Doctor Who has retconned the season 12 Master into a Patrick Troughton episode from the original series. Doctor Who is the BBC's longest-running science-fiction TV series. It's hard to believe, but there was a time when the British broadcaster didn't realize how valuable the property was; they gave it a shoestring budget and didn't bother to store the episodes, because they assumed nobody would ever want to rewatch them. As a result, the BBC wiped a lot of the tapes from the William Hartnell and Patrick Troughton eras. Even the First Doctor's regeneration episode, "The Tenth Planet," was erased; only a handful of clips remain. 97 of the 253 Doctor Who episodes broadcast between 1963 and 1969 no longer exist.
But the BBC is gradually attempting to fill the gaps. The original soundtracks have survived to a number of stories, and the BBC is developed new animated visuals to go with them. They're essentially recreating lost classic Doctor Who episodes, and the animation team's focus is on the sci-fi stories, given historical adventures such as "The Crusades" involved too many costume-changes and would take them years. In general, the BBC's animators are striving to be as authentic as possible - but, in the case of "The Faceless Ones," they've made a few minor adjustments. They've added some subtle references to the Master.
One early scene sees the Doctor and his friends materialize on the runway at Heathrow Airport, causing quite a stir. The police are called - and according to the Radio Times, the animators have added some entertaining Easter eggs in the background. There are two WANTED posters on the walls of the police station, both showing different incarnations of the Master. One is Roger Delgado, the first Master, and the other is Sacha Dhawan. Attentive viewers had noticed the first when a clip was released online, but the second comes as a pleasant surprise.
It's a fascinating change, writing both versions of the Master into earlier Doctor Who history. Delgado's Master wouldn't actually be introduced until 1971, four years after "The Faceless One" first aired, but of course he's a time traveler so could quite easily already be wanted in "The Faceless Ones," which is set in July 1966. Meanwhile, in the episode "Spyfall, Part 2," the Doctor stranded Dhawan's Master in the Second World War. He lived through the rest of the 20th century, and it seems by the '60s he'd become a wanted man in the United Kingdom.
It will be interesting to see whether or not BBC animators make subtle changes to other episodes, in order to reinforce the show's continuity. Of course, in this case, the timing is particularly entertaining; Doctor Who carefully concealed the truth about the character Sacha Dhawan was playing in Doctor Who season 12, in order to give the revelation he's the Master a potent shock value. It looks as though the BBC's animators were in on the secret.
Source: Radio Times