The latest War Master set continues the trend of stand-alone stories that vary greatly in quality and normally fall into one or two categories of “The War Master acts nice but is actually evil” or “The War Master fights an evil more evil than himself”, but I will give Rogue Encounters some praise for being a bit more outside of the box with one or two of the stories. Let’s take a look!
Episode 1, “Runtime”, sees the future of a war-torn planet be only one hour away from destruction by Dalek hands fall to a young and afraid girl called “Slug” (Aitch Wylie) with help from a suddenly arriving Master (Derek Jacobi), who of course acts like an ally. The two travel across the planet to reach a control point and stop the Daleks, fighting off drowned Daleks, illusions and a bounty hunter called Kindred (Nisha Nayar) who keeps trying to tell Slug what The Master is really like. It’s fine, another case of “if this is your first War Master story you’ll love it, but if you’ve listened to all of them it’s a bit old hat now”. You can probably guess how the end goes but I’ll leave that to the Spoiler section.
Episode 2 is “Manhunt” and takes your classic American X-Files-y story and puts the War Master right in the middle of it. Alison (Loreece Harrison) is on a road trip with her boyfriend when she sees a blinding white light and then wakes up to find him missing, reporting it to the police but they’re suspicious of her cover story of “I saw a bright white light and I can’t remember anything else”, like the old UFO sightings. She is visited by The Master, who claims to be a master of memory regression and can unlock her memories of what happened but she resists, at least until her boyfriend’s body is found and she’s suspected of murder. The Master begins unlocking classic grey alien probing scenes from her memory as they go on the run from the police, including a daring police chase, before eventually unlocking the whole story…
Episode 3 is titled “The Sublime Porte” and sees The Master pretend to be an archaeologist who is trying to uncover the titular gateway only to open it and find Bilis Manger (Murray Melvin) inside and fleeing in terror. Now I have to admit Bilis appeared on Torchwood after I lost interest and stopped watching, but it didn’t take long to get caught up. Basically he’s an all-powerful observer known to the Time Lords as “The Regulator” who balances the universe by wiping out entire civilizations when they get too big for their boots. The whole story is The Master running, trying to outwit Bilis (and normally getting someone innocent killed while doing it) and then running again when he fails. Eventually he does confront him though, and is taken into the Porte itself…
Finally “Alone” is a story set during the time the War Master is Professor Yana, an innocent human looking to help those few who remain at the end of the Universe. Yana meets a young man called Rafe (James G. Nunn) and the two become friends, but as time marches on Rafe begins to lose his memory and oddly starts to even fear Yana, both unaware that some part of the Master still exists in the fob watch Yana carries around, and he’s getting fed up of waiting. It’s a unique idea for a story in this series, but it’s also quite boring and definitely the weakest of the box, sadly.
The Continuity:
A good cover, though it did make me think The War Master would actually meet his human self, rather than Yana being in his own adventure (pretty much anyway…)
Not much really, well, beyond “Alone” being set just before the Tenth Doctor TV story “Utopia”. Kindred the bounty hunter mentions “what he did on Callous” as a reason The Master is evil, which is a reference to “The Master of Callous”, one of the earlier and probably still among the best of the War Master series.
Overall Thoughts:
While “Runtime” was pretty bog-standard and despite having a unique idea I found “Alone” pretty dull I really enjoyed “Manhunt” and “The Sublime Porte”, so that was a relief at least. As much as I love Derek Jacobi in the role this box hasn’t convinced me that these sets aren’t getting too stale, but at least half of the set being good and one of the other stories at least trying something new was a bonus…
Episodes 2 “Manhunt” and 3 “The Sublime Porte”:
Episodes 1 “Runtime” and 4 “Alone”:
“Runtime” ends with The Master and Slug successful, only for The Master to reveal that he had to save the planet because in the future Slug saves his life just before he lets her and her people die. So, bitter sweet to say the least, but also pretty predictable. “Manhunt” reveals that Allison and her boyfriend were abducted by aliens and were then put down on Earth with the means to infiltrate and steal data from The Master’s TARDIS, which they did at the cost of her boyfriend’s life. The Master finds out where the aliens are through her memories and sends Allison up to their ship to take his data back and have her revenge, but instead The Master sets it up so after she helps him Allison is killed and “uploaded” into the alien’s digital space, though at least there she is reunited with her boyfriend (who no I can’t remember the name of, sorry…)
“The Sublime Porte” has Bilis show The Master the Porte and manages to convince him that he is too weak-willed to use the device that can destroy planets and isn’t worthy of the power so The Master tries to show him by picking a world to wipe out, only to be led outside and find that he destroyed the planet they were both on in a predestined event anyway, and then Bilis vanishes with the entrance to his domain, leaving The Master humiliated but thankful to be alive. Lastly “Alone” ends with, well, Rafe wanting to be away from Yana because he thinks he’s evil, which upsets the old man greatly, though he is soon cheered up by receiving a signal from Utopia, setting up the episode of the same name. Kind of gave that one away already…
Hogan Reviews 