By the time The Brain Of Morbius was first broadcast on January 3^rd 1976, Hammer Films’ TV distribution deal was flooding the weekend schedules with its grisly back-log of gothic horror, and the British public were loving it. Whilst cinemas were being inundated with rip-offs of The Exorcist and The Omen, the more traditional oeuvre of bubbling beakers, excavated graveyards, mad barons and bloody melodrama were creating a domestic comfort zone far away from the modern commentary and visceral starkness of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.

Producer Philip Hinchcliffe seems to have seized on Britain ’s horror-mania in season 13 of Doctor Who, gleefully abandoning himself to the gore and grand guignol of staple horror fare in the likes of Pyramids Of Mars and The Brain Of Morbius…

Here we find the Doctor (Tom Baker) and Sarah-Jane Smith (Elizabeth Sladen) diverted by unknown forces to the gloomy and mist-strewn planet Karn, to which all spaceships that pass in range are drawn to their doom, and where the Igor-like giant Condo (Colin Fay) is busy cutting the heads off of the crash survivors in the ghoulish service of his surgeon-master Mehendri Solon (Philip Madoc).

Solon is an adherent of the cult of Morbius, a legendarily evil and renegade time-lord whose rescued brain is kept alive in his lower laboratory. The mad surgeon, clearly and joyfully templated from Hammer’s vision of the Baron Frankenstein, is anxiously awaiting the arrival of a crash-victim who can supply the one missing piece to the new body he has built for his dark master – the head!

Over on the other side of the rock-range, the powers of the coven-like sisterhood of Karn are fading along with the flame which provides the ‘elixir of life’, by warming the rock around it and producing the magical condensation which can heal all wounds and extend life almost indefinitely.

Sect leader Maren (Cynthia Grenville) holds a deep hatred of the time-lords, since it was Morbius himself who laid waste to the once-thriving Karn, and would like nothing better than to serve up a propitiating sacrifice of a nice juicy Gallifrean at the stake in the centre of the sisterhood’s shrine. An equally warm welcome awaits the Doctor at chez Solon, who has avaricious designs on the Doctor’s head…

As a Hammer fan, this four-part adventure is a welcome addition to the Beeb’s excellent releases and re-releases of Baker Who. Painted in primary colours – a ghastly pall of green dominates in Solon’s lair, whilst the flame-obsessed sisterhood naturally favour a rich palette of reds – The Brain Of Morbius is a satisfying four-parter with very few post-title re-treads, unusually good cliff-hangers and an adroit line in wit from a small but first-rate cast.

Philip Madoc, already a three-time Who veteran by the time of Morbius, is suitably psychopathic, and his parrying with Baker discovers an excellent chemistry and an amusing comic empathy between the two, particularly when Solon removes Baker’s floppy hat and compliments him on his ‘wonderful head’. The head-jokes keep coming, and the mood of general decapitation is kept on the boil by a clay bust of Morbius himself in better days.

Madoc would have made a great Master, which part he almost seems to be auditioning for in Morbius. Wishful thinking, perhaps, much as was Hinchcliffe’s initial notion to cast Peter Cushing or Vincent Price in the Solon role.

Baker remains the master of the cold-switch between gravitas and lunacy, whilst the always-reliable Liz Sladen demonstrates particular acuity in Morbius, and really shows us why she is perhaps the best-loved assistant in the show’s run. Sarah-Jane has a naturalistic depth in this story that Sladen’s antecedents and successors either deemed surplus-to-requirements, or were – generally - not able to match.

Morbius is a studio-bound affair, and none the worse for this theatricality, as it emphasises the Macbeth-like claustrophobia of the sisterhood as well as the gothic confines of Solon’s abode. The nature of the story requires little model work, besides the ‘ Sargasso sea ’ of wrecked spacecraft. This graveyard of spaceships is highly effective in episode 1 until the lightning flares up and reveals the miniscule scale of the miniatures.

The saturation of dry-ice and chiaroscuro lighting not only highlight the envelopingly creepy atmosphere of the piece and make the best of designer Barry Newbury’s wonderful skewed gothic sensibility, but also hide many of the low-budget sins that were later to be paraded nude in the over-lit JNT era.

There are a few canonical quirks and plot-fissures: why does Solon care about damaging the Doctor’s brain when he intends to replace it with that of Morbius? Why are the all-seeing sisterhood unaware of impostor Sarah-Jane in their midst? Why does the pacifist Doctor - who deliberated so much over Dalek genocide in Genesis Of The Daleks - commit murder so jocularly with the cyanide gas? And who are all those pre-Hartnell Doctors that flash up on the screen in the ‘mind-bending’ joust between the Doctor and Morbius?

(Actually they’re all members of the production team, who are about to get into terrible trouble with Equity – but it does rather raise the regeneration limit above twelve…)

EXTRAS:
The extras on this one-disc release are typical of the high quality and attention to detail that 2Entertain and the Beeb lavish on archive Who releases…

Commentary
A lively commentary featuring Tom Baker, Elizabeth Sladen, Philip Madoc, producer Philip Hinchcliffe and director Christopher Barry. Sadly something seems to have gone wrong with the sound on Philip Madoc’s contribution, which registers as rather distant and can make the frequent over-talking confusing. Baker, as usual, waits for his moment and leaps in with the unfettered humour and enthusiasm which endeared him to the nation in his most famous role.

‘Getting A Head’ – documentary – 32m.02
Here we find out about the contention between Terrance Dicks and Robert Holmes that led to Brain Of Morbius being ascribed to ‘Robin Bland’, as well as Tom Baker’s brush with a fiery death in studio 1 at the BBC. The interviews have been carried out with almost insane fidelity to the spirit of the story, with red or green lighting for sisterhood or Solon-related interviews, dropped in backgrounds and actual on-set lighting effects during the interviews, apparently. Excellent!
Features Philip Madoc, Cynthia Grenville, Colin Fay, Philip Hinchcliffe, Gillian Brown (Ohica), Dudley Simpson, Barry Newbury, Christopher Barry

Designs On Karn – 06m.11
Barry Newbury on designing the gothic world of Karn, featuring many production sketches.

Set Tour – 02.m.12
The sets of Brain Of Morbius are built up before your eyes, holodeck-style, in a virtual recreation of BBC studio 1. Fascinating.

Photo gallery – 4.35

Radio Times listings
The usual, small PDF with scanned snippets of Radio Times listings, for completists. Also features an amusing letter from Mrs. Margaret Duggan, who asks if Daleks and other who villains ever do anything mundane like eat or go to the toilet.

Infotext
An extra subtitle that you can turn on for a mountain of great Morbius trivia. It’s impossible to follow the story as the factlets pile up, so best turn the sound off completely.

Coming soon
Blimey, what a great trailer for The Trial Of A Time Lord. If only they had applied such zippy editing techniques to the show itself...

Fans of The Brain Of Morbius may be interested in the return of the Morbius character, who’ll be confronting Paul McGann’s eighth Doctor in new audio releases from Big Finish in July and August.

Story: (add a star if you love Hammer Horror)

Extras :

The Brain Of Morbius is released on July 21st 2008, rrp: £19.99
Check out our reviews of other Doctor Who DVDs...

Beneath The Surface
Black Orchid
Destiny Of The Daleks
The Time Meddler
The Five Doctors
The Invasion Of Time