CS Weekly Archive > DVD > 10/24/08

A Botched Operation

by jason davis

Doctor Who: The Brain of Morbius

Robin Bland (aka Terrance Dicks)

The time-travelling Doctor (Tom Baker) and his friend Sarah Jane Smith (Elisabeth Sladen) arrive on the desolate planet Karn, where the deranged scientist Solon (Philip Madoc) seeks to restore the brain of a deposed despot with a ramshackle body of his own design.  Sadly, the stitch-up in which Solon seeks to implant Morbius’ evil brain could serve as a metaphor for writer Terrance Dicks’ teleplays after script editor Robert Holmes was forced to re-work them for production.  Though both men were consummate television scribes, the fact-filled documentary “Getting Ahead” recounts how the four-part storyline suffered some severe lapses in logic when producer Philip Hinchcliffe nixed a key plot point, forcing Holmes to borrow from Frankenstein to patch the holes in Dicks’ plot.  Though the resulting story is rich in mood, thanks mainly to Karn’s mysterious Sisterhood and their Elixir of Life, the tale suffers from a predictable plot and almost operatic moments of mania from the entertaining but over-the-top Solon.

Doctor Who: The Brain of Morbius
BBC Video

Not rated; 99 min.

$24.98

Buy it now

Jason Davis has been the DVD Manager for CS Weekly, a contributing editor for Creative Screenwriting Magazine, and has written for Cinescape.com, MSN.com, and created the TV series Studio 13, which ran on Lorne Michaels' Burly TV network. He lives in the small space left over by his ever-expanding library of books, movies, and music.

Doctor Who: The Brain of Morbius courtesy BBC Video

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