Ooh, time to unleash my special interest. I have some trivia about this episode.
The plot of this one is that Morbius is an alien who's keeping himself alive inside the amalgamated body of a bunch of aliens like a sorta space Frankenstein. He wants to kidnap the Doctor because he wants to stick his dying brain into the Doctor's basically immortal body.
At one point, the Doctor is jammed into a machine and a bunch of faces get displayed - all previous actors to play the Doctor and also a bunch of previously unseen incarnations.
Dr Who would eventually establish a hard rule for how many times a timelord could regenerate before they'd just die instead only to hand wave it away a bunch of times. Fans would spend years debating whether these were past Doctors and thus how many the Doctor had left before he'd die.
So... a few series back there was a controversial twist that the Doctor is not in fact a timelord but instead some other unnamed thing and that the timelords had wiped the memory over the course of their history as they used the Doctor as a source of their immortality. In that episode they retconned the incarnations shown in "the Brain of Morbius" as being from the before the Doctor's memory was erased.
Ooh, time to unleash my special interest. I have some trivia about this episode.
The plot of this one is that Morbius is an alien who's keeping himself alive inside the amalgamated body of a bunch of aliens like a sorta space Frankenstein. He wants to kidnap the Doctor because he wants to stick his dying brain into the Doctor's basically immortal body.
At one point, the Doctor is jammed into a machine and a bunch of faces get displayed - all previous actors to play the Doctor and also a bunch of previously unseen incarnations.
Dr Who would eventually establish a hard rule for how many times a timelord could regenerate before they'd just die instead only to hand wave it away a bunch of times. Fans would spend years debating whether these were past Doctors and thus how many the Doctor had left before he'd die.
So... a few series back there was a controversial twist that the Doctor is not in fact a timelord but instead some other unnamed thing and that the timelords had wiped the memory over the course of their history as they used the Doctor as a source of their immortality. In that episode they retconned the incarnations shown in "the Brain of Morbius" as being from the before the Doctor's memory was erased.
I knew about the faces from this episode, but didn't know they'd retconned them because I really haven't cared about the latest seasons of Doctor Who.
Now I'm also wondering whether The Deadly Assassin was the first story to mention the 13 regenerations thing.
According to the giganerds on the Tardis wiki, it was.