The fourth and final episode of The Brain of Morbius made its debut today in 1976 - and what a lot it's got to answer for. We didn't know it at the time, but for many people this is when Doctor Who was irreparably broken.
The Doctor engages fellow Time Lord Morbius in a mental duel, wherein both try to push the other back through their regenerations. After seeing Pertwee, Troughton and Hartnell, another 8 faces are seen. They are all white males, some wearing different historical costumes. Writer Robert Holmes and Producer Philip Hinchcliffe (who are two of the people seen, along with six other production team members) intended this sequence to show that there had been incarnations of the Doctor prior to Hartnell. However, everything in the programe up to that point had indicated this to be wrong. The Time Lords even refer to Hartnell's as the earliest incarnation, in The Three Doctors. As it is, it is Morbius who loses the contest, so it was easy enough to say that these faces were really his previous incarnations.
However, this wasn't enough for Chris Chibnall, who felt the need to address this scene and have a multitude of previous incarnations, which the Doctor did not know about because the memories of them had all been removed by a Time Lord faction - which then became a much wider faction even bigger than the Time Lords.
The Doctor set out to get these memories back - only to not want to know them when she got them.
There is now a rumour doing the rounds about where this takes us next - but I'll talk about that separately...
Back to saner times, Spearhead From Space also concluded with its fourth instalment today in 1970, as did Warriors' Gate in 1981.
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