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This is why the Timeless Child retcon broke the Master to the point where he wiped the Time Lords out, of course. He couldn’t accept the idea the Doctor was the source of his own powers of regeneration, and the result was a horrific act of genocide amid yet another attempt at conquering time and space. But how did the Master become so twisted and broken to begin with? Doctor Who offered an answer 26 years ago today, in David A. McIntee’s The Dark Path.
The Dark Path is the Master’s Origin Story
Doctor Who was cancelled by the BBC in 1989, but the franchise never truly died; it entered what became known as the Wilderness Years, a sort of “time between times” where the story continued in other mediums. Virgin Publishing initially launched the so-called “New Adventures,” featuring Sylvester McCoy’s Seventh Doctor, and soon began releasing a “Missing Adventures” range featuring earlier incarnations too. These continued even after the Paul McGann TV movie, although the book license eventually reverted back to the BBC.
Virgin’s 32nd “Missing Adventure,” The Dark Path is essentially the Master’s origin story. It opens with the Master (still called “Koschei”) as a mirror image of the Doctor, a renegade Time Lord who wanders the galaxy doing nothing but meddle, but there’s already an edge of arrogance to him. He even has a human companion, Aila, who feels markedly similar to the Patrick Troughton companion Zoe. Unlike the Doctor, the Master has struck a deal with the Time Lords allowing him to intervene (likely working for the Time Lords’ covert Celestial Intervention Agency). Koschei feels rather like Tom Baker’s Fourth Doctor.
The title says everything. The Dark Path is the story of how a Doctor-like character could break, becoming the Time Lord’s nemesis. It begins with a powerful force known as the Darkheart, a neutron star with the ability to rewrite history, which draws the attention of both Koschei and Patrick Troughton’s Second Doctor. The Doctor is initially wary of Koschei, suspecting he’s been sent to hunt him down, and the two soon find themselves working at cross purposes. And then… Koschei’s companion Aila dies.
Koschei’s Betrayal Makes Grim Sense for the Master
McIntee is a skilled writer, and he tells an engrossing tale in which a hero falls from grace to become something truly evil. His vision of the Master is reminiscent of a classic Tom Baker scene in “The Armageddon Factor,” when the Doctor gained possession of the Key to Time and became tempted to use its power. Koschei comes into possession of similar power, and his initial goal seems noble; resurrecting Aila. But we soon learn that he cannot be trusted with control over time and space, abusing the temporal energies he now controls.
And then, in a shocking twist, The Dark Path reveals that Aila was not a human at all. She was a Time Lord spy, sent to keep an eye on Koschei because the Time Lords didn’t trust him (again calling back memories of the Fourth Doctor era, when the Doctor was given the companion Romana – albeit a lot more openly). Betrayed, Koschei decides to use the Darkheart to establish his supremacy. It goes badly wrong, and he’s left trapped in a black hole.
This is the final piece of the puzzle, a smart explanation of why the Master – a classmate of the Doctor’s – had used up all his regenerations by the time he arrived on Earth in “Terror of the Autons.” Ravaged by temporal energies, Koschei blasts through his entire regeneration cycle, his mind twisting and warping with the experience. Little wonder he became obsessed with stealing the Doctor’s own lives, as in the McGann movie; he has good reason to blame the Doctor, who stranded him in the black hole.
It’s anybody’s guess whether The Dark Path is canon; canonicity isn’t really a thing in Doctor Who, with writers and showrunners openly mocking the idea in a series that rewrites history at whim. Whatever the truth may be, though, McIntee’s story is an excellent one. It perfectly explains the Master’s origin, revealing a Time Lord who was once disturbingly like the Doctor but who was broken because of his own characters flaws, a shocking betrayal, and a traumatic experience of suffering.
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