Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary - watching Doctor Who one episode a day from the very start...
Day 438: The Brain of Morbius, Episode Two
Dear diary,
I seem to say this a lot, but Tom Baker really is very good at this whole ‘being the Doctor’ thing, isn’t he? There’s so many moments in today’s episode where you simply forget that anyone else can have ever played the part, because it’s just so right for him.
He’s helped by a rather brilliant script - there’s a lot of humour in here. For all the darkness in an episode where Sarah is blinded, the Doctor is very nearly burnt at the stake, and a mad professor has an argument with a brain in a jar, I found myself smiling and laughing right the way through today’s instalment. It’s doing that thing that Doctor Who is so very good at: walking the very fine line between scares and humour, and being throughly entertaining throughout. I’ve enjoyed a lot of episodes over the past few months, but I can’t remember the last time that I had so much fun watching one.
It’s the Doctor who benefits the most from all the joking around in the script, from his ‘confession’ to the sisterhood, through seconding the motion that he be spared from death, and the way he reacts to the TARDIS being moved via mental projection (‘Now, if you were to get yourself a nice little fork lift…’), and Tom also gets a fair amount of physical comedy, too. When Solon emerges from the basement to find the Doctor sitting there, grinning away… it’s impossible not to love it. Solon, too, benefits from the jokes, and his insults towards Condo are as amusing as anything else in the story.
All this humour being injected could run the risk of making the story seem light-hearted or trivial, but Dicks manages to alternate these moment with a fair amount of darkness. The aforementioned argument with Morbius is very well played, and I love that you never see who he’s arguing with, but merely hear the voice as we keep following Solon, letting Philip Madoc’s performance be the sole draw for your eye. Then you’ve got Condo finding out just how little his master cares for him, and threatening to kill him… it’s all quite powerful stuff, and it helps to readdress the balance between light and dark in the story.
It’s also nice to see more and more detail being shaded in about Morbius and his history. I mused yesterday that he was being built up as a kind of mythical figure in Time Lord society, much like Omega or Rassilon, and I still think that’s true, but there’s shades of it bridging the gap more with the version of the Doctor’s race that we’ll be seeing soon enough. Morbius led a rebellion, centring on Karn. He was exiled and disintegrated, and now Solon prepares to revive him to rule once more. Obviously, there’s great big shades of Frankenstein in Solon’s methods, but it’s still interesting enough to watch here.
