Tuesday, 18 July 2023

The Brain Of Morbius: Ranking - 124

  The Brain Of Morbius

(Season 13, Dr 4 with Sarah Jane, 3-24/1/1976, producer: Phillip Hinchcliffe, script editor: Robert Holmes, writer: 'Robin Bland' aka Terrance Dicks, director: Christopher Barry) 

Rank: 124

In an emoji: 🧠

  'Solon, you stupid nit - here I am, the greatest timelord that the universe ever saw and you've stuck me inside the brain casing of one of The Spice Girls! I refuse to be known as 'shouty spice'. Come back and do it again...'





Dr Who’s gothic period continues with a riff on Frankenstein’s Monster and one that’s surprisingly faithful to Mary Shelley’s original story considering that a) we’re on an alien planet b) we’re in an unspecified time in the future c) we’re on Karn, the next planet out from Gallifrey and d) the ‘monster’ is really a body of leftovers put together by the universe’s leading surgeon to house the mind of a timelord master criminal. It’s a natural place to go for both gothic fiction and science-fiction: since time immemorial man has been trying to command his body to live forever with the power of thought but the mysteries of one have never fully explained the other. The biggest difference is that back in Mary Shelley’s day you were very much stuck with the body you came with, but in the 1970s transplants meant that you really could ‘join’ parts of different bodies together for real. There’s even an old folk tale, dating back to the earliest days of transplants, that your overall essence was somehow diluted by adding body parts from someone else: for once this isn’t something ‘Quatermass’ had beaten Dr Who to but it is in the series’ other favourite influence ‘The Twilight Zone’ and the episode ‘Appointment On Route 17’ where a man with a heart transplant results in a complete personality change. This, though, is the very British, very Dr Who variation: instead of the new body part being benign and allowing the main character to have the confidence to get the man of his dreams it’s a cobbled together collection of alien parts that have crashed onto Sarn and been cobbled together into the sort of body only a monster could love. And into this body has been placed one of the greatest geniuses that ever loved, a timelord of such powers that even the Doctor seems in awe. Anyone whose ever experienced any serious illness will know the shock of finding out that you’re just a passenger in a body you can’t control and for a being who had incredible powers and is used to being totally in control that feeling is a quadzillion times worse. It’s very in keeping with the Hinchcliffe era of the show that it should take something as mystical and beautiful as the concept of regeneration and offer us a brutal, dark, animalistic version of it with the guts and gore put back in. But where, this story asks, does Morbius begin and end? Did he really die when his body did (in Terrance Dicks’ rather odd prequel novel ‘Warmonger’? (when Morbius was an evil dictator fighting a temporary army of Cybermen, Sontarons, Ice Warriors and Draconians as led by the 5th Doctor who vaporises his head!) Is that still Morbius in headcase as his brain slops around a fishbowl, mute? Is that really him supplanted into scientist Salon’s hastily concocted body? And what, after so many centuries of waiting, can possibly be left of his original self at all? Is Morbius a head case because he was always a head case or because he is, dor half the story, literally just a head in a case? Morbius compares himself to a vegetable but really he’s an animal, a being who once sneered at the whole of existence for not being as wonderful as himself reduced to a pet that ‘envies a vegetable’ without learning the lesson of humility. 


 Rather fittingly, this script is something of a hybrid itself, coming from three separate projects by two different writers before what reached us on screen. The story started when new producer Phillip Hinchcliffe suggested doing a story about robots because ‘I don’t know if we’ve ever done one before’ and script editor Robert Holmes farmed the idea out to his old friend who’d once given him his Dr Who job: his predecessor Terrance Dicks. Quite what he thought of the commission is unclear: after all his last story for the series had featured a Giant Robot and it had only been two years ago! Nevertheless he was happy to write something and decided to go in a completely different direction this time. Recognising that the other Hinchcliffe stories so far had been firmly in the ‘hammer horror’ vain Dicks came up with the idea of a robot hat tried to save its master (not The Master you understand but an early prototype version of Morbius whose deeply vain) after they crash-landed on an alien planet. With only the master’s head the robot desperately tried to save its brain by scavenging for other crashed spaceships and finding a collection of animals. The twist is that, being a logical robot with no real understanding of aestheticness, he keeps choosing the most unsuitable bodies. The first draft is a really traditional Dr Who story about the dangers of pride that asks much the same questions about where one’s identity ends. Needing to flesh the story out Terrance reached out to the first job he’d done since leaving his script editor’s job, the stage play ‘The Seven Keys To Doomsday’. One of three stage Who spin-off plays, this is the most fondly remembered and arguably the closest to the spirit of the series, even if it did feature a ‘new’ future Doctor (Trevor Martin, a bit-part actor who plays him a bit like Peter Cushing and is rather good in the Big Finish audio version) and a very episodic structure. Not wanting to write dialogue purely for the Doctor and Daleks Terrance came up with two ‘new’ ideas – the cybermat-like ‘Clawrantulars’ that walked around lopsidedly on giant crab-like arms and the ‘feminine’ timelord neighbours ‘The Sisterhood Of Karn’ who lived on the planet over from Gallifrey and were all girls (this being at a time, pre-‘Invasion Of Time’ and Romana, never mind the 13th Doctor and Missy, when the only timelords we’d seen had all been boys). The stage play also had the gothic castle setting, a giant slopping brain in a tank and a big epic mind battle – all elements of the final version. Job finished Dicks went off on his holidays, sailing round the |Mediterranean in a boat which, in the days before internet access, meant he was incommunicado for weeks. 


 Which all caused a bit of a problem. Holmes got the scripts and while he loved the story he wasn’t sure how he was going to make the robot work. It also wasn’t quite the Isaac Asimovy style robot story Hinchcliffe was expecting. Normally the solution would have been simple: ring up Terrance and tell him to have another bash. But nobody knew quite where he was. With time ticking and no other ideas to hand Holmes had to sit down and cobble together a story that was sort-of like Dicks’ version but not really, sending an apologetic note with the re-drafted version to Dicks’ house for when he got home. The original author was at first incensed and came as close as he ever did to losing his temper on his favourite show: the entire point of the original story was to study the very different concept of living to organic and robotic life, which surely made it the most robotic story ever. Complaining that practically nothing of his original draft had survived anyway he barked at his friends to put it out under ‘some bland pseudonym’ and sulked, vowing to steer clear of Dr Who for the foreseeable future. Holmes, who couldn’t be credited himself (or it would look as if he’s broken the writer’s union rules by commissioning himself rather than someone else) did just that, giving the name ‘Robin Bland’ on the final credits. Dicks, watching the story go out at home in a huff, found this hilarious and rang up his old friend to make his peace, saying he’d quite enjoyed it (even if it wasn’t his story). 


 As well he might. ‘Brian Of Morbius’ is Who at its daftest, a fun story that never takes itself too seriously (despite featuring some truly horrible moments). If you were to drop in on this story at random you’d assume it was a pure hammer horror film with its big drafty castle, mad scientist and hideous horrific creatures ( the body cobbled together for Morbius is the stuff of nightmares). ‘Morbius’ the story manages to juggle everything, much like Morbius the timelord: it’s action-based and gory enough to keep fans who like the ‘other’ sort of Dr Who stories occupied but throws fans like me who think about this stuff way more than they should a few bones along the way too. While the Frankenstein horror parts are the ones that everyone remembers, especially the cliffhangers that generally involve someone threatening something nasty to Sarah Jane Smith, the bits of ‘Morbius’ I love are the more, aptly given the plot, cerebral moments between the characters. Instead of a robot Holmes added an ‘Igor’ type man-servant whose the butt of all the jokes and fleshed out ‘mad scientists’ Solon, who is himself quite an egotist convinced he’s the greatest surgeon who ever lived but still treated as a lowly worm by Morbius’ disembodied head in a jar. All three make for quite the cast of characters: Morbius is the Hannibal of Gallifrey, once one of the most feared men in history that even the timelords feared. Morbius shares all the traits of the other timelords-turned-bad we’ve seen down the years like Omega or Rassilon but with an added very human sense of desperation, a frustration at his home race which the Doctor clearly shares even if they have different reasons for it, with the best scenes coming from the debates between the scientists and the Doctor about morality. It’s quite something hearing speeches from a goldfish bowl on top of a lump, but thanks to Michael Spice’s voice part Morbius is as good a baddy as any the 4th Doctor faces. He was charismatic and beloved enough to have built up his own cult who saved him after he was finally caught and executed by the timelords, his body dispersed to the different corners of the universe (a sort of Gallifreyan hung, drawn and quartered – it was Solon himself who rescued his head in ‘Warmonger’). Solon is an interesting character too, the sort of man who would be a King on his own planet but is treated like a servant here, with Phillip Msdoc finding ways to present his character as both victim and villain. It might be significant, too, that he shares a name with a man who tried bitterly to cling onto Ancient Greece’s epic past passing reform after reform and relive the glory days even though it was obvious the empire had been dying for some time. And then there’s Condor, treated as the lowest of the low and whose arm is even taken to better serve Morbius but who in many ways has more heart and certainly more brains than the pair of them. You’re meant to be horrified by him too at first, with his hook and his hunchback, but in true Who style the nicest person on this planet is the most hideous and he’s sweet rather than creepy. Unfortunately he’s hard done by as part of the story too: had he been a baddy like the others it would just be another part of the Dr Who message of karma catching up to all the right people, but the poor brainless servant whose organs are being harvested for Morbiuses’ return is more of a victim than anyone. 


What a monster Morbius comes too, in looks that match his voice far more than the rather regal bust of his younger self we see in Solon’s castle and which is a real triuph for the costume department with an order that they would never have been asked for before, a real patchwork quilt of monsters. A lot of Dr who monsters look cobbled together out of odds and ends. but this one shows what a real cobbled together monster would be like and is a fascinating collection of bits and pieces from different places including a Mutt from the ’The Mutants’ who dies and is cannibalised in the opening scene (surely an in-jke, given this 3rtd Doctor story is also about transformation but in a much more ethereal way, the ugly mutts turning out to be in the ‘chrysalis’ stage of their evolution and ending the story as beautiful beings of light) and what looks like a Mara claw. There are also eye stalks that were added last minute when it was thought it looked too much like a space helmet from a 1950s B movie; this suitably makes Morbius look more Dalek-like and points to the ruthless killer he is. As for the rest, Stuart fell wore the ‘fish-tank’ head as a helmet, smelt of coffee beans which were used to add texture to the skin and had a tuft of fur down the back to hide where the zip went! 


 So far so Frankenstein, but where the original was all about science gone rogue, this one is about science versus magic and to an extent masculinity versus femininity. Morbius is trying to cling onto life by fighting, continuing his physical macho battling even after he has no body left to fight with any more. By contrast The Sisterhood Of Karn don’t have multiple regenerations the same way as their masculine cousins but what they do have is the elixir of life, an ‘eternal flame’ that keeps them forever, well, not young exactly but not alive at least considering they should have died out centuries ago without it. They get their long life by tapping into a source of mystical power, by using their minds and believing in an unseen force that they worship in the form of a light. They’re a terrific creation, a feminist cult of time-witches who are every bit the equal in power to the timelords (although of course now timelords can swap gender it really confuses what happens here. Do the sisterhood get booted out if they regenerate as male?) Whereas Morbius is too aggressive they’re too passive and like using The Doctor to do their dirty work for them rather than do anything physical. In a sense it’s that question of identity writ large, the difference between body and mind and how the secret to life is getting both to work in tandem – which is, more or less, the main theme of the original ‘Frankenstein’ novel too before the films all made it about the ‘monster’. The lesson, in a way, is that both sides have missed the point and even with all those extra years gained haven’t learned to become more like the other. Or something like that anyway; I don’t know, you need a brain the size of Morbius’ to follow all the layers in this story. 


Along the way we hear lots more about the Doctor’s home race than we’ve heard before, even in more obvious stories like ‘The War Games’ and ‘Deadly Assassin’. As well as Sarn, the part of the story everyone talks about today is that ‘mind-bending’ battle from the stage-play as Morbius and The Doctor challenge each other to a special timelord kind of duel and send each other back through their past generations, with several lives we don’t know flashing up on screen while Morbius gloats, a scene that ‘The Timeless Children’ tried to explain, sort of 46 years later. Now what these represent depends on who you talk to: for Hinchcliffe they were indeed a cheeky reference to past Doctors we’d never seen on screen, the original idea being to attract big name actors (no actresses, not yet) to cameo as various unseen ‘Doctor’s. But that wasn’t Holmes intended at all: for him the script very carefully paints Morbius as an unstable personality and the people we see on screen are Morbius’ past lives (he is, after all, much older than the Doctor and has used up more regenerations: the fact he’s ranting is entirely in character for someone who is in complete and utter denial that he could ever possibly lose and it’s hard for a brain in Morbius’ cobbled body to even work out what’s happening; for me, at least Morbius assumes he must be winning without looking at the screen because he can’t even comprehend losing). For what it’s worth I always went with Holmes’ theory: there are just too many references to the first Doctor calling himself the original and the other Doctors all seem to recognise their ‘numbering’ too (plus surely they’d have all turned up in stories like ‘The Three Doctors’ ‘The Five Doctors’ ‘Dimensions In Time’ ‘The Name Of the Doctor’ and ‘The Day Of the Doctor’?) As for Terrance with the deciding vote? He says its nothing to do with him! (The stage-play did show different Doctors but then that was meant to be in the far future anyway). In the end it’s all a bit of a wasted joke anyway given that no actors took the bite (and gave the show the publicity boost the producer was hoping for) and instead the ‘Doctors’ ended up being members of the production staff: in order as seen on screen that’s production unit manager George Gallaccio in the top hat, Robert Holmes himself looking very regal in a tricorn hat, production assistant (and later director) Graeme Harper in the beard, director Douglas Camfield in the 17th century costume, Hinchcliffe himself dressed as a cavalier, production assistant Christopher Baker in the lace ruff, writer Robert Banks Stewart (taking a day off from re-drafting next story ‘The Seeds Of Doom’) in the medieval costume and director Christopher Barry in the Elizabethan outfit. This time it was the actors’ guild who heard about what was going on and petitioned for it to be stopped (given that none of the men were card-carrying Equity members) but they settled for a donation to their Christmas benevolent fund instead. 


 It’s certainly anything but bland whatever the writing credits say. If anything its not bland enough: someone else deeply upset by this story was Mary Whitehouse. The President of the National Viewers and Listeners Association (the British self-appointed censors) she’d had a bee in her bonnet about Who for years but really went after this story, with complaints about the levels of violence in a timeslot that actively encouraged children to be watching. In particular she thought the scenes in episode three of Morbius’ brains slopping on the floor covered in green goo and Condo being shot in the chest ‘;contained some of the sickest and most horrific material seen on children’s television’. Quite apart from the fact that Dr Who never is, was or will ever be pure children’s television (that’s a misunderstanding: even in its earliest days it was paid for out of the BBC drama budget) this is a very cartoonish sort of a story and this is very cartoonish violence. It’s hammer horror silliness, without blood or real pain, the two things that really will scare children and the story is carefully paced so that these scenes don’t happen in the cliffhangers and thus leave viewers waiting a whole week to see if everyone will be OK: instead we see that the characters in this story are pretty indestructible. In time the BBC bosses will agree with the attacks and go as far as to move Hinchcliffe on to the grittier cop drama ‘Target’, with Michael Grade using it as an excuse to postpone then cancel the series in another decade ‘s time. For now, though, the one part of this story that’s really upsetting – and in terms of plot rather unnecessary – is what they put Sarah through in this story. In a castle filled with timelords she’s the most vulnerable and goes through the wringer here, to the extent of losing her sight and even the Doctor thinking she might not ever get it back. By now she’s been our eyes and ears for so long that to see her distressed without the use of her eyes is one of the most distressing parts of any Who story and its not over in a quick scene or cliffhanger, it lasts multiple episodes. This is also a bad time for the Doctor to go all alien and distant, less empathetic than usual. That’s the part of this story that goes too far, psychological horror of a sort Mary Whitehouse didn’t seem to pick up on at all. It could have been worse incidentally: initially this story was planned to go out over Christmas week! (In the end it was replaced by a ‘Match Of The Day’ special and an omnibus repeat of ‘Genesis Of the Daleks’, the most-repeated Who story of the all. Which thinking about it is even less festive). 


There are other parts of this story that go a bit too far as well that just prevent it being a top tier classic. The slapstick comedy is pretty awful with lots of knockabout fights that look a bit silly. The big cavernous castle set is magnificent but the Sisterhood, by comparison, seem to have had no money spent on their half of the planet at all and some of their sacrificial sense are pitiable. There’s not that much for the Doctor to do either – Tom Baker has fun whenever he’s called on to spar with Solon or Morbius but is clearly bored of the scenes being captured by the Sisterhood that never really amount to much and has less space to be truly ‘alien’ here than usual (odd for a work by two writers who both knew this Doctor inside out – the one who created him and the one whose spent more hours writing for him than anyone else). The ending is too neat all round and, unusual for Who, doesn’t deliver much of the karmic justice the series usually meters out so satisfyingly, with the plot falling apart badly in the last episode: The Doctor and Sarah are imprisoned until they release some cyanide to knock out Solon – but they’re stuck either way, if he collapses from the fumes (and he does indeed die from them, a rare case of a Doctor directly killing another person on screen that isn’t by accident) they’ll only have to wait for him to wake up again and hope he lets them out (as luck would have it Morbius is alive but they don’t know he has the ‘lungs of a bistrop’ and can tolerate the gas and is relishing a re-match with the Doctor (a Doctor that according to ‘warmonger’, he hasn’t even met yet!) In the end the Doctor is saved by the elixir and a sacrifice that could have happened three and a half episodes ago! Morbius dies after being forced over a cliff but he doesn’t really suffer, while Condo is dead. Not to mention the fact that there’s one big anomaly in this story which Dicks spotted straight away (and which would have been avoided in this draft): why does Solon, the greatest surgeon in the galaxy, not stick Morbius inside the Doctor’s complete body rather than the monstrosity he’s cobbled together? 


 Still, the fact that you care about everyone in this small cast and the fate that befalls them shows how much ‘Morbius’ gets under your skin. ‘Morbius’ is still a fine adventure, silly and colourful and entertaining enough to draw you in but with enough big themes underneath it all to tax even the biggest brain cases. It adds whole great swathes to our understanding about the timelords and covers a lot in four parts, more than many Dr Who stories in six parts, and is full of big action sequences even though all the best moments come in long passionate speeches. Unlike some fans this is not my favourite story from my favourite era but I do appreciate it as a well-told tale, acted by a cast who are going the extra mile to make this story work. Another figure going the extra mile is composer Dudley Simpson, who considered this one of his favourites of his many many scored for Who: it was the one he chose to illustrate a talk he gave at the ‘Film and Television Institute’ and like many a Simpson score is exactly hat the Doctor (Who team) ordered: it captures all the hammer horror gothic style without being clichéd or ending up a parody. Although the figure who deserves perhaps the biggest medal is Stuart fell, Who’s long-time stuntman, who for this story is dressed up in the Morbius costume and having to act to Michael Spice’s voice without being able to see very much at all, not just for one or two scenes as per normal but weeks – somehow, even with the dialogue, he makes us sympathetic to his plight despite having nothing more to wave than a hand (and his only ‘mistake’ is his death scene, where he accidentally grabs the camera pedestal, a scene recorded so late on no one had time to do it over again). There are lots of little examples like that dotted around this story: a Frankenstein’s hybrid of a tale it might be, disowned by its original creator, but everyone is making this story with so much love and care that somehow it still works.It might not be one of the very very best DW episodes out there and like so many episodes before it what we see on screen can’t always match what’s there in the script, while I hold the sneaking suspicion Dicks’ original would have been even better had they managed to find a way to make it, but nevertheless this is a very memorable story that stays in your brain for a very long time after you’ve seen it and is also utterly unlike any other bit of television you will ever see: yes even ‘Frankenstein’. 


 POSITIVES + This is one of the few Dr Who stories where every speaking role is brilliantly cast and expertly performed. We know Tom Baker and Elisabeth Sladen are great of course and they carry much of this story – Sarah’s obvious fright and the Doctor’s less obvious but still visible concern really sell this story and you can tell that the Doctor is stretched, as close to being in awe of Morbius as this regeneration ever gets to being in awe of anyone. Phillip Madoc gave several star turns in Dr Who, all of them as very different characters in looks and motives, but this is his best: Solon isn’t a mad professor so much as a bad professor, using his brilliance in all the wrong ways and expecting to get love from one of the beings in the universe who has no love to give, ending up heartbroken at how little Morbius thinks of him – and you care, even though Solon in turn thinks so little of Condo. What could on the page have been a typical one-dimensional role becomes an all too believable character, doing the wrong thing out of spite and fear of being proved wrong. Michael Spice only has his voice to go on as Morbius but he uses it so well, conjuring up the frustrations of one of the most brilliant minds of his generation trapped in one of the worst bodies through Solon’s botched experiments. Cynthia Grenfell is every bit the equal of the male baddies, making the Sisters Of The Flame sound like a cult I wouldn’t actually mind joining (if, y’know, I regenerate as a different gender. And an alien). Best of all though is surely Colin Fay as Condo, the monster who seems the most Human and who throws himself into this part, managing to earn ourt sympathies immediately, even though Colin wasn’t a trained actor at all but an opera singer looking for a side gig between shows (he should have got a lot more jobs after this but didn’t – Wikipedia doesn’t even give him his own page). 


 NEGATIVES - For a story that changes pace and plot as much as ‘Morbius’ does it’s a shame how static it all looks, even if there’s a reason for it (Dr Who’s summer break and late re-writes meant that designer Barry Newbury had less than half his usual time to put the sets together). This is one of the few 1970s Whos with no film recording whatsoever – there’s no location shoot and not even a model shot (for the first time since ‘the Sensorites’ back in season one) a deliberate cost-saving measure that makes more difference than you might think. Instead two big sets is all we get and the plot switches between them on a loop (like a mobius strip in fact). Neither look quite believable or stops you feeling that they’re artificial the way the best Dr Who sets do – the castle isn’t up to the one seen in the past on ‘The Time Warrior’ or in the future on ‘State Of Decay’, while the Sisterhood – who wear plastic spoons painted silver round their necks – live in a a coven is even more basic, their beloved eternal flame around which the foundation of all their cult rests and which can revive dead timelords in future stories looks for all the world like...a Bunsen burner. 


BEST QUOTE: ‘The impossible dream of a thousand alchemists, dripping like tea from an urn’. 



Prequels/Sequels: The 5th Doctor novel   or novel ‘Warmonger’ (2000) is a sort-of prequel (from Morbius’ point of view), a sort of sequel (from the Doctor’s point of view) and a wild, wild ride. Terrance, who dedicated the book to his pseudonym ‘Robin Bland’, gets his own back on Bob Holmes for making the finished script of ‘Brain’ more jokey than he intended by writing his grittiest, darkest work in the Who catalogue and a novel that has a lot more in common with the desperation of ‘Caves Of Androzani’ than ‘Brain Of Morbius’. Terrance, like his pal Bob, was often critical of how ‘nice’ the 5th Doctor was and portrays him in a very different way, using that charm and politeness against him and pushing him to his limits as he becomes a reluctant war hero. This is also the only time Terrance wrote for Peri and boy does he see her in a different way to everyone else: far from being the universe’s victim she’s a rebel warrior queen on a par with Ace or Leela, outsmarting the bad guys and the last surviving member of twelve rebel leaders. The only part of her character that remains the same is the amount of characters leering after her and Terrance is a lot more outspoken in his prose than the Dr Who team were ever allowed to be on TV: lots of incidental characters are raped and you think they’re going to try it with Peri too, until she cleverly pretends that she’s infectious.  She also very nearly loses an arm during a run-in with a pterodactyl creature, which is how the Doctor comes to visit a young Solon, sucking up the vain young surgeon in the hope that he will re-attach it; he does, but only after nearly killing Peri as a ruse, letting his assistant ogle her on the operating table and conning the Doctor into pleading with the Sisterhood of Karn for an elixir of life for his private experiments: an early version of the Morbius brain casing. Morbius himself is around in his real body and such a threat to the universe that the Doctor ends up spearheading an army of Cybermen, Draconians and Sontarons to wipe him out – it’s his death scene that leads neatly to the events in ‘Brain Of Morbius’ although the Doctor is well aware that he has to let events run their course in order to avoid changing the timelines. Set over a period of several months, with the Doctor and Peri leading very different lives, it puts the Doctor’s sacrifice in ‘Androzani’ in a very different light (he’s making up for what he accidentally put Peri through here, while far from being relative strangers they’re old friends by now, with a Martha-ish sub-plot of Peri’s frustrations that the Doctor isn’t throwing himself at her like every other randy alien). Radical, controversial and utterly unlike Dicks’ usual safe cosy style I’m not quite sure what to make of this book. If you come to it purely for the Morbius angle you’ll probably be disappointed but if you ever watched ‘Androzani’ and thought ‘gee I wish there was another book that treated the 5th Doctor the same way’ then there’s still much about it to love. The book is dedicated to Bob, series editor Justin Richards and Robin Bland (‘without whose brief but glorious career this book could not have been written!’)  


The Eight Doctor ended up on Karn again after crash-landing into the planet as part of the time war in the ‘day Of The Doctor’ prequel ‘Night Of the Doctor’. It’s easily Paul McGann’s best work in the role, though at only a few minutes long you don’t get to see much of what’s happened to the planet. Meanwhile Big Finish provide a two-part sequel again for the 8th Doctor and his companion Lucie Miller who can’t seem to keep away: ‘The Sisters Of the Flame’ and ‘The Vengeance Of Morbius’ where the Doctor gets roped into the Sisterhood cult. 


 Previous ‘The Android Invasion’ next ‘The Seeds Of Doom’

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