Personalities? (or, what makes a Doctor a Doctor and not a Master?)

[rodlox]

This is what happens when I write Susan: I wonder which aspects of her personality would remain the same, and which would be different.

(not sure if anyone else has the same problem)

Comments

[scarfman]

Audrey Hepburn never played Susan. (I think it more likely that you read someone remarking that Susan looked like Audrey Hepburn.)
As for the Master: I maintain that the Master we saw during the UNIT years, then saw all decayed on Gallifrey and Traken, then saw subsuming the bodies and lifeforce of Tremas and of Bruce the ambulance driver (among, no doubt, others) - all that was one personality, his thirteenth. By whatever means the Master managed on the occasion of the Time War to acquire another regenerative cycle, Professor Yana was only the second incarnation of the Master we'd seen onscreen, and Harold Saxon only the third. Except, really the fourth and fifth, because the Monk and the War Chief also were the Master. Everyone who argues that the Monk and/or the War Chief can't've been the Master because their personalities were too different from his can thank Davies and Simm for tanking their argument.
The other Time Lords you listed have had only one incarnation onscreen apiece, unless you go in for speculation such as that

[rodlox]

ah. many thanks for pointing that out to me. I'd thought that, since teh decayed one looked different & had a different actor, that they were separate regenerations. (it "helped" that I've seen only four or five - total - of both Delgado and pre-Ainley Masters)

ahhh, so that's who folks mean when they say "Borusa". okay.

thank you.

[scarfman]

I'd thought that, since teh decayed one looked different & had a different actor, that they were separate regenerations.
Available data are not conclusive on the point; they can be interpreted that way. My hypothesis, however, accomodates the observed data that the Master's "Harold Saxon" personality varied widely from the personality/ies observed during the UNIT years through his subsumption into the TARDIS Eye of Harmony.
(I will point out that the decayed version was played by two different actors in Deadly Assassin and Keeper of Traken, so it can't be argued logically that the difference of actor in the role in The Deadly Assassin means that it's a different incarnation than previously.)

[rockthetardis]

Here from who_daily.

I think Simm!Master was just so damn happy to not be a human anymore. We're not sure at what age he fobwatched himself, but I assume he was stuck as a human for most of that life. There's also the bit about there being no one to get in his way - except for the Doctor, and he had him completely at his mercy. And he had the entire planet under his control. If I were in his place, I'd be dancing a jig, too.

What makes the Doctor a Doctor, and not the Master?

[safcooper]

My response was too long for the comment so I wrote it at my journal:

Here it is!