Board Thread:The Panopticon/@comment-4028641-20151008023030/@comment-6032121-20191107211213

Hm… SarahJaneFan beat me to tracing the passage. Well, the novel does state that Survival was the Master's last encounter with the Doctor, which is bothersome if you want a unified timeline that includes the VNAs… But let's not forget that it does not say how much time has passed since Cheetah World for the Master, just that he hasn't run into the Doctor since.

So while I obviously don't think that's what Uncle Terry had in mind when writing the sequence, it's plausible that the Master has stolen a different, temporary body in the meantime, possibly in an effort to get rid of the Cheetah Virus.