As soon as O’Donnell (Morven Christie) travelled through time in ‘Before the Flood’ and showed her fan-girl credentials (yelping excitedly about the TARDIS being bigger on the inside, giving a roll call of The Doctor’s greatest hits) it was pretty clear that she was being presented as Potential Companion Who’s Not Going To Make It To The End Of The Episode Alive.
Indeed, she couldn’t have been more effectively killed off if The Doctor had made one of his offers of ‘all of time and space’ to her. But before she met her end at the hands (claws) of The Fisher King, she gave a tantalising hint as to a future threat for The Doctor.
Sure, it was only a throwaway line, nothing to get too worked up about, but we’ve seen enough of Steven Moffat’s Doctor Who by now to know that a throwaway line that’s nothing to get too worked up about is exactly where he will seed his biggest clues.
Who, or what, is The Minister of War? We have no idea – all we do know is that the Doctor will find out at some point between 1980 and 2119 – but it hasn’t stopped us pondering.
Here then, supported by absolutely no evidence whatsoever, are five of our most preposterous suggestions…
The War Lords
Anyone coming to Doctor Who post-2005 may have very little idea who The War Lords are. They’ve only been used in the classic series once, and that was back in 1969. Unless you’re a long-term fan who knows your Krynoids from your Vervoids, they are a relatively obscure villain.
Having said that, obscurity didn’t stop Steven Moffatt using The Great Intelligence as the major adversary in ‘The Name of Doctor’. It’s worth pointing out that The War Lords are presumably a lot more important in Gallifrey mythos than their relatively short amount of screen time in the show itself would suggest.
In all honesty, The War Lords are too good a concept to leave along for much longer. Their return would enrich the Doctor Who backstory mythos, and Moffat has proved himself adept at ransacking all of The Doctor’s history for plunder, like a cackling Dr Simeon.
The fact remains that The War Lords are quite the most obvious possibility for the Minister of War’s identity. So obvious, in fact, that we may need to look elsewhere…
Omega
For no better reason than he’s due a return, and that he’s the other Time Lord apart from Missy and Rassilon who is intimately connected with The Doctor’s home planet Gallifrey – the search for which is the soft story arc bubbling away in Peter Capladi’s background.
More importantly – for a villain that has so much potential – Omega has been served poorly in his previous two outings. In ‘The Three Doctors’, he was outshone by poor CSO and the star wattage of – well, the three Doctors – while in ‘Arc of Infinity’ he was finally portrayed by Peter Davison cosplaying as a bowl of Rice Krispies.
Omega deserves better, and it is doubtless just a matter of time before he is returned as a Big Bad in the Doctor Who universe.
UNIT
No, really. Okay, every single one of the theories we’re throwing out here is as ridiculous as the other, but consider this: why did the psychic paper show UNIT in ‘Under the Lake’?
The obvious answer is to get in a bit of narrative shorthand so that The Doctor can get to work quickly (and of course so O’Donnell can namedrop The Doctor’s adversaries to him), but really, writer Toby Whithouse could have found any number of ways to cut to the chase.
Perhaps sabotage and deliberate warmongering is on the cards in the future?
Missy
Alright, we’re scraping the barrel here, and frankly we’d be mildly disappointed if it did turn out to be Missy – even if we love Michelle Gomez so much that we’re championing for her to have her own series (and, yes, we accept that almost nobody else seems to think is a good idea).
It’s worth remembering that in The Master’s very first season, back in 1971, he was the major antagonist in every story that year. And a certain ‘Harold Saxon’ has already infiltrated the government once before.
WOTAN
You may need to look this one up. And let’s be honest: we’re unlikely to get a power mad computer living in the Post Office Tower who can’t even get The Doctor’s name right as this year’s major villain.
But, WOTAN did first appear in a William Hartnell story called ‘The War Machines’, and frankly, we’re clutching at tenuous straws here. While we’re discussing this story, though, it’s worth remembering what a weird – and prescient – story ‘The War Machines’ actually is.
WOTAN isn’t an alien menace, but a supercomputer that has decided that humans can’t be trusted to run things on their own, and sends out an army of connected mobile computers to enslave humanity. Somebody at Skynet must have intercepted an email.
It’s odd to think of a Hartnell story as particularly modern – even the very few episodes set on then current-day Earth have a whiff of nostalgia about them – but the bones of the actual plot of ‘The War Machines’ would bear scrutiny today.
Adric
Not really.
Who, or what, do you think the Minister of War is? Let us know below…