January 2008
Why did Liz leave UNIT?
Did you know that The Doctor was once forced to regenerate even though he wasn't dying? Yup. The Second Doctor got caught being naughty and interfering in the timeline, and the Time Lords back on Gallifrey sent his friends home, gave him a time out...and forced him to regenerate.
Stranded on Earth with no companions and a broken TARDIS, the Third Doctor had to start over from scratch. Luckily for him, his old buddy Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart found him and put him on payroll as scientific advisor to UNIT, where he would work alongside a young physicist named Elizabeth Shaw. Liz and The Doctor hit it off almost immediately, and they spend the next four serials (Season 7) battling monsters, aliens, and trigger-happy Brigadiers, and they try like Skaro to get the TARDIS operational again. Liz and Three were as close as One and Susan, or Two and Jamie, or Nine/Ten and Rose, and, while it's possible that Liz didn't need The Doctor, he certainly needed her.
And then Caroline John didn't return for Season 8. But, instead of a properly emotional farewell (or even a laughing-at-the-darkness type parting, as with Jamie), Liz just...didn't come back to work, and this scrawny, stringy-haired, anime-eyed little waif did, and no one bothered to tell us why.
See, here's the main problem: Robert Holmes was left in charge of writing her out. Now, Holmes was good at several things – he could do sarcasm, and he could do pathos, and he could do interesting plots. But the two things he was absolutely rubbish at were exposition and characterization. So, when he was tasked with getting rid of Liz, he simply had the Brig say the following:
"What you need, Doctor, as Miss Shaw herself so often remarked, is someone to pass you her test tubes and to tell you how brilliant you are.
If Dr. Elizabeth Shaw ever said that, she had a sly grin on her face and was playfully poking The Doctor in the side. There is no way that woman stormed out because she was feeling under appreciated, as Holmes would have us believe. And I seriously doubt she would have been tempted away by a more lucrative job offer – I think her relationship with The Doctor was worth more to her than that. I also find it highly unlikely that she would have left out of some moral objection to the work she was doing; even if UNIT itself is a bit morally iffy, The Doctor kept things as morally acceptable as he could.
I know she came back later for a couple of the specials and for P.R.O.B.E., but why did she leave in the first place?
June, 2008
How many times had The Master regenerated when we met him the first time?
As Captain Chaotica!! pointed out, the young Master we see in "The Sound of Drums" has alarmingly blue eyes, so it is probable that Delgado wasn't the original model. Of course, eyes do change colour, but it is much more common for brown eyes to fade to blue with age than the other way round. And besides, if he was completely out of lives by the time he showed back up in "The Deadly Assassin," chances ae good that he had used several befoe we ever met him. At the same time, Delgado-Master didn't seem too terribly jaded, so I somehow suspect he hadn't been through TOO many regenerations yet.
It is of course entirely possible that many, MANY years had gone by in his personal timeline between when he left The Doctor in "Frontier in Space" and when they met back up again in "The Deadly Assassin." It is even possible (maybe) that the events of S3/29 happened for The Master before "The Deadly Assassin." That may actually even explain an inconsistency or two. Maybe. But, see, knowing what we do about The Master, I find it difficult to imagine him going too terribly long without pestering The Doctor*. I also have a hard time imagining Delgado-Master being careless enough to lose his life easily. But then, once he regenerates, he's no longer Delgado-Master, and, as we well know, not all Masters are so understated and calculating as Delgado.
So, taking conversations with the good captain into consideration, I'm going to guess that Delgado-Master was probably number three or four or so. He or one of his next couple of incarnations get caught in the act of doing something...shall we say, naughty?, and, unable to weasel his way out of a death sentence. When his executioners discover that death doesn't really stick, they keep trying until he's out of lives. Or, possibly, he had some sort of accident that couldn't be survived**. But, either way, he went through all of his remaining lives very quickly, then somehow managed to crawl off in the condition we see Pratt-Master.
Either that, or he was busy terrorising Ten through Thriteen during those intervening years.
* Well, some incarnations... Delgado-Master just seemed to like annoying him in a antagonistically friendly sort of way, Roberts-Master wasn't imaginative enough to come up with anything else to do with his time, and Pratt/Beevers-Master was obviously out for a bit of revenge. But Ainley- and Simm-Master probably only bother with The Doctor when they run across him, once that initial vengeance thing is gotten out of the way.
** If a Time Lord were somehow trapped in a lava floe or swallowed alive by some extremely large beastie or something, I assume he would keep regenerating and dying over and over until he was out of lives. The Doctor would not have survived what Jack just recently went through.
