stunt_muppet

Because I did.

The Doctor announcing that he's going to work on the machine alone: It's just so much the Doctor, sure he'll be fine, and if he's not sure, then he doesn't really care.

Yeah, but with the examples you gave (assuming that I know what you're referring to, and I think I do), both Four and Ten seemed to know exactly what they were getting into. When the Machine switched on, Three looked...a bit too surprised. I see what you mean about the Doctor disregarding personal risk, but the scene still niggles.

I think what I saw from the scenes with the Doctor and the Master in the Machine wasn't so much fear of a specific thing but fear of something represented by that thing - helplessness and entrapment in the Doctor's case (up until the last few seconds, he was stuck in the Inferno-verse with no way out), inferiority in the Master's. Now that I read over this whole block o' text again, I don't think I phrased that very well.

But that bit, I think, is an example that maybe gives the Master's bitterness some weight. Maybe, on the personal level, the Doctor is capable of being the asshole in the relationship and has done some shitty stuff to him.

Yes! That's it exactly. One of the things that this serial does so well is deepen and complicate the relationship between them, a big part of which is that the Doctor isn't always doing the right thing and that the Master isn't always wrong.

I'm still in awe of the fact that TWTB saw fit to include something like that in the Master's second appearance. That will never not impress me. They've never been simple, these two. :D

It's being piled in the corner with The Deadly Assassin and the scene where they rolled around on the ground while a building fell down around them.

PLEASE STOP MAKING ME THINK ABOUT CRISPY!MASTER IN ANY KIND OF SEXUAL CONTEXT WHATSOEVER. Even if it's just a symbolic sexual context. Thank you, that'll be all. ;)

Funny that such symbolism would emerge in the Master's first reappearance since Frontier, though. We all needed a reminder, I suppose.

Both of these things get explored with Five and Ainley, too -- the Doctor as committing personal wrongs against him (despite himself) and the Master's intense attachment to him through the bitterness.

Having finally seen a bit more Five/Ainley!Master serials, especially Planet of Fire, I can say you're exactly right about this, too. Even in Castrovalva you can kind of see it, what with the Master using Adric to math a whole city into existence just for him. Which the Doctor then promptly leaves him in as it collapses, of course.

Reply Part 2 to come when I'm not supposed to be working.