Best Enemies

I've been mulling it over ever since I saw the season finale, what the Doctor is forgiving the Master for. After all, they've got so much history, right? It could mean just about anything and everything. It could be, as many fans seem to take it, a sweeping statement of universal forgiveness for all the Master's activities, because after all being the only ones left (and being the guy who blew up all the others) could put a lot of things into perspective.

And yet while I find that a very satisfying interpretation in many ways, it never sat right with me, for several reasons. 1: It's not like the Doctor to say, "It's okay that you've cut swathes of destruction across the universe and killed literally countless numbers of people." 2: It's not exactly the first time the Doctor has blown up whole species or planets out of necessity, so why should he have the sudden epiphany now? 3: Doing so would be ignoring who and what the Master is: a nature which the Doctor is, of all beings, the most familiar with. 4: Reading it that way implies, it seems to me, a certain awareness of Old Who that Davies hasn't been in the habit of assuming on the part of fans thus far. 5: It would be sloppy writing. Not to say this doesn't happen, but it's just sloppy to throw in significant phrases like that without some kind of firm (even if indirect) indicator of what it refers to.

I think most of us understandably want something substantial to chew on. It'd be great to get a significant peek at the Master's psychology, and having the Master back on screen after so long, gosh, of course we're gunning for some character development for him. Who wouldn't like to see his deep and meaningful reaction to the whole Time War business?

But after watching those episodes what may admittedly be a few times too many, I'm slowly coming to the conclusion that we don't get it. I think we get something a lot more trite than that: that we're meant to read the Master's notable emotional instability as stemming from his (admittedly unaccustomed) feelings of guilt over running away from the war, and the Doctor is simply forgiving the Master for doing so.

Now, that wouldn't necessarily be all bad, I suppose, because it's still saying something if the Master, who once accidentally destroyed about 1/4 of the universe without being too fussed (he had enough left to keep playing about in), has trouble coming to terms with abandoning Gallifrey in her hour of need. And there's the "saving the Master" aspect. The Doctor might mean nothing more than helping the Master get over the initial throes of debilitating reaction, but alternatively the sheer possibility of the Master feeling bad about it could certainly be enough to open the Doctor up to the option of redeeming him (and for long-time fans, it wouldn't be the first time the Doctor's thought like that). It's less than satisfactory in the sense that if this is really what's up, then it's barely even touching on the Master's real responses, because all it's really dealing with is the initial burst of trauma and not any of the good, chewy long-term bits underneath--if in fact he has any, because the Master almost blew up Gallifrey himself once, and he didn't care much then. He might've been more upset about the thought of the Daleks winning than of the Time Lords losing; the Daleks weren't much more fond of him than they were of the Doctor.

Of course, it's also possible that "I forgive you" was shorthand for, "Hey, the other last Time Lord whom you've consistently screwed over from one end of time to the other does not in fact hate you, and you are not alone in the universe if only you'd sit down to talk long enough to finish some muffins and a nice cup of tea." Which again: sloppy. But then much as I love Who, I can't say this would be the first shocking! instance of sloppy writing to show up in the scripts.

So y'know. What do you all think?