The Brain of Morbius - Episode 4

Let’s discuss the costume of Morbius now that its complete. It might look a bit silly with the head ware on but the rest of it looks quite good. I suppose on a BBC budget they couldn’t do the costume that they wanted but I still thought that the human hand was a nice touch.  The Doctor tries to get Solon to disconnect Morbius’ brain from the rest of its new body and tis clear that this isn’t going to happen. It’s another example of how slow the Doctor has become in his new incarnation to figure things out. He slightly gets the chance to redeem himself when he comes up with a plan to try and flush Morbius out with a special gas and that only kills Solon.

The ending of certain characters was a slight problem for me Kondo’s death is quite sad and happens early on. It would have been nice if he had survived until the end and would have had his hand reattached. Solon’s death was a bit of a cop out really because I think that considering he had been so involved in the story up until this point that he deserved a better ending. This wasn’t the way that Philip Madoc should have ended his time on the show but it seemed that he suffered from a lack of time because he was basically reduced to a supporting role which isn’t what he was really.

There is a rather fun mind battle between the Doctor and Morbius. We see faces in the mind screen which seem to suggest that William Hartnell wasn’t the first incarnation. This is of course nonsense as it could be argued that they were incarnations of Morbius but it’s something that gets bought up whenever this story and in particular this scene is discussed or watched. It’s the final encounter between the Doctor and Morbius and its not the sort of final battle that most people would have expected. It wasn’t a war of words or a fight with swords or anything like that but just a battle of who was the most powerful mentally.

Morbius’ death comes at the hand of the sisterhood who effectively push off a cliff. The last shot of him is spinning to the ground in the sort of way that Wile E Coyote use to fall to the ground. It’s quite a good if slightly odd effect though I don’t know if he should have been spinning around. That said it would normally be an issue if the Doctor weren’t the one that stopped/destroyed the villain but in this case, it worked that it was the Sisterhood that ended Morbius’ life. The sisterhood use the elixir on the Doctor which shows that they have pretty much got over their dislike of the Doctor.

I thought that it was a solid four part adventure. I don’t think that its as good as ‘Pyramids of Mars’ but it’s certainly one of the best Doctor Who stories in the classic era. The thing about this episode is that its one of those final episodes that doesn’t feel like it’s a final episode. That’s not to say that it was boring but it didn’t really feel like it was ending until the bit where the sisterhood are cornering Morbius. The story as it is continues the good trend that the show was heading on and this second season of Tom Baker’s is shaping up to be just as good as his first.