Listen up, everyone! I’m back on my bullshit! And by “bullshit” I mean “heartbroken overinvestment in a certain fictional character known as the Master.” As I said in part I of this essay, I know what the Spymaster wants: MUTUAL UNDERSTANDING. Let’s see how this plays out in the culmination of his story…
The pinnacle of the Spymaster’s attempts at understanding the Doctor occur in The Power of the Doctor. Both the Spymaster’s turn as Rasputin and his body swap with the Doctor demonstrate his desperation to understand…well…the peculiar power of the Doctor.
Look at the Spymaster’s disguise as Rasputin. It’s more than just canon confirmation that the Master has a thing for pretending to be Russian [see Razor and his questionable accent]. It’s a chance for the Spymaster to be a Doctor.
If you look past Rasputin’s scandalous and sinister reputation, you see that he is best known for his meteoric rise to power and his mysticism. Born to Siberian peasants in 1869, he had little formal education, but he took a pilgrimage in 1897 that caused his religious conversion, teetotalism, and vegetarianism. His religious fervency, charisma, and alleged “strange manners” fascinated influential religious people in St. Petersburg. These influential people allowed him access to the city’s elite salons and, eventually, with the endorsement of the upper classes, Rasputin became close to Tsar Nicholas and Tsarina Alexandra.
For a time, Rasputin served as confidant and advisor to the royal family, particularly the tsarina and her kids, who trusted him implicitly. Rasputin lived with the tsarina and her kids, instructed the kids in religion, and apparently healed her hemophiliac son Alexei on several occasions. Eventually objection to Rasputin grew, and there were several assassination attempts. One of them succeeded.
So, to recap, while Rasputin had a bad reputation, at least for a while, the tsar and the tsarina and family loved him, accepted him, trusted him, and granted him great power. He used that power [supposedly] to alleviate their son’s suffering.
By assuming Rasputin’s identity, then, the Spymaster temporarily experiences the friendship, loyalty, and affection that the tsar and tsarina gave to Rasputin. In this way, he has the chance to feel the awe, love, and devotion that companions often show to the Doctor.
Furthermore, being Rasputin allows the Spymaster an opportunity to improve a kid’s health [or at least to take responsibility for alleviating his symptoms]. In his guise as a Russian mystic, the Spymaster thus acts as a helpful provider of health care – i.e., a doctor…or a Doctor.
@natalunasans @spoonietimelordy @queen-of-meows @sclfmastery
Salutations, fellow pedants! The Spymaster has returned [to much rejoicing], which means that THE ANGSTMASTER has too. The first one, of course, is Sacha Dhawan’s portrayal of the Master, while the second one is me. Specifically, it’s me in my mode as a DW analyst. I’ve already discussed what the Spymaster wants in part I—mutual understanding—and how he achieves it as Rasputin in The Power of the Doctor in part II. We now discuss the body swap in The Power of the Doctor and the flip side of mutual understanding.
The body swap in The Power of the Doctor, being more of an appearance swap, nevertheless seems to impart to the Spymaster some profound firsthand knowledge of what it’s like to be the Doctor. After all, he says, “If I don’t get to be the Doctor, then you don’t either.” He also says, “Please don’t let me go back to being myself.” [Or something like that.] Both of these lines indicate that his experiences during the body swap aren’t just that of the same old Spymaster in different clothes. He feels during the body swap like someone beside himself—like the Doctor. He finally knows what it’s like to be that person [or he thinks he does], and he doesn’t want to let that go.
I began this essay with the contention that the Spymaster seeks mutual understanding. However, all I have reviewed so far are the Spymaster’s attempts to understand the Doctor in more and more intimate ways. I have not yet pointed out the Spymaster’s struggle to explain himself to the Doctor.
The Spymaster’s deepest desire is not only to understand the Doctor, but also to have the Doctor understand him and his feelings. If we think back to his relationship with the Doctor as O, we see very little of it, but we do know that they communicate in secret codes [i.e., the fish] and that the Doctor signs off her text with “Kisses!” The fish suggests in jokes and a comfortable camaraderie, while “Kisses!” suggests that they are talking about feelings from time to time, even if casually and jokingly. The Spymaster uses his O persona to indirectly test out expressing emotions to the Doctor.
He escalates his self-expression to the Doctor by using force in The Timeless Children. He coerces her into accompanying him to the ruins of Gallifrey in the first place, ties her down with a magic force field [or something], and then subjects her to an infodump about Tecteun and her eugenic experiments on the Timeless Child. This is a fucking gross, racist, and sexist situation in which the scary evil brown guy overpowers the heroic white woman and violates her mind for…uh…basically the whole episode, and I hate it. I’m not excusing it. I’m only saying that the Spymaster does this in part because he wants her to know what he knows. He wants her to learn what he has learned in the same way that he has learned it. He wants her to feel what he feels.
When the Spymaster and the Doctor have their showdown with his Cyber-Masters and he dares her to release the Death Particle, the Spymaster’s desire to have the Doctor understand him becomes explicit. “You’ve given me a gift…of myself,” the Doctor tells the Spymaster. “You want me to be scared of it because you’re scared of everything.” In other words, she correctly states that he wants her to feel afraid in the same way that he does.
The Spymaster agrees, saying, “You don’t even know your own life. Look how low I have brought you.” But he’s only projecting his own confusion, despair, and defeat onto the Doctor. He wants her to know what it feels like to be him, but he hasn’t succeeded in transmitting his experience.
This brings us again to the body swap in The Power of the Doctor. The Spymaster has failed at forcing the Doctor to understand him, so now, desperate and out of other ideas, he just flat-out tells her: “Please don’t let me go back to being myself.” Does he assume and hope that the Doctor’s time in his form has given her a sense of what it is like to be him? Does he really want her to empathize? He seems to be begging for escape here. Well, at the very least, he doesn’t want to be abandoned.
Sorry, Spymaster – but we’re a long, long way from the Doctor’s historic compassion for [or at least attachment to] the Master. This isn’t Three petitioning Kronos to spare the Master’s life in The Time Monster or Eight begging the Master, “Give me your hand!” as he’s sucked into a vortex of doom. Nor is this Ten, sobbing, “C’mon! Regenerate!” over the perishing Master or Twelve asking Missy, “Stand with me.” This is Thirteen, who turns the Kasaavin on the Spymaster, rats him out as a brown guy to the Nazis, and leaves him for dead in The Power of the Doctor. Thirteen notoriously avoids feelings. She’s notoriously enraged at the Master for all the racist, sexist, homophobic, ableist bullshit that was the S10 finale. [Hey, so am I!] So she’s constructively dealing with her rage by denying her feelings for the Spymaster and abandoning him so she doesn’t have to deal with all those icky complex emotions.
I admire Chibnall’s commitment to portraying Thirteen as a ruthless asshole [not just toward the Spymaster, but toward everyone in general], even as my sympathies obviously lie with Bill, Grace, the Spymaster, and all dead/tortured/gratuitously suffering non-white characters. It’s just another piece of evidence in my long-running argument that the Doctor is really more of an antihero and much more similar to the Master than they [and the narrative] want to admit.
@natalunasans @spoonietimelordy @queen-of-meows @sclfmastery @aegipanomnicorn-blog
P.S. I wrote this essay having only heard about The Power of the Doctor secondhand from @natalunasans . I will probably have some more pertinent thoughts and better quotes when I actually see it. >:P