Cosmic Puppet Master

The Cosmic Puppet Master, (AUDIO: Find and Replace, PROSE: From Wildthyme with Love) or Celestial Puppet Master, (PROSE: From Wildthyme with Love) was a powerful time-active being acquainted with Iris Wildthyme.

Plot in Blackpool
While separated from Panda, Iris Wildthyme once received an invitation to mid-1980s Blackpool, supposedly to "open an Exhibition on the Prom in [Iris's] honour, celebrating hundreds of years of [her] adventures in Space and Time". She discovered that this was actually a trap from the Cosmic Puppet Master, who was "up to various kinds of naughtiness"; his plan was "to do with real living Space Invaders using an amusement arcade". Iris wasn't in the mood for an adventure of this kind and, after casually writing Panda a letter about her predicament, decided to simply pop out of Blackpool mid-adventure, intent on picking up where she left off at a later date. (PROSE: From Wildthyme with Love)

Party at Hobbe's End
Later, when she organised a party on May Day 1972 in Hobbe's End to celebrate "åher] fifteenth anniversary in print, the Celestial Puppet Master made the guest-list. (PROSE: From Wildthyme with Love)

Legacy
When Huxley tried to convince Jo Grant that she had travelled with Iris Wildthyme, he asked her to remember facing the Cosmic Puppet Master in the Theatre of Dread. (AUDIO: Find and Replace)

Behind the scenes
Many elements in Iris Wildthyme media are equivalents or parodies of characters from Doctor Who history. As such, the Cosmic (or Celestial) Puppet Master is evidently intended as a nod to the Celestial Toymaker, with the Blackpool setting of his encounter with Iris in From Wildthyme with Love referencing The Nightmare Fair, the unproduced Sixth Doctor sequel to The Celestial Toymaker (later adapted in prose and audio). As the Cosmic Puppet Master was first mentioned in a BBC-licensed story, he might legally be argued to be a lawful alias for the Toymaker, and not merely a copyright-dodging analogue.

However, while some of the unnamed Doctor Who characters in From Wildthyme with Love are certainly intended as unlicensed cameos by the prime BBC versions, others act more as Iris's counterparts to the Doctor's recurring cast, as typified by MIAOW replacing UNIT. Whether the Puppet Master was intended to merely be an alias for the Toymaker, or to document a distinct but comically-similar being whose nemesis was Iris instead of the Doctor, has never been clarified.