Mastermind

"An interview with the Master! Wish me luck."

Writer: Jonathan Morris
Format: Audio
Released: July 2013
Series: Companion Chronicles 8.01

Featuring: The Master, Ruth, Charlie

Synopsis

The Vault – an archive of alien artefacts securely stored deep beneath the Angel of the North.

There's also a prisoner in the Vault. An extraterrestrial known as the Master. He has been on Earth for some time, but now he's under lock and key.

This is his story.

Or, as Captain Ruth Matheson and Warrant Officer Charlie Sato discover... perhaps it is theirs.

Verdict

Mastermind was a great Companion Chronicle! I am really glad that we returned to the setting of the UNIT Vault, also known as the Museum of Terrors, alongside the familiar voices of Ruth and Charlie. This one focused on one particular aspect rather than the entire Vault as was the case when we were introduced to the location in Tales From the Vault, and that was a fun little twist. The idea of the artefact being the Master was fantastic! I liked how things started with it still clearly early days for Charlie as a UNIT employee and the prospect of them actually having Excalibur, King Arthur's sword, was quite majestic. What I really loved was the inclusion of a grandfather clock within the Vault, but I wasn't actually expecting the Master to be a prisoner! He was so deadly that he was locked within a vault in the Vault and the clock had quite the history having been found in Ancient Egypt having been there for three millennia. There was also evidence of Dalek weaponry scorches which was good. I found it a little weird that the Master only awoke once every five years for an hour, but while he was conscious it was clear that he would get away. The protocols put in place by UNIT of not having any individual with the Master for more than ten minutes was good, along with the failsafe locking in and the willingness to kill the other. He was a master of hypnosis and UNIT weren't messing around when it came to the Master. Charlie's reaction to knowing that the Master was the prisoner was fun and I enjoyed the description of Roger Delgado's incarnation that he expected to see. We had nice references to The Mind of Evil and The Daemons as it was clear that Charlie had read the UNIT file! I was not expecting the events of The Movie to be so important as it got referenced and I didn't expect this incarnation of the Master to be post-events of that story. I did like that Grace had given a file to UNIT depicting those events and from there we had an interesting tale of the Master being in a vaporous state and yet another new body. I was very intrigued by the concept of the Master always reverting back to his natural state that we presumably would see in The Deadly Assassin. We then got a strange little tale of the Master's life on Earth from 1906 onwards and I found it amusing that he was on the Titanic! He also became the leader of the Hudson Dusters gang and had numerous bodies throughout the century. After conquering New York, he headed for Las Vegas and controlled the casinos. I mean, there's a whole Master spinoff from Big Finish possible in the events of the Chronicle. He needed electrical power to become a Time Lord again, but the best he could achieve was keeping one body for 40 years. His plan of always having a ready body by going through a family by generation was wonderfully disturbing, if maybe seemingly uncharacteristic. Frankie working out the chain was fun and I liked how his threat was killing himself. Ruth telling us the story of how the Master was detained back in 1993 amidst Croatia's independence from the Soviet Union was very good as he lost consciousness and then nicely mentioned the Brigadier and Jo. Ruth's idea of the Master working for UNIT was never going to end well and I thought it rather strange that she bargained with books and movies. The Master's plan of offering to change the past for both Charlie and Ruth and a traumatic event that occurred in their lives with a father or fellow soldiers respectively was very good, and once the offer was made the Master's escape was already complete. Charlie went back to the earthquake that took his father, but then when Ruth started bringing him back into thinking straight the Master had vanished! I liked that. Charlie thinking that he was actually the Master was also quite fun. The Master had hypnotised the pair of UNIT soldiers quite brilliantly, the alarm was dead and it was all a plan to retrieve something of his from the Vault. The best way of doing that? Become an artefact yourself. The way things ended with the failsafe already hit and Ruth and Charlie stuck was really good. Overall, a great audio adventure!

Rating: 8/10