Here in the heart of Dr Who’s “Tribute to Classic Horror Movies” era, we get a homage to “Frankenstein” that is probably the most clear and direct such borrowing Dr Who has done yet. Pyramids of Mars had mummies but it wasn’t “The Mummy,” Android Invasion had elements of “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” but was an entirely different story, but this episode of Dr Who simply is a retelling of “Frankenstein”— although owing more to versions from Hammer Films in the 50s and 60s than to the original. We have the mad scientist Dr Solon in his creepy isolated castle (with lightning flashes behind it), his Igor-like assistant Condo, his patched-together monster needing only a head to be complete, the Doctor and Sarah knocking on the door asking to come in out of the rain— and Solon realizing the Doctor’s head is just what he needs. We’ve even got torch-wielding villagers to pursue the monster at the climax, although here they’re the fire-worshiping Sisterhood of Karn, just for an extra layer of Transylvania-ness to the whole Gothic setup. Finally, a bit of “They Saved Hitler’s Brain” is thrown into the mix, as Solon’s whole mad experiment is aimed at providing a new body for the executed Time Lord war criminal Morbius, whose brain Solon keeps around in a jar of creepy green jello.
It’s another great episode from this golden age of Dr Who. It is very definitely the most Gothic of the series’ “Gothic Horror” era, and the most ghoulish as well. Besides watching from behind the sofa, I imagine a lot of kids delightedly squealing “EEEWWWWW!!!” at various squicky horror-movie moments. The era’s anti-Dr-Who crusader Mary Whitehouse naturally thought these scenes were traumatizing the poor little tykes, but I doubt it.
I’ll grant one moment that goes too far: a scene in which Solon’s assistant gets shot is shown with an effect better suited to a Die Hard movie than to Dr Who. It’s jarring even here in the middle of Dr Who’s cobwebbed answer to Transylvania. But it’s the only complaint I have about this story.
Details
- The story is credited to “Robin Bland,” actually a pseudonym for Terrance Dicks. Given the assignment to write a Frankenstein-themed episode, Dicks wrote and handed in a script in which Morbius is saved from death by a faithful robot sidekick who sets about building him a replacement body. The robot has no sense of esthetics and so builds a practical body without any concern for how horrible it looks. Then, as Dicks puts it, “I made the mistake of going on vacation.” Producer Philip Hinchcliffe realized the production couldn’t manage a credible robot on their budget and, since Dicks was out of town, asked script editor Robert Holmes to revise the story to include a human mad scientist instead. Holmes took the opportunity to enormously increase the “Gothic quotient” while doing the revision. When Dicks returned, he objected that Holmes’ version made no sense— the allegedly brilliant human surgeon Solon would have known better than to make a horrible bits-and-pieces body when he could just transplant the brain into an intact body instead, it was only the limitations of a robot brain that made the story credible. Although Dicks laughs about it now, at the time this evidently developed into a serious argument that ended with Dicks demanding to have his name taken off it. “Use whatever bland pseudonym you can think of,” he told Holmes— and Holmes responded by coming up with “Robin Bland.”
- Morbius, we’re told, was a former president of the High Council of the Time Lords who led some kind of rebellion, gathered millions of followers called the “Cult of Morbius,” and made himself into a terrible dictator over a large part of the Galaxy before the Time Lords finally brought him down. So in other words he tried to do what the Master is always trying to do— and evidently with far greater success, at least for a time. The lesson here is that the Master really should never have kept going out of his way to involve the Doctor in his schemes, desire to one-up his old school buddy or not.
- Now let’s talk about the infamous “Faces” scene, endlessly troublesome to continuity-obsessed fans. At one point the Doctor and Morbius engage in a kind of mental battle using an apparatus that pits their brainwaves against each other. We’re not told a lot about it, but from what we see it appears to involve forcing the opponent’s mind back along its own past. At first the Doctor is winning: Morbius’ current monstrous “face” appears on a screen, then his face from before his execution. But then the Doctor’s face appears and Morbius is triumphant as the face changes to one of Pertwee, then Troughton, then Hartnell… and then a whole series of other faces, in various kind-of-doctorish costumes, while Morbius taunts, “How long, Doctor? How far back do you go?” It is very clear that these are meant to be regenerations of the Doctor from his life before we first saw him in his William Hartnell face. In other words, the first Doctor we saw was not the first Doctor.
- So is this a problem? Remarkably, to this point in the series it has never been said that Hartnell’s Doctor was the first one. In The Three Doctors, the Time Lords grab the Doctor “from before he changed his appearance” in order to have the Second Doctor help the Third, and then they try to add the Doctor before that to the mix as well, but they never say that the Hartnell Doctor was the first. He’s just as far back as they manage to go. And there’s been no definitive statement about that anywhere else. However, after “The Brain of Morbius” the series would introduce the idea that Time Lords can only regenerate twelve times, and would behind to get rather obsessive about keeping track of how many times the Doctor had done it, and would very firmly establish that Hartnell’s version was indeed the First Doctor (most recently in “The Name of the Doctor,” although we do have the whole John Hurt business to figure out).
- Retconning fans have tried to argue the unexplained faces are those of Morbius‘ earlier regenerations, but in the story itself it’s quite clear that can’t be it. Though it doesn’t quite say so explicitly, the dialog makes it clear enough that it has to be the Doctor (and the producers of the episode are clear that’s what they intended). So we’re left with a contradiction: was the Doctor we met in 1963 really the first one? On the preponderance of the evidence, and certainly according to today’s continuity, yes. But “The Brain of Morbius” has its counter-claim.
- Meanwhile, who are those faces? They were members of the episode’s production crew, including director Christopher Barry, who all dressed up in Doctorish clothes of their own choosing and had their pictures taken. This in turn caused another minor headache: after the episode aired the series’ production office got a letter from the British screen actors’ union complaining they’d cheated actors out of getting paid to have their pictures taken by using non-union crewmembers for the images (non-actors’-union, that is). In the end the program had to make some kind of donation to the union to make the trouble go away.
- Behind the scenes anecdote: the actress who played the leader of the Sisterhood of Karn tells of a near-accident in a scene where the sisters are about to burn the Doctor at the stake. The pyrotechnics malfunctioned and sent flames too close to Tom Baker, who was so busy acting he didn’t notice until she yelled “Jump, Tom!” and prompted him to get out of the way, after which the firemen had to be called in to stop the set from burning down. True to the tight budgets of the day, no other take was done and so Tom Baker’s near-immolation is what’s actually shown on screen. As interesting as this anecdote is, it must be mentioned that no one else in the crew has ever mentioned it (at least nowhere I’ve seen) so perhaps we should take it with a grain of salt. On the other hand, people wanting to keep their jobs at the BBC could have good reason, even thirty-five years later, for not publicly mentioning such an accident. and when you watch the scene on TV it sure does look like those flames are both bigger and closer to Tom Baker than you’d normally see… so as Ripley used to say, “believe it… or not.”
Next week:
“The Seeds of Doom,” 6 episodes. The season 13 finale, not to be confused with the Patrick Troughton episode “The Seeds of Death.”
