Abandoned Gothic ruins and what looks like a witches' coven add flavour to a superbly atmospheric Who classic...

Continuing the trend for taking inspiration from classic horror films at pace, The Brain Of Morbius ups the gothic horror ante further. This time around, the source is Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (or The Modern Prometheus as an alternative title) – both stories feature a mad scientist creating a vicious monster that ends up going on the rampage. Doctor Who of course, needs the sci-fi twist, which in this case is the fact that the monster houses the brain of renegade Time Lord, Morbius.

And it’s yet another belter of a story, a brooding masterpiece that positively drips with atmosphere. Interestingly, this is the so-called cheapie of the season. There are no outside location scenes – instead, the characters are asked to skulk around rather obvious balsa wood cliffs. The guest cast is quite small, with only five main speaking parts and the return of a hapless Mutt from The Mutants. And even some of the effects are less than special – the biggest howler is when the Morbius monster falls to his doom. In fact, he only falls a couple of feet (if that), since you can see a telltale claw waggling about as he bounces off the comfy crash pad.

"The Brain Of Morbius proves that big blockbuster special effects and budgets don’t matter when you’ve got such a great story to tell"

But The Brain Of Morbius proves that big blockbuster special effects and budgets don’t matter when you’ve got such a great story to tell. Another interesting point is that The Brain Of Morbius is another heavy rewrite job. Believe it or not, there is no such person as Robin Bland, it’s a made up name of a rewrite job that Robert Holmes provided for former script editor Terrance Dicks’ original submission. However, you’d never guess this, as the story moves along at a breakneck pace, with many intriguing characters, plot twists and scares along the way.

Because the guest cast is so small, this allows the characters more room to develop. One of the main principals is of course, Solon, a man who’s all smarmy politeness on the surface and duplicitous evil underneath. Solon is in fact a disciple of Morbius, but takes his dedication just a little too far, when he’s on the lookout for some unassuming grunt’s head, which can be used as the crowning glory for his beloved master. As bad luck would have it, The Doctor and Sarah happen to be seeking shelter from a torrential downpour, when they stumble upon Solon’s castle. Solon, being Solon, regards The Doctor as a brand new donor and so proceeds to unleash some of the worst hospitality seen outside of your average Come Dine With Me episode.

Hmmm, let’s have a look at the scores: “Dinner was OK, wine knocked me out, host tried to chop my head off. Zero out of 10.” Needless to say, Solon came last in the round behind Martha Tyler and her tea and fruit cake, Vivien Fay and her sausage sandwiches, but nearly beat Zargo and Camilla and their snooty brand of haughty cuisine.

Solon’s geniality is rapidly unmasked by all of the other characters who see through him like glass. The Doctor evidently doesn’t trust him when he returns to the castle to ask for help with Sarah’s blindness (“We’ve already had one taste of your hospitality,” says The Doctor after Solon’s tactlessly offered him another slug of wine), Maren dismisses his attempts to get The Doctor back after he’s about to become the toast of the day. And even a blind Sarah calls him mad. However, it’s at this point that we see the real Solon, a genius gone wrong and driven mad by his own power-crazed ambitions.

You could argue that Solon’s motives are partly driven by his own arrogance. He’s been scorned by others for his unfaltering dedication to Morbius, and so he sees himself as an unloved genius. His badly assembled-body is supposed to be an Up Yours to the people that laughed at him, as he sees himself as the proud resurrector of Morbius. On the surface, Solon is the Frankenstein of the story, creating a monster from different bodies from the crashed spaceships. But whereas Frankenstein feels disgust and remorse after his creation wakes, Solon is still hellbent on seeing his master live again, despite the loss of life at stake. It’s telling that his final words are: “You will live again!” – oh, the irony, as he promptly falls red-faced and wide-eyed to the floor after ingesting too much cyanide.

"Philip Madoc offers perhaps the best of his four performances in Doctor Who, knowing when and when not to go too over the top"

Philip Madoc offers perhaps the best of his four performances in Doctor Who (although the understated evil of The War Lord comes a close second). Madoc reads the role perfectly, knowing when and when not to go too over the top. And like his performance in The War Games, Madoc subtly brings out the pure evil in the character of Solon, making him one of the nastiest human baddies in the era of the fourth Doctor. For once, Solon isn’t possessed or infected, he’s acting purely on his own ego and out-of-control dedication to Morbius.

And judging from his curtain-cut haircut, he’s probably driven himself mad by listening to too many Happy Mondays and Soup Dragons albums.

Solon’s luckless butler Condo bears the brunt of his ire on a frequent basis. In terms of the Boss From Hell, Solon’s scoring pretty impressively. Not only does he shout at Condo, he also offers him as a barbecue substitute to Maren, and worse still, shoots the lumbering oaf in the chest after Condo discovers that his arm’s been donated to the Morbius creature. No wonder Condo shuffles around with the look of a man who’s on the verge of tears. Luckily Sarah brings a little ray of sunshine into Condo’s life, after he takes a shine to the plucky journalist. “Girl…Pretty!” he rumbles, as he finds her blundering about in the rocks. Awwww. It would never have worked though, even if Condo hadn’t been throttled to death by the Morbius monster. Call it a hunch, but I can’t see Sarah and Condo going on a blind date to Ohica’s Tandoori Restaurant. Good performance from Colin Fay though, who apparently went from being an opera singer to working behind the scenes on various TV productions.

On the other side of the tracks, we have the Sisterhood of Karn, a gaggle of chanting, hand waving women who have tremendous psychic powers. Not only can they cause freak squalls at the wave of an arm, they can also cause spaceships to crash out of fear that their beloved Elixir Of Life will be taken from them.

Not that it’s much of an issue anyway, since the Elixir is in very short supply. Craggy old head Maren has kept up the pretence of a steady supply of Elixir by feeding the Scared Flame with powdered rineweed. With her paranoid ways and propensity for telling fibs to keep the status quo, Maren would make an excellent political spin doctor. Maren is excellently played by Cynthia Grenville, her gruff, quavering voice being the perfect choice. It’s nice to see Maren progress from the hostile old battleaxe to an ally of The Doctor’s. Despite getting off on the wrong foot with the Time Lord, she ultimately decides to help him (in a neat bit of trickery in Part Three, this is still ambiguous as we think that the Sisterhood have killed him, since his body’s lying motionless on a stretcher) and even heeds his advice about immortality being a poor reward – to the point where she sacrifices herself to the flame.

"Maren is excellently played by Cynthia Grenville, her gruff, quavering voice being the perfect choice. It’s nice to see Maren progress from the hostile old battleaxe to an ally of The Doctor’s"

That said, I’m no expert, but surely sitting in a fireplace would be a lot more painful than becoming young again and then vanishing. Where’s the screaming? Where’s the charred remains?

Ohica, however, is a little odd. Practically every sentence she says is accompanied by a mad wide-eyed glare, as if she’s trying to make her eyes pop out in a gruesome party trick. Either that, or she’s been watching too many videos of Jethro Tull’s Ian Anderson. Talk about Living In The Past.

Even Tom Baker’s wide eyes can’t match the scary stare of Ohica. Never mind though, since he’s on commanding form again. The great thing about Baker’s performance is that he knows when to judge the mood of the piece. Take the moment when he’s held to ransom by the Morbius monster in the final act. One moment he’s joking about and calling Morbius “Chop Suey, the galactic emperor” – the next he’s ramming his hands furiously down on the table, and hissing his doubt angrily at Morbius’ claim of a fully-functioning brain. As ever, his double act with Elisabeth Sladen’s Sarah is truly inspired, even if the journalist gets a bit of a raw deal in this story.

Feminism certainly doesn’t rule, since Sarah is more of a screaming Perils Of Pauline-style damsel-in-distress. Poor old Sarah is blinded by the light from Manfred Maren’s Finger Band, and what’s more is left screaming and cowering from both an excited Condo and an over-excited Morbius monster. The scene in part four in which the creature towers over Sarah is particularly cringe-inducing, since it’s blatantly obvious that she could just get up and run away. Despite the best efforts of Sladen, the character of Sarah just comes across a screaming heroine and little else – although this is due to the script rather than Sladen’s acting. She’s especially good at conveying blindness, something that’s not easy to do by any means.

Despite this faux pas, the script of The Brain Of Morbius is still well up to standard. It’s by turns, dark and humourous. “Can we read his thoughts?” is just one of the many masterful lines sprinkled throughout. It’s also well made by Christopher Barry, who’s already proven himself to be a dab hand at directing gothic-style stories with The Daemons. He perfectly captures the ethos of the story, and uses subtle lighting and subjective camera angles to paper over the fact that all this is taking place in studio. Having said that, Barry Newbery’s designs are outstanding. The outside of Karn may look a bit fake, but this is more than made up for by the unusually decorated interior of the Sisterhood’s dwelling and especially the atmospheric insides of Solon’s castle.

The Brain Of Morbius has generally been well received by the fans and the public alike (the heavily curtailed December 1976 repeat drew very good figures). However, it has attracted its fair share of controversy in certain quarters. For one thing, the mind-battle between The Doctor and Morbius opened up a whole can of worms, since – gasp! – there are other faces apart from the first four Doctors! Speculation abounds as to who this motley lot are, although they do bear uncanny resemblances to the Doctor Who production team…

The second, most notorious criticism came from Mary Whitehouse and her blue-rinsed band of do-gooders, who pounced upon the violence in this story like a cat pounces upon a mouse. For example, when Condo is shot by Solon, blood is seen to leak out from a realistic-looking wound. Add to this a headless mutt, various strangulations by the Morbius monster and The Doctor choosing to gas his opponent to death, and it’s little wonder that Whitehouse got her cardigan in a twist. Is the violence too far? That’s for each and every individual to decide. Me, I personally think that it’s still fantasy violence, it’s done in a context of escapist fantasy. And it’s also important to point out that Doctor Who is very much a moral show that promotes good over evil. And if it scares a few kids in the process, so be it – since kids love being frightened anyway. Doctor Who is the equivalent of going on the scary ride at the fairground for kids - It may be terrifying, but it’s still damn good fun.

Which pretty much sums up The Brain Of Morbius.

John Bensalhia limbered up for this mammoth task with a full four-series review of Blake's 7, and writes professionally and recreationally all over the web. Check out his portfolio of work at Wordprofectors.

Check out John's previous Doctor Who review, The Android Invasion