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WATCH ALONG | CLASSIC DOCTOR WHO | 13x17 | The Brain of Morbius: Part 1
🕑 Added 2025-04-18 21:18:04 +0000 UTCNOTE: Parts 2-4 have been recorded and will be posted over the next hour or so as they're edited and uploaded to Dropbox.
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A Few Notes:
Please no spoilers beyond this episode unless you see that later episodes have already been released. In that case, no spoilers beyond those episodes.
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If you're based in the UK (or using a UK streaming site), here are instructions for how to get your copy to sync with mine.
The show footage will play for the first 30 seconds with both video and audio. After that, the show footage will be silenced, and the video will be blurred for the remainder of the episode. There is also a count-up timer that begins once the episode has started. These things will hopefully make it easier for you to keep your copy of the episode synced with mine.
This episode was viewed on BritBox via Amazon Prime.
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Comments
Jade Ellis
Although I agree that it comes across a bit ambiguous who the faces are the intent at the time was they were the Doctor and Morbius's line about 'how far Doctor, how long have you lived' seems to back this up. The theory that they were Morbius came later. Even so yeah it left it as a mystery. However the novels in the 90's expanded on these faces so for me when it came up with Chibnall's era it didn't really bother me as I already thought of them as previous versions of 'the Doctor' That said I still think Fugitive Doctor would fit better between 1 & 2 and wouldn't even disrupt the Timeless Child storyline to much. As for weather it took away or added more mystery to the Doctor is an interesting thought. I may have to look at doing a blog post on that.
Azmat Mahmood
Re. Faces at the end. Until the timeless child arc in S12, I and a lot of other people just thought those other faces we saw were Morbius' previous incarnations. That's the good thing about that sequence, there's an implication of there being more to the Doctor than we know but it's left ambiguous and the fans are allowed to make up their own minds about what it all really meant. It just added to the inherent mystery that is a part of the Doctor's character and the feeling that we'll never truly know who he really is. What Chibnall did by confirming those faces are pre Hartnell Doctors is the antithesis of this approach and added a lot of unnecessary backstory and robbed the Doctor of their mystery. We know too much about the Doctor now and the issue is, it's done nothing to impact the character or the show and in fact fundamentally misunderstands the Doctor's by making them special and a chosen one type character. It's just a load of empty and hollow additions to the lore.
Azmat Mahmood
(2) I also love how despite the horror and at times graphic content, this story is absolutely hilarious and filled to the brim with classic one liners. I don't think any story has balanced horror and humour quite as brilliantly as this story does. I don't even need to mention Tom Baker, he's operating at peak level at this point. He can go from silly to serious and vice versa in an instant and remain completely believable. However, Phillip Madoc, who last appeared in the show playing the War Lord in The War Games, almost threatens to steal the show from the main man, and that's no easy feat! He has a magnetic screen presence and makes you believe in every word he utters, whether that's proclaiming how great it'll be if he succeeds or hilariously hurling out insults at anyone who gets in his way. It's a perfectly pitched ott performance, never going over the line into farce and it's also a world away from the type of performance he gave as the War Lord, which was very intimidating, quiet and subtle. Phillip Madoc is regarded by many as one of, if not the best repeat guest actor in the show's history and performances like this make it easy to see why. The man had so much range. As with Pyramids of Mars earlier in the season, this is another Robert Holmes rewrite (you can add it to the ever-growing list of Holmes classics) and this time the original scripts were written by none other than the legendary Terrance Dicks, former script editor throughout the third Doctor's era and for most of the second Doctor's final season too. There's actually a funny story behind how it got the Robin Bland pseudonym. Basically, Terrance Dicks' original idea involved a robot building a monster body, but producer Phillip Hinchcliffe didn't think they could make it work within the budget limitations and asked Holmes, the incumbent script editor, to rewrite the whole story since Dicks wasn't available. Once Dicks found out about the changes Holmes had made to his scripts, he didn't think his name should be on it anymore because the changes were so extensive it was no longer really his story. He was also really unhappy with the changes and felt they made the story a bland rip off of Frankenstein, so told Holmes over the phone to give it some sort of bland pseudonym and that's how Robin Bland came to be. Sums up who Robert Holmes was and his sense of humour, which is also littered throughout this story and so many others. In later interviews Terrance Dicks admitted he was wrong in his assessment and that the story was anything but bland. The Brain of Morbius is one of the all-time greats imo.
