Synopsis: The planet Karn is home to a secret Sisterhood who administer a sacred flame that can provide the secret to everlasting life. It’s also home to Dr Solon, a scientist with a very singular purpose – the resurrection of a Time Lord war criminal called Morbius. Only his brain survives, but Solon, with the help of his brutish servant Condo, has fashioned a monstrous new body to house the brain. All it needs is a compatible head – and the Doctor and Sarah have just dropped in for a visit…

Chapter Titles

• 1. A Graveyard of Spaceships
• 2. The Keepers of the Flame
• 3. The Horror Behind the Curtain
• 4. Captive of the Flame
• 5. Sarah to the Rescue
• 6. The Horror in the Crypt
• 7. Solon’s Trap
• 8. The Doctor Makes a Bargain
• 9. The Monster Walks
• 10. Monster on the Rampage
• 11. Deathlock!
• 12. A Time Lord Spell

Background: Terrance Dicks adapts his own scripts, which were hurried rewrites of scripts by Robert Holmes and broadcast in 1976 under the name ‘Robin Bland’.

Notes: The alien in the first scene is not specifically a ‘Mutt’ from The Mutants, but is identified as Kriz, a member of ‘The Race’, who are six-limbed mutant insects who ‘colonise, not conquer’ as they are a moral species, led by a ‘Great Mother, Goddess and Queen in one’. 

The sisterhood are dressed in black, not various shades of red as on screen. Maren uses a crystal ball. She enjoys immortality like the rest of the Sisterhood, but when they first discovered the secret of the flame, she was already old – hence why she looks ancient. Solon has made many clay busts of Morbius, destroying each one for not being right (yet he feels enthusiastic about his body for Morbius; maybe he just can’t draw fingers…).

The mind-wrestling battle skims over the other faces on the screen (you know the ones) without explanation, merely covered by Sarah having ‘a confused impression of even more faces on the screen’. Read after the events of The Timeless Children, it’s handy that Dicks saw not to lock down the identities of those other faces one way or the other. 

Cover: New artist Mike Little has a large portrait of the Fourth Doctor (using a photo reference from Robot) with Solon facing down the Morbius creature, all three outlined with a thick red line and electrical crackle (the red is dropped for later reprints). It’s a bit… basic compared to earlier efforts. The 1991 reprint cover used Alister Pearson’s gorgeously moody VHS cover, which shows the Doctor (as seen in Seeds of Doom) plus Solon, Maren, Sarah and the Morbius creature.

Final Analysis: It’s surely just a coincidence, or maybe just a product of the era being adapted, but Terrance Dicks follows Ian Marter’s debut with another horror novel. Considering the original script that Dicks wrote differed greatly from what became The Brain of Morbius, he resists the temptation to make sweeping changes to Robert Holmes’s transmitted version. What we get is a straightforward but sombre adaptation, not shying away from the more visceral descriptions, yet not quite reaching the levels of violence we enjoyed with Marter.

Although it’s purely transferring the TV characters to the page, we can note here that this story boasts by far the largest number of roles for women in this era (a period of three years where the overall ratio of female to male is roughly 1:6, excluding Sarah Jane, but where six entire stories feature no women guest characters at all). This is especially relevant as a reworking of the Frankenstein story, where the underlying subtext, created by a woman writer, was a man trying to create life by completely removing women from the process. Here, we have a man failing to create an authentic lifeform, hiding out mere feet from a community of women who have survived for centuries entirely without men. Our leading lady runs around literally blind to the horrors around her but the hero only survives thanks to a sacrifice on the part of the main female guest character.

Solon’s laboratory lacks the traditional lightning converters and sparks we might expect, but the Sisterhood’s own future is assured thanks to a ‘spark’ (in the form of a firework that clears a blockage in the flue of the sacred flame). All of this is present in both the TV story and this book too, but we’ll have to wait a while for the best adaptation of this. Clue: It’s aimed at much younger readers…