Doctor Who has long been my favorite show, but my actual viewing it over the years has been very on-again / off-again. Lately, it’s been all-on, as I’m actually closing in on finishing re-watching all of the classic episodes (at least the ones that are easily available for me to stream), whilst blogging about each serial.
The Brain of Morbius is considered by many, I think, to be a classic. But even so, and even though Doctor Who is my favorite show and I’ve been watching it for years, I don’t think I’ve ever seen the whole thing before. And so it’s never really been a favorite of mine. But now I finally have sat down and watched the serial from beginning to end. What were the results? Read on!
The Brain of Morbius
Starring Tom Baker as the Fourth Doctor
Companion: Elisabeth Sladen as Sarah Jane Smith
Written by Robin Bland. Directed by Christopher Barry. Produced by Philip Hinchcliffe. Script Edited by Robert Holmes.
Format: 4 episodes, each about 25 minutes long
Originally Aired: January 1976 (Episodes 17-20 of Season 13)
Spoilers Ahead!
The Brain of Morbius has got a strong Gothic horror-vibe going for it. On the whole, this is not my favorite vibe (for Doctor Who or otherwise) but there is no denying that this is one of the serial’s strengths. Across the board, the design is rich and detailed. It’s still limited in the way that 70s Doctor Who always is–you would never be fooled that the story’s settings are real places, but they are so immersive and atmospheric that it is a pleasure to suspend one’s disbelief. Much credit is owed to designer Barry Newbery (a veteran of the show from all the way back to An Unearthly Child) and costume designer L. Rowland Warne for making this serial work so well.
But they aren’t alone, of course. The script is solid, balancing the story well between the two main settings–Solon’s castle and the shrine of the Sisterhood of Karn. Each only has a couple of speaking characters, but their dynamics are consistently interesting. There’s a feeling of depth and history that you get with the Solon & Condo pairing, and to a lesser degree with Maren & Ohica, that the show doesn’t always achieve with its guest characters.
It makes it all the more meaningful to watch the Doctor and Sarah crash into each of these worlds and see how their presence affects things. And also gives the scene where Solon ends up killing Condo quite a lot of weight. Like, Condo is definitely a bad guy, and it’s not like these two don’t already have a contentious relationship.
But you feel sorry for him, and it’s affecting to see him gunned down like this by someone he at least sort-of thought he could trust.
The story borrows heavily from Frankenstein, of course. The final form of Morbius, with his brain in a jar atop of a monstrous body cobbled together from spare parts, is quite a sight to behold.
It’s something that in a lesser production would have been comically ridiculous, but here works excellently. There was something about this era of the series where the show bought so strongly in to its more outrageous elements (be they robot mummies or carnivorous plant monsters or shape shifting reptiles) that it was easy for the viewer to do so as well. As I said before, suspending ones disbelief becomes a pleasure.
The cast of The Brain of Morbius are as equally wholehearted with the material as the rest of the production. Regulars Tom Baker and Elisabeth Sladen both do a solid job anchoring the story, but it’s the guest cast who really stand out. The characters are largely archetypes–the witch, the malformed assistant, and the mad scientist, but each of the actors behind these figures manages to go beyond just being a type of person and are able to create real characters. If not for the skills of Cynthia Grenville (Maren) and Colin Fay (Condo) none of the aforementioned character interactions would work nearly as well. But we have to pay special acknowledgment to Philip Madoc as Solon.
Solon is so intense, so over-the-top at times that he does threaten to enter pantomime territory. But again, similar to the Morbius body in the last episode, Madoc is so absolutely committed to the role that viewer buy-in is easy. I can understand that maybe for some it might feel like a bit much, but for my money the performance is excellent. It’s good that Tom Baker doesn’t try to match his energy–it’s much more effective to see the Doctor remain unflappable and level-headed in the face of Solon’s obvious madness.
The Brain of Morbius ended up being surprisingly influential in the days of the modern series. The Sisterhood of Karn are the same group that we see in the 2013 mini-episode The Night of the Doctor, where they are essential in facilitating the Eighth Doctor’s regeneration into the War Doctor. The main sister in that story is named Ohila, a name which I think is not coincidentally similar to this story’s Ohica. Ohila went on to appear two more times in the series, in The Magician’s Apprentice and Hell Bent (the first and last episodes of Series 9).
The other big contribution of The Brain of Morbius to the show’s mythology is the idea that the Doctor had a bunch of identities prior to William Hartnell’s.
This comes up as the Doctor confronts Morbius in a “mindbending” contest, which features images of each of the Doctor’s televised incarnations in reverse chronological order, followed by eight previous versions. It has been confirmed that the production team intended these faces to indicate the. Doctor had earlier incarnations, even though the same production team confirmed not long after this (in The Deadly Assassin) that this was not the case, and that Time Lord’s were limited to twelve regenerations only.
For the most part, fans ignored this revelation and held onto the “twelve regenerations only” idea, probably because overwhelmingly this is what the show itself told us. From 1976 to 2019 there is a multitude of direct confirmations related to this idea, and even prior to this there were both implied and explicit references to the fact that William Hartnell’s Doctor was the first. But, during the ill-advised (I’d say) Timeless Child revelation during the Chris Chibnall / Jodie Whittaker era of the show, it was confirmed that the Doctor has nigh-countless incarnations pre-Hartnell, with the show going so far as to feature again the eight “Morbius Doctors” as part of a montage of the Doctor’s life.
Of course, it was also confirmed at that time that the Doctor didn’t remember this fact. I guess his experience with the mindbending contest left him too addled to recall all those extra parts of his life.
Incidentally, The Brain of Morbius is credited to “Robin Bland” but was actually written by former script editor Terrance Dicks. When budgetary constraints forced current script editor Robert Holmes to rewrite the serial extensively, Dicks was reportedly pretty unhappy and refused to put his name on it, leading to the writing being credited to a rather ironic pseudonym. I’ve never read the original version (and doing so would not be enough to tell us if it would have worked, even if it could have been produced with the series’ limitations), but there is certainly no reason to be ashamed of the finished product.
Other Thoughts
• Michael Spice (the Voice of Morbius) was also Magnus Greel in The Talons of Weng-Chiang. John Scott Martin (the alien Condo kills at the start) played lots of roles in the series, mostly monsters, and was a Dalek operator in almost every classic-era story from The Chase onward. Stuart Fell (the body of Morbius) also appeared in many stories as an actor and a stuntman, notably as the body of Alpha Centauri in The Curse of Peladon and its sequel, and did fight arranging in The Talons of Weng-Chiang and State of Decay. He was also a fight arranger on Blake’s 7 and was involved primarily with stunts in projects such as Superman, Superman II, The Empire Strikes Back, Who Framed Roger Rabbit and even an episode of Monty Python’s Flying Circus.
• Philip Madoc, who played Solon, featured in Doctor Who three other times.
He was Eelek in The Krotons, as the War Lord in The War Games, and as Fenner in The Power of Kroll. He also appeared as Brockley in the Peter Cushing film Daleks’ Invasion Earth 2150 A.D.
• The Doctor’s faces previous seen in the mindbending contest are all members of the BBC’s production offices. In order of appearance (and thus presumably in reverse order of the Doctor’s life) they are portrayed by George Gallaccio (production unit manager for a bunch of stories in the 70s, and apparently the BBC’s first choice to replace Philip Hinchcliffe as producer, but he turned it down), Robert Holmes (script editor for this story and many others, and the classic show’s most prolific writer), Graeme Harper (assistant floor manager and production assistant, before becoming a director), Douglas Camfield (a long-term Doctor Who director whose had done work starting all the way back with An Unearthly Child), Philip Hinchcliffe (the show’s current producer), Christopher Baker (a production assistant at the BBC who never actually worked on the show), Robert Banks Stewart (the writer of Terror of the Zygons and The Seeds of Doom), and Christopher Barry (director of this and many other stories, starting with The Daleks).
All the photos of these incarnations of the Doctor were taken especially for this story except for the one of Graeme Harper, which had been taken for Colony in Space, where it depicted the adjudicator that the Master had replaced (and presumably killed). That leads to my personal fan theory that the Master actually killed the Doctor back then, who had been working undercover as the adjudicator. Of course, the Doctor didn’t actually die, but the Master left before realising he’d triggered a Time Lord’s regeneration.
This must be what happened! It’s the only theory that fits, right? And we have to whatever we can no matter how crazy to reconcile every little detail that the show gives us into a clean and coherent narrative! Right? Right?!
Hmm…maybe time to go touch grass.
