The Vault – an archive of alien artefacts securely stored deep beneath the Angel of the North.
There’s also a prisoner in the Vault. An extraterrestrial known as the Master. He has been on Earth for some time, but now he’s under lock and key.
This is his story.
Or, as Captain Ruth Matheson and Warrant Officer Charlie Sato discover… perhaps it is theirs.
THE COMPANION CHRONICLES: MASTERMIND
The eighth and final series of Companion Chronicles begins with “Mastermind” from Jonathan Morris, a sequel to “Tales from the Vault” from back in the sixth series. Rather than returning to that story’s superficial, unrewarding anthology format, Morris instead decides to make this story all about the Master – and the result is still superficial and unrewarding.
So we’re back in the Vault with Ruth Matheson (Daphne Ashbrook) and Charlie Sato (Yee Jee Tso). We learn that the Master is being held prisoner in the Vault, and that he is in a state of suspended animation from which he only awakes for one hour every five years. And when he does wake up, the UNIT operatives on site must interrogate him. To do this, they must use a series of elaborate security procedures designed to prevent the Master from hypnotizing them; in the worst-case scenario, there is a failsafe that will lock down the prison and prevent any escape. So right off the bat you know that UNIT understands exactly how dangerous the Master is and how stupid it is to send a couple of ordinary human soldiers in to interrogate him. Clearly, the Master must have access to some incredibly important information in order for UNIT to take such a massive, stupid risk, right? Well, no – they just want to find out how he arrived on Earth and how he wound up in the prison in the first place. This is your motive for potentially endangering the entire planet?
I’ve seen this story compared to “The Silence of the Lambs” from multiple quarters, but the similarities end on the surface. Yes, the Master is locked in a cell, and yes, he plays mind games with his interrogators. But rather than focusing on these mind games, or on some sort of outside problem they need him to solve, the story focuses almost entirely on how the Master came to be there. First, there’s a belabored explanation (tied into mediocre short story anthology “Short Trips: The Centenarian” if you’re interested) of how the Master came to be the Deathworm Morphant and how he escaped the Eye of Harmony in the time following the TV movie. Evidently, as his captured bodies decay, they eventually turn back into the rotten Geoffrey Beevers Master. With this crucial continuity point addressed, the story turns to the Master’s time stranded on Earth after escaping. What follows is a catalogue of evil things the Master did to keep himself entertained until he could get his TARDIS back. First, he skulked around England for a while, murdering people as necessary. Then he booked a ticket on the Titanic, and when it sank he took a seat on a lifeboat intended for a woman or child! My, how evil! After that, he became a gang lord in New York, then moved to Las Vegas and took over the criminal enterprise behind the casinos. The problem here is that we don’t actually see any of these events. All we get is the Master recounting them in the broadest terms. We do see a few scenes of the Master passing himself down through a family from father to son, but even these aren’t nearly as interesting as they could be.
Geoffrey Beevers turns in one of his usual deliciously evil performances, but it feels like a missed opportunity for one big reason: the story doesn’t dive into the Master’s character to any significant extent. The best Companion Chronicles allow us access into the mind of the narrator – here, we get a list of horrible things the Master has done, but nothing more about his motivation other than the self-evident fact that he’s evil. And the supporting characters are utter non-entities. Matheson gets a hint of development when we learn about her time with the UN during the breakup of Yugoslavia, but Sato’s feelings over the death of his father are the most obvious of clichés. I loved the way the Master tempted them, but of course the story doesn’t actually do anything with that idea, allowing him instead to do the very thing the entire system is designed to prevent.
Most of the flashbacks take place in America, probably because 2/3 of the cast is American. This means that Beevers gets to play an American version of his Master, and his accent is somehow both completely convincing and completely ridiculous. Ashbrook is fine in her various roles, but Yee Jee Tso is terrible in all of his. The worst part of the experience is listening to Tso trying to hold his own against Beevers and failing, something that happens over and over again. I’m not normally one to pile on, but “he was in the TV movie” shouldn’t be a reason to cast someone with the range of a potted plant.
The general response to “Mastermind” has been overwhelmingly positive, and I don’t understand it. As a story, it wastes almost everything good about it in order to focus on the boring, unconvincing elements. Even the production suffers: while Ken Bentley directs well, the sound design from Neil Gardner and the score from Daniel Brett are way too obvious. The Master announces that he killed someone, and we hear the sounds of a chiming clock and the screams of a dying woman? Subtle this is not. Which is a nice description of “Mastermind” as a whole, come to think of it.
Mediocre.
4/10