Trivia / Doctor Who S13 E5 "The Brain of Morbius"

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• Alan Smithee: The script was altered so much that Terrance Dicks asked that it be credited to "some bland pseudonym". Robert Holmes (who wrote the finished version) complied spectacularly, by crediting the serial to "Robin Bland". Supposedly Dicks found the pseudonym funny which led to him making up with Holmes.
• Blooper:
  • During the mindbending contest, Sarah Jane can be heard calling the Doctor "Tom". This is even subtitled on the DVD.
  • When Morbius is run off the cliff, Stuart Fell couldn't see what he was doing due to the limited visibility the Morbius suit gave him, misjudged his fall and collided with the camera.
• Creator Backlash: Director Christopher Barry admitted on the DVD Commentary that he regretted the scene in which blood explodes from Condo when he is shot at point-blank range by Solon.
• No Budget:
  • Due to the low budget, only a single professional dancer was hired and then copied in the scenes by actresses who had been chosen because of previous dancing experience.
  • Infamously, the decorative element on the chest of Maren's costume was made using plastic spoons spray-painted gold◊.
  • Though, all the doors in Solon's castle creak lovingly.
• On-Set Injury: According to Cynthia Grenville (who played Maren), Tom Baker nearly got set on fire during a stunt which required him to be in a funeral pyre which is set alight. The BBC effects department heavily fireproofed everything in the pyre, but the flames shot up in massive columns instead of creeping around in a circle around the Doctor's feet like they were supposed to. If Grenville hadn't broken character and yelled at Baker to jump until he did, he would have been seriously injured — the fire brigade had to be called in between takes. If you watch the sequence, you'll notice later shots of the pyre are a lot less fiery than the early long shot of the Doctor, especially shots with the Doctor in.
• Prop Recycling: Dicks’ ideas for the crab-like parts of Morbius' new body came from the Clawrantulars. They were creatures which, like the planet Karn, had appeared in the non-canon stage play Doctor Who and the Seven Keys to Doomsday.
• Reality Subtext: The plot kicks off when a religious fanatic looks up to make eye contact with the Doctor and becomes infatuated with his face. This is peculiarly similar to a formative experience Tom Baker recounts in his biography, where, as a monk forbidden to look at faces, he'd accidentally glanced up to see another novice and become infatuated with his face.
• Recycled Script: Like the previous serial, this features a genius Mad Scientist who treats bodies like playthings and has a complex about creation and destruction, along with his sympathetic assistant who was rescued from a spaceship accident by the scientist and is missing a body part. The servant then goes through a Heel–Face Turn upon discovering that the body part was actually accounted for all along. These similarities were because both scripts had to be heavily edited by Robert Holmes, who wrote most of the material between Styggron and Crayford in "The Android Invasion" to pad out the run time, and who adapted "The Brain of Morbius" to feature a mad scientist/The Igor pair to reduce the required budget; presumably he'd had this dynamic on the brain.
• Serendipity Writes the Plot: In the original script, Morbius' new body was cobbled together by his devoted robot servant. But it was the cheap story of the season, so they couldn't afford a robot costume as well as Morbius' body. So it was heavily rewritten to make the robot a human mad scientist (played by Philip Madoc, resulting in a classic story).
• Troubled Production: This story was largely the result of two writers having a falling out. Terrance Dicks submitted a story concerning a robot building a new body for a Time Lord war criminal currently stuck as a disembodied brain, but the serial got stuck as the Bottle Episode of the season, so to save money the script editor Robert Holmes rewrote it from the ground up to replace the robot with a human character. This enraged Dicks, who felt the rewrite opened up massive plot holes — he saw the story as a Turned Against Their Masters scenario about a robot that cannot understand beauty building a new body for his master, while a human would be able to understand Morbius would rather be in a better body — and was also upset about how Holmes' rewrite turned the story into more of a Hammer Horror pastiche than science fiction. Eventually Dicks realised he'd lost the argument and suggested Holmes replace his name on the script with 'some bland pseudonym', so Holmes passive-aggressively credited the story to "Robin Bland". Whatever his problems with the story, Dicks found the pseudonym hilarious.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Peter Cushing, Freddie Jones, Christopher Lee and Vincent Price were on the wishlist for Solon.
  • Bernard Bresslaw was considered for Condo.
  • Terrance Dicks' version involved a space criminal called Morbius crashlanding onto a planet, and his robot servant — who lacks any sense of aesthetics — assembling a new body from different aliens despite their different biologies.
  • Philip Hinchcliffe has said that he attempted to get some unspecified famous actors to appear as the faces seen during the mindbending contest. He was unsuccessful and photos of members of the production team were used instead.
• You Look Familiar: Philip Madoc had already appeared in "The Krotons" and "The War Games".

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