Mark of the Rani

People seem to have a problem (oh alright, fans have a problem!) with the Master's continual re-appearance in Doctor Who throughout the eighties, mainly with regard the way he apparently keeps dying and then popping up again with a jaunty line akin to Davros' "not when there is an escape pod to be had!" to explain, or not explain, his miraculous resurrection.

It's become a cliché, along with wobbly walls, reverse the polarity and the Daleks stair-ascending antics. And like them all, it is lazy, over-used and not even really true in the first place. In fact Davros is, if anything, a more shameless merchant for inexplicable comebacks than the Master, simply waking up in "Destiny" after being buried for years, surviving the Movellan virus in "Resurrection" and escaping the justice of the Renegade Daleks in "Revelation" all without much of a plausible excuse. Perhaps the Master is targeted more because he is so smug about his continual survival, somewhat modestly claiming that the "whole Universe" knows he's indestructible in "Mark of the Rani".

But does he really have need to make this claim anyway? I've chosen to talk about this subject with regards to "Mark" because it's his most unlikely reappearance following apparently being "burnt to a crisp" in "Planet of Fire". But it's also the only real 'death' of his that we see: at the end of "Castrovalva" he is being restrained by his own creations, but we know he's trapped with his own TARDIS as means for escape; In "Time Flight" and "The Five Doctors" he survives anyway and he is happily away on his toes at the end of "The Kings Demons". So just where does this business about the Master apparently keeping coming back from the dead come from?

"Planet of Fire" is where. But it always amazes me that people find his resurrection in "Mark" so implausible, given that the whole series is about Time Travel anyway. Who's to say the Master that the Doctor meets during the Industrial Revolution hasn't just escaped from Xeraphas? Or been deposited there by Rassilon? In fact, "The Trial of a Time Lord" shows us that the Doctor/Master meetings are NOT in sequence with the way we see them, because the Ainley Master has been flitting about in the Doctors future and duelling with the Valeyard. You can't just ignore something like that. We should be able to accept the Master's death and sudden reappearance just as Sarah Jane can accept meeting the Third Doctor in the Death Zone, after she's seen him "die" and regenerate into the Fourth. What's the difference?

Of course there's the matter of the Master's post-"Mark of the Rani" appearances to contend with, all of which must take place prior to "Planet of Fire" if we follow this logic. Unless we suppose that the Master staggered, charred and unrecognisable, from the Numismaton flames to somehow escape into another adventure. "The Deadly Assassin" perhaps? There's actually no reason why the Master seen in that story should resemble a burned corpse, unless of course he really has just met a fiery demise... and there's no reason to suppose that "Keeper" follows "Assassin", just because we saw the stories in that order on screen. Or maybe you could insert a whole run of Big Finish adventures into the gap beyond "Planet"?

It's something to think about. But next time you watch the Master shrug off his ingenious scarecrow's disguise and grin that evil grin to camera once more, don't be so narrow as to think he's just cheated death. Because as a time traveler like the Doctor, he could simply have it all to come...