Theory:Doctor Who television discontinuity and plot holes/The Brain of Morbius


 * Morbius' globe head falls apart when he tumbles over the cliff edge, and the camera bounces.
 * He's just been through a fight and is falling off a cliff. He's entitled to a structural defect after that. The camera bounce can simply be indicative of the dramatic nature of his falling.


 * Why doesn't Solon just put the brain into the Doctor's head?
 * Because Solon wanted to give Morbius various other biological advantages in his new body.
 * However, a simple transplant would have likely given Morbius the ability to regenerate again, so Solon's decision is still suspect.
 * Who knows what additional biological advantages beyond regeneration Solon's creation possesses? It might not look very impressive, but for all we know it could be virtually immortal and indestructible, or possess other fantastic abilities besides which the ability to regenerate is practically nothing.
 * Solon does not know how many bodies the Doctor has left and he probably does not want to risk the possibility that he is on his last.
 * Furthermore, Solon is a deranged egotist with a perverse artistic streak, who expresses great pleasure at the notion of "creating" Morbius anew. Building a new, albeit hideous, body, would be a far more effective way for him to demonstrate his full range of surgical expertise and (twisted) creativity.
 * Perhaps Solon likes the Doctor's head but not the rest of him? Let's face it, he's a bit weird, it wouldn't be wholly out of character for him to focus on acquiring one 'perfect' part from an otherwise 'flawed' whole rather than just putting the brain in the 'flawed' body.
 * Also, let's be honest, a bit of sunk-cost fallacy. Solon's spent years in lonely desolate isolation cobbling together his new Morbius body from whatever scraps he can find with the only available company being some fanatical matriarchial time-luddites, a pompous bullying megalomaniacal brain and a one-armed Igor he clearly has very little respect for. After all that time, effort, discomfort and fanatical crazed energy going into this project, the idea of just binning it and doing what's comparatively just a little bit of basic brain-swap surgery has to be a little deflating, underwhelming and anti-climactic.


 * The Sisterhood member Morbius kills does not seem to notice him until he attacks her, in spite of the grunting and growling he makes as he approaches her.
 * Clearly Morbius is intelligent and stealthy. This is not the first run-in he has had with the Sisterhood                    and,  fully aware of his surroundings, could sneak up on her as well as he did.


 * Surely it's worth mentioning one of the biggest discontinuities in the entire series, the Morbius Doctors. Going 'Back to the beginning!', Morbius runs through the 4th, 3rd, 2nd, and 1st Doctors' faces, and then 8 more (who happened to look just like the current production team, but that in itself isn't a discontinuity). They were clearly meant to be the 1st through 8th Doctor, meaning that what we think of as the 4th was actually the 12th. Which was fine, up until The Deadly Assassin told us that he only gets 13 bodies, The Five Doctors (and later stories) told us that the 5th actually was the 5th rather than the 13th.
 * General fan consensus is that these are Morbius's past incarnations. In any case, The Five Doctors showed us that whole new cycles of regeneration were available with the consent of high-ranking Time Lords or by such means as those used by in The Keeper of Traken.
 * Well, not so much anymore.
 * Even if an earlier Doctor is in there, it doesn't necessarily mean an earlier regeneration. It could just be First Doctor as a younger man.


 * Having just rewatched this, there is no way you can interpret those as Morbius's faces. "How far Doctor? How long have you lived?" And the idea that all 8 faces were the first Doctor is even more implausible--they look nothing alike. The intent of the scene is obvious and unmistakable. (And even if it weren't, we know that the production team intended it that way because they've told us so.) But the original question assumes there's no way to retcon this, and there's at least one obvious way: They could be previous reincarnations of the Other. In fact, Morbius's discovering that the Doctor goes back much further than he expected--and that he really is dealing with a fellow "Time Lord of the First Rank", or even more than that--neatly explains his bizarre reactions better than anything the writers at the time could have intended. I don't know if Platt intended that retcon or not, but it works. And it's probably not the only one that works. And if you can charge this story with a discontinuity on the basis of continuity only invented in future stories, I don't see why you shouldn't be allowed to resolve it the same way.
 * You absolutely can interpret those as Morbius's faces. Just because he's giving some "trash talk" to his opponent at the time doesn't really tell us anything. Sure, we know what the production crew intended, and we also have various way it could be interpreted (explained above and on several other pages in this wiki). Truth is, we don't know how mind-bending works, as to who's images are being shown at any given moment.So speculate all you like, but again - this alleged discontinuity has been explained numerous ways and in numerous places.
 * Evidently both EU and subsequent material has dispensed with the 'Morbius faces' theory.
 * Possibly the biggest continuity screw-up with the "unseen Doctors" theory, aside from the following season's decision to retcon Time Lord regenerations to a limited number (thus contradicting multiple statements of the Doctor's alleged immortality from the Troughton era), is the declaration of the President from "The Three Doctors" that the Hartnell version is the "earliest Doctor." However, given what "The Deadly Assassin" would reveal about the Doctor's black ops background, and the ease with which a determined renegade Time Lord can delete their own data from the Capitol archives, there is no reason to suppose even a Lord President should necessarily know everything about the Doctor. On the whole, and especially given the later direction both the classic and new series would take in deepening the mysteries around the Doctor (Cartmel Masterplan, etc), the Morbius "Doctors" play pretty well into the narrative.


 * They cannot be previous incarnations of Morbious, however, they can be the faces of the Doctors teachers, lecturers and family members."Going back to your very beginning".


 * considering Morbius collapsed before the doctor, it would be reasonable to assume the doctor had overpowered him and was showing Morbius his own past faces.
 * It is quite clear that Morbius is winning.
 * That's what he thought, too.
 * Evidently the Timeless Children and also Lungbarrow contradict this.


 * The Solonian mutant in episode one is pretty hard to reconcile with the plot of "The Mutants" itself, which depicted the Solonians as an ancient but non-technological race. Even assuming this to be a later story in which they have acquired technology, it would make precious little sense for one of them to go space-faring while in its vulnerable, transitionary insectoid form. It would be tempting to dismiss it as a totally different species that just looks the same, did the script not confirm it, albeit clumsily: "Poor Mutt ... a mutant insect species." Nor is it particularly fortunate scripting that the Doctor uses the Earth Empire's racist term for a Solonian mutant. It gives the impression that Robert Holmes wanted to allude to "The Mutants" visually, but could barely remember the actual story.


 * What exactly was the Doctor's line of thinking in believing that killing Solon with poison gas would somehow help him and Sarah escape? If Solon had died during an earlier phase of the operation when the Morbius brain was not fully repaired, then Morbius would have either died or remained a brute, leaving their situation unchanged. And even in the scenario where the operation was completed before Solon died, how would the Doctor have known that Morbius would have come down to confront him and Sarah and not left them to die of dehydration or (more likely) the fumes from the gas? If anything, keeping Solon alive likely would have granted them a greater chance of escape.