Synopsis:
The Doctor, Ian and Susan have found Barbara's travel dial on the ground, and see that it has blood on it...
The doors behind them open and they are bathed in a harsh light, and hear a shrill noise. Venturing inside they find Barbara reclining on a couch, being served exotic refreshments. She explains that when she activated the travel dial she had panicked and tried to tear it off, scratching her hand.
This is the city of Morphoton, where people are granted anything they wish. A young man named Altos appears, and he confirms what Barbara has said. Susan asks for a new dress to be made from some beautiful fabric. The Doctor does not believe Altos, but suggests that he would like a laboratory replete with every known scientific apparatus.
That night as they sleep, female servants emerge and place small discs on their foreheads. Barbara's falls off. Seconds later they are bombarded with strange lights and sounds.
In the morning, Barbara discovers that the surroundings she thought luxurious are really squalid and ruinous. The beautiful dress she was given is just rags. However, her companions have not noticed any difference from the evening before. When she sees that Altos knows, she runs off.
The Doctor and Ian are shown an empty room, but see it as the laboratory which the Doctor asked for.
Nearby in a small chamber are a group of creatures which resemble brains with eyes on stalks. They are housed in glass containers, fed by special gasses.
They order Altos to capture and kill Barbara, as she has escaped their mental conditioning. The others are to become slaves. With no bodies, they rely on humans to work for them.
Barbara hides in a cellar where she meets a young woman named Sabetha. It was she who had failed to put the disc on her, and she is now awaiting punishment. She has one of the Conscience keys on a chain around her neck - the thing she had wanted most - and Barbara realises that she must be Arbitan's daughter. Altos arrives and tries to seize Barbara, but Sabetha knocks him out.
She finds Ian, but is horrified to find him bringing her before the Morpho creatures. Breaking free of his grip, she smashes their protective domes, killing them.
All the mental slaves are freed, including Altos, who it transpires is Sabetha's friend and another of Arbitan's agents.
As the people of Morphoton go on the rampage, the young couple agree to travel on with the TARDIS crew. However, the Doctor has decided to go on ahead to the fourth destination, to meet up with a friend of Altos' in the city of Millennius. Upset at being left behind by her grandfather, Susan uses her travel dial to leave ahead of the others.
She finds herself in a dense jungle. Within seconds, she is bombarded by screeching sounds...
Next episode: The Screaming Jungle
Written by: Terry Nation
Recorded: Friday 27th March 1964 - Lime Grove Studio D
First broadcast: 5:30pm, Saturday 18th April 1964
Ratings: 9.4 million / AI 60
Designer: Raymond P Cusick
Director: John Gorrie
Additional cast: Katharine Schofield (Sabetha), Robin Phillips (Altos), Heron Carvic (Voice of Morpho)
The main inspiration for this segment of the story is the Lotus-eaters, who feature in Book IX of Homer's The Odyssey. Odysseus and his men arrive at a land where the people do nothing but eat lotus flowers. When his men are encouraged to eat the flowers they become apathetic and don't want to leave, and Odysseus has to force them back onto the ship to continue their journey. Nation takes this further and has the luxury a form of deliberate trap, so that people can be rendered susceptible to mental, then physical, enslavement.
Some really bad scripting sees Barbara arrive in Morphoton, meet the locals and learn all about their culture - also finding time to change into a new dress, sepcially made for her - all within a matter of seconds. The others were right behind her, and the travel dials only allow you to reach other places, not times. She claims that she tore her dial off due to panic, but has then just left it lying on the ground outside - despite it being the vital link back to the TARDIS and therefore to home.
There's nothing to suggest that this is all due to the mental influence of the Morpho creatures. There was that strange son et lumiere effect as the big doors opened, so their mental processing has started, but this doesn't cover everything that could have happened to Barbara in so short a space of time.
The episode showcases Jacqueline Hill's Barbara, who is wrung through the emotional mill. She's the only member of the TARDIS crew who is not affected by the Morpho - which is ironic, as she was the first to arrive and so helped pave the way for her colleagues' near enslavement.
It had been decided that the regular cast would need to have their holidays scheduled into the production of various stories, now that the series was going to run for the entire year (in production for 48 weeks). As the star, William Hartnell got to go first, and his fortnight's break was added to Nation's scripts in rewrites by David Whitaker. The Doctor announces that he will go on ahead - thus excusing himself from the next two episodes.
For the scenes where we see both the luxurious setting, and the squalid one, Jacqueline Hill was recorded on the nice set, whilst the others moved to the ruined set. We never see all four characters on screen at the same time.
It was necessary to record these scenes out of order - rare for the time - which meant a longer editing process. To save on expensive edits it was always best to try to record the entire episode in story order. Watch enough early Doctor Who and you will see the tricks they used to achieve this, with certain characters going on ahead to a new set - giving the others time to catch up. Fade to blacks were also used - which were scheduled to allow foreign TV stations to insert ad breaks.
Once again Ray Cusick had to resort to black drapes as a background to the chamber where the Morpho creatures reside. They were built by Shawcraft. One of the glass domes was made from sugar glass, so that it could be seen to be smashed by Barbara.
Cusick had financial problems with the main set, when he was reprimanded by department heads for the use of expensive materials. You will see some caryatid statues are wrapped in coloured perspex tubes. The statues were from stock, but the perspex was costly.
On the ruined version of the set Cusick placed some stuffed rats, but the director objected to them and asked for them to be removed.
It was originally intended that a photo caption of a laboratory would be used for the Doctor and Ian to see, but they decided just to show a plain room, with a tin mug representing the advanced equipment.
A rare fluff from Jacqueline Hill this week: when talking to Sabetha she refers to a "deep form of... deep hypnosis".
- This was the final episode of Doctor Who to be broadcast on BBC TV. BBC 2 launched on the Monday following this episode, and so BBC had to rebrand as BBC 1.
- For the first time, the episode title and writer credit were shown over the opening titles, just as they faded to black.
- Terry Nation named the brain creatures "Morpho's" (sic) in his script. In Greek mythology Morpheus is the god of sleep and dreams, the son of Somnus. Because he fashioned images in peoples' dreams, his name also came to be associated with modelling and shaping. The devices which are placed on the travellers' foreheads are called "somnar discs".
- When Altos found Barbara in the cellar with Sabetha, he was scripted to threaten her with a knife. Following the controversy of Susan's threats to Ian with a pair of scissors in The Edge of Destruction, this was deleted.
- Heron Carvic was the pseudonym for writer Geoffrey Rupert William Harris, the creator of the "Miss Seeton" series of novels. She is an elderly lady detective akin to Miss Marple. Among his other acting credits was voicing Gandalf in the 1968 BBC radio adaptation of The Hobbit.
- Future Doctor Who writer Gareth Roberts once wrote a homoerotic novel using the title of this episode, under the pseudonym Christopher Summerisle. (He took the name from the classic folk horror film The Wicker Man in which Lord Summerisle is played by Christopher Lee).
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