunges towards Capaldi and he backs away, but then he takes her hands in his own and looks at her tenderly.
But Missy is much more interesting as a lit stick of dynamite than as a damp squib. No scene with her this season has been as electrifying as the moment in season nine where Clara asks if they’re supposed to believe that Missy’s turned good. And Missy is so affronted by the very notion, she incinerates a UNIT soldier in cold blood, before remarking that he seemed to be married, maybe with kids. Missy’s most fun when she’s cackling, dancing, wreaking havoc, piling up a huge body count.
I love a good redemption arc—but it’s a tough thing to earn. The worse the crimes, the higher the threshold. Among the many things I admire about Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., the show’s crown jewel is its handling of Grant Ward, who betrays his friends for the Nazis and is never once forgiven. (Even when we meet an alternate Grant Ward who’s made different choices, it’s more of an object lesson, not a sign that the real Grant deserved easy redemption.)
There’s almost no question that this season will end with Missy (or the Master, if she goes back to being a bloke) going firmly back to the side of evil. You have to put the toys back into the box, after all, and the Doctor always needs a dark reflection. I just hope before the storyline wraps up, we get to see more of Missy at her best—and by that, I mean her worst.
Before writing fiction full-time, Charlie Jane Anders was for many years an editor of the extraordinarily popular science fiction and fantasy site io9.com. Her debut novel, the mainstream Choir Boy, won the 2006 Lambda Literary Award and was shortlisted for the Edmund White Award. Her Tor.com story “Six Months, Three Days” won the 2013 Hugo Award and was optioned for television. Her debut SFF novel All the Birds in the Sky, recently won the 2016 Nebula Award in the Novel category and earned praise from, among others, Michael Chabon, Lev Grossman, and Karen Joy Fowler. She has also had fiction published by McSweeney’s, Lightspeed, and ZYZZYVA. Her journalism has appeared in Salon, the Wall Street Journal, Mother Jones, and many other outlets.
Send her to ONCE UPON A TIME where even psychopaths can really, really change and get a happy ending. (Snark!)
Anyone who has had a person in their life who keeps promising to change and proves it enough to regain their trust, then had that trust bites them in the butt as that person returns to his usual self can understand The Doctor’s wariness yet hunger for the change to be real. Since this is fiction, maybe The Doctor’s belief in the possibility of redemption will happen.
My money is on Missy giving her life to save The Doctor from The Master.
There is only one true Master, and that was Roger Delgado. But Michelle Gomez runs a close second.
The bromance angle is interesting in retrospect.
Master Roger was always disguising himself in a very obvious way so that Three would always identify him (“That orchestra conductor? They keep calling him Maestro and everyone knows that’s Italian for Master!” and “That priest/teacher? He calls himself Magister and everyone knows that’s Latin for Master!”). I always thought that was sloppy writing but if one retcons the concept of a tortured friendship (not present in the first appearance where Three is told “An old friend of yours is coming. The Master” and he responds “What is that jackanapes doing here?” I took “old friend” as sarcasm) then it makes much more sense—“here I am, you clever boy, and I am not hiding from you all that hard!”
While I agree that Missy as a villain is delicious (thanks to Gómez), I don’t agree that we couldn’t be watching a male Master being remorseful. They use Missy’s female body because it’s her doing it, but they could do it with a male actor all the same.
I do wish we get to keep Gómez around for a few more seasons.
And Grant Ward didn’t betray his friends, because he was always HYDRA. He had some remorse about duping Skye, and sure, a little bit about the rest, but it wasn’t a betrayal, because he wasn’t seduceed by HYDRA along the way: he was HYDRA from the start. That’s not betrayal, that’s a full-on double agent.
I can get wanting the Master to stay a villain. And I can agree that it’s a bit dodgy timing the redemption for a female regeneration. But I don’t like or agree with the idea that the Master CAN’T have a redemption arc. Who is FILLED with Redemption. We see DALEKS getting nice from time to time. So for me, any instance in which the Doctor refuses to believe the Master can change reflects poorly on the Doctor (forgivabley so, but badly nonetheless) but doesn’t prove anything about the Master’s essential nature.
Personally, I find irredeemably evil boring as hell. A Master who’s nothing but evil isn’t interesting to me… I’d be far more interested in a partly-reformed Master who sees ‘doing good’ differently and still arguably evil but at least with more complex intentions, like thinking “Okay, this society is pretty sick… the best thing I can do is incite a lot of chaos, maybe by triggering a war, and let it sort itself out.” Or “If I take over this little planet, I’ll make sure people are treated right.” That would IMHO provide much more interesting conflicts with the Doctor in episodes to come.
Thin Ice was not the best episode this season. It was a middle-of-the-road regency romance with some nice set dressing. The dialogue was good, but nothing about it surprised me. Extremis had the benefit of a whole new DW twist well carried off, Oxygen was superlatively creepy and deft with its anti-capitalist theme and Empress of Mars pulled off the whole steampunk thing with an interesting change of allegiance for the conclusion. I’d rate them all higher.
The new arc for Missy isn’t wrong and could be quiet interesting I think. It’s just we don’t have enough story this season to flesh it out or get it started really. They’re has to be more to Missy than discovering emotions we need to see what she does with them. When Simm shows up I’m expecting fire, mayhem, and destruction. I’m not sure what Missy will do but it’s going to be messy. Unrelenting evil is boring. The other Master had a purpose to all his evil; trying to re-start his regenerations because he reached his last one. Winding the Doctor up is fun but other than that what’s the point.
I’m inclined to think that the redemption arc is a a bit of a red herring. Moffat is far to immersed in the mythology of the show to believe that anyone would believe that The Master could genuinely and permanently change.
To play with the idea of the hope of redemption is a different thing, and the tension between the Doctor wanting the companionship of the Master/Missy, versus genuinely knowing who this creature is.
There are other interesting things stringing along. Why would the Doctor every agree to be an executioner, even intending to avoid an actual killing? What is River’s involvement, via Nardol, and why? Did River expect the Doctor to kill Missy?
Set aside any expectation of redemption, and there are a bunch of other things going one.
Harvest of Time! Yes! It is so pitch perfect (and under-rated), written by a true fan, that I heard Jon Pertwee’s voice while reading the dialogue. Highly recommended, especially for fans of the Third Doctor.
Would it be too wild if the next doctor is played by Michelle Gomez? We know Time Lords can choose their next appearance. Capaldi’s chose the face of the Roman from the Popeii episode and a Time Lady tried on a number a looks (was it Romana or the Rani?) before her transformation crystallized.
If it involves a sacrifice by Missy, Capaldi’s death scene could result in the Doctor choosing to honor her. Far-fetched maybe, but would be awesome.
I’ve been thinking the same thing, that Michelle Gomez could be the next doctor. Either the doctor choosing her face (as Romana did), or even a hybrid of the doctor and Missy – we’ve been told the regeneration will be complicated and different from previous ones, and hybrids have been brought up in Who a lot.
You know, just once I’d like to see something official about some ordinary Gallifreyans, not Time Lords but plumbers or physicians or something, who were abroad in the universe when All That Stuff Happened, picked an out-of-the-way corner to settle, and have been living on the slow path ever since.
While DW canon is wibbly-wobbly, it’s still (I think) official that a Gallifreyan’s physical abilities are basically Batman meets Doc Savage with a bit of Legolas thrown in. All of their senses are keener, and they have at least one extra–a kind of sense of time that allows them to predict the path of an orbital body by glancing at it, see the most likely outcomes of any action. etc. (Gallifreyan games must be deeply weird from our perspective.) Mentally they’re as psychic as Tolkien’s elves. They look weirdly like baseline humans, although their blood is red-orange and their usual body temperature is barely warmer than a corpse’s–and of course an internal examination will reveal something very different. In their first bodies they may be adolescents for centuries, with all that that entails, and they may live on as adults for more than a thousand years, punctuated by abrupt changes in personality.
So imagine, a small colony of Gallifreyans just trying to live out their lives and not get noticed by anybody who still has a TARDIS, because trouble follows them, every time…
10. Jenny Islander: We got a bit of that in the episode (Heaven Sent?) where the Doctor’s literal line in the sand places him on the side of the common folk. Clearly not all Gallifreyans are arrogant Lords mucking about with the universe. It’s not made explicit, but we also know from a couple earlier episodes (like the ones with the Simms Master) that the Doctor may have been raised in the barn where he eats the bowl of soup waiting for Rassilon, surrounded by what looks like peasant folks..
I recently watched all of Classic Who from beginning to end, including the recreations/restorations with the still pictures and scratchy audio tracks.
By the end, I was utterly weary of the Master. Yes, he’s a great villain. But from a moral point of view, it is inexcusable of the Doctor that the Master is still alive. He has been given many chances to reform, or at least to fail to do evil and every single time, he has murdered people.
Sure, they were mostly red shirts. And in TV land, whether we acknowledge it or not, we value the life of a primary character like the Master, more than we value the lives of a room full of red shirts.
But the Doctor strives to be moral. And it has reached the point, where he has zero excuse for not knowing better. Only an idiot would fail to kill the Master on sight at this point in the Doctor’s experience. Failing to do so, knowing what he knows, makes him at least partially responsible for all the murders that the Master continues to commit. So many of those murders, going all the way back to the Classic Who days were preventable, if the Doctor would just grow a brain and execute the Master on sight.
Of course he never will because the Master is too popular with the audience. But continuing to pander to the audience’s love of the Master, makes the Doctor into an immoral, weak, self-indulgent fool.
And hence, I cringe whenever I see a new Master based episode, because I must once again endure the Doctor being portrayed as an immoral idiot.
Regarding common Gallifreans. There was a classic Who episode, I think the one in which the Sontarans invade Gallifrey, in which the Doctor’s companion flees the city and finds back-to-nature Gallifreans living in the wilderness. Of course, she enlists their aid to help retake the city or some such. I’m nto sure those really count as non-time lord Gallifreans or if they were mroe like world-weary Time Lords. It’s never clear that there are non Time Lord Gallifreans.
Jeff, was that the episode where Leela leaves? One thing is for sure: the Master is not going away any time soon. Heavens, even when his ashes were being taken back to Gallifrey, he somehow survived and escaped into a human body! I think it’s a case of “will he change, won’t he?” If you’ve binged on the whole original series, it’s a different experience from sitting down at the TV and watching the next episode.
But the Doctor doesn’t kill. If he did, he wouldn’t be the Doctor. He doesn’t use weapons, as far as I recall, apart from his Venusian martial arts. The fourth Doctor could have prevented the Daleks from existing. He didn’t. He wanted them to have a chance. So you could say, I suppose, that the Daleks are as much his fault as Davros’s. And Davros – how do you kill a child, even knowing what he is going to become? Is Davros his fault too? Maybe, but he just wouldn’t be the Doctor if he had flown off in the TARDIS and abandoned that little boy. And it is so like him to give a second chance, in hopes that things might change. The Christopher Eccleston Doctor was angry and bitter and charged at what was supposed to be the last Dalek in a way that Tom Baker wouldn’t have. But he’d just lost his people and his home world.
There’s another thing: as a Time Lord he knows all too well what can happen when you stuff around with the past. An abandoned Davros might have survived anyway, and remembered that telephone box, and done what he did anyway – or more.
Regarding ordinary Gallifreyans, there have to be Gallifreyan motor mechanics and hairdressers and dentists. If you want an example from outside the show, have a read of Barbara Hambly’s Antryg stories. Barbara Hambly is a huge fan of the show and her hero, Antryg, is the Tom Baker Doctor with cheap jewellery instead of a long scarf. His companion is a human computer programmer, Joanna, who becomes his lover. His Master is his former mentor, who admittedly doesn’t hang around after the second novel. I will avoid spoilers here. He has his very own Council of Timelords to plague him.
BUT – the mages, this universe’s Timelords, are not the majority. In fact, they’re disliked and suspected by ordinary folk and have laws made against them.
A bit like Tolkien’s Elves, those Timelords. Who washes the dishes? Lothlorien and Rivendell are artist colonies. There are peasant Elves, but we only meet them once, in The Hobbit, and they are part of an inferior breed of Elf.
1. Harvest of Time was one of the best Who novels ever, with the Stephen Baxter one a close second.
2. I hope Missy is not redeemed, as she is a perfect foil just the way she is. I hope she survives to vex the doctor again in his (or her) next regeneration. But before he is sent back to his own time, I hope everyone uses Saxon like a dog uses a chew toy, as he is just totally irredeemable. Come to think of it, this might be where we see a Saxon to Missy regeneration scene…
Killing the Master would irrevocably change the character of the Doctor. Even when he was known as the War Doctor, he didn’t carry a weapon nor ever kill directly; although his troops did, so that may be an academic distinction.
It’s similar to the Joker question. Given Joker’s 100% recidivism, why would Batman not kill him to save the lives of future victims. Again, that would change who he is. He’s a figure of vengeance and punishment, but not the ultimate punishment. Some of that can be correlated to ideology, where Batman draws a line for himself. That line has been crossed by writers like Frank Miller, who’s ideology skews far right. His Batman has no problem killing. Alan Moore’s definitely does.
@13. Jeff Walther “…back-to-nature Gallifreyans living in the wilderness…”: those were “the Outsiders, a group of former Time Lords who had chosen to leave the Capitol” (per A Brief History of Time Lords).
I find this obsession with forced gender swapping really rather sinister. From what I can tell it is only a tiny but extremely vocal minority of Dr Who fans who write and write and write about it, along with deleting and complaining about the majority of Whovians other views and comments, who are extremely happy with the Doctor being a man.
Please allow the comments to reflect fans true feelings rather than deleting opinions other than your own.
Easy to say this after the fact but Missy turning good was a convincing conclution.
People cling to the illlgical notion that people cannot change, or in the case of this articles writer, just don’t want people to change out of preference. If people could never change, then Missy/Master would never have gone “bad”. If you were making a genuine, disciplined effort to change your ways and that involved torment via conscience then I would expect “damp squib”. Missy is trapped in a vault for decades with only her thoughts and intentions for company — you would be driven mad over the things you could remember if you were a mass murderer attempting to reform. In this season there were more complexities to the Doctor and Missy. Yes, Missy was utterly diabolical but there was always proof that Missy had hints of whatever was left of her morals or sense of sanity.
The dalek two parter that was mentioned, Missy wanted to help the Doctor and took the confession dial very seriously. The Doctor is fixated on ideals that make little sense to a Timelords way of life and is extremely humble, relatively speaking, whereas Missy sees her status as a Timelord as a free pass to do as she pleases — time and space is her petri dish and the Doctor is her friend and classmate. What does it tell you of a society that would cure a psychopath of a fatal condition and then set them loose? Is that not a silly thing to do? (Reference to Simms return)
Back to the latest season.
Things to be noted: Missy was genuine about her condolences for the passing of River Song, a hint to some level of care. Also, the Doctor didn’t spare Missy because she pleaded for her life, how do I know this? The Doctor didn’t sabotage the machine there and then, he would have had to get there beforehand as he hinted at when he said he was familiar with the machine. The Doctor never intended to kill Missy, if the Doctor had a dream it would be to get back his only friend.
What I am beginning to find so very stale and lazy with writing these days is this constant obsession with having foil characters. Like the Doctor must always have the “sadistic Master”. It felt like a long time coming for the Master/Missy to finally be in position to reflect and reform. Its even helped to shed light on the not so black and white dynamics of the two.
Missy had plenty of wisdom to hit the Doctor with, such as his arrogant sense of good not being absolute. He always muddles in, trying to take down the bad guys but see it on the flipside — this has resulted in the Doctor killing indirectly and altering the fates of many for both good and bad, even in situations where the Doctor could sacrifice just 1 for the sake of many but instead endangers many for the chance that things will turn out ok. He retains his sense of good in the knowledge that he didn’t try to kill someone, depite death following him around. The difference with Missy is she is the one pulling the trigger, electing to take lives for her purposes: why let a whole world suffer when you can just push one little girl into a volcano. Somehwere down the line, Missy began blurring the line not seeing killing and destruction as a crime but as just a simple act of no meaning or just the way things work. Eventually that indifference will make committing atrocities easier, more elaborate, maybe even enjoyable. Logically, you can’t empathise with those you kill so easily. With all this in mind, it only makes sense that the Doctor merely needed an opportunity to reform Missy and once it could be started we would eventually see that result. Here is to hoping that good Missy has somehow survived being attacked by herself and may we finally enjoy what has been a long time coming: the Master actually developing.