A very very belated Who Review

Survival. The end of the classic series. Anthony Ainley's final canonical performance as the Master. Sophie Aldred's last appearance as Ace. The last time that the TARDIS windows wouldn't be lit (yay budgets).

Okay, blah blah, pacifist and feminist elements woven all throughout the three-part script by newcomer Rona Munroe, blah blah silly-looking Cheetah People and sillier-looking black cats. I wanna talk about Ainley and McCoy's one and only story together.

By this point in the series, Anthony Ainley had been the longest-serving recurring character, first appearing (spoiler alert) in The Keeper of Traken (1981). He'd (spoiler alert) killed off Tom Baker's doctor and had survived both Peter Davison and Colin Baker. So it's not all that surprising, then, when he and the Seventh Doctor begin their conversation at the start of Episode 2, Ainley's giving McCoy "I'm going to outlast you too" looks that work absolutely perfectly for his character. McCoy is shooting back looks of absolute disgust. The other Doctors Ainley worked with didn't have that same chemistry. Tom Baker was horrified, not particularly disgusted. Peter Davison seemed to always spend more time feeling sorry for the Master's victims than actually being angry at the Master himself, and Colin almost treated him as a friendly enemy (oh, wait, that's because the Master wasn't the main villain in the only 6th Doctor serial he appeared in).

Gone are the Bond/Blofeldesque Pertwee/Delgado exchanges. The Master is becoming completely unhinged (in a good way; Eric Roberts was all wrong) and the Doctor knows he's going to have to put his enemy down once and for all, which he does, abandoning him on a planet that's blowing up around them. I'd like to see David Tennant do that.

Okay, McCoy overacts when he's talking to the cat and pretending to talk to Ace. This is Doctor Who. Everybody's guilty of that at some point. Still, check out this serial for yet more Ace character development (*-seriously, it took them 24 years and how many companions to realize that they could have some serious character development on the show?), pure, unadulterated Ainley evil the way he always wanted to do it, and one of McCoy's greatest performances.