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Dr. J.B. Worley: Hello, Dorothy. How are you? Dorothy Gale: I wish I wasn't tied down. Dr. J.B. Worley: Nothing to worry about. Dorothy Gale: What are those? Dr. J.B. Worley: Oh. We'll just put them over your ears. Pretty soon they'll draw all those unpleasant dreams out of your head. Then, when you wake up, you'll never be bothered by them again.
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~ Dr. J.B. Worley to Dorothy Gale.
Dr. J.B. Worley is the overarching antagonist in the 1985 Disney dark fantasy film Return to Oz, which serves as an unnofficial sequel to the iconic Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer 1939 film The Wizard of Oz.
He is an extremistic psychiatrist of the late 19th century who wants to use electricity to "heal" the brains of his patients, arguing that the incoming 20th century will be the "century of electricity". In October 1899, Worley is trusted with the care of Dorothy Gale, whose tales about the Wonderful Land of Oz make her Aunt Em and Uncle Henry believe if she is delusional, while Worley sees the girl as the perfect candidate for a electrotherapy treatment.
He was portrayed by the late Nicol Williamson, who also played the Nome King in the same film, Cogliostro in the Spawn movie and Dr. Eric Mason in Columbo.
Towards the end of the 19th century, Dr. J.B. Worley is the director of the School and Sanitarium of Electric Healing, the local mental asylum of Kansas. An ambitious psychiatrist, Dr. Worley believed that the incoming 20th century will be the "century of electricity", so he decided to apply electrotheraphy on his patients to see if he could cure them through those methods, using a machine to subject electrical currents to his patients with a pair of headphones. However, his electrotherapy treatment was anything but successful: the patients were always left with mental damage, leading Worley to lock them up in his sanatarium cellar.
In October 1899, Worley is visited by the local farmer Em Gale and her niece Dorothy, whom Em and her husband Henry believe to be delusional due to her stories about the Wonderful Land of Oz, which she supposedly visited months ago when she was caught by a tornado, preventing her from properly sleeping. Despite Dorothy's insistence that Oz is actually real, Worley concludes that she has been hallucinating and explains her and her aunt about his electrotherapy treatment, showing them his machine and saying to Dorothy how it looks like a face. Dorothy reluctantly agrees and Em leaves her in Dr. Worley's charge. He then requests Nurse Wilson to take Dorothy to her room, where she is left all alone until Worley tells her to come.
Later that night, Dorothy is brought tied up in a stretcher to Dr. Worley by Wilson and other nurses, despite her reluctance at being restrained. Worley insists her that she has been tied up to the stretcher to prevent her from falling and puts the headphones of his machine, promising her that he would get rid of all her "unpleasant dreams". However, before Dorothy's mind could be damaged, a lightning miraculously provokes a power failure, forcing Worley and his staff to leave the room to check on the power generator, leaving Dorothy all alone. This allows Princess Ozma of Oz to free Dorothy and help her escape from the sanitarium through a nearby river to the Land of Oz, despite Nurse Wilson's best efforts to capture them.
At the end of the film, after Dorothy returns to the real world following the defeats of the Nome King and Princess Mombi, Uncle Henry and Aunt Em track her down with the assistance of the townsfolk. Em then tells Dorothy that the lightning burned the sanitarium to the ground and that all the staff and patients were forced to evacuate, though Worley didn't make it: instead, he died trying to save his machines. Regardless, Wilson (and possibly other staff members) is arrested and it can be deduced that Worley's inhumane treatment to his patients will be exposed, posthumously damaging his reputation and proving him wrong about the use of electricity on mental patients.
Trivia[]
Dr. J.B. Worley has a similar role to that Miss Almira Gulch has in the 1939 classic The Wizard of Oz film, as they are both unpleasant adults whom Dorothy Gale later sees in the Land of Oz: in Worley's case, Dorothy pictures him as the Nome King; in Miss Gulch's case, Dorothy pictures her as the Wicked Witch of the West. Fittingly, they weren't created by the original Oz author L. Frank Baum and disappear from the story by the end after their Oz counterparts are defeated (though Worley is confirmed to have died while Gulch's fate is left ambiguous).
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