Template:After Cheetahs

 Making sense of the 1990s It's difficult to understand what happens to the Master between Survival and the television movie without examining the real life publishing history. Each major purveyor of Doctor Who fiction in the 1990s gave a different take on what happened to the post-Cheetah Master:

As the name implied, the Virgin New Adventures were about telling new stories, and this clearly coloured Virgin Books' approach to the Master. 1994s First Frontier is the first piece of fiction to feature the Master after Survival. It's an attempt to move beyond the Ainley Master into wholly new territory by establishing that the Master gets a whole new set of regenerations It says the Master immediately goes to 1957 Earth after Survival and he gets a whole new set of regenerations. Ace shoots him, and he actually regenerates into a form that looks like — according to author David A. McIntee's description — . Other stories that you can slide into this continuity are Housewarming and the book Happy Endings.

BBC Books took over the Doctor Who prose license so that they could champion the then-new Eighth Doctor. They were apparently also interested in drawing a straighter line between Ainley and the Master who'd just fought the Eighth Doctor. Towards this end, Mike Tucker and Robert Perry completely eschewed New Adventures continuity. In the short story Stop the Pigeon and the book Prime Time, they say that the Master does not go to 1950s Earth after Survival, and he certainly doesn't get a new regenerative cycle. He still looks like Anthony Ainley. He still is infected with the Cheetah Virus. He more or less just continues on as the Ainley Master — implying that it's Ainley who goes to the Daleks' gallows just before the TV movie opens. Perry and Tucker

Big Finish are built on sound. They need a voice actor to command the part, and one that will sell CDs. So they decide to go with an actor who's already established in the role: Geoffrey Beevers. This means that their narrative problem is to explain why the Master sounds like the guy from The Keeper of Traken. How to do it? Easy: undo Keeper of Traken. Write a tiny bit of technobabble to suck the Tremas facade away. Voilá: Beever's got the gig again. Look for this "retro-Beevers" Master in Seventh Doctor audios, Dust Breeding and Master. But don't expect much in the way of narrative connection. There's no explanation of how this Master either escaped Cheetah World or turned into Eric Roberts.