Review by Cavan Gilbey

Now I like The Brain of Morbius quite a bit, as I imagine many fans do, but I have never quite understood the frequent clamouring for the eponymous villainous Time Lord to return. He’s a great presence in that debut serial because he was a brain in a jar, seemingly punished by the people of Gallifrey with great anger and viciousness thus leaving him reduced to such a state. His appeal stems from this great mystery about who he really was before becoming a Futurama celebrity head-in-a-jar, putting him back in a humanoid body just makes him essentially another Master or Omega really. Now Big Finish have brought back the character a couple of times, most recently with the Dark Gallifrey stuff giving him a whole three dedicated episodes; which I haven’t heard. But bringing him to the Time War offers up a potentially interesting set of interpretations of what you can do with him; is he a resurrected weapon, a manipulative background player or even a Dalek sympathiser?

After having heard Morbius the Mighty, the latest entry in the War Doctor saga and penned by Tim Foley, I’m not entirely sure of why this story needed to have him as a villain.

The word I would use to some up my thought about this story is ‘obligation’. There’s a sense of this story just existing to give Morbius a chance to fight the War Doctor because we’ve seen ‘War’ incarnations of the other predominant Time Lord characters. Hell, the Doctor and Morbius don’t even really meet in a true sense and when they do the script resorts to just making both characters recite The Wrath of Khan at each other. There’s a few recent Big Finish stories that feel made this way, but they also don’t go on for three hours.

Crucially there isn’t enough story to cover three hour long episodes of Doctor Who, not when episodes one and two repeat themselves quite a bit. That isn’t to say there aren’t good concepts introduced, I especially like this idea of a group of hybrid Robomen becoming a third player in the way and attempting to wipe out both sides to cease the conflict. That idea alone could easily make for a solid enough two-parter but as a small element of a wider story it feels undercooked, as does this element of the Doctor being unable to time-travel due to an illness. I feel like if Morbius has been a threat committing his actions in a different time period and the Doctor is stuck in a decaying future then Morbius may have felt like more of a true threat that the Doctor had to use their brain to deal with. Instead he ends up just feeling like an angry ghost who occasionally menaces our hero.

The cast really hold this one together. With Carley continuing to be one of the best recasts the company has ever done, he’s really found a great characterisation for this incarnation that still feels like the one we knew Hurt played near the end of the character’s lifespan. Samuel West does a great job as Morbius, carrying a strong sense of menace and hatred in the way that he spits out every rage-filled line of dialogue. I just wish the script was juicier for him. Shelia Ruskin’s Cora provides a bit of an emotional  core to the story, with Ruskin playing the role with an almost motherly sensibility towards the Doctor at points.

At the end of the day I came away from this story merely acknowledging that I had heard it. There’s nothing inherently wrong with Morbius the Mighty but it is hardly going to be setting anyone’s world on fire. A rare misstep from Tim Foley, who is usually one of the best regular writers Big Finish work with.

6/10

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Review: The War Doctor Begins – Comrades in Arms

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