Thoughts on National Character
Who is The Master?
An Article on the lost episode reconstructions
Over the years, hints have been dropped and guessing has been invited. "Do you not know me?" The Master has asked a time or two. "We were at school together," is the closest any writing team has come to giving us an answer.
The problem is, that clue covers a lot of ground and fits in with any number of totally different theories, including the one below...
Keep in mind that that, like many of the rest of us, the Doctor is often his own worst enemy... and when the different facets of his personality get together (as they do, from time to time) the chief thing that they do is bicker and complain at each other about what a bad job they are...
And so we hereby advance the theory that the Doctor and the Master are not rivals, not schoolmates, not professor and student, nor even brothers: they are one and the same person.
It's our notion that the Master is the twelfth regeneration of the Doctor: that the qualities the Doctor successfully repressed through 12 reincarnations (fear, anger, resentment, lonliness -- after all, his companions always leave him) are at last unleashed in a disastrous final regeneration.
Further, though suffering from repressed memories (otherwise he could always avoid defeat), the Master does have some degree of self-knowledge -- his frequent attempts to kill the Doctor amount to nothing more or less than attempts to bring about his own existence.
We like a happy ending as well as the next person, but this would seem to preclude a happy ending for the Doctor. Or would it? We have a notion that the Master has an enemy within, just as does the Doctor. How does it all end up? At the beginning!
... but that's a subject for another page.