Marvel Database
Advertisement

Quote1 What, you plan to turn into a purple dragon while I take the form of a germ for you to catch? Please, do you honestly want to have a wizard's duel with me? Quote2
Doctor Strange

Appearing in "The Oath - Finale"

Featured Characters:

Supporting Characters:

Antagonists:

Other Characters:

Locations:

Items:

Synopsis for "The Oath - Finale"

Doctor Strange is distraught to realize that his faithful manservant has died. The Night Nurse tells him she can try to restart his heart, but without a miraculous intervention Wong will only be a shell of his former self. Meanwhile, Nicodemus West escapes.

Strange tracks West to a washroom where the man is hesitating over pouring the potion down the drain. They have a tense conversation, and Strange lays West's objections bare: the real difficulty is not that magic and medicine don't mix, it is that West botched the spell and was unable to acknowledge his own mistakes. If magical cures entered the world of medicine, they would be adopted just like pacemakers and CAT scans in their day. West flees a second time, but Strange confronts him on the roof of the Timely Pharmaceuticals building. Knowing it has come down to a fight, West summons the Sands of Nisanti, a magical item that will prevent either of them from casting spells for three minutes. West claims that he has the advantage of physical health and strength, since he hasn't relied on spellcasting all his life, while magic is all that Strange has.

They battle in a heavy rainstorm. West is winning easily, while Strange is neither attacking nor effectively defending himself. Then Strange reveals that he is merely waiting for West to finish wasting his energy -- within seconds the fight turns around. Yes, Doctor Strange has mastered the martial arts as well as the mystic. West goes down, and Strange tells him to stay there, but the other man bolts. In the lightning and rain, he misjudges the edge of the roof and falls. Strange cannot cast the spell to save him.

At the foot of the building is West's broken body... and the broken bottle of Otkid's Elixir. Strange can salvage only a single drop; enough to save Wong or reproduce the potion for the rest of the world, but not both. As he stares at it, conflicted, West's astral projection reminds him that he swore a Hippocratic Oath never to withhold treatment from a patient in his care, and advises him to make whichever "choice will allow you to look yourself in the mirror come morning."

Twenty-four hours later, Wong awakens in the Sanctum Sanctorum. When he realizes Strange chose to save him instead of the world, he is shocked, but touched.

In private with Night Nurse, Strange expresses his anger and frustration that no one will know Timely Pharmaceuticals's part in this. But the Nurse holds up a copy of a memo, stolen from West's desk, which implicates the entire board of directors in the scheme to murder Strange and his associates. "I'm so happy I could--" Strange begins, but before finishing the obvious "--kiss you," he offers the Nurse his Sanctum Sanctorum as her new base of operations.

See Also

Links and References

References

Advertisement