[Anonymouse]

Oh, dear. It seems the Doctor has finally gone off the deep end. He's on the slippery slope the Time Lords were once on (referring back to the Dark Time mentioned in The Five Doctors), before Rassilon sorted them out. And there is literally no-one to stop him...except perhaps the Master.

Imagine that, if the Master ended up saving the Universe from the Doctor!

Perhaps we'll find out who retrieved the Master's ring from his funeral pyre - though I strongly suspect it was his wife, Lucy. A while back I had an idea for a story in which the Master planned for his own death, anticipating that the Doctor would take him prisoner, and hatching a plan to escape him by hiding a copy of his memories (greatly compressed, of course, bearing in mind what happened to poor Donna) in Lucy's mind, without her knowledge, and compelling her to kill him at the right time, then retrieve the ring (which contains a copy of the Master's bio-print, so he could be cloned). Remember the look on her face? She looked lost, distracted, as if she didn't know what she was doing. At that point, I thought "Hmmm..." and started scribbling. Not that I've got anywhere with it since; life keeps getting in the way.

So if that's what the writers do to bring him back in The End of Time, remember: you heard it here first!