Fixing Missy

I've been thinking about Missy for a little while now. The big reveal that she was The Master was all well and good, and I'm happy to roll with it now that it's happened. However, it's not exactly an ideal situation from my point of view. I will probably get jumped on for this, but I'm still not fully on board for gender-swapping regenerations. For good or ill, they have been part of the canon since Neil Gaiman's otherwise great The Doctor's Wife. But it's not just the gender swap that disappoints me about the Missy reveal. It is the missed opportunity that came with it.

Yes, I'm talking about The Rani. Radio Times reported on how Steven Moffat tried to trick people into thinking Missy was actually The Rani, and I must admit, she was actually my first thought when we met Missy. Moffat clearly had Rani front of mind at the time, so why default to The Master? He had already featured prominently in a season arc in season 3, and as the main protagonist in the Christmas / New Year special The End of Time in 2009-10.

The casting would have been perfect too.
(image from Following the Nerd)

With such a huge existing Rogue's Gallery and nearly infinite possibilities for new villains, there really is no need to recycle enemies at this rate. Also, it's rather questionable as to why you would gender swap a male villain when there is already a perfectly serviceable female one ready to use. Rani would arguable have fit in with the Death In Heaven season arc better than The Master does too. Her cold, calculating nature would easily see her team up with the Cybermen if it meant she could somehow further her research. The Master's motivation seems to be purely to taunt The Doctor and prove him to be a bad man.

That said, it's actually not too late to turn this whole thing around. Allow me to explain:

The last time we saw The Master he was burning up his life force to attack Rassilon and company at the climax of The End of Time. We all assume he is then either time-locked with the rest of Gallifrey, or his unstable body disintegrates. Either way, he is never to be seen again. But The Master has survived without a body before. He's also a big fan of possessing other people's bodies. It's not unreasonable for his disembodied essence to somehow escape the time-lock and wander the galaxy stealing bodies.

Those bodies, however, aren't good enough. Much like the 1996 Movie, they quickly degrade. He needs a Time Lord body. He searches the galaxy for The Doctor, but is always a step behind. He eventually decides to lie in wait on Earth, The Doctor's favourite backwater. He just misses The Doctor on several occasions, such as turning up at Craig and Sophie's place just after their Lodger left, or the time all those cubes showed up.

By chance The Master stumbles across The Rani, who has also somehow managed to escape the time locked Gallifrey, and is working to perfect a way of storing the essence of sentient creatures indefinitely, using the same basic technology as the Chameleon Arch. Perhaps she plans to use this technology to transfer the Time Lords minds off of Gallifrey, if not their bodies. Perhaps she has other plans for it. Either way, she is now using the resources of the Cybermen to further this research.

The Cybermen have had issues with strong personalities overriding the emotional suppression of the upgrade process. This is their attempt to make a better Cyberman by testing the personalities within the Nethersphere and placing only the most desirable ones into the strongest bodies. While the personalities can survive in an artificial neural network, which is essentially what The Nethersphere is, they can't bond with a purely robotic vessel, and require a bio-organic link.

The Rani is able to develop the basis for an upgraded Cyber chassis that can use a relatively small amount of organic material from the same species to create the required neural link, but her plan is always to dump the entire contents of the Nethersphere into these new bodies, even those strong enough to overcome the emotional suppression. She wants to use the tech for her own ends, not create an unstoppable Cyber Army. Just let them fight amongst themselves while she makes good her escape.

Unfortunately for Rani, The Master manages to use her own tech against her, pushing her out of her body and storing her in her own personal version of The Nethersphere. The Master is then able to possess her body, again getting the Time Lord (or Lady) form he desired. Naturally The Master (now Missy) uses the existing partnership and technology to her own ends, but being unaware that Rani had bypassed the selection protocols in the Nethersphere, she dumps the strong personalities as well. These include Danny and The Brigadier, and things play out as we have already seen.

Now that was a lot of back-story to get through, but it tidies up a couple of issues I have with that story, namely the fact that Cybermen can suddenly use corpses to create new Cybermen. Previously they have always been upgraded living beings, so justifying this new evolution would be nice. From here, you can see it sets up a situation where The Doctor can find out about this, and be forced to choose between leaving Rani in a lonely limbo state, or essentially killing his friend. Obviously we'd find a way to save both, but then we've got two antagonists out in the field ready to clash with The Doctor again in the future.

Oh, man! Can you imagine The Master in a Cyberman body?