N.B. there might (or might not) be spoilers in this article!

It’s surely no coincidence that Steven Moffat chose to bring his previously unseen Doctor to life on Karn. The clip of The Brain of Morbius‘s mind-bending contest on the BBC programmes website might well somewhat sneakily cut the scene short, but the Beeb can’t hide these other hitherto unknown incarnations of the Doctor that easily!

“How far, Doctor? How long have you lived? … Your puny mind is powerless against the strength of Morbius … Back. Back. To your beginning!”

Morbius, The Brain of Morbius: Part Four

Even if Philip Hinchcliffe had not confirmed that it was the intention to imply they were pre-William Hartnell Doctors, the dialogue in the scene leads you to that conclusion. (‘Back. Back. To your beginning!,’ says Morbius.) The Doctor appears to be losing the contest and indeed nearly dies as a result of it. In fact, so close to death is he that Maran has to give up the remaining Elixir of Life to revive him – and we know how powerful that stuff is!

So maybe, when the President of the High Council said ‘Show me the earliest Doctor‘ back in The Three Doctors, he didn’t know there were previous incarnations? Or maybe Hartnell’s incarnation was the first time he called himself ‘Doctor’ (and therefore the earliest “Doctor”)?

Perhaps the Doctor we met in An Unearthly Child was merely the first in a new cycle of regenerations? Perhaps his previous set of lives is kept a secret even from the rest of the Time Lords and only a mind as powerful as Morbius’s can unlock it?

Or maybe that cutaway to Sarah means these are Morbius’s previous lives – as some have summised? Or perhaps we missed even more of the Doctor’s previous lives in that brief gap? Might we have seen The Curse of Fatal Death Doctors? The Shalka Doctor? Is one of those faces the protagonist of The Infinity Doctors?

That’s an awful lot of ‘perhaps’ and ‘maybes’, and yes many of them are too glib to be plausible attempts at ret-conning, no matter how much fun it might be, but my own loose take is that the faces in the contest are the Doctor (or at least the Time Lord we now know as the Doctor) and if they are, given what we know now, they could only be explained by being from an earlier regenerative cycle.

Of course, different heads is a theme throughout! The Doctor’s own previous ‘head’ is even discussed in the conversation he, Sarah and Solon have when they arrive at the scientist’s castle.

I might even go as far as to call that foreshadowing.

“Well, I have a feeling he’s keeping something else there too. Something far worse than a headless body.”

The Doctor, The Brain of Morbius: Part One

Whether it’s the graveyard of spaceships, close to where the Doctor and Sarah arrive on Karn (with the Doctor once again convinced the Time Lords have meddled in his affairs), the Sisterhood who caused it as they stop at nothing to protect their order or the manner in which Solon has cannibalised his victims to his and Morbius’s end, there’s an almost ruthless streak to The Brain of Morbius throughout. If a grim and foreboding atmosphere were not necessarily the most tangible evidence of this, then it’s plain in Solon’s mistreatment of Condo and in the graphic violence of his shooting. Arguably even more shocking is the Doctor’s deliberate poisoning of Solon with cyanide gas.

Of course The Brain of Morbius does have one enormous plot-hole – namely, why didn’t Solon simply use the Doctor’s body (or Condo’s for that matter)? – with perhaps its only other mis-step for me being that the Doctor twice falls for trusting Solon when really he should have known better. But I’m prepared to forgive it this given everything else about The Brain of Morbius is pretty much great: the sets, the costumes, the dialogue, the performances – does any other actor do quiet menace in Doctor Who as well as Philip Madoc?

Whether what’s on-screen is mostly Robert Holmes or Terrance Dicks’s work hardly matters – The Brain of Morbius is anything-but-bland. And with the character of Morbius, the Sisterhood of Karn (who I’ve not said much about but are brilliantly realised here), and its literally mind-bending revelation about the Doctor’s past, it greatly enriches the lore of the Time Lords. That it does so whilst telling a cracking Gothic tale into the bargain makes it seem almost as if such mythologising was done in passing, unlike the ‘mighty atom and a thunder flash’ with which the Doctor and Sarah leave Karn.

Son of Unearthly Times says …

"The Sisterhood of Karn – aren't those the people who helped the Eighth Doctor to regenerate?"

"Solon is so mean to Condo, calling him a 'chicken-brained biological disaster' and a 'chattering fool' – and then he shoots him in the guts!

"The way that the mind-bending contest goes and what Morbius says ('How long have you lived?') makes me think the faces are the Doctor's."

Son of UT Rating: 8/10