User:NateBumber/Sandbox/Morbius I

A draft of a merge of the Imperator into First Morbius. – n8 (☎) 19:45, 8 September 2021 (UTC)

In his original incarnation, Lord President Morbius declared himself the Imperator and attempted to overturn Gallifrey's non-interference policy in favour of military conquest, a controversial move which sparked the Time Lords' first and greatest Civil War. He failed and was exiled. Forming a new army of non-Gallifreyans, he began calling himself the General and attempted to resume his conquest of the universe, but he was defeated and executed.

Early life
Morbius was born to the Patrex Chapter (PROSE: The Legacy of Gallifrey) and House Dvora. He was one of four renegades of his generation, caused by mutations in the breeding-engines. (PROSE: The Book of the War)

Like all Time Lords, Morbius was taken from his family at the age of eight for the selection process in the Drylands. Staring into the Untempered Schism as part of a Time Lord initiation rite, Morbius was said by one Time Lord historian to have been driven mad by what he saw in the Schism. (PROSE: A Brief History of Time Lords)

As a child, he was friends with his housemate Thessalia. (PROSE: The Return of the King)

Political career
Following Rassilon's abdication from the head of the Presidency, the nature of the High Council's membership was refined and codified with Rassilon's former Cardinal and fellow Prydonian, Pandad, as the first regular Lord President. The Council would now include four Councillors, and the charismatic Morbius was one of those four.

However, unlike his fellow members of the High Council, Morbius disapproved of much of Rassilon's new order, wanting a more egalitarian Gallifreyan society. He argued that all Chapters should be represented on the Council equally, and also that the Eye of Harmony should be unlocked so that all remaining Gallifreyans could be given the ability to regenerate, rather than it remaining a privilege of the bloodlines which Rassilon had personally favoured.

His ambition and personality, which sharply contrasted with the sedate and conservative traditions of the Great Houses, earned him a following, (PROSE: The Book of the War) and almost despite himself, Morbius became a sort of populist cult-leader as he continued defending these policies. (PROSE: The Legacy of Gallifrey) Over time, he also began advocating a belief that Time Lords should take advantage of their power to conquer the universe (TV: The Brain of Morbius) and reshape history itself to better suit the Houses' needs and interest, regardless of the Protocols. (PROSE: The Book of the War)

Though Lord President Pandad might have considered granting Morbius his earliest demands for better Chapter representation and the spreading of regeneration, he could not condone Morbius's eventual demand for the Presidency itself. Pandad ordered him exiled, alongside some of his more vocal supporters, hoping that this show of force would quench the brewing rebellion. According to one account, Pandad was successful; (PROSE: The Legacy of Gallifrey) by another account, Morbius succeeded in becoming head of the High Council, with one Saran as his Vice President. (PROSE: Warmonger)

He declared himself Imperator, although Thessalia claimed he fancied the title War King. He created the Order of the Weal for her to lead. (PROSE: The Return of the King)

While based on Gallifrey, Morbius formed a personal army of mercenaries, bought by his promises of time travel and immortality, (PROSE: Warmonger) although he never promised to bring these members of the lesser species into his bloodline. He encouraged his following to regard him personally as a god, (PROSE: The Book of the War) and they came to be known as the Cult of Morbius. (TV: The Brain of Morbius, PROSE: Warmonger)

The Civil War
According to one account, President Morbius's own High Council, disapproving of the path he had taken, decided to betray him and attempted to have him exiled. (PROSE: Warmonger) His own Order of the Weal, still led by Thessalia, denounced him in front of the ruling Houses. (PROSE: The Book of the War) In return, Morbius and his followers abandoned Gallifrey and attacked hundreds of cultures in the outside world in the name of the greater good. (PROSE: Warmonger, The Book of the War) Taking on the alias of "the General", Morbius recruited an army of space pirates with which he ransacked more and more planets, gaining more followers and armies in the process. (PROSE: Warmonger)

The stagnant society of the Great Houses struggled to understand these events. After a prolonged period of paralysis, the ruling Houses decided to act. (PROSE: The Book of the War) Uncomfortable with being seen to act directly in the universe, the Time Lord High Council pulled the Fifth Doctor into Gallifrey's past and appointed him "Supreme Coordinator of the Alliance Battle Fleet", director of an unlikely army of humans, Draconians, Cybermen, Ogrons, Ice Warriors and Sontarans against Morbius. The Time Lords also providing the Doctor with financial support and a flagship. (PROSE: Warmonger)

According to the Scrolls of Gallifrey, Morbius had been exiled by Lord President Pandad as soon as he had made his bid for the Presidency, though he then claimed the title of President-in-exile. Escaping his exile, Morbius and his Cult assembled an "army of evil" with which to take the Capitol by force and returned to Gallifrey ready to attack, starting the Time Lords' great Civil War. Pandad took the lead of Gallifrey's armies against Morbius's own force, which mostly comprised of alien lifeforms.

The war dragged on for many years and claimed the lives of untold numbers of Time Lords, Gallifreyans, and other sentients. (PROSE: The Legacy of Gallifrey) Planets involved in the conflict included Fangoria, Romark, Darkeen, Martak and Freedonia, which provided troops for Morbius, and Sylvana, Zandir, Tanith and Electra, which fell to him. (PROSE: Warmonger)

In the end, the last of Morbius's forces were forced by the last of Pandad's to the planet Karn for a final clash during which the better part of both armies died, as did Karn's native population. The only local institution or population to survive the clash of Time Lords was the Sisterhood of Karn, (PROSE: The Legacy of Gallifrey) who had originated on Gallifrey itself, (PROSE: Cat's Cradle: Time's Crucible) and helped the Alliance defeat Morbius, (PROSE: Warmonger) who throughout all these events was still in his first incarnation. (TV: The Brain of Morbius)

Trial and execution
Although the grisly verdict had been decided in advance, (PROSE: Warmonger) Morbius was still put on trial, by the Sisterhood of Karn, (PROSE: Warmonger) with the Sisterhood's leader Maren attending the execution personally. (TV: The Brain of Morbius) The sentence of death by public and ceremonial disintegration was in part a panicked attempt by the Time Lords to caution the universe at large against ever opposing them. It was the first deliberate killing of a member of the Great Houses since their society's foundation. (PROSE: The Book of the War)

With Morbius encased in a dispersal chamber, Pandad climbed atop one of Karn's cliffs to grandiosely deliver the verdict in a public address. But before he could do so, Pandad became lost in the momentousness of what he had to say, misjudged his footing, and plummeted to his death. Pandemonium erupted, but Cardinal Helron, one of Pandad's High Council, seemed to manage to activate the execution machine before Morbius could take advantage of the confusion to escape; (PROSE: The Legacy of Gallifrey) Morbius's body was publicly atomised "to the nine corners of the universe". (TV: The Brain of Morbius)

Post-mortem
However, Morbius actually escaped death: one of his followers, the human surgeon Mehendri Solon, had secretly removed Morbius' brain prior to his disintegration. (TV: The Brain of Morbius, PROSE: Warmonger) Solon had secretly been aided by the Fifth Doctor, who knew that Morbius's brain had to survive in order to keep history on track. (PROSE: Warmonger) Solon stayed on Karn in hiding, where he began planning to build a new body for Morbius. Once reborn in this makeshift body, Morbius entered a mindbending duel with the Fourth Doctor during which he was mentally regressed to his earlier, more humanoid face. (TV: The Brain of Morbius)

Legacy
The Fourth Doctor described Morbius as "one of the most despicable criminally minded wretches that ever lived", though Solon noted that members of the surviving Cult of Morbius begged to differ. (TV: The Brain of Morbius)

His career was the first in millennia to dramatically alter Houses' relations with the wider universe. His reign shook House society to its core, leading to the formation of groups such as House Paradox and interventionists (PROSE: The Book of the War) like the Celestial Intervention Agency. (PROSE: Warmonger) It also set precedent for the creation of unimaginably violent and dangerous weapons for the War in Heaven. (PROSE: The Book of the War)

The Book of the War described him as one of the original renegades, describing his monomaniacal "Imperator presidency" without mentioning his name. (PROSE: The Book of the War)

The result of the Imperator's trial inspired such great regret in Thessalia that she committed suicide in one incarnation, and toward the end of her life she obsessively talked to Larissa about him and the upcoming War. (PROSE: Newtons Sleep)

The black, friable spires of Yarvelling's Church from Skaro were a fragment of the Last Great Time War. According to one account, the Eighth Doctor saw the Cathedral fused with fragments of Morbius' Red Capitol in the backwater where he triggered the Moment. (PROSE: Doctor Who and the Time War)

Appearance
Morbius's original Gallifreyan body appeared as a middle-aged man with a strong forehead and sunken eyes. He had short, dark hair and prominent cheekbones. (TV: The Brain of Morbius) He was "slightly under medium height" with a high domed head and "classically handsome features". Prior to being deposed, he dressed in the traditional outfit of a President of Gallifrey, wearing the Presidential robes, the Sash of Rassilon and the Coronet of Rassilon, and carrying the Rod of Rassilon. (PROSE: Warmonger)

Personality
According to the Fifth Doctor, Morbius had "tremendous charisma and almost hypnotic powers of persuasion" and was a "military genius". (PROSE: Warmonger) In his next body, Morbius would look back on his glory days as a man who had "dreamed the greatest dreams in history". (TV: The Brain of Morbius)

Behind the scenes

 * No actor was cast as the original incarnation of Morbius in The Brain of Morbius: the face glimpsed in the mindbending duel is visibly not a human actor but the clay bust earlier seen in the hands of Mehendri Solon.