Category: Doctor Who
Doctor Who episode 420: The Brain of Morbius – Part Three (17/1/1976)
This is still witty: Solon enjoys mocking Condo’s attraction to Sarah Jane, ‘Oh, he’s such a romantic’ (before adding, ‘That’ll do she doesn’t like it’), and can’t even resist making an ‘irresistible’ pun about Morbius’ crowning irony (‘Fool,’ snaps back an unamused Morbius). The prosaic explanation for the death of the Flame of Eternal Life (soot), and Morbius’ gloriously quotable rant (‘Even a sponge has more life than I!’) are superb. But Holmes also introduces the same kind of philosophical angle that lifted Genesis of the Daleks.
Doctor Who episode 419: The Brain of Morbius – Part Two (10/1/1976)
One thing I hadn’t noticed when I’ve watched The Brain of Morbius in the past, usually in an attempt to make it through the whole serial in one go, is how funny the script is. Robert Holmes does love a good villainous rant (recently we’ve had ‘Abase yourself, you grovelling insect’ and Sharaz Jek’s ‘stinking offal’ monologues still to come). But this opens with a wonderful stream of vitriol from the frustrated Solon, who’s just had his magnificent head stolen from under his nose:
That squalid brood of harpies, the Sisterhood. That accursed hag Maren found I was holding a Time Lord and rescued him. May her stinking bones rot! I’ll see her die, Condo. I’ll see that palsied harridan scream for death before Morbius and I are finished with her.
Doctor Who episode 418: The Brain of Morbius – Part One (3/1/1976)
This is immediately positioned as another significant step towards revealing more about the Time Lords and the Doctor’s past, connecting it to Pyramids of Mars both visually and thematically. Like Sutekh, the Sisterhood of Karn know of, and are contemptuous towards the High Council of the Time Lords, whom they suspect of coming to Karn to steal the Elixir. Separately, Solon dismisses the Time Lords as ‘spineless parasites’ (how the mighty have fallen: the last time Philip Madoc was in the show talking about Time Lords they were demigods).
Doctor Who episode 417: The Android Invasion – Part Four (13/12/1975)
In practice the android invasion is confined to about two rooms in the space centre. This certainly has all the elements of a climactic episode – stuff that in theory should be fairly solid. Tom Baker playing an evil duplicate of himself and the two versions getting to fight, with the benefit of seven years of editing and effects evolution since Barry Letts last had a go at directing a scene like this in The Enemy of the World. Sarah Jane finally getting back to Britain in 1980, and being reunited with her friends Harry and Benton and (checks notes) Colonel Faraday.
Doctor Who episode 416: The Android Invasion – Part Three (6/12/1975)
Like Planet of Evil, after a promising first half this starts to go to pieces in Part Three. Part of the problem is that Terry Nation seems to have lost interest, so instead of the kind of ethical debates and mounting dread in the latter half of Genesis of the Daleks this becomes a roll-call of Nation clichés: a radioactive planet; a deadly virus that will wipe out life; android doubles. And whereas Robert Holmes presumably did a lot of work on Genesis, in Season 13 he’s got his hands fully rewriting Pyramids of Mars and The Brain of Morbius. The result is an incredibly slapdash episode.
Doctor Who episode 415: The Android Invasion – Part Two (29/11/1975)
It’s odd, the motifs that keep cropping up in Season 13 despite different directors and writers. Here, Styggron has a screen very similar to Sutekh’s that he uses when communicating with Crayford (it’s even shot at a similar angle), and a hidden camera in the pub, just like Broton. Perhaps it’s a natural approach when the show is moving away from armies of monsters to more well-characterised lead villains, hiding away in their secret lairs.
Doctor Who episode 414: The Android Invasion – Part One (22/11/1975)
I’m not sure there’s any episode of Doctor Who that’s so disastrously undermined by its title. It’s as if Barry Letts took the brouhaha over Invasion [of the Dinosaurs] – Part One so seriously that this goes in entirely the opposite direction, revealing exactly what’s going on before the first line of dialogue is spoken. Why they went with a spoiler rather than the more evocative The Enemy Within, or even the prosaic The Kraals is a bigger mystery than what’s left when the central conundrum has its legs kicked from under it so brutally.
Doctor Who episode 413: Pyramids of Mars – Part Four (15/11/1975)
The Doctor’s confrontation with Sutekh is one of the greats. It has some similarities to the third Doctor’s encounter with the Great One: in both cases seeing our hero mentally dominated and manipulated like a puppet by the monster is immensely unsettling. Beyond that, Robert Holmes takes the opportunity to expand Time Lord mythology: just as Gallifrey was casually dropped into The Time Warrior, here the Constellation of Kasterborous is thrown in. In future seasons it seems like everyone has heard of the place. Here, Sutekh needs the galactic coordinates to realise the Doctor is a Time Lord. He’s not very impressed: ‘The Time Lords are a perfidious species’ gives us a clear hint that they aren’t the paternalistic gods implied by The War Games: barely godlike at all, in fact, and certainly to be looked down on by the other godlike beings. It’s foreshadowing further developments this season and next, and a nice bit of Holmes iconoclasm.
Doctor Who episode 412: Pyramids of Mars – Part Three (8/11/1975)
The Doctor is at his most brooding in this episode, showing no patience with Laurence Scarman’s pathetic attempts to appeal to his brother (just an ‘animated human cadaver’ the Doctor tells him brusquely), and even losing his sense of humour with Sarah, who accuses him of being inhuman. Later, he pushes Laurence’s corpse aside dismissively. This runs the risk of making him unlikeable, except the show’s already spent a season establishing his credentials and the scale of the threat here is immense: Sarah’s concern over one man’s death is brushed aside: ‘Four men, Sarah. Five, if you include Professor Scarman himself, and they’re merely the first of millions unless Sutekh is stopped.’
Doctor Who episode 411: Pyramids of Mars – Part Two (1/11/1975)
For such an iconic serial there’s not an awful lot of story here: the Doctor continues to share fragments of a backstory he already knows, while we’re left to try to piece together the bigger picture, but the essentials boil down to Sutekh ‘destroyed his own planet, Phaester Osiris, and left a trail of havoc across half the galaxy. Horus and the rest of the Osirans must have finally cornered him on Earth.’ In some respects this is Pertwee-style ancient gods stuff, but that just makes the differences even more marked. This is nothing like the sugar-rush whimsy of The Time Monster, and is more macabre than The Dæmons. Instead of big-budget Action by HAVOC the show’s now spending its (presumably smaller, thanks to 1970s inflation) budget on impressively detailed sets, and aiming for creeping dread.
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