The Master seems to have got a bit of a thing for Cybermen in recent years. When you look at all the Masters’ plans (from 2005 onwards) they all revolve around the same idea: using the Doctor’s precious human race to hurt him/her. And what better tool than the Cybermen?
We don’t see enough of Jacobi’s Master so let’s start with Simm’s. His first plan involves taking over Earth, decimating the population while the Doctor watches and then policing his new global empire with the Toclafane. What are the Toclafane revealed to be? Humans from the future having lost all hope and turned into mechanical monsters. He showed the Doctor what monsters the human race are.
When he returns in The End of Time, his plan is to turn all humans into copies of himself. So whenever the Doctor looks at his favourite species, all he will be able to see is the Master, laughing at him. Again, humanity is his weapon of choice.
In the Doctor Falls, Simm’s final plan is to push the humans (from Mondas, but referred to as humans) into converting themselves into Cybermen. He’s shown the Doctor humans as cruel monsters, and humans as mindless copies of himself, and now his finale is humans as emotionless machines. He’s persuaded them to take the thing the Doctor loves most about them and to throw it away. And worst of all, he takes the Doctor’s companion and converts her too.
Then he dies and Missy is born. Missy wakes up presumably with very little memory of the Doctor Falls, but clearly little subconscious snippets such as needing to carry a spare part of her Tardis around with her. She also presumably remembers the beginnings of a plan to hurt the Doctor with Cybermen that she can’t remember completing so formulates her Death in Heaven plan. In S9, she’s really jut improvising but her weapon of choice is still a human: Clara, hiding her inside a Dalek to try and get the Doctor to kill her. In S10, he’s reforming so has no evil plans until she’s recruited to Simm’s, and then she is killed.
Now Dhawan’s Master, I believe has to come after Missy. Gallifrey hadn’t been destroyed while Missy was alive - expanded universe canon claims she travelled there several times, once straight after the Witch’s Familiar where she told the Time Lords the Doctor knew the truth about the hybrid. Also Missy never mentioned the Timeless Child mystery or anything from S12, but did refer to the Doctor abandoning her and leaving her for dead: clearly either her residual memory of the Doctor Falls, where Simm’s Master is left stabbed in an elevator with the Doctor nowhere to be seen, or her actual memory of the End of Time where he leaves him on Gallifrey with Rassilon and the high council.
Having established Missy has some memory, it’s fuzzy rather than completely absent: perhaps Missy’s desire to reconnect with the Doctor and reform comes from her vague recollection that she’s going to die for good at the end of this regeneration. In the Doctor Falls, there could have been enough of a nagging at the back of her head that she takes an opportunity to adjust the Master’s laser screwdriver so then when he thinks he’s killed her, he’s actually just stunned her, or triggered a regeneration?
However it happened, we reach Dhawan’s Master who discovers the secret of the Timeless Child. This revelation shatters his already fragile mental state, and undoes any progress towards reform he has made. He’s filled with rage for one simple reason. He tried to get the Doctor to be like him, and then finally tried to be like the Doctor, because he knew the Doctor and he weren’t so different, so if one of them could be that way then the other could too. But now he knew the truth - the Doctor was nothing like him, she was so much more. How could he hope to be like her now he knew he was just another Gallifreyan insect. So he snapped.
What’s the last image in the Master’s head of his own evil? A manic, cruel, bearded man who hides in plain sight (Harold Saxon, Mr Razer). Oh, and who uses Cybermen to hurt the Doctor. The real Dhawan Master underneath is a sad pathetic lonely little boy who just wanted to believe he was special too, and now is borderline suicidal and swings wildly from mood to mood. He’s putting on an act over the top of all that though and that act is an even more over the top impression of the Simm Master.
Last time he used the Cybermen, he used them on the Doctor’s closest friend, then on the dead of the human race. He needs to go bigger this time. So he murders every Time Lord on Gallifrey and turns their corpses into Cybermen.
(I imagine he discovered the Kasarvin while searching for information about where the Doctor came from and his plans with them sound remarkably Cyberman-y too, converting humanity into hard drives. That was all prelude to bringing the Doctor to Gallifrey though).
The Doctor has to face her own race (as far as she believes), including presumably her own family, turned into an emotionless slave army for the Master, and she has to be the one to destroy them all forever (in the Master’s plan). And in the process, she will finally end both herself and the Master, giving him his death wish and his revenge. This is, as far as I can see, the end point of the Master’s Cyberman escalation and when he inevitably returns, he’s going to have to look somewhere else for his next Master plan. Whatever it is though, it will be cruel, and it will be to hurt the Doctor through the people she loves.
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