Best Enemies

Hi everyone. I'm new to this comm, and while I know the userinfo says you guys don't want just another picspam/fanfic community, I brought one just for a tiny little shameless plug and for a reason explained below. However, before that, I want to give you my query:

I've been a New Who fan since 2006, and have since tried my best to learn absolutely everything that it could possibly be useful to know about it. However, all of my knowledge of Old Who is cursory at best and derived almost entirely from hearsay and wiki-surfing.

Recently, however, a friend of mine (my primary RP partner it seems) has gotten into Doctor Who and reestablished my fervor for the series and kindled what I already had going for Doctor/Master since my first watch of The End of Time. Yes, I realize that's bit slow on the uptake, but I had some personal baggage reasons for hating the Master until recently. Now I adore him... I'm not sure which was healthier.

Anyway, all that said, she and I have a rather good, functional knowledge of Ten and Simm-Master, but she in her short time in the fandom seems to have amassed a better picture of their relationship as a whole than I have, and therefore, since it seemed like this sort of discussion was allowed according to the userinfo, I was wondering if anyone might be so kind as to help me figure out how to give a crash course to myself (or give me one?) about important Old Who Doctor/Master related things, since I can't possibly go back and catch up on all of it anytime soon.

I'm particularly interested in this Theta and Koschei business I have heard about but have not been educated about. I was under the impression that the word Koschei was a sort of Ukranian/Russian myth. I was aware that Theta was a sort of red herring for whatever the Doctor's real name is at one point, but... help, if you're so inclined?

I basically just need little arrows to point me in the right direction, but talking to people is great, too.

And here's the picspam I promised with attached explanation:

I come bearing a picspam that it took me an hour to cap with WMM today. My friend has since linked me to an efficient program that I'm hopeful about.

This picspam is brought to you in order to promote scifiland as a part of a challenge there. If you love scifi of any kind and are looking for something to do, you should join. Ask for Team Antihero! (You can be a Hero, Villain, or Sidekick, too.)

This picspam is from my favorite scene in The End of Time Part II. It involves the Doctor and the Master and spoilers, but out of context if you've never seen the show they won't make a lot of sense, so if you're curious, you should look anyway unless you're a spoilerphobe.

I capped this scene in particular because, while there are a lot of screencap sources out there for Doctor Who that are higher quality than anything I'm able to produce manually, the thing I noticed about this particular episode was that, while there are a lot of caps around, even in HD, that very few people had many very good caps of anything except the Doctor's face and Timothy Dalton in this particular scene. Maybe it's just where I'm looking for caps, but I know that for my own personal use I wanted to really try to get some good Master caps while I was at it, and initially I wasn't sure if I was going to get at least 20. I ended up getting nearer a hundred.

Like I said, Spoilers for Eot II.

( Choose your enemy well... )