Considering Dicks’s initial involvement with ‘The Brain of Morbius’ (3), I’d been hoping to see glimpses of an earlier version sneaking through, especially as, according to Shannon Sullivan, Dicks felt Holmes’s changes did ‘great damage to the central ideas of the story’ (4). As it turns out, Dicks must either have been simply overstating his case in anger or have later come round to Holmes’s way of thinking because this is an even more faithful novelisation than Doctor Who and the Carnival of Monsters.

    That doesn’t, however, mean that nothing’s different. The most obvious change comes with the treatment of Kriz, the injured survivor of the spaceship crash at the very beginning. Not only is he now not a mutt, but Dicks lavishes a lot of effort on describing the poor unfortunate’s race in the two pages before he’s butchered – they’re a ‘great civilisation’, all ‘order, cooperation and selfless hard work’ (5), too ‘moral’ for conquest (6), even as their need for new lands has become desperate (7). On top of that, Kriz’s death itself is a sad spectacle, what with him begging for his life to be saved, greeting his murderer with the intergalactic sign of peace and emitting ‘a high-pitched whistling scream’ on realising he’s doomed (8). It can’t help but all reflect very badly on Condo, who kills Kriz, and Maren, who dragged his ship down to Karn in a way that would probably have killed him anyway (9).

    Looking at Condo first, he undergoes much the same arc as in the broadcast episodes – from thuggish sidekick though Sarah-stroker to hero who dies momentarily saving our protagonists – but each stage is a little more extreme in the novelisation. As he spies Kriz in the opening scene, for example, he moves in with his sword because he’s impatient for the creature to die (10). That same swiftness to the sword returns twice more – when the Doctor upsets Solon (11) and when Sarah is seemingly unconscious and surplus to requirements (12). Even more noticeably, his thoughts regarding Solon, who ‘he hated’ and ‘often planned to kill’ (13), are far more violent than on TV, where he’s more of a loyal Igor figure who only turns on his master when offered as a sacrifice to the sisterhood and when he discovers his arm’s been used on the body intended for Morbius.

    As a result, Condo’s tenderness in the second half of the story feels more significant – he becomes, as a new line puts it, a genuinely ‘changed man’ (14). When Condo is sent to retrieve a blind runaway Sarah, on TV he seems quite conflicted between his fondness for her and his instructions from Solon, one moment harshly declaiming ‘Maybe kill girl’ and ‘Master order!’, the next softly cooing ‘Condo not kill’ and ‘Girl nice’ (15), but in the novelisation he’s much clearer in his thinking: ‘Condo not kill. […] Condo like’ (16). That fondness, despite all his talk of how pretty she is, also has a more specific root in the book – it’s not Sarah’s appearance that awakens Condo’s kindliness (he was, after all, ready to kill her without a second thought early on) but her ‘helplessness’ (17) while she’s blind, as evidenced, for example, in his attentiveness when making sure she gets something to eat, sitting her down carefully, guiding her hands and listing the foods he’s brought (18).

    Sadly, not everything about Condo is so well handled, partly because of the loss of Colin Fay’s performance, partly because Dicks uses the word ‘barbarian’ to describe him six times (19), but mostly because of a characterisation choice that in isolation doesn’t look so bad. It’s revealed that Condo’s presence on Karn results from his ‘slave ship’ crash-landing on the planet (20) and Solon making him his servant. Solon uses the promise of restoring Condo’s missing arm as a means of keeping him ‘humble and obedient’ (21) in a far more transparent way than on TV, where it sounds more like a deal (22), and Condo is aware that he has ‘simply exchanged one form of slavery for another’ (23).

    This could have made the character more sympathetic, trapped in a situation he wants nothing to do with, but that doesn’t fit with his impatience to get Kriz’s head or eagerness to reach for his sword. Meanwhile, any suggestion that he might himself be invested in cult of Morbius or feel any attachment to Solon has been banished, so it’s not like he’s got any misguided investment in what he’s doing. Instead, his only motive is his missing arm and his only emotion is burning hatred for Solon. Alongside this, he’s ‘a practical man’ who focuses easily on how to achieve his prize (24), which means he’s calculated the restoration of his arm is worth the slaughter of all those who crash-land on Karn. This is reinforced by the manner in which his sensitivity in the face of Sarah’s blindness is described as ‘long buried’ and the regret he feels at the thought of her pickled head in a jar is an ‘unaccustomed pang’ (25) – these are responses he’s deliberately suppressed and forgotten. The result is that Condo becomes strangely more complicit in his actions during the first half of the story, despite his condition of slavery.

    And then there’s Maren. The clearest tweak to Maren’s character comes just after the Doctor has restored the sacred flame. On TV, the scene ends with a hint that the sisterhood might not be wholly appreciative (26), setting up the Doctor’s apparently being dead the next time he appears. This presumably is a reference to whether or not she’ll drop his previous sentence, even though it’s surely now clear he’s not intent on stealing the last of the elixir, especially as it’s no longer the last of the elixir. True, she finds the Doctor incredibly tiresome and might be reluctant to ‘show’ gratitude, but that would hardly lead to her to kill him for rescuing her civilisation. In a trademark bit of added Dicks depth, the novelisation not only offers a reason (27) but explains how the Doctor’s behaviour is not simply tiresome but provocative (28).

    In the process, Dicks also explicitly labels Maren an autocrat (29), and a ruthless one at that, willing to kill in order to preserve her absolute rule and beliefs. This ties back to the start of the story and Kriz’s death, in which the novelisation makes the sisterhood more actively involved – they personally wreck each passing craft ‘with telekinetic energy’, making them directly responsible for ‘dragging’ each ‘innocent’ traveller to their death (30). Maren prizes the sisters’ age-old way of life above all else, unable to conceive that anyone could desire anything other than to steal it from them (31) and willing to make the sisterhood indiscriminate murderers to preserve it.

    This strengthens the parallel between Maren’s elixir-fuelled reign and Morbius’s desire to cheat death and regain power, which subtly shifts the core idea of the story and improves the ending. On TV, the problem with the sisters of Karn is that the elixir of life has prevented any progress – as the Doctor puts it, immortality is a trap and they’ve fallen right into it (32). However, by the end, all the Doctor’s done for them is fix the flame and ensured a steady future flow of elixir. Yes, Maren’s dead but, if the problem lies with the elixir, the problem’s still there. Dicks, through making Maren so actively resistant to any progress, changes the emphasis so that the elixir is simply symptom and enabler.

    Accordingly, on TV, when Maren sacrifices her life so the Doctor may live, she does so simply accepting that an ‘end’ might sometimes be necessary (33); in the novelisation, she echoes the Doctor’s words in calling for an end to ‘stagnation’ and the need for ‘change’ (34). Furthermore, the book has already shown the crumbling of the sisterhood’s autocratic ways (35), not only expressing doubt but turning to others for their opinion, and presented Ohica, who assumes leadership of Karn at the end, as a figure tempted by the Doctor’s talk of progress (36). The novelisation makes clear what the broadcast episodes only hinted at – the Doctor has won the argument and the sisterhood will change.