The classic Doctor Who story ‘The Brain of Morbius’ included a sequence which seemed to depict some unknown incarnations of the Doctor. Who were these people, and what was the true intention behind their inclusion?
In ‘The Brain of Morbius,’ the Doctor comes up against a renegade Time Lord who survives only as brain housed inside a Frankenstein-style body. He has been preserved by a slightly unhinged surgeon known as Mehendri Solon on the planet Karn and, to cut a long story short, there is a sequence in which the Doctor challenges Morbius to a mind-bending contest – the equivalent of a duel, except the fighting is done with their brains.
And in ‘The Brain of Morbius,’ this contest all plays out on a screen which displays various images from both the Doctor and Morbius’ consciousnesses, during the course of which some faces appear. Some of these are familiar; there is the incumbent Time Lord Tom Baker, followed by Jon Pertwee, then Patrick Troughton, then William Hartnell, and then… a complete stranger.
In reality, the extra faces that appeared in ‘The Brain of Morbius’ were production unit manager George Gallaccio, script editor Robert Holmes, production assistant Graeme Harper, director Douglas Camfield, producer Philip Hinchcliffe, production assistant Christopher Baker, writer Robert Banks Stewart and director Christopher Barry. But why were they included?
Well, the producer Philip Hinchcliffe has confirmed that he intended these faces to be earlier incarnations of the Doctor, and Hinchcliffe did intend to imply that William Hartnell was not the first incarnation, and that there had been others before him.
Interestingly, fandom was not overly concerned with this potentially canon-changing moment from ‘The Brain of Morbius,’ maybe because it was subtle, and left open to interpretation. Because, on watching the sequence, one could well believe that these faces belonged to the Time Lord Morbius, or they may even have been memories of someone else entirely. It was left to the viewer’s imagination.
Certainly, the canonical plot points embedded into the rest of the Classic series seem to confirm that William Hartnell was the very first Doctor, and there is nothing else in the rest of Classic Who which suggests there were any earlier incarnations. Indeed, one of the most famous lines attesting to this fact comes from the First Doctor himself in ‘The Five Doctors‘ when he says, “As it happens, I am the Doctor – the original, you might say!”
And when Doctor Who returned in 2005, this sense of continuity was maintained. All of the sequences which showed the Doctor’s faces (such as in ‘The Next Doctor’ and ‘The Eleventh Hour‘) showed the Time Lords in order, with William Hartnell as the first. The companion Clara Oswald also maintained this fact when she entered the Doctor’s timestream in ‘The Name of the Doctor’ and saw all of his other incarnations, and confirmed that Matt Smith was the eleventh.
It wasn’t until 2013 that the numbering began to change with the introduction of the War Doctor played by John Hurt – a ‘forgotten’ incarnation, as it were, because the Time Lord didn’t refer to himself as the Doctor when he fought in the Time War.
And so, at this point in the series’ history, the more plausible explanation for ‘The Brain of Morbius’ sequence was that these faces must have belonged to Morbius, and not the Doctor.
However, this idea went out of the window with the 2020 episode ‘The Timeless Children,’ in which the writer Chris Chibnall revealed that William Hartnell was not, in fact, the First Doctor and that there had been many others – possibly hundreds – before him. And ‘The Brain or Morbius’ was doubtless one of the inspirations behind this development.
The idea proved divisive among fans in a way that the original ‘Brain of Morbius’ sequence was not, perhaps because ‘The Timeless Children’ wasn’t subtle or implicit with the information it presented; it concretely rewrote Doctor Who history as fans understood it and, effectively, told people to like it and accept it, even if it didn’t quite make sense.
And of course, in the context of the wider Doctor Who canon, it doesn’t make sense, even with ‘The Brain of Morbius’ sequence. There are countless moments that a fan could point to which make it tricky for the First Doctor to be anything other than the First Doctor, one point being the aforementioned scene in which Clara entered the Doctor’s timestream and didn’t see any of these hundreds of other incarnations.
What, then, are we to make of the faces from ‘The Brain of Morbius’? Well, for fans of the revelation from ‘The Timeless Children,’ it does fit quite nicely; the images of Hinchcliffe, Holmes, Harper et al. can all be explained away as forgotten, previously unseen incarnations of the eponymous Time Lord.
But for those who have difficulty coming to terms with the idea, it is easier to say that the ‘Brain of Morbius’ faces were simply some of Morbius’ earlier incarnations, and in fact this has been one of the more commonly-held and accepted interpretations since ‘The Brain of Morbius’s transmission.
And if one wanted to take it a step further, there is also the possibility that the information given in ‘The Timeless Children’ was a complete fabrication. The Master, who told the Doctor about her so-called ‘forgotten’ past, could have been telling lies. Moreover, it’s worth remembering that he got his information from the Matrix, the Gallifreyan data store, which has been invaded, altered and tampered with several times in Who history, ‘The Trial of a Time Lord’ being one of the more obvious examples.
There is also the suggestion put forward in ‘The Giggle‘ that the Celestial Toymaker may have been behind the ‘Timeless Children’ plot revelations, and indeed the faces from ‘The Brain of Morbius.’ In the episode, the Toymaker tells the Doctor that he made a jigsaw out of his history, implying that he has been manipulating the Doctor’s past and turning it into a perplexing mess. The writer Russell T Davies stated in the episode’s commentary that he deliberately included this line to give fans ‘an out’ for some of the show’s more baffling pieces of seemingly contradictory continuity.
In short, we may never know the truth behind the faces in ‘The Brain of Morbius,’ and in a way that’s a good thing – the show is called Doctor Who, after all! It wouldn’t be the best idea to reveal too much about his identity.
But tell us what you think. Did the ‘Brain of Morbius’ faces really belong to the Doctor, or someone else? How do you interpret the mind-bending sequence from this classic adventure? Let us know in the comments below.
In short we may never know the truth behind the faces in The Brain of Morbius, but we do though, they’re faces of the Doctor. When those 8 faces were appearing on the screen Morbius said “Back, back to your beginning” talking about the Doctor, not himself. The First Doctor not being the very first incarnation doesn’t ruin anything, because it’s what happened to his character from An Unearthly Child and onwards that truly matters. The incarnations before him worked for a shady black ops organisation, serving for the glory of Gallifrey, a very different life to the one the First Doctor had. Yes an unknown number of the Pre-Hartnell Doctors used the name Doctor, but remember when the Fugitive Doctor came to Earth, and she regained her identity back, the TARDIS would’ve been translating whatever she said (Gallifreyan) to English, so the Gallifreyan word for Doctor might be a scientific name, or maybe multiple Gallifreyan scientific names can translate to Doctor, because Doctor doesn’t just mean a healer or wise man, it can also mean a scientist. So who says that the name Doctor meant the same thing to the Pre-Hartnell Doctors than it did to the Post-Hartnell Doctors. The only actual similar trait the Fugitive Doctor had to the Post-Hartnell Doctors is not using weapons, at least at the time of Fugitive of the Judoon, as she had just left the Division. But when she was working for them there’s no doubt that she and her previous incarnations would’ve used weapons.
I am convinced that those faced were indeed Morbius and displayed when he (Morbius) was getting the upper hand in the game. I do not accept the Timeless Children rubbish and advocate it be discarded.