31 MORE Days, 31 MORE Screams: Day 16 (Doctor Who: The Brain Of Morbius)

CANON FIGHT! CANON FIGHT!

Surprise! I'm going back to my old haunts! Yes, it's time once again to look at a spooky classic Doctor Who story from the very spooky Phillip Hinchcliffe era of the show. The last time we were here, we looked at Hinchcliffe's first real sort of influence on Doctor Who with The Ark In Space. I could have gone to lots of places for another Hinchcliffe Horror outing, but I made this choice because it's another quite good story! Also because I have the DVD sitting here and it's quite convenient for me to slap it in and flip on the TV and lay down. So, this is The Brain Of Morbius and it's really just a great little adventure with Tom Baker and Lis Sladen in it. You can't ask for much else, but what you can ask for in a Halloween marathon is a little bit of horror. Your wish is granted. Here, then, is The Brain Of Morbius.

At its heart, it's kind of a "Let's Do X" story. Doctor Who is very very good at this sort of thing, and Brain Of Morbius is no exception. The X in this case is Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, which is one hell of an X to slip into Doctor Who. Being its own sort of British institution, Doctor Who is a great fit for Gothic horror inspired by classic literature. There's the equally wild State Of Decay, which is Doctor Who's Let's Do Dracula and has the use of a rocket ship as a stake. That came after this, though, so let's try and get our focus back for at least a paragraph. The planet Karn definitely evokes that same Gothic mood that Sub Rosa would on Star Trek about 20 years later, with rolling fog and thunderstorms and rain and even a big spooky castle. Karn is also a spaceship graveyard, and even though you just get one model shot of them all your imagination can run wild. Our Dr. Frankenstein in this iteration, Dr. Solon, is not trying to create life from nothing, but rather to create a body for his boss, Morbius. This is a theme that the Hinchcliffe Horror era ran with, of powerful long-dead archnemeses returning to life and being confronted by the Doctor. Morbius, in this case, is a long-dead rogue Time Lord. Every piece of dialogue about him suggests he was the real deal and a very bad case. Gallifrey's ultimate renegade, someone to make the Master look like a wet paper towel. Anyways, Dr. Solon is trying to make a body for Morbius to return to life but he's limited by what he can find on Karn, so he has a cobbled together monster body for the guy. And a dimwitted Igor-esque assistant who gets the parts for him. Oh, and there's a weird cult... thing with a bunch of women called the Sisterhood of Karn who literally have an immortality elixir? It wouldn't be classic Doctor Who without two opposing factions that each want to capture and/or kill the Doctor and companion. So, somehow the Doctor needs to stop Morbius before he comes back and is a galactic menace, while also keeping himself and Sarah Jane alive from everyone trying to get them.


I can imagine this one being quite spooky to a kid in 1975! Even if I'm an adult 40 years later and this stuff doesn't really get to me, there's some gnarly imagery. Solon's helper getting shot looks way too real for Saturday teatime, and the Morbius monster itself is a great one. There's also a shot of Morbius's pulsating brain and that shit just is kind of unnerving. It's a great 100 minutes of Doctor Who, but what's in here that's scary to anyone above the age of 8 or so? Oh, there's an altogether worse and wild nightmare lurking within the climax of this story, something that will keep a certain type of viewer up at night. I speak, of course, of the Dread Beast known as Canon. In the final showdown between the Doctor and Morbius, they have a mind battle and we're shown both Tom Baker and all of the Doctor's past incarnations... and then we go back further. The people on the screen are all folks who work on Doctor Who wearing costumes, but the implication is that Tom Baker is like... the 12th incarnation of the Doctor? if you try and resolve it with the next 40 years of Doctor Who, it's like reading the fucking Necronomicon; you just can't do it without driving yourself batty. There's no good answer other than destroying the canon altogether and declaring that Doctor Who has no canon, which is sensible enough. In the end, Morbius can't handle that fact and his brain jar smokes and he falls off a cliff. That's the end of that, until he comes back in 8th Doctor audios... or did he? Maybe those "never happened" either. Canon is a devilish thing, but what I do know is that this is a pretty rad little story. If you're into the whole Doctor Who thing, give it a go. Tom Baker rarely disappoints.


Now then, let's look into this whole Fronkensteen thing more.