Doctor Who Project: The Brain of Morbius

Chop Suey, the Galactic Emperor!

To address the obvious: Robin Bland’s “The Brain of Morbius” (Story Production Code 4K) essentially recreates Shelley’s Frankenstein by way of Hollywood and Hammer Films, down to the dramatic lightning strikes, a stumbling Igor, a stitched-together monstrosity, and a torch-waving mob ushering in the monster’s end. But Bland—a pseudonym for long-time Doctor Who writer and script editor Terrance Dicks—spices up the otherwise tired tale with an impressive amount of ephemera regarding the Time Lords, adding interest to the surprisingly effective horror trappings on display.

The TARDIS materializes on the foggy planet Karn, guided there, according to the Doctor, by the Time Lords. He’s certain they’ve summoned him yet again to carry out their “dirty work,” and he refuses to help them, declaring, “I’m just going to sit here and do nothing.” Sarah attempts to get the Doctor interested in the plot at hand, remarking on all the crashed space ships nearby. Even the discovery of a headless alien, killed after escaping one of the wrecks, piques the Doctor’s interest only mildly. So Dicks whips up a sudden rainstorm to drive the time travellers to take shelter in a nearby structure, helpfully silhouetted on the horizon by blue lightning.

Inside, Solon and his hook-armed assistant Condo argue about the usefulness of the alien head Condo has recently procured using said hook; when the Doctor and Sarah arrive, seeking respite from the elements, Solon cannot help but remark upon the perfection of the Doctor’s head, a creepy comment that the Doctor takes in stride. The storm has knocked out the power in Solon’s abode, allowing these scenes to be shot with low lighting to amplify the ominous feeling. The audience already knows that Solon occupies the “mad scientist” role, leading to an odd sense of gullibility about the Doctor, who senses no danger when he and Sarah succumb to a drugged glass of wine.

Solon needs the Doctor’s “magnificent” cranium as a receptacle for the brain of Morbius, who formerly led the High Council of the Time Lords before being disintegrated for attempting to take over the galaxy, as often happens. But the Doctor is spirited off the operating table just before the head-removal procedure by the Sisterhood of Karn, who possess telekinetic powers. The red-robed novitiates aren’t trying to save the Doctor, though—they just want to be the ones to kill him…

Doctor Who Project: The Android Invasion

Let’s try the pub!

Terry Nation writing a Doctor Who story about robots wanting to invade Earth isn’t entirely noteworthy, unless, as in “The Android Invasion,” (Story Production Code 4J), those robots are not Daleks. Here, an alien species known as the Krall seeks to take over the Earth as a replacement for their radiation-suffused homeworld. The Krall’s master plan (sorry) involves building a small number of android doppelgängers who will surreptitiously replace key personnel in a British space research center—and, for some reason, in a nearby pub.

Indeed, a good chunk of the four episode story focuses not on the execution (and subsequent foiling) of the planned conquest but rather on the androids learning to pour ginger beer, hop out of lorries, and count out shillings’ change in a replica of the research center and nearby town. For unexplained reasons, the TARDIS materializes near this Potemkin village on the Krall planet instead of on Earth, and while the Doctor is puzzled by anomalous energy readings, he and Sarah have no idea that they are countless light years from their intended destination. Wonky TARDIS circuits are a screenwriter’s best friend, it would seem. Almost immediately, they are set upon by white-clothed helmeted figures with finger guns, and as they rush to escape from these surprising foes, they see a UNIT soldier jump off a cliff to his death for no apparent reason.

Upon examining the body, the Doctor notices that the soldier’s billfold contains brand new money, all the coins scratch-free and minted in the same year. An odd coincidence, repeated once more when the Doctor and Sarah enter the deserted village and find similar fresh currency in the empty pub’s till. More ominously, the pub’s tables hold half-full mugs of beer. Peering through blinds, they see the missing drinkers return, hauled in a truck driven by the same mysterious helmeted figures. The people clamber out of the truck without emotion or sound, then resume their places in the pub. On cue, they all begin talking and drinking once more.

The Doctor and Sarah see the “dead” UNIT solider among them, increasing their bafflement. Our time travellers postulate various theories as to how these people are being controlled and/or re-animated, believing themselves to be on Earth in an actual British town, but they never once consider them to be androids. The viewer, however, has already been tipped off by the story’s title, as well as by establishing shots of the UNIT soldier walking alone in a jerking, halting, mechanical manner. These are robots, android copies of human beings, programmed, for some reason, to drink pints.
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Doctor Who Project: Pyramids of Mars

Egyptian mummies building rockets? That’s crazy!

Only Doctor Who could get away with the title “Pyramids of Mars” (Story Production Code 4G) for a story set primarily in southern England, but series script editor Robert Holmes and Lewis Griefer (collaborating as Stephen Harris) nevertheless keep the Egyptian theme paramount. Just as “Terror of the Zygons” incorporated the Loch Ness monster into the Doctor Who universe, this story explains the Egyptian pantheon as the super powerful Osirians, a race known throughout the galaxy for their intellect and longevity. And of all those Osirians, only Sutekh, also known as Set, the god of death and destruction, remains, trapped beneath an Egyptian pyramid by Horus and the rest of the long-dead deities.

Trapped, that is, until a doughty English archeologist, Marcus Scarman, cracks open Sutekh’s earthly tomb and discovers a sarcophagus that also functions as a time and space tunnel to Sutekh’s subterranean prison, as tends to happen. Indeed, right from the start of this four episode story, the technobabble comes on strong and unceasing, with copious references to psytronic energy and various other plot-propelling scientific terms, culminating in an unsatisfying deus ex machina ending. Still, much is forgiven by having mummies turn out to be bandage-wrapped robots which do, in fact, attempt to build a rocket—pyramid shaped, of course.

Sutekh intends to use the rocket to destroy the Osirian devices in a pyramid on Mars that keep him paralyzed beneath the Egyptian pyramid housing his tomb. Handily, his tomb contains all the necessary components for said rocket, along with servitor robots to construct it. Once Scarman triggers the sarcophagus, he falls under Sutekh’s mental domination and brings all of the rocket parts and mummy robots to a house that stands on the exact ground that will eventually become UNIT headquarters. While this change of setting makes sense in production terms, it being far easier (and cheaper) to film in an English country house rather than building several Egyptian-themed sets, from a plot sense there’s little to recommend it.

The initial pystronic energy released by Sutekh’s contact with the outside world affects the TARDIS, causing the “relative continuum stabilizer” to fail, drawing the Doctor and Sarah to Scarman’s house in 1911. The Doctor realizes that inconceivable mental energy would be required to break the TARDIS’ barriers, and the thought both frightens and fascinates him. “Something’s going on contrary to the laws of the universe. I must find out what,” he declares, to Sarah’s dismay. Though often faced with overwhelming odds, it’s rare that the Doctor encounters a foe he considers far more powerful than he is, one capable of destroying the universe: Sutekh.

Doctor Who Project: Planet of Evil

It’s fifteen degrees to night.

It’s for the best that Doctor Who story titles aren’t subject to truth-in-advertising laws, because Louis Marks’ “Planet of Evil” (Story Production Code 4H) would otherwise find itself hauled before the magistrate. The planet in question, Zeta Minor, “the last planet of the known universe,” does house a portal to an anti-matter dimension, whence an energy creature that kills a good score of humans over the course of four episodes originates, but there’s no actual malice or ill-intent involved. If anything, the anti-matter monster fights for good, or at least for survival, because removing any anti-matter from Zeta Minor will result in a cataclysmic explosion, destroying the universe. Like, the whole thing.

“Planet of Moral Utilitarianism” doesn’t make for a very pithy title, however, so “Planet of Evil” will have to suffice. The set dressing and direction do go to great lengths to create a moody, dark, and claustrophobic environment on the planet, helping to foster a sense of tension and horror reminiscent of the battlefield scenes in “Genesis of the Daleks” and the mine scenes in “The Green Death.” In order to keep the monster hidden until the obligatory revelation at the end of the first episode, though, the hapless human miners and guards killed by the creature must fall to the ground wrestling with an invisible foe; the inevitable campy gurning somewhat undercuts the desired effect of terror and malevolence.

Once revealed, the anti-matter creature’s design proves to be both effective and well-conceived, the glowing red lines matting brilliantly against both the humid jungle and the later beige-and-white interior scenes. It’s hard to imagine that this is the same show that gave us the woeful animatronic Loch Ness Monster just one story prior.

The humans, from the planet Morestra, seek to harness the power of anti-matter crystals found on the planet to provide their civilization with limitless energy to replace that of their dying star. Apparently, by the year 37,166 (as dated by one of the plentiful gravestones scattered in the encampment), humanity still hasn’t figured out its energy problems; even the spaceship sent to rescue the mineralogical survey team headed by Professor Sorensen (Frederick Jaeger) has just enough fuel to reach the far-flung planet and return, leaving little in reserve should, say, an anti-matter creature decide to prevent the ship from taking off again.

The Doctor and Sarah, somewhat off-course on their intended short hop from the Scottish Highlands to London, arrive in the temporal-spatial vicinity of a distress call sent by one of the miners. The TARDIS homes in on the signal, and the Doctor feels compelled to investigate, with the result that he and Sarah are poking at a desiccated body when the Morestran space patrol shows up. As is typical, they are blamed for the multitude of deaths, and over the course of the first three episodes, every time they escape from the Morestrans, they stumble upon another victim of the energy creature and are blamed for that death, too.

Our time travellers find themselves subject to much ill-treatment in this one, including one nearly-successful attempt at summary execution by being tossed into space, so much so that Sarah asks, “Do you ever get tired of being pushed around?” The Doctor has reached his limit, it seems, responding, “Frequently,” and not much later, he punches someone out.

Doctor Who Project: Terror of the Zygons

That, Doctor, is a kilt.

If ever a story could explain the demise of Doctor Who‘s UNIT era, Robert Banks Stewart’s “Terror of the Zygons” (Story Production Code 4F) fits the bill. This, the penultimate UNIT story, shows just how out of sync the militarism and regimentation of the Brigadier’s bunch has fallen from the frenetic energy and mordant sarcasm of the Fourth Doctor. Where UNIT’s deployment of mortars and bazookas and lots of lads shooting rifles not quite straight added to the visual excitement of the Second and Third Doctor’s adventures, here they just get in the way of the Fourth Doctor’s investigation of the Loch Ness Monster.

Indeed, it’s odd that most Third Doctor UNIT stories did not suffer greatly from the presence of Lethbridge-Stewart, Benton, and Yates, given that regeneration’s incredible disdain for military solutions; the Fourth Doctor, by contrast, shows no great compunction about blowing the beasties up and would seem a better fit in theory. The friction comes much more from stylistic approaches, as well as a tendency towards four episode stories in Tom Baker’s era. In “Terror of the Zygons,” Stewart’s plot spends scant enough time on the shapeshifting Zygons who have hidden in Loch Ness for hundreds of years; the inevitable padding that comes with the Brig telling Benton to call someone on the radio which then fades to location shots of UNIT troops milling about a forest just eats up valuable screen time. One can almost hear the audience groaning for the action to shift back to the Doctor. And, of course, nothing UNIT does actually changes the direction of the plot in the least.

Right from the start, the Doctor shows his irascibility at the Brigadier for summoning him back to Earth for so trifling a matter as the destruction of a few oil platforms off the Scottish coast. Only the siren song of a mystery can get this Doctor interested, and finding tooth prints of an enormous beast in the rig wreckage does the trick. Stewart does a nice job of not mentioning Loch Ness until deep into the second episode, allowing viewers to piece together the appearance of a long-necked prehistoric creature with the Scottish moorland setting before finally springing the connection.

Doctor Who is often associated with this trick of using an unexplained real-world phenomenon as a plot device, elucidating the incident in the course of advancing the narrative—aliens are almost always responsible—but in truth, this technique dropped off after the first few seasons, the last instance coming in Season Five’s “The Abominable Snowmen.” In this case, the mystery might have been better left unexplained, for the Zygons use the Loch Ness monster as…a milk cow.
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Doctor Who Project: Revenge of the Cybermen

Well, we can’t just sit here glittering, can we?

They brought the Cybermen back for this? After lying fallow for almost seven years, the silver streaks return with a thud in Gerry Davis’ “Revenge of the Cybermen” (Story Production Code 4D). Gone is the sense of unstoppable menace from their last appearance, in Season Six’s “The Invasion,” much less the existential body horror of the original Cybermen that Davis helped Kit Pedler develop back in “The Tenth Planet.” The story on offer here suffers from the same diffused focus as Davis’ last story, the visually impressive yet narratively cluttered “The Tomb of the Cybermen,” which introduced his seminal contribution to Cyberman lore, the Cybermat. A key component of this story, it is cute, cuddly, and oh so carnivorous.

Following directly on from “Genesis of the Daleks,” this story sees the Doctor, Sarah, and Harry appear back on Space Station Nerva, the Season Twelve leitmotif. Only the current version of Nerva contains quite a few more dead bodies than the one they left way back at the end of “The Ark in Space.” The Doctor surmises from the technology on display that they have arrived thousands of years before their last visit, when the station was used as a cryogenic ark to safeguard humanity against solar flares. They await the arrival of the TARDIS, which is travelling through time (yet remaining static in space) to meet up with them after their Time Lord-imposed sojourn on Skaro. In the interim, they explore the now-familiar hallways, discovering that there are only three humans left from whatever fate befell the space station.

In short order, the viewer learns that one of the survivors, Keller, has orchestrated the deaths as part of an overly-elaborate plan to lure the Cybermen to Nerva Beacon, built to warn passing spacecraft about the presence of Voga, a rogue planetoid captured by Jupiter’s gravity fifty years prior. The bait for the Cybermen turns out to be Voga itself, a planet whose copious gold reserves turned the tide of the Cyberwars some generations in the past. As the Doctor helpfully points out, the non-corrodible metal coats the breathing apparatus of Cybermen, suffocating them, and the combined forces of humanity and the Vogans used “glitter guns” to end the conflict. In the long years since, the Vogans have hidden deep within their wandering planet, in fear of the remnants of the Cyber Fleet.

One faction of Vogans, encountered by Keller during his exploration of the planet, wants to end that threat, so in exchange for gold (of course), Keller somehow contacts the ages-lost Cybermen offering the location of their arch nemesis. The Cybermen (again, somehow) send him a Cybermat with instructions to kill all but four people on the beacon. Meanwhile, the Vogan faction builds a rocket that they will use to destroy Nerva once the last remaining Cybermen are on board. And why do the Cybermen want four humans left alive? Because Cybermen don’t do manual labor, apparently—they want the humans to carry the Cyberbombs (yes, really), complete with trapped explosive harnesses, to the heart of Voga to blow it up.

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