The Brain of Morbius

When the TARDIS materializes on the planet Karn, the Doctor suspects that the Time Lords themselves have interfered and diverted the ship off its chosen route. The planet is home to the mysterious Sisterhood, a group of women who discovered immortality through the Elixir of Life which is formed by an eternal flame. In years past, the secret of the Elixir was known only to the Sisterhood and the Time Lords, but a rogue Time Lord named Morbius exposed the secret and promised it to the cult that rose up to follow him until he was defeated and executed. The Doctor and Sarah discover that the mad scientist Solon has Morbius' brain alive in a tank in his castle, and he is using the bodies of survivors from wrecked spaceships to create a new body so Morbius can rule again. All that he needs is a head, and he thinks the Doctor's will do perfectly.

Okay it's an obvious ripoff of Frankenstein but it's a damn scary tale, with Sarah suffering blindness from the power of the Sisters, the monster lurching across the planet, the eerie chants of the Sisters themselves and Solon's fanatical desire to resurrect his master. There's a cameo appearance by a Mutt from The Mutants as it crawls from it's wrecked spaceship, and there is loads of Time Lord mystery exposed and hinted at; apparantly rogue Time Lords are not just confined to the likes of the Doctor and the Monk and the Master, and in his time Morbius was a leader of an army of millions, "The scum of the galaxy," as Maren of the Sisterhood says.

The effects of the brain in the tank are done quite well and were ripped off themselves in Robocop 2 many years later. And there is a nasty fatal gunshot wound in part 3, with a lot of blood flying everywhere - the stuff of Mary Whitehouse campaigns indeed. And the Robocop 2 inspiration isn't the only place where this story's future effects will reach; in 1992 author Paul Cornell created an entire adventure called Love and War inspired by one line from the script of this adventure, where Maren and Ohica discuss the "silent gas dirigibles of the Hoothi".

Of course there is a bad link to the future as well. A Terrance Dicks novel called Warmonger was published a few years back, taking the fifth Doctor and his companion Peri back into the years before The Brain of Morbius when Solon was relatively good in his motives and when Morbius was only just rising to power..... but it sucks. Pure crap. Terrance Dicks may have been script editor and had a lot of input into this story but he should have left it alone. Makes watching Brain slightly painful knowing what was to come next.

But what comes next surely does not suck. At all. I promise.

NEXT EPISODE : THE SEEDS OF DOOM