Ainley was the fourth actor to play the Master and the first to portray the Master as a recurring role after the death of Roger Delgado in 1973. He first appears in the 1981 story The Keeper of Traken and returned almost every season up until the cancellation of the original series in 1989, including the final story Survival. He returned for the 1997 BBC computer game Destiny of the Doctors, and later for the Twelfth Doctor story Robot of Sherwood, looking remarkably good for someone who had been dead for 13 years.