How Michelle Gomez & Peter Capaldi Redefined The Arch-rivalry Of 'Doctor Who'

Professor X and Magneto. Obi-Wan and Anakin. The Doctor and The Master.

Pop culture history is littered with legendary antagonistic twosomes bound by complex backstories and emotional baggage to boot. As our tastes in entertainment have grown and refined over the years, we've become less interested in the absolutes and extremes of old, simple "good-vs-evil" tropes to embrace the more nuanced aspects of ethics and morality. And it's a trend that has been embraced even on long-running sci-fi series Doctor Who, too, particularly in its continued portrayal of classic villain The Master.

Currently played by veteran Scottish actress Michelle Gomez, who is making her maiden voyage to Australia for Supanova Pop Culture Expo in Brisbane and Adelaide from this weekend, The Master — now Mistress, or Missy — is one of The Doctor's oldest foes. First portrayed from 1971-73 by Roger Delgado (with further pre-revival incarnations including Peter Pratt, Geoffrey Beevers, Anthony Ainley and an ill-advised turn from Eric Roberts in the 1996 telemovie), the character was largely angled as a prototypical Archenemy, hellbent on universal domination and inflicting pain on The Doctor for kicks. 

While the three post-revival Masters — including the ever-so-brief Derek Jacobi, as well as John Simm and Gomez — are still clearly galactic loose cannons with deeply, deeply nefarious motives, the character has been increasingly developed by the further addition of childhood and early-life backstory to recast The Master as not just a space-terrorist extraordinaire, but a former close friend of The Doctor's, over whom the latter now feels not just antagonism but outright guilt and, ever so occasionally, understanding.

This relationship, and the emotion behind it, formed the crux of the success of Simm's on-screen rapport with then-Doctor David Tennant, just as it does for Missy and Twelfth (and current) Doctor Peter Capaldi; arguably even more so, Gomez tells The Music.

"There's something very believable and touching about their friendship that has seems to have gone awry..."

"I think the strength of Missy is Peter — and I mean Peter's Doctor," she says. "That's the success of Missy, is the dynamic that she has with this particular Doctor.

"I'm not sure what would have happened had she been playing opposite anybody else other than Peter Capaldi, but I think Peter and I definitely have chemistry that works, and there's something very believable and touching about their friendship that has seems to have gone awry, and I think the success of my Missy is Peter's Doctor."

To a degree, that's because it's not just Missy who has changed over the years — Capaldi's Doctor has unquestionably offered a darker Time Lord than Matt Smith's goofy Eleven, Tennant's geek-chic Ten or even Christopher Eccleston's short-lived postwar Nine. There's something about Twelve — older, gruffer, less prone to nonsense — that his predecessors didn't wear quite so openly in their interactions, if they had them, with their Masters: a sense that neither one of them may be totally comfortable in the absolute certainty of their perspective any more.

"I think the stakes are higher because of that," Gomez explains. "I think it's definitely more believable, and that they're sort of invested in one another, in a way, that maybe hasn't been there in the past. Maybe that's because The Master is now a female, you know, and that brings a whole other dynamic to it. It brings many different levels of consequence, and I think that makes it all the more exciting and at times they bring out a vulnerability in one another, and they blur the lines of good and evil.

"You really mustn't forget that Missy is thoroughly evil, but you do … she'll kill you if you get too close."

"You could be forgiven at times for thinking that The Doctor's completely lost it and he's moved across to the dark side, and then there's times that you think that Missy's his best friend and she's just trying to kind of reach him again. And that's another reason why Missy is successful, because there's a danger in that, you know; you really mustn't forget that Missy is thoroughly evil, but you do. You do, because the way [outgoing showrunner] Steven [Moffat]'s written her, she is likeable, and you kinda want to be in her gang and then you realise she's a gang of one and she'll kill you if you get too close, really just because you bore her, more than anything.

"So I think it's really complex, and I think that's what makes it interesting, and I think that's what makes them almost human, and that they are quite flawed. They are two very flawed characters, out there in the darkness."

The pair's core humanity, or near-humanity, has become a core tenet of their interactions, few though they may actually be — surprisingly, Missy has only appeared in a handful of episodes, her recognition and renown having asserted herself as one of the most memorable and broadly beloved villains of the past decade despite the fact. But it has bled into other aspects of the show, too, as The Doctor's continued adventures demonstrate that getting older isn't necessarily the same thing as getting wiser. 

"I think that's important; I think it's important for the audience to be able to relate to those characters, and there's nothing more boring than the absolutely ignorant," Gomez says. "None of us have all the answers, and I think the wisest people I know are the ones that say, ‘I don't know; I don't know. I don't know what the outcome's gonna be, I don't know what the answers are, all I know is that right here, right now, everything's exactly as it should be.'

"I think you can meet a 75-year-old and there's something still really vibrant and alive about them, because there's a part of us that never grows up." 

"And I think that's kind of a reassuring message, as well, to a lot of the fans, because a lot of the fans ... are a wide age range; you know, I always have to remember that the main fan base is still very young, in a way. Even our older fans."

And that's the thing about Doctor Who: as much as some things keep changing, and will continue to do so, its place in the pop-cultural fabric of the West remains as assured as ever, and Gomez is thrilled to return for another date with Missy next season — but she'll stick around for the long haul in one capacity or another regardless.   

"I am first and foremost a fan, before I'm anything else, because I was brought up on a healthy diet of Doctor Who, and it's like Doctor Who, the show, just speaks to the child in all of us," she says. "And I believe that most of us have some sort of arrested development from, like, age 12. I think you can meet a 75-year-old and there's something still really vibrant and alive about them, because there's a part of us that never grows up.

"I think that's another reason why Doctor Who is an incredibly special show and it's set apart from, I would say, anything else on television — because it's been going for 50 years and it talks to generation to generation, and it just doesn't quit. It's incredible."

Michelle Gomez is appearing at Supanova Brisbane (11-13 November) and Supanova Adelaide (18-20 November). For tickets, see the event's website.