Characters / Doctor Who – Missy

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"Hello! I'm Missy! You made it! I hope my boyfriend wasn't mean to you."

The Mistress / "Missy" (Twelfth Doctor)

"Say something nice."

First appearance: "Deep Breath" (2014)

Regeneration story: "The Doctor Falls" (2017)

Played by: Michelle Gomez (2014–2017)

"You know, I... might have been guilty of just a teensy little fibette."

This mysterious, very manic and teasing woman first showed up in "Deep Breath", and was referred to as "The Gatekeeper of the Nethersphere" in promotional material. She would appear in several episodes to welcome the dead to a place she calls "Heaven", in reality said Nethersphere. Her identity and motives were initially a mystery, but she seemed to be familiar with the Doctor. Upon encountering the Twelfth Doctor in person in "Dark Water", she revealed herself as being the latest incarnation of the Master, and the Nethersphere itself held a more sinister purpose than its inhabitants assumed.

Aside from being a true sadist, the newly-rebranded Mistress is also very flirty and fond of playing little games — dancing around, pretending to be a droid, setting up tea parties for her victims, and so on. She makes no secret of her fondness for the Doctor, calling him her "boyfriend" and openly displaying the Unresolved Sexual Tension aspects of their dynamic. Contrarily to most of the other incarnations, Missy seems to have no desire to kill the Doctor, but instead wishes they would reconcile. Of course, this is the Master we're talking about, so don't expect her to be any less dangerous now that she's regenerated into female form, which, for all intents and purposes, she seems to have taken completely in her stride.

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A-K

• Affably Evil: Although still insane, she actually acts genuinely friendly and polite when not getting another urge to murder someone for fun, unlike many previous incarnations:
  • Is courteous to the Half-Face Man when she meets him, apologizing for how "mean" her "boyfriend", the Doctor, could be.
  • She tells Doctor Chang that she's going to keep a picture of him looking "so sweet", always, before killing him so he can't get in the way of her Evil Plan. She says that she even "feels a bit emotional" about it afterwards.
  • She encourages Osgood to be more confident in herself in "Death in Heaven", before murdering Osgood for the hell of it.
  • Her entire plan in Series 8 turned out to just be an attempt to repair her friendship with the Doctor, in her own Axe-Crazy way.
  • Tries through most of Series 10 to be on her best behaviour, going so far as to honestly request the "little people" she meets to stay out of her way lest she get an overwhelming urge to murder.
    Missy: Hello, ordinary person. Please maintain a minimum separation of three feet. I'm really trying not to kill anyone today, but it would be tremendously helpful if your major arteries were out of reach.
• All for Nothing: Her difficult ordeal toward reforming ends when her past self kills her in disgust, and her next incarnation learns about a certain devastating Time Lord secret, then backslides into an even worse monster.
• Ambiguously Evil: Comes across this way for most of Series 8, where she mostly appeared Once per Episode to comment on the Doctor's adventures or greet a recently dead soul. The ambiguity is later thrown out the window with the revelation that she's the Master. Interestingly, it comes back in her later appearances, particularly in Series 10 where no one's completely sure whether or not she's genuinely trying to reform.
• Anti-Villain: It can be hard to tell if she is this or an Anti-Hero for most of Series 10. She qualifies as one or the other, finally becoming a clear example of an antihero before her Heel–Face Door-Slam in the final episode. Interestingly, she has some traits of Classical Antiheroes as well, including the cowardice (though ultimately, Simm's Master is suggested to be even more cowardly).
• Arc Villain: For the Twelfth Doctor, as his most persistent and intimate foe who appears in every season of his tenure. Even though she's not necessarily the driving force, her influence is highly felt — especially in Series 9 where the consequences of putting Clara and the Doctor together rear their tragic head.
• Axe-Crazy: She's still just as murderous as her past selves, but this time she is more open about it.
  Osgood: Why would you bother killing me? I'm not even important.
  Missy: Oh silly, why does one bother popping a balloon? Because you're pretty.
• Bad Boss: Kills Dr. Chang when he is no longer needed, and casually vaporizes Seb after he cheers at the Doctor performing a death-defying stunt.
• The Bad Guy Wins:
  • In a roundabout sort of way. Missy got the Doctor and Clara together because of their polarizing personalities. It could also be construed as her attempt to fulfil the prophecy of the Hybrid. And though the Doctor and Clara ultimately parted, the Doctor is alone, with no memory of Clara at all. So though Missy failed to bring the Hybrid forth, she did set in motion events that left the Doctor miserable and alone.
  • She also very nearly wins at the end of "Death in Heaven" — her Cyberman army is defeated, but she has so devastated Clara that she is going to kill Missy. And the Doctor is so determined to protect Clara that he's willing to kill Missy so she doesn't. When Missy tells him to say something nice, the Doctor simply says "You win" and Missy says "I know."
• Best Served Cold: The Doctor has abandoned or imprisoned more than one Time Lady over the years. Her dialogue in "Dark Water" teases at the return of the Rani, Romana, or even Susan Foreman.
• Big Bad: For Series 8, taking deceased people to turn into a Cyberman army.
• The Big Damn Kiss: After forty-three years of Foe Romance Subtext, she finally gets one with the Doctor. Followed by kissing his nose. Once he realises how thoroughly broken she is, and how desperate she is for his friendship, he very sweetly kisses her back in the next episode.
• Black Comedy:
  Dr Chang: Are you going to kill me?
  Missy: Now, come on, let's not dwell on horrid things. This is going to be our last conversation, and I'm the one who's going to have to live with that.
• Blue-and-Orange Morality:
  • While in general she's completely and vocally evil, her relationship with the Doctor falls under this banner. She considers their endless battles to be indicative of close friendship, and claims their feelings for each other are indescribable in human terms. The (scary) thing is, however badly cracked and warped her outlook is, she's not entirely wrong. The Doctor sent his confession dial to her, after all, and Clara noted that he was too happy to hear she survived.
  • She can be considered a Downplayed Example even after her Character Development; she tends to look at morality from a more utilitarian standpoint than the Doctor. This often leads her to look callous, and it's a reason she's an Anti-Hero, but she's also not presented as a Straw Vulcan. A major theme of series 10 is a contrast between utilitarian ethics, which advocates actions that produce the greatest good for the greatest number of people (meaning that ethics are dependent upon circumstances and outcomes), and deontological ethics, which advocates for inviolable ethical principles regardless of circumstances. Throughout series 10, Missy generally holds to the former, while the Doctor generally holds to the latter. Interestingly, the show itself seems to suggest that one must consider both philosophies to have a balanced ethical viewpoint. One can compare this to Watchmen, another work that explores the same ethical issues and reaches a similar conclusion (in which Veidt represents utilitarianism and Rorschach ultimately represents deontology, though both are particularly dark representations of their respective philosophies).
• Book Ends: Her first appearance consists of her dancing and swinging her umbrella around in a lush, bright green garden that has a lot of different-coloured flowers. "The Doctor Falls"'s last shot of Missy is her lifeless body in an overgrown, dark green vine-covered ground with only white flowers. It also book ends her relationship with the Doctor: White flowers range in significance from purity and innocence to sympathy, showing that she sympathised with the Doctor and her decision to side with him was genuinely true.
• Breaking Speech: Calls the Doctor out on his general motivations at the end of "Death in Heaven".
  The Doctor: All of this... All of it, just to give me an army?
  Missy: Well, I don't need one, do I? Armies are for people who think they're right. And nobody thinks they're righter than you! Give a good man firepower, and he'll never run out of people to kill.
• But for Me, It Was Tuesday: Subverted. Missy thought she'd lived her lives as the Master this way, but when she's in the middle of a Heel–Face Turn, she realizes, tearfully, that she actually did know the names of the many, many people she's killed over the years. As the Master is responsible for the death of a quarter of the universe, it's understandable she's crying over it.
• Card-Carrying Villain: Calls herself "Queen of Evil".
• Character Catchphrase: "Say something nice" before she kills someone. She also says it before she thinks the Doctor is about to kill her.
• Character Development: Probably more so than any previous incarnation of the character, Missy changes substantially over her arc on the show. A Driving Question of series 10 is whether she's genuinely trying to reform herself or if it's just another ploy. The finale ultimately suggests the former, with her suggesting that the Doctor is right that the two of them should, at last, stand together because that's what they need to do to survive, though it doesn't stick after she's zapped with Saxon's laser screwdriver. She shouldn't have been able to regenerate from that, but due to the character's Joker Immunity, no-one seriously expected her to be Killed Off for Real.
• The Chessmaster: Came up with a solid plan for the Series 8 finale, and was the architect of the Doctor and Clara's relationship.
• Chronic Backstabbing Disorder: Out of all the TV incarnations, she's the closest to being on the Doctor's side. At times. It changes. A lot. Especially once she has to choose between the Doctor and her own former self. In series 10, she literally backstabs her past incarnation. Partially this is because he finds her to be a case of Future Me Scares Me and she wants to ensure that he becomes her out of spite. It's also partially because of her aforementioned Character Development, though.
• Clingy Jealous Girl:
  • She's quite offended when the Doctor names Davros rather than her as his greatest foe.
    Missy: No, wait, hang on a minute, Davros is your arch-enemy now? I'll scratch his eye out!
  • Also livid at the suggestion that the Doctor's confession dial, sent to the Doctor's closest friend, is for Clara. Clearly, it's intended for Missy.
• Complexity Addiction: Her plan to contact Clara in "The Magician's Apprentice" involves stopping Earth's plane traffic, so UNIT would find Clara and play her Missy's message, and then have UNIT transport Clara and a team of their operatives to the Mediterranean where she would find Clara and tell her what she needed to know. It is just that Missy perfectly well knows Clara's exact address, but arranging for UNIT to have a team of snipers on hand when Missy stops by Clara's home to talk to her apparently wasn't grandiose enough for her (as she points out, she knows perfectly well Clara won't talk to her without the snipers).
• Corrupted Character Copy: Invoked, She's really pushing this evil Mary Poppins thing.
• Cradling Your Kill: Creepily true of Harold Saxon, whom she praises and caresses while stabbing him in the back. And then graciously helps him to the elevator, with assurances that he'll make it back to his TARDIS before he regenerates into her.
• Depraved Bisexual: Kisses the Doctor after all their years of Foe Romance Subtext, and is more than happy to offer Clara the same make-out session (Clara refuses). It should be noted that Word of God (from various lead writers) states that Gallifreyans don't really factor gender into attraction, so this is a race trait, not a character trait. The "depraved" part is all her, though.
• Desecrating the Dead: She gleefully takes advantage of the fact that dead humans vastly outnumber living ones, and uses the corpses to create an army of Cybermen.
• Dies Wide Open: She's left lying in a holographic forest, eyes open and motionless, after the laser screwdriver seemingly sapped away all her life and took away any hope of regenerating. As to be expected, it doesn't last.
• Disintegrator Ray: Rather than a TCE or a laser screwdriver, she carries a customised PDA/smartphone with a disintegrator ray built in.
• The Dreaded: The usually calm and collected Twelfth Doctor becomes increasingly terrified of her as he begins to realize her identity. By the end of "Dark Water", he's running through the streets screaming for people to get away after seeing her Cyber-army. She also deliberately invokes this trope when giving Osgood a countdown to her death.
• Even Evil Has Standards: Missy saves the Doctor from being drained by Davros and the Daleks. And then, just for the lulz, pokes Davros in the eye...
• Evil Counterpart: To the Doctor, of course, with her dark clothing and her Scottish accent; also a bit to Clara, whom Missy herself decided was the Doctor's ideal companion. "Bubbly personality masking bossy control freak" → "A calculating mass-murderer pretending to be Mary Poppins."
• Evil Is Petty:
  • She uses every human death in history to create an army of Cybermen. Not to conquer the universe, but simply to prove to the Doctor that they're Mirror Characters
  • When Clara questions whether Missy's pretending to have done a Heel–Face Turn, Missy begins killing nearby UNIT soldiers, just to prove she's still evil. She even takes delight in telling Clara that one of them was a new father.
• Evil Plan: Makes a digital version of Heaven using Gallifreyan Matrix technology, to cull experience from humans who recently died, which she then uploads into Cybermen made from their corpses to make a world-conquering army... which she plans to give to the Doctor, to prove they're Mirror Characters.
• Ex-Big Bad: By Series 10, where she spends most of the season imprisoned and seems slowly on the way to reforming. In the finale though she teams up with the Saxon Master after running into him, only to ultimately decide to go back to the Doctor and join his side for real.
• Females Are More Innocent: The first female incarnation of the character is notably the only one thus far who manages to pull a Heel–Face Turn (even if only briefly). Even more notably, the next incarnation went straight back to being a villain.
• Foe Romance Subtext:
  • Calls the Doctor her "boyfriend" when the Half-Face Man meets her. It turns out to be an actual Villainous Crush by the time they meet.
    Missy: Hello! I'm Missy. You made it. I hope my boyfriend wasn't too mean to you.
    Half-Face Man: Boy-friend?
  • The Doctor/Master relationship is pushed even more as Missy actually receives the Doctor's "last will" meant for his oldest friend. Who else often receives a dying person's will? Their spouse. The implication is clear.
  • Though in the same episode, Missy herself defies this trope by claiming (possibly untruthfully) that Time Lord friendships are a lot deeper than human ones and if Clara or anyone else reads romantic subtext into her interactions with the Doctor, it's just because our primitive monkey brains are obsessed with sexinvoked.
• Foil: The Doctor said that his meet-up with Clara in "Deep Breath" was orchestrated by a "controlling, needy game-player", but he was referring to Clara. It was actually set up by Missy.
• For the Evulz:
  • Orders the Cybermen to kill some Belgians, just because they can... and because Belgian is not French.
  • Also vaporizes a couple of UNIT soldiers for no reason other than to prove to Clara that she's still evil.
  • The Doctor and Ashildr speculate that she united Clara and the Doctor together just to see what chaos would result from their initially clashing personalities. Moreover, the Doctor and Clara becoming more and more similar to each other ends up causing even more trouble, ultimately temporarily turning the Doctor into a Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds who risks the universe to bring Clara back from the grave, the kind of act Missy could get behind!
• Friendly Enemy: She's quite friendly to the Doctor, mainly because she wants to be friends again.
• Fun with Acronyms: While pretending to be a robot, she claims her name is M.I.S.I., Mobile Intelligence Systems Interface.
• Gender Bender: Regenerated with a female body this time around, and very happily presents and identifies as female. Her puffy sleeves are a genderbent homage to Ainley's first outfit. The Saxon Master calls her "lady version" when they meet.
• A God Am I: She put herself in charge of her own little heaven and (using Gallifreyan Matrix technology) had complete control over the souls and bodies of the deceased all throughout human history, as long as humans have had the concept of an afterlife, making her a bona fide Angel of Death.
• Good Is Not Nice: While Missy does try to be a better person, even then she's removed and cold about it, viewing the death of Bill as a small price to save others.
• Greater-Scope Villain: Long before she made her presence known to the audience, she had already had an influence in the Doctor's life, being the one responsible for introducing Clara to the Eleventh Doctor.
• Heaven: She claims her "Nethersphere" is this in Series 8. In truth, she's using Time Lord technology to capture the minds of the dead and remove their emotions, then re-download them into their Cyber-converted bodies, creating her own personal army of Cybermen. The Doctor theorises that she's been doing this for such a long period of human history, the entire concept of the afterlife is based around her.
• Heel–Face Revolving Door: She goes from helping the Doctor or Clara to hindering them several times over the course of "The Magician's Apprentice"/"The Witch's Familiar".
• Heel–Face Turn:
  • Defied in "The Magician's Apprentice"; when Clara asks if her offering help means she's "turning good", Missy vaporizes a couple of UNIT soldiers to prove she's still evil.
  • Series 10 showed that she is now sincerely trying to do this, with the Doctor's help. The process is... slow going.
  • "The Doctor Falls" fully confirms Missy has legitimately turned over a new leaf, going so far as to kill her previous Simm incarnation when he refuses to help the Doctor. Thus far, she is the only incarnation of the Master to go this far. Pity she was killed off by her predecessor shortly after, which, inevitably, results in the next incarnation of the Master to show up being firmly in the villainous camp (albeit a very broken villain).
• Heel–Face Door-Slam: Just when she's on the verge of truly siding with the Doctor, her own past self shoots her in the back. Her redemption is shown not to stick either, as the next incarnation of the Master to appear onscreen has regressed back to the character's usual villainy (or at least tried to). Although if Big Finish's Missy: Series 2 is canon, Missy did save herself using a forbidden Time Lord technology called an Elysian field to reconstitute her personality and give herself a new regeneration cycle. Her next incarnation is a very good person and calls herself the Lumiat, not the Master. But Missy herself, at a point in her timeline long before her Heel–Face Turn, fatally shoots the Lumiat, and it's possible that the Lumiat is going to regenerate into who will become the Sacha Dhawan Master.
• Hidden Agenda Villain: We as the audience meet Missy in "Deep Breath", but it's unclear what exactly she's up to.
• Hoist by Her Own Petard:
  • Bringing back all the Earth's dead, with Cyber-weaponry, and their own minds restored into their bodies, and then attempting to murder Kate Lethbridge-Stewart... leads to her being defeated by one very determined Cyberconverted Brigadier.
  • Telling the Simm Master that, after mortally wounding him, she's going to join the Doctor in a futile fight, leads the Master to kill her to prevent it.
• Icy Blue Eyes: Her gaze matches that of the Twelfth Doctor's.
• I Hate Past Me: Literally, fatally stabs him in the back — to make him turn into her. On the other hand, she takes the time to mention how much she loved being him and how she'll always miss how intensely he felt everything.
• I Just Want to Have Friends: Well, one, at least. For all the Foe Romance Subtext and stalker-like facets to her character, all she really wants is her old friend back. All the psychotically flirty behaviour is just the Master, well, being the Master.
• Internal Homage:
  • Her relations with the Doctor hearken back to the first incarnation of the Master ever introduced, Roger Delgado, and his dynamic with Jon Pertwee's Third Doctor. UNIT shows up soon afterwards, led by the Brigadier's daughter, resulting in a full circle recreation of the era of Doctor Who that Peter Capaldi knew best.
  • Her series 10 arc also could be considered an example either of an internal homage to a case of What Could Have Been or of a Mythology Gag. The writers apparently originally planned to have Roger Delgado's Master undergo a Heel–Face Turn before dying, but Delgado's actor's death resulted in the abandonment of this plot line. Missy undergoes a Heel–Face Turn in series 10 that is ultimately revealed to be entirely genuine. However, she appears to be killed at the end of "The Doctor Falls". The question wasn't whether she'd survive — presumably every Doctor Who fan knows that the Master has Joker Immunity — but whether the Heel–Face Turn would stick in the character's next incarnation. (It didn't.)
• Irony: The last two incarnations complained about meeting their ends by the hands of a woman. Now the Master is a woman. To her credit, she completely rolls with it, and delights in being girly. And becomes the one to stab the Simm incarnation, ultimately triggering his regeneration into her. There's an added layer of irony here since the Simm incarnation ultimately dies at the hands of a woman twice.
• Karma Houdini:
  • Despite having cold-bloodedly murdered several UNIT agents right in front of her, Clara not only agrees to work with Missy on finding the Doctor, she insists that Missy accompany her when the Doctor is about to be transported away. At no point is it ever mentioned again about Missy killing the agents (one of whom is described as a father). There is also no follow-up to the fact that she killed one of the Osgoods, either. Granted, her last scene in that episode was being surrounded by Daleks, but her last words were "I've just had a very clever idea", presumably an idea on how to escape.
  • Subverted in series 10. She is sentenced to death, but the Doctor ultimately rescues and imprisons her, and makes her freedom contingent upon her reforming herself. Most of the series' arc is about her attempts to do this, with a major Driving Question being whether they are genuine. It's immediately clear that this is a painful and difficult process, and the series finale ultimately indicates that she actually has changed. Ultimately, one can draw parallels to the real-life debate over whether criminals should receive rehabilitation or punishment, and whether one considers her a Karma Houdini in this series will probably depend largely upon one's stance on this issue.
• Karmic Transformation: Subverted. Her last two incarnations were blatantly sexist, but if she had any problems with her new incarnation, she's gotten over it by the time we see her. Which is exasperating for her when she meets her previous self and he's as sexist as ever, twisting the trope from subverted back to karmic as she becomes the one to murder her previous self in the first place.
• Kill the Cutie: Missy murders Osgood (whether that Osgood was human or Zygon is a mystery for the ages), taunting her with the knowledge that she's going to kill her before doing so. And then crumples her glasses under her boot heel.
• Kiss of Death: Puckers her lips and blows kisses before killing each of her victims. She does this with almost every kill, even applying lipstick in the case of Osgood and her guards.
  Missy: Thanks for being yummy.

L-Y

• Large Ham: Roger Delgado was a bit eccentric, Anthony Ainley swings between the lines of Arch-Enemy and affably evil, John Simm was just mad... but Missy? There is nowhere big enough in the entire universe to host this woman's ego, especially when she carries on her traditional psychotic tendencies with a wicked sense of cruelty in her veins. Such as smooching at her subordinate as she disintegrates him, for example.
• Laughably Evil: She delights in her own absurdity, playing it up even after she murders people just for the hell of it.
• Left for Dead: Accuses the Doctor of doing this to her after she was flung into Gallifrey on the final day of the Time War.
• Lotus-Eater Machine: Places people who die into a digitized version of a modern urban city.
• The Mad Hatter: Responds to people expressing bemusement at her actions by pointing out that she's "bananas". And she really is — absolutely, completely insane... though perhaps not quite as much as she lets people think. She's more lucid than Simm's Master was, prior to getting the drums removed (though that really isn't very hard).
• Meaningful Echo: Simm's Master muttered "I win", right before he crushed the Doctor's yearning to rejoin his people by killing himself. The Doctor's parting line as he resignedly points a disintegrator at Missy? "You win." (And just like last time, with her death goes the Doctor's one shot at finding Gallifrey.)
• Meta Guy: Several times, most memorably when she calls Bill and Nardole "exposition" and "comic relief".
• Mirror Character: Her plan in Series 8 is to give the Doctor ultimate power, so he'll see that she's not really any worse than him and stop hating her.
  The Doctor: Why are you doing this!?
  Missy: I need you to know we're not so different! I need my friend back~!
  • Ashildr theorizes that this desperation to make him realize this may also be behind Missy bringing the Doctor and Clara together. Their initially clashing personalities eventually grow so similar that the Doctor cannot contemplate life without Clara, and when she dies in a horrible Senseless Sacrifice he undergoes a Protagonist Journey to Villain in which he gives up his principles and almost destroys the universe to bring her back from the grave — and thus, like Missy, creates mayhem to reclaim someone he loves. But he recrosses the Despair Event Horizon and proves himself the better man once more, though it comes at a great personal cost.
• Mutual Kill: She stabs her past self, the injury that led to him regenerating into her in the first place. He returns the favour by shooting her in the back.
• Never Found the Body: As per usual.
  • She appears to get vaporized by the Brigadier near the end of Series 8's "Death in Heaven", only to return in Series 9.
    Missy: Death is for other people, dear.
  • Lampshaded in "The Magician's Apprentice":
    Missy: Okay, cutting to the chase: not dead, back, big surprise, never mind.
• Not Quite Dead: Despite the Master being in a rapidly deteriorating body and fighting with Rassilon, the Time Lord President, back in Series 4, Missy turns up alive and perfectly healthy in Series 8. (As per usual for her.)
  Missy: Death is for other people, dear.
• The Only One Allowed to Defeat You: In "The Doctor Falls"
  Missy: Because if somebody kills you and it's not me, we'll both be disappointed.
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business:
  • Missy, and by extension the other Masters, are usually calm and collected. When she finds out she's on a rebuilt Skaro, she freaks out. We have never seen the Master scared before. It makes sense if you remember she was once executed on Skaro.
  • Missy also nearly breaks down at explaining why she remade the Cyberman army on Earth: she missed her friend, and wanted him back.
  • Missy finds herself horrified at all the damage she's wrought over the years, weeping and remembering the names of those she's killed. A previous incarnation accidentally killed a quarter of the universe, and barely batted an eye.
• Only Sane Woman: She's willing to put aside her endless conflict with the Doctor and reconcile.
• Our Liches Are Different: Her character draws on aspects of this trope, from her Not Quite Dead nature to raising an army from the dead.
• Perky Goth: She combines classic, Edwardian clothes with spikey bracelets and copious amounts of eyeliner, and she's very, very bouncy.
• Polite Villains, Rude Heroes: An affable woman who encouraged someone to be more confident in herself before violently killing her versus a snarky man who bad-mouths everyone while saving all of humanity.
• Psycho Ex-Girlfriend: Refers to Twelve as her "boyfriend" and spins stories about how he's so violently protective of her (he's actually terrified of her). Her plan in Series 8 is actually to give him a "birthday present" of his own Cyber-army to make him a more ruthless "hero".
• Psychopathic Womanchild: Like Twelve, she sometimes acts more like a broody teenager than her apparent age. Dressing like a Goth Mary Poppins, sharing "special girl secrets" with the much younger Osgood, etc.
• Psychopomp: Presents herself as the "gatekeeper of the nethersphere" through Series 8 and greets the newly dead.
• Redemption Equals Death: Subverted. While she fully intended to redeem herself, she's killed when she commits to it, not when she's able to fulfil her good intentions. Both she and the Saxon Master find this hilarious.
• Reformed, but Not Tamed: Her Heel–Face Turn does not improve her batty and callous personality.
• Relationship Upgrade: They're still arch-enemies, but in "Death in Heaven", they have a long-overdue talk about how much they need each other — including the Doctor getting down on his knees to softly kiss her.
• Removing the Head or Destroying the Brain: Claims the only way to kill her without her regenerating is to get three snipers to shoot both her hearts and her brain stem at the same time.
• The Reveal: Drops a bombshell on the Doctor in "Dark Water", when she gets frustrated at his inability/refusal to figure out that she's the latest incarnation of the Master.
  12th Doctor: Who are you?
  Missy: You know who I am. I'm Missy.
  12th Doctor: Who's Missy?
  Missy: (sighs) Please, try to keep up. Short for Mistress. Well... I couldn't very well keep calling myself "The Master" now, could I?
• Samus Is a Girl: A variant in that we know her gender before the big reveal about who she really is.
• Self-Serving Memory: Claims the Doctor "abandoned" her, when in fact her previous incarnation threw himself into the fight to have his revenge on Rassilon. This could, perhaps, be a call-forward to her incarnation's death and she's remembering Simm's incarnation seeing her die, alone, while the Doctor "abandoned her" to fight though due to two of them being there, parts of it are fuzzy.
• Shipper on Deck: Zigzags between affirming and averting. In "The Magician's Apprentice" she goes out of her way to try and downplay Clara as being anything more than the Doctor's latest "puppy", yet a major arc related to her character involves her having brought the Doctor and Clara together. In "Hell Bent", Ashildr refers to Missy as "a matchmaker" in this context, though her full rationale for doing this has yet to be explained in detail.
• Shout-Out: She sings "Mickey" (substituting her own name) and floats in on an umbrella towards the end of "Death in Heaven". In "The Magician's Apprentice", she initially contacts UNIT via their "Doctor channel", texting them her rewritten version of "Mickey".
• Slasher Smile: She gives Osgood a magnificent one before killing her.
• Sobriquet Sex Switch: From "the Master" to "Missy", short for "the Mistress".
• Stable Time Loop: Directly kills her previous incarnation, which triggers his regeneration into her.
• Stalker with a Crush:
  • She spends the majority of Series 8 tracking the Doctor's movements. She even goes out of her way to meet with most of the people who died in his recent adventures to ask about him.
  • Appears to be a little bit of this regarding Clara, too, such as at the end of "Flatline".
• Third Law of Gender-Bending: She fully embraces female clothes and makeup, and switches titles to Mistress and Time Lady ("I'm old-fashioned").
• Troll:
  • Seems to be this incarnation's most defining trait. She loves messing with people, pretends to be a droid and even improvises a mnemonic acronym to go with her name, just for the hell of it. This gets decidedly unfunny when she murders Osgood just because the Doctor likes her, and tells him the coordinates for where Gallifrey used to be, convincing him it reemerged from the pocket universe. In all fairness, it did... almost at the end of time itself. She didn't mention that part.
  • And in "The Witch's Familiar", Missy almost tricks the Doctor into killing Clara, currently trapped inside a Dalek, in another decidedly unfunny moment.
• Uncertain Doom:
  • She was allegedly vaporized by the Cyberized Brigadier in the Series 8 finale. It of course doesn't stick, and she's back again in Series 9.
  • She appears to have been Killed Off for Real in "The Doctor Falls". Right after luring her former self into an embrace to skewer him with a blade hidden in her umbrella, he retaliates by frying her with a full blast from the laser screwdriver, enough to disable her ability to regenerate — which was designed for use against the Doctor. She drops dead not long afterward. But just like all those other times the Master/Missy has pulled a Houdini on death, it didn't stick.
• Unexplained Recovery:
  • When Missy returns after being left on Skaro surrounded by Daleks.
  • For once averted in "The Witch's Familiar", actually giving an explanation for how Missy survived being vaporized by the Cyber-Brigadier in "Death in Heaven".
• Unusually Uninteresting Sight: The Master's regeneration into a female doesn't seem to turn any heads at UNIT. Osgood had already surmised Missy's identity before the Doctor even mentioned it.
• Villain Ball: Even after acknowledging that Osgood being alive is more advantageous, she still kills Osgood, remarking that she (Missy) is "Bananas".
• Villain Decay: Even though she keeps reminding people that she's not good, she appears as little more than a minor nuisance in Series 9's two-part opener; it remains to be seen what happened when she found out that the Doctor and Clara were separated for good and he lost his memories of why he loved her, which spoiled all the fun of Missy's plan to make him miserable (and more like her) by teaming them up!
• Villainous Cheekbones: Apparently, Michelle Gomez herself used them as a selling point.
• Villainous Crush: Makes out with the Doctor when they first encounter each other in their new forms, and continuously flirts with him while enacting her latest Evil Plan.
  Missy: You know who I am. I told you. You felt it. Surely you did.
  The Doctor: Two hearts!
  Missy: And both of them yours.
• Villains Act, Heroes React: She's the one who gave Clara the Doctor's telephone number ("the control freak and the man who should never be controlled"), left an ad in the paper in "Deep Breath", made the Nethersphere in Series 8, and unleashed an army of Cybermen in "Dark Water"/"Death in Heaven".
  Missy: Clara. My Clara. I have chosen well.
• Violent Glaswegian: Is played by a English-Glaswegian woman this time, and is still as kill-happy as ever.
• Walking Spoiler: Learning her full nickname, "The Mistress", gives away that she's the latest incarnation of the Master, and that at least one of the Time Lords has left the pocket universe the Doctor used to save them back in Series 7. It's also almost impossible to discuss anything about series 10 without mentioning her apparent Heel–Face Turn.
• We Used to Be Friends: Her overall plan in series 8 is that she wants to be friends with the Doctor again, like they used to be as children. The problem is that she's so caught up in her previous selves' ways, and is so mentally broken from the events they endured, she doesn't know how to do so beyond dragging the Doctor down to her own level. Series 10 sees her willing to try changing herself instead, with copious amounts of help from the Doctor himself. It's slow going but the desire is there, and the Doctor wants his friend back just as much as she does.
• Woman Of Wealth And Taste: She dresses in fancy, Edwardian-style clothes.
• Would Hurt a Child: In "The Lie of the Land", she claims to have once pushed a little girl into a volcano.
• Xanatos Gambit: At the end of the day, her series 8 plan would have ended in her victory. Either the Doctor takes control of her army and conquers the universe, as she wanted, or the Cyber-rain wipes out humanity and she keeps an even bigger army.
• Yandere:
  • More overtly so than previous incarnations: She loves the Doctor, but also kind of wants to kill him and all his friends.
    Missy: Oh, "Clara, Clara, Clara"! You know, I should shoot you in a jealous rage. Now wouldn't that be sexy?
  • You can see the flare of jealousy in Missy's eyes when the Doctor offers Osgood a seat in the TARDIS; her number was up from that point on.
  • She's equally put out when the Doctor calls Davros his greatest enemy instead of her.
• Yank the Dog's Chain: Telling the Doctor Gallifrey's location... where it's definitely not at the moment. And gets her own in "The Doctor Falls", thinking she can stab Saxon and stand with the Doctor gets her lasered in the back. She dies in the grass, without hope, without witness, without reward, and this trauma is a big factor as to why her next regeneration is so wrecked.
• You Have Outlived Your Usefulness: Kills Dr. Chang when she finally activates the Cyberman army he inadvertently helped her create.

Audio Tropes

The Mistress / "Missy" (Tenth Doctor)

Voiced by: Michelle Gomez (2019-present)

• Always Someone Better: Than the Monk, whose path she keeps crossing.
  • Although the Monk, with the help of his own female future self, does eventually get one over on Missy.
• Ambiguously Evil: Admits in "The Broken Clock" that even she doesn't know if she's really evil or not anymore.
  • Her desire to resolve this in "Masterful" leads to her forcing her past selves into a Secret Test of Character to see if there's another way of being the Master. Most of them fail.
• Corrupted Character Copy: "A Spoonful of Mayhem" makes her similarities with Mary Poppins more obvious by having her become a governess to two children named Oliver and Lucy Davis. Like Poppins, she takes the children on adventurers where they encounter "magical" creatures. The difference is that she's a mass murderer imprisoned on Earth and while she grows fond of the children despite them betraying her, and they in turn did end up liking her, she cares more about getting what they want than helping them.
• Distracted by My Own Sexy: Towards the Eric Roberts version. And herself, as she admits she's occasionally spent days just looking at herself in a mirror.
• Eviler than Thou: Towards the Monk in Divorced, Beheaded, Regenerated. He tries his best to reverse this, but throughout the whole story she treats him as a joke and leaves him at the mercy of an angry populace with a broken TARDIS.
• Face Death with Dignity: At the end of "Masterful" she's the only incarnation of the Master still alive and even she's dying thanks to being poisoned by her past self and she's in a timeline that's about to be undone, all the while facing a ravenous entropy field that also happens to be her future self. She still manages to get in some last one liners whilst lying on a throne and drinking (still poisoned) champagne.
• For the Evulz: When the Deathworm Master and War Master shoot the Eleven, she joins in, admitting that he hasn't done anything to her personally, but she's still going to shoot him for fun.
• Genre Savvy: Compared to the Monk, Missy is far more on the ball and her schemes work out more often than not... which is why she keeps dealing him humiliating punishments and pinching bits from his nicer TARDIS.
• Hates Being Alone: Without the Doctor around, Missy is often fixated on having a companion like the Doctor does, treating Oliver and Lucy Davis like her companions even though she's using them for a scheme, offering to let Aleyna and Jo Grant travel with her, and kidnapping Bertram and forcing him to be her companion. It doesn't help that she's very honest about how she'll kill them the minute she gets bored with them, though.
• Mistaken for Special Guest: Not directly, but in Day of the Master, when the Eighth Doctor learns that two other incarnations of the Master are working with a female Time Lord, he assumes that this Time Lady is the Rani rather than realising that she’s another version of the Master.
• Obfuscating Insanity: Implied in Masterful. Besides the fact that she insists she's no more insane than her past selves, she's just more open about her issues, she does ultimately get what she wants and manages to outwit all of her past selves...except the War Master when he decides to commit the ultimate form of suicide in order to save the universe and abort the timeline they're in.
• The Only One Allowed to Defeat You: She's not very fond of River Song, for that whole "'killed' the Doctor" thing. That's her job, dammit!
• Other Me Annoys Me: She's the one doing the annoying, during "Day of the Master". Her insanity means that despite being the oldest version of themselves present, the other Masters can't stand her.
• So Last Season: "The Lumiat" reveals that she views the Tissue Compression Eliminator as this, which is why she never used one, referring to it as both old fashioned and outdated. She does have a TCE in her possession, which ends up getting stolen by the Lumiat who tries threatening her with it.
• Straw Nihilist: Shows shades of this in "Masterful". She ascribes her inability to take ANYTHING seriously to the fact she views the universe as a joke, and one that's being made at her expense. As it takes place before her Character Development in Series 10, she's even willing to let the universe die and herself along with it. 'For funsies'.
• Teeth-Clenched Teamwork: After her scheme to bamboozle the Ogrons into thinking the Monk is the Master, she tries stealing his TARDIS outright. However, since people just kept stealing parts, the Monk modified his TARDIS so the controls would respond to him alone. In her efforts to circumvent the safeties, Missy only succeeded in linking herself to the same TARDIS, leaving it unable to move without both pilots' cooperation. She takes it with more philosophy than the despairing Monk, calling it "the start of a horrible friendship".
• What the Hell Is That Accent?: Missy's attempts to imitate the Deathworm Master's American accent range from a hokey Southern caricature to equally hokey Australian.
• You Are Better Than You Think You Are: In Masterful, Missy essentially hijacks the Simm Master's plan and turns it into an experiment to see if her past selves are capable of doing good while still being, well, the Master. It has...mixed results. Jo Grant also tries this with Missy, but this being Missy before her Heel–Face Turn, it goes very badly for her in the end.

Comic Tropes

The Mistress / "Missy"

• I Hate Past Me: She sees the Delgado Master as a child, albeit a brilliant one, and while she describes the Simm Master's human-eating period as their 'emo phase', still feels the need to remind herself she's better than that.
• Masquerading As the Unseen: She attempts to pass herself off as a new incarnation of the Doctor to the Delgado Master in Missy. Needless to say, her idea of appropriate Doctor behavior needs a lot of work. And the Delgado Master pretty much figured out who she was from the start anyway.

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"I will never stand with the Doctor!"
"Yes, my dear. You will."