THE DOCTOR WHO RATINGS GUIDE: BY FANS, FOR FANS
Omega
Reviews

The Three Omegas by Stephen Maslin 29/3/15

1

"I should have been a god!"
There's so much of The Three Doctors that could be improved upon, if only they would let us try. This is clearly never going to happen but indulge me for a few moments. How about...
  1. Re-shooting the Time Lord scenes in their entirety so that they look more like The End of Time and less like a geriatric call centre?
  2. Re-shooting Hartnell's scenes with a Doctor of the current vintage? (Heresy I know, but what the hell.)
  3. A little bit of CGI here and there (but not so much as to lose the retro feel)?
  4. Editing it into two 40 minute episodes?
  5. A fresh, one-off title sequence?
Alas, we would be able to do nothing about the Gel Guards or the cheap sets or the periodically clunky script (it is by Bob Baker and Dave Martin after all). Nor, alas, could we do anything about the villain of the piece: Omega.

For "this Omeega bloke", as Sergeant Benton so memorably describes him, is nothing more than a machine for shouting. One can see what was being aimed at: a commanding arrogance; a domineering and intimidating presence, born of injustice and wounded pride. Yet with a few decades hindsight, what we actually ended up with was over-acting of colossal proportions. The Three Doctors has some fine moments (the best coming courtesy of Patrick Troughton - "Nobble him? You're talking about one of the most powerful blokes in the cosmos!" - and Nicholas Courtney - "Don't just stand there, man, open fire!") but Omega, bystander to history, does not provide any of them.

1 a

"I've attained my true form at last!"

Though, Omega's next official appearance pits him against the Fifth Doctor, there is a kind of unofficial one with the Fourth Doctor in The Hand of Fear, where Eldrad inexplicably turns into Omega in the middle of episode four. Same actor, same vocal delivery, same scriptwriters, same lack of depth and defeated by a similarly childish stratagem. The fact that he is not credited as Omega is immaterial. That's who he is.

2

"Act? How?"

Could one make any post-post-production improvements to Omega's second proper outing, The Arc of Infinity? Er, no. I mean, why bother? It is as close to irredeemable as it is possible to get: script, sets, music, almost every actor on screen. (Let's just hope the cast and crew had a nice little break in Amsterdam, shall we?) The Arc of Infinity is the canary in the coalmine of 80s Doctor Who. Forget the successes of Season 19: if this was what was served up as the first story of a new series, things were bad indeed. And for a story in which Omega is the villain of the piece, he is not only ridiculous but utterly forgettable. Only at the end, with Omega in the form of Peter Davison, do we have anything about which to give a damn. A scant few minutes (and a lot of bemused Dutch people) and that's it.

Could we at least tidy up the character's back story then?

3

"Now you can die happy!"

Well, a very thorough job on Omega's back story has already been done. Although one should be wary of a perceived need to retrofit the past (which can be rather boring, not to say unhealthy), when it's done as entertainingly as in Nev Fountain's eponymous audio drama Omega, we can all breathe a huge sigh of relief. It beats The Three Doctors and The Arc of Infinity on every point: superb incidental music, a brilliant script (with a lot of very funny lines), a very neat narrative structure, an excellent supporting cast. Throw in one of Doctor Who's most jaw-dropping cliffhangers and Peter Davison at his very best and who could ask for more? Best of all is that Omega (the character) is given depth he simply did not have before.

AFTERTHOUGHT

It's odd that we had to have two rather poor TV stories about Omega (the character) before Omega (the far superior audio drama) had any reason to exist. Good though it undoubtedly is (one of the finest stories of Doctor Who's 40th anniversary year), Omega the audio drama sets a dangerous precedent. Any long-running fantasy show is going to end up with flapping loose ends and things that don't tie up. By producing a story that reconciles so many such things and so well, a siren call goes up to Who obsessives the length and breadth of the known universe: to make every TV story and novel and comic strip and audio tale fit together, like medieval scholastics trying to reconcile the Bible with the surviving works of Aristotle. You must resist the urge to take on either of these momentous tasks: neither can be achieved.

So that's two things you can cross off your 'To-Do' list for next week.