To celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Master's first appearance, Big Finish will release Doctor Who: Masterful, an audio play featuring eight incarnations of the Master from both the TV series and the production company's previous audios.
Masterful will mark the first time John Simm, who played the Master from 2007 to 2010 and again in 2017, has worked with Big Finish. “It’s a real honor to play this character: the nemesis of the Doctor. He’s everything the Doctor is but he’s evil," John Simm said. "And it’s been great recording with Big Finish. You don’t get bored, it’s fantastic. It’s fun. It went really quickly. And I got to work with Derek Jacobi.”
Details about the story are so far scarce, but it will involve the Master's female regeneration "Missy" (Michelle Gomez) and the fan-nicknamed "Crispy Master" (Geoffrey Beevers), who appeared in the original 1963 TV series. Other incarnations include Eric Roberts' Master from the 1996 Doctor Who movie; the Derek Jacobi Master from Season 3 episode "Utopia" and numerous Big Finish audios and Alex MacQueen's Master, who mainly matched wits with the Eighth Doctor. Additionally, Mark Gatiss will play a Big Finish-exclusive Master played by Mark Gatiss that hails from a parallel universe where the Master was stranded on Earth and unopposed by the Doctor for decades, while Milo Parker will play a new version of the character.
Crossovers between different incarnations of the same character has been a regular occurrence for the Doctor since The Three Doctors, which aired in 1974-1975. However, despite the "timey-wimey" nature of the show, different Masters crossing each other's paths is much more rare. Big Finish first had an inter-Master story with 2016's The Two Masters, in which the MacQueen's and Beavers' Masters teamed up with and, naturally, backstabbed each other. Finally, multiple versions of the Master met on the TV show for the first time in Season 10's "World Enough and Time," when the Simm Master unexpectedly appeared to challenge Missy's commitment to becoming a reformed Time Lady.
Doctor Who: Masterful will be written by Big Finish veteran James Goss (Doctor Who: Ninth Doctor Adventures: Retail Therapy) and produced by David Richardson (Doctor Who: Fourth Doctor Adventures: Blood of the Time Lords). It will be released on January 2021 and is available for pre-order as a limited edition eight-CD box set or a digital download.
(via Nerdist)