Doctor Who: 10 Huge Questions After The Power Of The Doctor
2. Will Sacha Dhawan Stay On As The Master?
Our current Master, Sacha Dhawan, has said he’d be up for returning to face-off against a new Doctor. But how likely is that?
It’s quite clear from his script that Chibnall thinks Russell T Davies will probably want to recast the Master. Leaving him to die, the Doctor tells her foe that his body is failing after he'd put it through so much. The set-up is there for the Master to regenerate offscreen in his TARDIS - no explanations would be necessary, and Davies could just start afresh with a new actor.
For his part, Ncuti Gatwa has teased the possibility that his Doctor might come up against the Master, but in that same interview with Sky News, Russell T Davies added "or the Missy. The Master can be female as well". But if he does change the character’s gender again, a surprise reveal wouldn’t be quite so impactful as the Missy twist in Dark Water.
Another possibility is that we could see Dhawan appearing one more time, but unrecognisable, with his body in a degenerative state similar to his reintroduction in The Deadly Assassin. An entire adventure centred on his desperate quest to find a new body. The classic Master story. We don’t always see the Master’s regeneration, but his next encounter with the Doctor could very well end with a reveal of Missy 2.