Board Thread:The Panopticon/@comment-197.86.143.194-20200710194940/@comment-197.86.143.88-20200711053704

Borisashton wrote: The Monk's page states that no valid source has drawn the connection to the Master. Could you summarise in an in-universe "According to one account"-style sentence or two which sources state this? It started on another thread Essentially, Malcolm Hulke and Terrance Dicks, who co-wrote The War Games (TV story), and thus co-created The War Chief, and who also both worked extensively on stories featuring The Master, made several in-universe comments that established that Edward Brayshaw and Roger Delgado were playing the same Time Lord. A few quotes here..

From Episode 8 of The War Games (TV story) :

DOCTOR: Oh, do you? WAR CHIEF: Your machine is a Tardis. You’re too familiar with its controls to be a stranger. DOCTOR: I had every right to leave. WAR CHIEF: Stealing a TARDIS? Oh, I’m not criticising you. We are two of a kind. (Thus, we can clearly see that both the Doctor and the War Chief have stolen a TARDIS)
 * WAR CHIEF: You may have changed your appearance, but I know who you are.

By the way, the same scene played out in Doctor Who and the War Games (novelisation) like this(page 104):


 * The War Chief took the Doctor into his private office just off the war room and told his bodyguards to leave. “Now, ” he said “a traveller in a space time machine. There is only one person you can be”.

Back to those stolen TARDISes. Remember, the War Chief has stolen a TARDIS. The Doctor has stolen a TARDIS. Has anyone else stolen a TARDIS? Why, yes. From Doctor Who and the Sea-Devils (novelisation) (page 28):


 * ‘But what use is your TARDIS to you while you’re in here?’ Jo asked: ‘It would be difficult for you to understand,’ said the Master, ‘but my TARDIS is my proudest possession.’ The Doctor laughed. ‘You don’t even own it! You stole it from the Time Lords!’ ‘As you stole yours!’ retorted the Master.

So, again, the Doctor has stolen a TARDIS. But we now know that the Master has stolen his TARDIS too. So, that makes three stolen TARDISes, right? Well, the exact same person who wrote The War Games AND Doctor Who and The Sea Devils ALSO wrote this. From Doctor Who and the Doomsday Weapon (novelisation) (page 7):


 * ‘The first TARDIS was very small,’ he said. ‘On the outside, yes,’ said the old Keeper. ‘Inside it could carry up to three persons, four with a squeeze. Later we built much bigger ones. There have been two stolen, you know.’ The young Time Lord didn’t know. ‘By our enemies?’ he asked. ‘No. By Time Lords. They both became bored with this place. It was too peaceful for them, not enough happening.’ The old Keeper smiled to himself, as though remembering with some glee all the fuss when two TARDISes were stolen. ‘One of them nowadays calls himself “the Doctor”. The other says he is “the Master”.

So, the Doctor stole a TARDIS. The War Chief stole a TARDIS. The Master stole a TARDIS. But, by Season 8, a grand total of TWO TARDISes had been stolen.

What did Terrance Dicks have to say in the matter? From The Three Doctors (novelisation) (page 93):


 * In his various incarnations, the Doctor had found himself up against many terrifying enemies. With the exception of the Master, this was the first time he had found himself opposed by a fellow Time Lord. And in comparison to Omega, the Master shrank almost to a petty criminal.

Yes. In the words of Terrance Dicks, prior to Omega, the Doctor had only ever encountered ONE other renegade Time Lord...the Master.

There is lots more, but the thread was to establish that authorial intent was that the Master and the War Chief are one and the same, and that there is in-narrative that they are one and the same.

At which point, Najawin entered the discussion, made some personal insults, claimed to "not have a horse in the race", but generally made it clear that he/she hated the only sensible conclusions that could be drawn from those(and many other) pieces of both in-narrative and real-world quotes.

So, the result was Najawin saying "Well, that makes the Monk the Master too! And we know that that's not true" (or words to that effect). The response, which another user posted much better than I did, is that Hulke, Dicks, Holmes etc. all worked on the same Era, and all referenced The War Games in stories involving The Master. Whereas none of them had anything at all to do with the Peter Butterworth stories. And it wasn't even clear if any of them were even aware of those stories at the time they created the Time Lords, the Master etc. But Najawin used the existence of "the Monk" as one of their only two pieces of "proof"(despite 'not having a horse in the race') that "The War Chief can't be the Master". *The other is the Dream sequence in Divided Loyalties, btw.)

So, this thread was actually worthwhile. And really, it's worthwhile even without those comments of Najawin'.

I am not stating that Butterworth was the Master. But I'm not stating that he's not the Master either. And, in fact, unlike the character of Master/War Chief, there was NO clear in-universe narrative in the television serials to establish that Butterworth was even a Time Lord. If we state that he is a Time Lord, then, if we go by Dicks and Hulke, it appears to be that they included him to be the Master as well. Which actually wouldn't have contradicted anything at all at the time. BUT, then, we don't even know if they even had him in mind at all when they created the War Chief/Master.

And then of course the various other ranges. He's "Mortimus", who was both at the Academy with the Doctor, yet had never met him before 1066.

He's "the Time Meddler", and that monk's cowl was a badly executed one-off disguise.

He's "the Monk", who never met the Doctor before 1066. But the same incarnation says that the Doctor is THE ONLY ONE who calls him "the Monk".

He's a human being from the far future who stole a time-space ship, and sued it to try and move Earth's technology forward before its time, while also using his new possession for personal profit.

And, how many times did he(they?) encounter the Doctor "for the first time since The Daleks Master Plan"?

So, this Thread is not saying "the Monk is..." Personally, I don't believe that Peter Butterworth ever even played a character called "the Monk" the way the Doctor is called "the Doctor". "The monk", yes. But not the "Monk" as a Time Lord name. In fact, going just by tv, we don't even know that he even was a Time Lord.