a) Doctor Who is a huge beast, worked on for 45 years by thousands of people. Every actor, writer and director had their own things which they gave to the series. Inventing your own part is, then, quite a different affair to screwing around with Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter, each of which had One Creator and one unified vision. Hell, nowadays the show is being run by the fanboys - you can look in back issues of Doctor Who Magazine to find fan-rants written by RTD, the Moff and the rest. Therefore, my contribution is no less valid than anyone else's. It wouldn't be the first time I've remoulded canon in my own image. I have not one but two of my own superior Valeyard origin theories, as well as a grisly theory about the fates of ex-companions and a private version of what happened to Turlough on Trion. Also, in my canon Caves of Androzani goes by its original name, Chain Reaction.
b) the area I'm covering has been deliberately not touched on - it's practically an invitation. It has only ever been explored in audios/novels (in Master and The Dark Path, and also in Lungbarrow and the rest), and therefore of questionable canonicity anyway.
c) And it's always been crappy. This makes far more sense.
The super-mega theory about why the Doctor and Master stopped being friends, and why the Doctor got exiled, and also why he won't tell anyone his name. And some other stuff.
So it started from me asking how someone as fundamentally evil as the Master and as good as the Doctor could ever have seen eye to eye. It's well established that they used to be friends at the Academy, and it's clear from every on screen encounter that they get on really well when they are not facing their ideological differences [every time Delgado'n'Pertwee team up; also how pally the Doctor is with the Portreve (Castrovalva) and Yana (Utopia) when he doesn't realise their identity]. The chemistry is so there, but they can't help but argue when it comes to ethics.
However, when we first meet the Doctor he is not good or heroic, at least not how we expect. He kidnaps his first companions against their will, lies to them, and even attempts murder to get out of a tight spot. It's through contact with the humans Ian and Barbera that he learns the value of compassion and valiance, and with each successive companion he becomes more and more like the figure we recognise. Even the Third Doctor still has to be talked into heroics by UNIT - he'd much rather be back on a cosmic joyride. You don't really see the Doctor landing and attempting to help until the Fifth - it's not until his Sixth regeneration that he starts actively looking for trouble and thinking of himself as a Doer-Of-Good.So we can suppose that the Doctor of Gallifrey was even less well behaved, at least in human terms. In other words, he was thinking like a Timelord - superior to everyone, not caring about lesser species [reasonable guess based on the first few episodes, and every Timelord we've ever met]. Yet there was one fundemental difference - he was not content to sit and just watch the universe go past. He wants to travel and he wants to get involved. [obvious, really, from his later behavior] Not necessarily "involved" as how you'd imagine the Doctor to get involved nowadays - saving people, hunting things - but still, he was thinking BIG. Every non-renegade Timelord we've ever seen has been completely tedious and law-abiding, so you can imagine how a rebellious Doctor would bond with the only other person in his class [probably] who also had big ideas. Loneliness does strange things to people ("Such a lonely little boy...", Girl in the Fireplace), so the Doctor's enthusiasm at meeting a fellow mind would naturally lead him to overlook the Master's flaws. The pair become completely wrapped up in one another* - they neglect their studies [numerous references to the Doctor failing his exams - Deadly Assassin and Ribos Operation are two], but have some very big plans of their own.
[*you've met people like that, right? Also, see later episodes - the Doctor and Master seem to care about only each other when they meet, and seem to regard one another on another plane of existance. Nothing else seems to matter. See: every time the Master abandons his meticulous plan, and instead chooses to reveal his identity so he can gloat, particularly Kings Demons. See the Doctor's refusal to bring the Master to justice, even when he should know better - letting him escape in Deadly Assassin despite an attempt to detonate a black hole at the heart of Gallifrey; letting him live in Castrovalva despite the fact he murdered Tegan's aunt, destroyed Nyssa's home planet and pinched her dead father's corpse, tortured Adric for a few days and accidently blew up a third of the universe. Do I really need to defend the statement that they have an unhealthy obsession with one another?]Now comes the theorising. Together, they did something they secretly knew to be wrong, but were arrogant enough to assume the results would justify it. It starts small, but then it goes too far - and even though their aims seemed the same with the blindness of enthusiasm, when put to the test it turns out the Master's core motivation (power!) and the Doctor's (more hard to define at this point of his life) are quite different. They start to disagree about the basic nature of what they are doing, it gets completely out of hand, and then the Timelords catch up with them.
I hope that doesn't seem too much of a jump of logic. To my mind, it makes sense that their mutual desire for something would get larger and larger, especially because no one else would be invited to join their little friendship [see: obsession in every other Master episode ever]. Also that they wouldn't be content with merely theorising [later episodes; this is what sets them apart from other Timelords - action, change, actually putting things in motion], and they wouldn't be too worried about the consequences [later episodes]. Finally, this is when my question - "how someone as fundamentally evil as the Master and as good as the Doctor could ever have seen eye to eye" - gets answered. It is not until now they have realised that their basic aims are different.Of course, the problem is of defining exactly what they were up to. At that point, the theory turns into pure invention. Both want to travel, to make change and to think outside the small-mindedness of the Timelords - I'll leave it at that. For non-fans, I want to make it absolutely clear - this "event" is never referred to on screen, on audio or in the books, there is no canonical substantiation for it except that it seems to make a lot of sense. So we have to ask ourselves what do the Timelords percieve as crime. The answer is interferance, along with non-conformity. It is clear, from Deadly Assassin and Trial of a Timelord, that the Timelords pretty much regard the Doctor and Master as as bad as one another. Neither want to stay on Gallifrey, both want to go out and change things. The distinction between one's "good" and the other's "evil" would be quite lost on them.
What happens is something like this: the Master is caught, and the Doctor isn't. Or possibly (but less likely IMO) the Doctor decides things have gone too far and hands the Master in, or even both get caught but the Doctor escapes. Infinite permutations of this exist - I like the first one best - but all are equally theoretical.
For this crime, both are stripped of their names
.[this is pure fabrication on my part, but seems to make sense. The Timelords are obviously into their ritual, and the Doctor obviously has a hangup about his. It is my belief that when a serious crime is comitted a Timelord no longer has any right to his name. Evidence? The renegade Timelords we meet are: the Doctor, the Master, the Rani, the Meddling Monk - also, if you accept them as Timelords, the Celestial Toymaker, the War Chief and the Valeyard. No exceptions, unless you count Omega - and he isn't strictly a renegade, merely a villain who happens to be Timelord. Also Morbius, but again that's complicated, and Drax - but I haven't seen his episode, so I can't come up with a smart answer. But everyone we meet on Gallifrey has a name - Borusa, Maxil, Flavia, Andred and so on. There are exceptions - the Inquisitor is one, so is the Castellan and Lord President - but those are all ceremonial Gallifreyan titles, so maybe there's a custom whereby you can surrender your name (therfore also your dynastic responsibilities) for the greater cause of Gallifrey itself.], and hence must choose new ones.
The Master is put on trial - the Doctor is not [in the interests of telling a good story, evidence for this follows]. But obviously, peeved about being abandoned, and also prone to panic as we see in later episodes, the Master has no qualms about revealing the Doctor's part in it. The gravity of what they have done not only endangers them, but also their families [reasonable guess - the Timelords are evidently very dynastic, and the the Doctor's family is all dead. We are presumably meant to think they are Time War references, but this works just as well] Instead of standing by his buddy and admitting to his part, the Doctor uses his freedom to rescue his family. Possibly arriving to find them all dead, possibly they have merely vanished and been imprisoned/exiled [based on half-garbled memories of Cold Fusion. Death seems violent and sudden for the Timelords - maybe imprisonment makes more sense, because pre-Doctor would not necessarily want to take the huge risk of a prison break. Perhaps the best answer is he simply cannot find them, and doesn't have time to risk Susan's life to save them all. Something tragic definitely has happened, even before the Time War - in Tomb of the Cybermen, he claims his grief about them "sleeps in his head" -but in Curse of Fenric he claims he doesn't know whether or not he has a family, suggesting maybe he never found out where they got to.]
In any case, he does find his granddaughter Susan [no time here to discuss whether she's actually his grandchild - I hate the Cartmel Masterplan, I don't know why collective Fandom has such a hernia about "the Menoptra and Vespiforms" and I don't know why it's necessary to invent a huge mythos about pre-Doctors, the Other and parallel timelines to explain away a simple fact like the Doctor having screwed someone once. While I like the idea that "Grandfather" could be a Gallifreyan term of respect, she is so obviously his that this whole argument is rendered null. Too cute to be anything but.] and the pair of them hastily escape in a stolen TARDIS. When we first meet Susan and the Doctor, they are definitely in danger and on the run. The way to make someone behave like a criminal is to treat him like one. The idea that Susan might be in danger also explains why he kidnaps Ian and Barbera - their knowledge might prove an anomaly which would alert the Timelords.The Doctor is eventualy put on trial in The War Games - proof that he wasn't put on trial first time around, and evidence that only the Master was caught for whatever-it-was. His punishment is one forced regeneration - we can also presume that's what the Master got. As we have no idea what regeneration Delgado!Master is actually on, he could have recieved an even more severe penalty ["I have wasted all my lives on you!" - TV Movie], given that by the time the Second Doctor was put on trial he had saved the universe once or twice and maybe had some mitigating arguments. I haven't actually seen The War Games, which naturally hampers the argument, but I can't handle more than one regeneration in a year.
Here ends the theory: from now on, I'm merely justifying using Master episodes. The following is more spoilerific, if anyone actually cares, but not so much it'll spoil anyone's fun.
This non-canonical event is reflected in all the subsiquent meetings between the Master and the Doctor. In his first appearance in Terror of the Autons, the Timelords warn the Doctor that the Master is on the way - ergo their history is known, and the Timelords are keeping tabs on both of
them. The Master's first action is to attempt to kill the Doctor, ergo he's still cross about something. But when he's not crazy with vengeance, the Master is really keen to team up with the Doctor. It happens automatically - even in Terror of the Autons, it takes only five words for the Master to have a complete change of heart, and for both to efficiently solve the problem and save the world. Ditto in Sea Devils, in Claws of Axos. Not only does the Master want him to help, he actually expects him to. On several occasions, he genuinely believes the Doctor is going to leave with him. It suggests they did once have a very healthy working relationship, and the Master expects that to still be there - not understanding that in the interim, the Doctor has become a Good Guy. It also explains why the Master has such LOLage at the Doctor's pretensions to goodness, because the Doctor he knew was far more flexible in the morality department.[I'm no longer a fan of my Doctor/Master alien-concept-of-marriage theory, but those who like the idea may want to fner over Terror of the Autons working title: The Spray of Death.]
Similarly, the Doctor seems to feel he owes the Master something. It's more than the Doctor's regular refusal to let villains die - the Doctor is actually pretty flexible on that front. It does genuinely seem as if he has something to make up. The Sea Devils is a particular example of this, with him going to visit the Master in prison to check he's OK, and having fought extra hard to prevent the government from having him killed. It's a very telling episode - the moment the Doctor agrees to help the Master build his super-device to awaken the Sea Devils and Enslave The Universe, his guard just evaporates. He doesn't even suspect the Doctor will sabotage it - it's all "here are the blueprints, please rebuild it and lets conquer Earth together".
Of course by the time you get to the end of the Third Doctor's run, the Master is beginning to get the idea. The next time you see him is Deadly Assassin, where his plan involves sacrificing the Doctor - although it's a matter of survival, which is always of a slightly different priority for the Master.[For the record, I rank the Master's motivation as 1) Survival, 2) Winding the Doctor Up and Attempting To Kill Him, In A Good Natured Fashion, 3) Universal Domination. I base this on what he is willing to abandon, i.e. he will always abandon a plan or the Doctor to save his life, but he will also always abandon a plan to save and/or annoy the Doctor.]
After that, Logopolis - and mk.2 Ainley!Master is a different kettle of gumblejacks. His actions are no longer governed by my Non Canonical Event, so much as events we've seen on screen. And he is very, very different. The chumminess goes away after Castrovalva. Five and the Master never once team up the way Three inevitably would. The Master still puts him in fatal scenarios which are deliberately easy to escape - it's like the unwritten rules of the game - but at the same time he genuinely wants to hurt him. Kings Demons - all of it - is my evidence. I think he's finally got the message.
So what do you think? Any plot holes? Any inconsistancies? I'd love a chance to defend and make my argument better. And look at me, all grown up: I've managed to write an essay about the Master without mentioning Planet of Fire once. Hurrah for me!
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