The Gallifreyan Time Lord known as The Doctor, as the currently on television Doctor Who season finale will attest, has many an enemy. There are the Cybermen and the Daleks and the Sontarans, to name a few. Perhaps though there is no enemy so equal to The Doctor as The Master.
A Time Lord himself, The Master is the yin to The Doctor's yang (or yang to his yin if you prefer). Through the years of both the original and new Doctor Who series, The Doctor has run into this nemesis repeatedly – on different planets, in different incarnations, and in different time periods. The Master first puts in an appearance during the time of the Third Doctor's exile on Earth (The Doctor ran afoul of his fellow Time Lords for interfering in the affairs of others), and it is as The Doctor's exile is nearing an end that this particular battle with The Master takes place.
With Jon Pertwee's portrayal of the Third Doctor and Roger Delgado as The Master (Delgado was the first to play the character) already well established, what one gets in "The Time Monster" is a tale that assumes that the audience has a decent amount of background. The plot for this particular confrontation between the two Time Lords involves The Master masquerading as a professor conducting a laboratory experiment with time in order to unleash a monster known as Kronos which was prayed to by the inhabitants of Atlantis.
Yes, it's something of a foolish tale, and over the course of the six episodes "The Time Monster" runs, the story does do a fair amount of shifting in focus. It appears at first as though the entire story will take place in the present day before everyone takes a trip back to Atlantis in order to… well, by that point it is all about political intrigue in Atlantis and a very different story than the one the audience was initially served. That might be okay except that the original time travel theory stuff and the bringing of Kronos from the void into the world is far more interesting than the unnecessary Atlantis overlay.
The tale also, at least when looked at today, has an uneasy relationship with the women's liberation movement. Early in the tale one character is positioned as being very vocal in her support for equality. As the story progresses there are repeated moments, particularly those that deal with the political machinations in Atlantis, where the notion of equality feels to be severely undercut. Intentional or not, it makes "The Time Monster" feel very dated (something that the effects are usually responsible for on Doctor Who).
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