Rather than resolve the Master's predicament straight away, we first see what some of our other characters are up to. Jo decides to go to the cavern by herself.
As part of his instructions on how to build the technobabble device, the Doctor tells Osgood to "reverse the polarity," although he disappointingly doesn't say of what.
Azal talks to the Master in a big, shouty, Treebeard-Omega-Eldrad sort of voice. That's because they're all voiced by Stephen Thorne lol. We see the Master from between Azal's legs (and sometimes a cigar-shaped spaceship is just a cigar-shaped spaceship) and then from over his shoulders - now that his origin has been exposited and he has spoken with a regular character he is no longer quite so mysterious and thus is no longer given the status of a POV monster.
He knows that the Doctor is from the same race as the Master and wants to speak with them both. Azal says
"My race destroys its failures. Remember Atlantis?"
but as the Master won't visit Atlantis until the end of the next season, he probably doesn't. The Master runs away from the cavern and makes a 'phew, I got away with it' face, and then he starts laughing.
Yates sees that Jo is gone and decides to go after her, while Benton and Miss Hawthorne have a drink - well, they are in a pub after all!
The Doctor finishes his explanation to Osgood and goes to return to the village on his motorbike, leaving the Brigadier and UNIT to follow him when the device is finished and gets them through the heat barrier.
Jo and Yates go into the cavern where Yates makes a mess with one of the Master's books, ripped up by the Master's own "booby trap" forcefield - a useful demonstration to Jo in the short term, but surely a massive giveaway that they had been in here in the longer term? Well, a cultist comes in and completely fails to notice, which just goes to prove that you don't have to actually be good at stealth, just better than your opponent's Spot Hidden.
(Somebody tidies up the mess off-screen before the next scene in the cavern. I don't know who, but it is presumably neither Jo nor Yates since many of the pages landed on the other side of the forcefield.)
The Master's henchmanny shoots the Doctor off his motorbike, so the Doctor runs away, having only brought Venusian Karate to this gunfight.
There are then a couple of komedy filler scenes - one with Miss Hawthorne offering Benton some tea (I'm sure I'm not the first reviewer of this story to note that he's well in there, naughty Miss Hawthorne), the second with the Brigadier and Osgood trying to get the device going.
The komedy scenes are placed here in order to contrast with the terrifying scenes that follow, as we see mannys performing the black secret at the heart of their English paradise: Morris Dancing.
The Doctor tries to get past them but he gets captured because, as any Scottish cat knows, the Morris Dancers are evil. Their leader is the Master's henchmanny, who pulls a gun on the Doctor to make sure he doesn't get away.
One of the Morris Dancers has a fight with Benton until he gets knocked out by Miss Hawthorne, who says
"Look, I know these people, they're not wicked. Well... most of them anyway."
The villagers tie the Doctor to a pole with ribbons, and the image of this reminds me of something...
The Master's henchmanny calls the Doctor a "black witch" and suggests that they "burn him."
This leads to the villagers chanting "Burn him!" in such a way that must surely have influenced the witch scene in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. They're actually about to do this when Miss Hawthorne runs out and shouts "Stop!"
This scene was already ridiculous filler, so the plan she and Benton have come up with seems almost sensible under the circumstances. Miss Hawthorne claims the Doctor is "the great wizard Quiquaequod" and will use his magic power against them if they don't release him. The "power" consists of Benton shooting things (a simpler version of this plan having obviously been rejected as being not convoluted enough) and then the Doctor using his Chekhov's Remote Control from episode one to summon Bessie to run over the henchmanny.
I think what allows this scene to succeed (well... partially) is that Benton is also surprised - because while Jo and Yates saw Bessie operating under remote control earlier on, he didn't. On the other paw, where the scene finally goes too far is when Benton asks
"How on Earth did you do that, Doctor?"
setting the Doctor up for the reply
"Elemental, my dear Benton."
Mew.
In the cavern, the Master has all his cultists present and they do lots of chanting. When the Master goes to sacrifice a cock (or it could be a hen, I suppose, but that's less intrinsically open to my making a cheap joke), Jo runs out from where she and Yates had been hiding the entire time to try to stop him.
But it doesn't matter, because the Master summons Azal anyway.
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