#10 (13.17 - 13.20): The Brain of Morbius.

Solon (Philip Madoc) attempts to revive the evil Morbius!

4 episodes. Approx. 99 minutes. Written by: Robin Bland (pseudonym), Terrance Dicks (uncredited), Robert Holmes (uncredited). Directed by: Christopher Barry. Produced by: Philip Hinchcliffe.


THE PLOT

The TARDIS is diverted to Karn, a planet that has been reduced to little more than a wasteland, a graveyard for starships pulled to their deaths by the Sisterhood of Karn. An ancient order, long allied with the Time Lords, the Sisterhood guards its "sacred flame" within the mountains of Karn.  The flame provides the elixir of life, granting immortality to those who drink it. They guard this resource jealously and, when they recognize the Doctor as a Time Lord, they fear he has come to steal it.

Karn is also home to Solon (Philip Madoc), a skilled surgeon who has made this wasteland his home for the sake of experiments on living tissue. His experiments serve dark ends. Solon is a follower of the Time Lord tyrant Morbius (Michael Spice). After the Time Lords and the Sisterhood united against him, Morbius' body was executed. However, Solon saved the brain, plotting to transplant it into a new body so that Morbius can live again. The only piece he needs to complete his work is the head - and he believes the Doctor's will be a perfect fit! 


CHARACTERS

The Doctor: Has become fed up with the Time Lords using him as their errand boy. When he realizes that he's been diverted to Karn through their intervention, his immediate inclination is to do nothing. Once he senses Morbius' mind, however, all hesitation vanishes. He becomes focused on stopping Solon from reviving the evil Time Lord, and is not above physical intimidation. As in Genesis of the Daleks and Pyramids of Mars, the Doctor's grim tone suits Tom Baker's strengths, bringing an extra dimension out in his performance - which still leaves plenty of room for clowning, particularly when taken captive by the Sisterhood, whose rituals he is pitiless in mocking.

Sarah Jane Smith: Notices that something's "off" about Solon instantly. While the Doctor drinks Solon's wine, she surreptitiously pours it out, feigning unconsciousness when the Doctor succumbs to the drug. She rescues the Doctor from the Sisterhood in Part Two when they prepare to sacrifice him to the flame. Even after she is blinded, when she hears a voice calling out in panic in Solon's lab, she follows it to try to help... Not realizing that the voice she hears is Morbius', just knowing that someone is in distress and wanting to help if she can.


THOUGHTS

As is quite well-known within Who fandom, The Brain of Morbius began life as a Terrance Dicks script, one which was given a Page One rewrite by Robert Holmes. An annoyed Dicks demanded his name be removed from the final product, and the "Robin Bland" pseudonym was born.

That this is, to all practical purposes, a Robert Holmes script shows, most vividly in the dialogue. With all due respect to Terrance Dicks, his words just don't have the richness, the poetry that Holmes can bring. Holmes has the ability to use language as a paintbrush, investing life into stock characters and resonance into standard scenes, as when Morbius bemoans his state to Solon:  

[I]"I can see nothing, feel nothing.  You have locked me into hell for eternity.  If this is all there is, I would rather die now... Even a sponge has more life than i.  Can you understand a thousandth of my agony?  I, Morbius, who once led the High Council of the Time  Lords, reduced to this - to the condition where I envy a vegetable!"[/I]

Holmes also gives every character or character group their own agenda. These aren't just servants of the plot.  Everyone in this story wants something and acts to get it.  Solon is a fervent devotee of Morbius, and of course he wants his lord restored to glory... but he also wants glory for himself. As Morbius observes, he is not content to be a servant; he wants to be acknowledged as Morbius' creator. The Sisterhood fears the Time Lords, believing that they have sent the Doctor to steal their "elixir of life," and everything they do within the story is to protect their elixir and their "sacred flame." Even Condo has his own personal goal, to recover his arm, something which makes him simultaneously a servant to Solon and a threat to him.

Alliances are formed and switched throughout the story. Solon attempts to save the Doctor from the Sisterhood in Episode Two, then later sends him into a trap.  In both cases, he's serving his ends: If the Sisters sacrifice the Doctor, his head will not be usable; but both Solon and Sisters want the Doctor nullified as a threat.  The Doctor helps the Sisters in Episode Three, hoping to gain them as an ally.  He even teams up with Solon team in Episode Four, to track down the Morbius-creature. Again, both men's aims are served: The Doctor wants to stop a rampaging monster, Solon wants to subdue Morbius long enough to finish his work.  This makes both Sisterhood and Solon temporary allies and enemies at multiple points in the story, keeping the pace alive and allowing the narrative to turn in some interesting directions.


PLOT HOLES: OR, WHY DID THEY DO THAT?

Not that Dicks isn't right that the redraft introduced some plot-holes. Even on my very first viewing of the story, I wondered why Solon was so keen to stick the Doctor's head on his mish-mash of mobile body parts. Surely it would be more efficient and have a more desirable end result to simply transplant Morbius' brain into the Doctor's head, on the Doctor's own body?  A throwaway line to explain why the head has to go on the mongrel body, or a reference to the body being an experiment like the fishbowl that Solon doesn't really intend to use, would adequately cover this.

Episode Four then sees the Doctor becoming deeply stupid. Having intimidated Solon into agreeing to dismantle Morbius, he then... leaves Solon alone with Morbius, only to act surprised when his enemy double-crosses him.  "I should never have left him alone," the Doctor grits when he realizes.  No, he shouldn't have - and he's frankly far too smart to have done so, save that the plot demanded it.

Neither of these bumps stop this from being a very good serial. Minor plot issues and convenient character stupidity to advance the plot have been part and parcel of Doctor Who since 1963, and will likely continue to be a part of the series for as long as it survives. It's enough to keep me from giving this the "9" I had been leaning toward - but this is still wonderfully entertaining viewing.


Overall Rating: 8/10.

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#1 (12.1 - 12.4): Robot

The robot menaces the newly regenerated 4th Doctor and Sarah!

4 episodes. Written by: Terrance Dicks. Directed by: Christopher Barry.  Produced by: Barry Letts.


THE PLOT

The Doctor has just regenerated into his fourth persona, and it's his most eccentric yet. Gone is the brittle yet dignified dandy.  In his place is a large, curly-haired, grinning figure who seems to be more than a little childish, and possibly a little insane.

It's a bad time for the Doctor to be unstable. The components of a top-secret disintegrator gun have been stolen by an unknown force. Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart initially insists that he needs the Doctor's help just to keep him safely around for observation - but as the crisis escalates to the point of a nuclear apocalypse, it becomes apparent that the Doctor truly is needed, possibly more than ever before.

But can this new Doctor be trusted to maintain focus on the task at hand?


CHARACTERS

The Doctor: Cards on the table: Despite being the fan favorite, the Fourth Doctor has never been a particular favorite of mine. That said, most of my issues with him come later, and there's no denying that Tom Baker makes a strong first impression. He's energetic and zany, but he also takes care to keep the Doctor at a certain remove. The Sherlock Holmes-like aspects of the character have always been there, ever since the First Doctor talked a primitive tribe into seeing the significance of a caveman's knife, but they're extremely prominent here.  This is particularly true of scenes in which he appears to be distracted by irrelevancies while actually collecting important observations, such as a crushed dandelion at a crime scene.

Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart: My first draft review of Robot was written after a run of Season Seven stories, and the jump from Inferno to this really showed the Brigadier's deterioration. In Season Seven, he was brisk, efficient, and intelligent - a man born to lead. That Brigadier wouldn't have needed the Doctor to point out that two components of the same weapon had been stolen, he would have noticed all on his own. Even viewing in strict chronological order, I'd rate this as one of the character's most ineffectual showings, and it's as well that the new production team quickly decided to rest both him and UNIT.

Sarah Jane Smith: A strong story for Sarah Jane. With Barry Letts and Terrance Dicks still in charge, her background as a journalist and an independent-minded woman is still a driving force. For the first episode, and for much of the second, she is actually more proactive than the Doctor and the Brigadier are. After she is subject to a "demonstration" of the robot's inability to override its directive to never harm humans, which causes it considerable distress, she shows compassion for it, setting up (overly obvious) King Kong parallels for the rest of the serial.

Harry Sullivan: Ian Marter, who previously played an unrelated guest role in Carnival of Monsters, makes his debut as new companion Harry, a naval physician assigned to UNIT who starts out as the Doctor's doctor. Marter brings a relaxed and likable presence to the role, and he has an easy rapport with both Baker and Sladen. There isn't actually much for him to do in this story, an early sign of why he was written out after only one year, but I wasn't sorry to see him step into the TARDIS at the story's end.


THOUGHTS

Robot marks the beginning of the end of the UNIT era, and it honestly was about time for the show to move on. By this point, UNIT had become a collection of comic book soldiers, an impression not helped by them being pitted against a league of mad scientists plotting to take over the world - with a giant robot and a Ray Gun, no less. I question how some could complain about Doctor Who cartoons such as The Infinite Quest and Dreamland. Decades before that, this was a cartoon that just happened to be in live action!

For all of that, I mostly like Robot. Some of that is nostalgia. It was not the first Who story I ever saw, but it was the one that made me a regular viewer back in the mid-1980s. From here, I watched every story during PBS' mid-1980's omnibus reruns of the series, going all the way through to Trial of a Time Lord (which, for a long time, I had thought to be the series' finale).

Even without nostalgia goggles, there is much to like. Terrance Dicks understands the importance of story construction and pace. Robot moves along briskly, effectively introducing the situation and the guest characters, establishing the threats, and bringing them all together for the final episode. The plot may feel a bit thin, but there are enough strands to give the Doctor and the Brigadier elements to investigate even as Sarah pursues leads on her own.

The UNIT set-up also ensures that Tom Baker's debut story felt familiar to contemporary viewers. This is a very different Doctor, but he's surrounded by familiar regulars while navigating what's essentially a mid-range Pertwee story. Given Pertwee's five-year tenure and his enduring popularity, this was a canny way to reassure the audience that this was still very much the same show, a bit of comfort food before the new production team took over to steer it in a very different direction.

For its first three episodes, I think it works quite well. Too bad that it falls apart in the final installment. Once the robot grows to giant size to make sure no one misses the King Kong allusions, all internal credibility vanishes. The next several minutes, showing the robot rampaging around toy cars, paper houses, and plastic soldiers is ludicrous and - worse - dull.

After five years of spearheading Who, Letts and Dicks had to know the giant robot was going to look awful. Worse, the script doesn't do anything interesting; in fact, once the robot grows in size, the script stops doing interesting things.


OVERALL:

I would rank Robot as the weakest "new Doctor" story of the first five (though it's still better than the debuts of the Sixth and Seventh Doctors). It's a thin story even during the enjoyable first thee parts, and its final episode is largely poor. Still, it is mostly enjoyable, and Tom Baker makes a good first impression in the role.

It's good that a new production team was coming in - because the series was about to get a major jolt of renewed creative energy...


Rating: 6/10.

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