Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary - watching Doctor Who one episode a day from the very start...
Day 440: The Brain of Morbius, Episode Four
Dear diary,
This episode contains another one of those scenes which Doctor Who fans find themselves arguing over. You know the one - the Doctor and Morbius are engaged in a spot of Time Lord wrestling, and we watch on the screen as an image of the Fourth Doctor’s face shifts into that of the Third Doctor. As the battle goes on, we then see the Second Doctor! And then the First! Hooray! All the old Doctors! But then… hold on… who’s that?
The… Zeroth Doctor… and the… Minus First Doctor… and… hold on… what?
Eight more faces appear up on the screen, all in various costumes plucked from history. Specifically, it’s the faces of Christopher Baker, Robert Holmes, Graeme Harper, Douglas Camfield, Philip Hinchcliffe, Robert Banks Stewart, George Gallaccio and Christopher Barry - all people working on the production team at the time. As the faces begin to appear, Morbius wonders how ‘far back’ the Doctor goes, and the implication is seemingly that these are the Doctor’s first eight incarnations, pushing Tom Baker up to number 12!
Obviously, this goes on to cause problems a year later, when it’s announced that Time Lords can only have thirteen lives (although we’ve recently seen the Doctor overcome this problem on Trenzalore). I’ve seen all kinds of theories thrown around over the years to try and explain away these various other faces, but to me the most plausible explanation is that they’re the faces of Morbius’ earlier forms. There’s nothing to contradict this, and while his dialogue about reaching back in to the Doctor’s past overlaps with the first of these faces, the longer they go on, the more Morbius seems to be in pain… and then the machine displaying the faces blows up! As fa as I’m concerned, this explanation is as good as any other, and it’s certainly the one I’ll keep in mind if I ever need to join the debate. To be honest, the whole sequence was less of a big deal than I’d been expecting it to be - considering all the fuss that seems to be made of it from time to time, it seemed to be quite tame!
I have to draw special attention to an exchange in this episode which may be my favourite ever between the Doctor and Sarah. She stumbles across him having escaped from the lab, and is surprised when he starts to wake up. ‘You thought I was dead, didn’t you?’ he asks, before adding ‘You’re always making that mistake…’ Considering how often I’ve drawn attention to it over Sarah’s time in the TARDIS, it’s lovely to see the show itself drawing attention to it!
It’s just another example of this being one of the best scripts that Terrance Dicks has ever produced for the programme. It was extensively rewritten by Robert Holmes one it had reached the production office (so much so that Dicks asked for his name to be taken off the broadcast, and have it put out ‘under some bland pseudonym’), but I think as a team working together, they’ve created something really rather special. Is it a perfect story? No, it’s not. As stories go, it probably isn’t deserving of the high praise it often receives. But there’s bits of this tale which are really very good, and I’m sure I’ll be revisiting it again at some point in the future.
