Master (Buffy The Vampire Slayer) - Establishment

Establishment

At the beginning of the series, Buffy has left behind a destructive past that has labeled her as a trouble-maker at school and instilled in her the fear that the actions she has had to take to be a successful Slayer are responsible for breaking apart her parents' marriage. She arrives at Sunnydale High School believing that she has made a fresh start. Her mother Joyce (Kristine Sutherland) is unaware of her daughter's vocation and stresses that Buffy's time in Sunnydale should be as peaceful as possible. When Buffy arrives in the school library, however, she finds that the new librarian, Giles (Anthony Head), is expecting her and ready to continue her training. His expectation that she is there to take up her role as Slayer upsets her; she wants nothing to do with him or with Slaying. Giles is, in fact, Buffy's new Watcher, a mentor who will teach her about the demons she must face, as well as supervise her training in weapons and battle strategy. Although she desperately desires to be a mere high school student, she is unsuccessful in avoiding her destiny to fight vampires. On her first day she finds a vampire's victim at school, and resumes her work as the Slayer.

Because it debuted midway through the 1997 television season, the first season of Buffy has only 12 episodes as opposed to the standard 22 in subsequent seasons. The Master is first seen in the series premiere "Welcome to the Hellmouth", which was aired immediately before the second episode "The Harvest", which reveals more of the Master's character and backstory. In "Welcome to the Hellmouth" the Master is presented as one of the "old ones" a vampire with extraordinary physical and mental powers, but weakened through long isolation and needing to feed on people; he is raised from a pool of blood by his acolyte Luke (Brian Thompson). The head of a cult called the Order of Aurelius, the Master attempted to open the Hellmouth in 1937, placing himself in a church to do so. An earthquake swallowed the church during the Master's attempt, and he has been living in the ruins for 60 years. He is imprisoned by a mystical force, unable to leave his underground lair, so he bids his minions to find people for him to feed from. The Master's incarceration underground was a device used by the writers to avoid having Buffy meet him and then thwart his attempts to kill her each week. Whedon was concerned that audiences would consider this implausible and that weekly confrontations would leave no tension for the season finale when Buffy and the Master would finally meet and battle each other. In "The Harvest", in an ornately dark ceremony the Master makes Luke is his "vessel": every time Luke feeds, power will be transmitted to the Master. Luke goes to The Bronze, the local nightclub frequented by Buffy and her friends and begins to feed on the patrons before Buffy — following a delay caused by getting grounded by her mother — can kill him. Although Luke successfully feeds on a couple of victims, Buffy defeats him, thereby leaving the Master contained underground and robbed of his proxy.

The majority of vampires on the series have a human face that can turn into what Whedon and the characters call "vamp face". When shown immediately before feeding, the vampire characters transform with prosthetic make-up and computer-generated effects, giving them prominent brows and cheekbones, sharpened yellow teeth, and yellow eyes. Whedon intended to use the vamp face to be able to place vampires around Buffy in different locations — especially at school — to highlight the element of surprise by illustrating that the characters often face friends and peers who appear normal, but have dark sides. Simultaneously, the vamp face shows that Buffy is killing monsters instead of people. Whedon made a decision to have the Master in permanent vamp face to indicate that he is so ancient he precedes humanity. The Master never shows a human face; the make-up specialist conceived him as bat-like, intentionally making him look more like an animal. His facial make-up, bald head, extremely long fingernails, and black costume all refer directly to the 1922 German Expressionist film Nosferatu, directed by F. W. Murnau. Like the vampire of that film, Count Orlok, the Master lives in a state of furious isolation from which he is desperate to escape. According to author Matthew Pateman, the Master's presentation underscores both his great age and his European-ness — he is emphatically Old World. Even so, as a result of his entrapment in the New World, he adapts and shows himself able to incorporate American technology into his plans.