Mrs Who?It has been said that in mid-life crises many Time Lords and Ladies undergo a sex change. This is the basis of a theory I have; namely that the Master, in an early incarnation, was married to the Doctor, who was, in his formative years, a rather immature Time Lord, given to rash, impulsive actions, such as his proposal of marriage after a wild night of drinking and celebration following graduation from the Academy. However, the Doctor got her pregnant soon after the marriage, and faced with the prospect of becoming a father so early in life, the Doctor's bottle went. Unsure of what to do, he panicked and stole a Type 40 Time Capsule, in for repairs on its guidance systems and prototype chameleon circuit. He fled Gallifrey and lay low on a small planet for a very long time, during which he made modifications to his time capsule. However, in those years he matured and resolved to return to Gallifrey five minutes after he had left. Unfortunately though, he had not been able to repair the faults in the guidance system, and arrived many years too late. He slipped in during the pandemonium that followed the destruction of the embassy on Minyos. Despite his maturity, there was still a maverick streak in the Doctor and he decided to leave Gallifrey again, since the Time Lords had become content to observe. Before he left, though, he discovered that the child which had caused his departure had been in the Minyos embassy with his wife. They had both been killed and left an orphaned daughter. The Doctor felt sorry for her, and took her with him when he left. In the time between the Doctor's first departure from Gallifrey and his return, his wife brooded, since the shock of her husband's departure had brought on a regeneration, with disastrous consequences. The trauma of a regeneration, coupled with the emotional strain of pregnancy, unbalanced her mind and she developed a fixation that the Doctor was hoping that the shock would kill her. Once her son had graduated from the Academy, she stole a TARDIS, as the time capsules had become known, to track down the Doctor and kill him. This quest dominated her life over many regener- ations until her mid-life crisis. With the extra stress of a sex-changing regener- ation added to the normal stress of any regeneration, her memories and ambitions were confused, and his life became dominated by the quest for power. It was at this time that he adopted the name "The Master". Strangely, it was only once the desire to kill the Doctor had diminished that the Master encountered the Doctor, who by this time had eradicated virtually all memories of his family. The only exception was Susan, as his grand-daughter had chosen to call herself after their stay on Twentieth Century Earth. In fact the Doctor had so successfully forgotten his family that he had no memory of ever being married. Once the Master had reached the end of his thirteenth life, drastic measures were necessary, and they were taken, as the Master strove for continued life, finally achieving it on Traken. When he achieved prolonged life he effectively turned back his body clock. This dredged up many facets of previous lives, one of them being the "kill the Doctor" priority of old, although he had still forgotten that they had ever been married, and he therefore assumed that the reason for this hatred was because the Doctor had so often thwarted his plans of conquest. However, the memories of marriage were not lost forever, and when the Master faced almost certain death on Sarn, the stress of the occasion rekindled the embers of the memory of another stressful occasion - the Doctor leving him all those years ago - which prompted him to cry out "Won't you even show mercy to your own wife?" The callousness shown by the Doctor as he left the Master to die on Sarn once again embittered the Master, and once he escaped the destruction of Sarn he once more set about trying to destroy the Doctor, but when he next met him his obsessiveness caused him to make mistakes. The last time we saw the Master he was aiding the Doctor. This was not, however, due to a rekindling of his one-time love for the Doctor, but simply because he thought a universe with the Doctor was inifinitely preferable to one shared with the Valeyard. And there the love story end. For now ... |