“There’s only player I dared not face,” he says with menace. “The one who waits.” But when the Doctor presses him for more information, the Toymaker only responds, “That’s someone else’s game.” The line seems to echo Beep the Meep’s own sinister warning about the impending arrival of his “boss,” who the Doctor will presumably meet in series 14. Gatwa’s Fifteenth Doctor will have to deal with the one who waits, the figure so scary that even the Toymaker had to run and hide from it.
Now, this One Who Waits could certainly be a new character designed by returning showrunner Russell T Davies. A number of interesting characters debuted during Davies’s first tenure on the series, including the Ood and the Beast from “The Impossible Planet/The Satan Pit,” the invisible creatures from “Midnight,” the Weeping Angels from “Blink,” and… uh, the Slitheen.
However, as demonstrated by his decision to bring back the bad guy from a mostly lost First Doctor (William Hartnell) adventure for “The Giggle,” Davies also loves to revive a forgotten bad guy. One interesting possibility would be the War Chief, a Gallifreyan totalitarian introduced in the second Doctor’s last adventure, “The War Games.” The shrewd leader of the War Lords, the War Chief has appeared in non-canonical books, but has not been back on TV since the late ’60s. And since his introduction, the War Chief has been connected to the Master. In fact, it’s long been debated whether the War Chief is actually a regeneration of the Doctor’s greatest rival, so it would make a bit of sense that he’d be interested in freeing the Master as part of a new plan to take down the Doctor.
The return of Melanie Bush (Bonnie Langford) could also point to a villain from the Sixth Doctor’s (Colin Baker) time, namely the 1986 serial “The Mysterious Planet.” From his first appearance, the Sixth Doctor struggled with darker, more cowardly instincts. In “The Mysterious Planet,” viewers learn that those instincts manifest in the form of the Valeyard, a devious figure who represents the Doctor’s dark side. According to the Master, the Valeyard springs from “somewhere between [the Doctor’s] twelfth and final incarnation.” Thus, as the Doctor hurled toward his later incarnations in NuWho, the Valeyard’s return was a popular fan theory, with some hoping that Matt Smith, John Hurt, or Timothy Dalton would be playing the character.
Of course, all that has changed now that the Doctor was given a new set of regenerations in “The Time of the Doctor” and even more so with the revelation in “The Timeless Children” that the Doctor does not come from Gallifrey and thus has no limit on her regenerations. Given the emphasis on multiple Doctors since Davies’s return, and several references to Chris Chibnall’s run in the recent specials, it feels like the perfect time to bring back the Valeyard in a new, even more terrifying form. Of course, we Whovians have been saying stuff like that since Christopher Eccleston regenerated at the end of the reboot season.
So, Whose Hand Picked Up the Gold Tooth?
In place of wild speculation, let’s take a look at what we do know. After the two Doctors forced the Toymaker into a box, Kate Lethbridge-Stewart (Jemma Redgrave) quickly set to giving UNIT orders on disposing of the box. At the same time, the pants-less Fifteenth Doctor and the shoeless Fourteenth Doctor left with Donna to sort out the mysteries of Bigeneration. In short, we saw everyone doing something when the hand reached out to grab the tooth.
