Fan Conventional Wisdom (FCW) calls this another poor story, following right on the disappointing Time-flight. I remember finding it pretty weak when I originally saw it back in the day, and as a result haven’t taken a look at it in a long time.
I was surprised, therefore, to sit down with my DVD of the story and find I enjoyed it quite well. No, it’s not going to make any “best of” list of recommendations I make for friends, but it’s a solid outing for the Fifth Doctor.
Opening the historic season 20, and following John Nathan-Turner’s promise that every story this season would feature a monster or villain from the past, Arc of Infinity brings back Omega, the villain from The Three Doctors the opened season 10— an appropriate choice, 10 years later. Omega was the “stellar engineer” who gave the ancient Gallifreyans the power of time travel, by harnessing the power of a supernova to create the black hole now called “The Eye of Harmony.” Caught in the blast, Omega was believed killed but in fact had been transformed into antimatter and trapped, forever alone, in the antimatter universe. Countless millennia alone have driven him mad, and convinced him that the Time Lords abandoned him to his fate deliberately.
In the present story, a temporary stellar phenomenon (the “arc of infinity” of the story title) has given Omega another chance to return to the normal universe. To do so, he must bond with a Time Lord already here, and chooses the Doctor. But if he fails— or possible even if he succeeds— the resulting antimatter explosion will destroy “countless billions of lives.” The easiest way to stop him would be to kill the Doctor— so the Time Lords, ever ready to choose expediency above ethics, take remote control of the TARDIS and summon it home, where they sentence the Doctor to death. In fact there’s a traitor on the High Council, secretly helping Omega (as there always seems to be when a story returns to Gallifrey) but though the Doctor urges them to investigate that, the Time Lords, though protesting how very sorry they are, are still going to take the easy solution and execute the Doctor.
Meanwhile on Earth, briefly-former companion Tegan Jovanka has encountered a mystery just like those she met when traveling in the TARDIS: her cousin has been abducted by an alien creature in an abandoned crypt beneath the city of Amsterdam. Joining up with her cousin’s friend, Tegan has to investigate the alien on her own. Of course the alien on Earth turns out to be connected to Omega’s plot and the two storylines finally converge in episode 4, when the Doctor returns to Earth for a climactic chase scene through the streets of Amsterdam to capture Omega before his body reverts to antimatter in an explosion that will destroy far more than just Earth’s own solar system.
Arc of Infinity marked the second time in Dr Who’s history when the series filmed outside of England (the first was Paris, for the Fourth Doctor story City of Death). As on the prior occasion, they make full use of the opportunity to spend a lot of time with the characters walking around Amsterdam’s streets. Script editor Eric Saward disliked the use of the location, arguing there was no story justification for it— nothing of any particular “Amsterdam-ness” is involved. On one level he’s correct: a story shouldn’t include things that aren’t relevant to the story being told. But I’m going to side with Peter Davison, who in discussing this story points out that there’s always a ridiculous amount of running in Dr Who, and the story did call for a chase scene, so why not Amsterdam instead of some gravel quarry pretending to be an alien planet, or the usual London? I’ll add to that: even though little of Amsterdam as Amsterdam comes into play, and in that sense the foreign location is not relevant, I think it helps the series overall to show that sometimes strange alien events do happen in places other than London. And it all looks much more interesting on screen than a gravel quarry.
What about the story itself? First of all, Omega gets to be a more complex character than in The Three Doctors, where he just shouted and bellowed a lot. Here, for most of the story he again plays a simple villain role, but does so with more intelligence and less shouting. He also gets a sympathetic, if brief, character arc in episode 4. Having achieved transfer into our Universe, Omega at first keeps sounding like a standard villain, vowing to conquer Gallifrey next. Then he leaves his headquarters to walk around the city. He casually kills a gardener to steal his clothes, acting much like we’d expect the Master to. But then we see him start to delight in finally being back in a world where he’s not all alone. He stops to watch a street performance, and seeing a child smile at him he smiles back. You can see him starting to give up the anger and megalomania that define most Dr Who villains. But then he starts changing, he realizes it’s not going to last, and his madness returns— and he flees from the Doctor with his only plan to escape long enough for the explosion to happen, because if he can’t survive “then all must perish with me!”
That one moment, when we glimpse just a chance that Omega might have found some redemption, might have been able to leave his madness behind and go back to the person he once was, the one the Time Lords still revere, if only things were different, almost pays for the whole story by itself. (It helps that because of the bonding with the Doctor, Omega in these scenes is also played by Peter Davison.)
I like the scenes on Gallifrey. We’ve long since given up on the original godlike Time Lords first scene in The War Games and by now we expect them to be (to combine several descriptions from both Classic and New) “pompous, dusty senators, deliberative to the point of indolence.” Arc of Infinity gives each Time Lord a distinct character while remaining within that framework. Each has a different voice in their scenes debating with each other and with the Doctor and Nyssa, and that keeps the scenes alive. While the High Council talk things to death, non-Time-Lord characters supply some needed action. A technician named Damon, an old friend of the Doctor’s, joins him and Nyssa as an ally. The Captain of the Guard, Maxil, hovers on the edge between being an antagonist and an outright villain, as he enjoys arresting the Doctor just a little too much (“I’m only doing my duty,” he tells the Doctor at one point. “You don’t have to relish it so,” the Doctor answers.)
Gallifrey itself looks reasonably good, certainly better than on our last visit (The Invasion of Time, which featured sets of painted plywood with cardboard control panels and bare concrete floors). Some of the actors smile a bit at the oddity of the Gallifrey sets, which feature occasional sofas along the corridors and one lounge area that looks like “something out of an airport terminal” (in Peter Davison’s words). But I think the sets— even the “lounge”— actually work. You find employee lounges or coffee rooms inside massive office buildings. The surreally mundane scenes of Time Lords sitting around drinking cups of whatever they drink, as the main characters rush past them up and down the corridor, reinforces what the Time Lords are: a race of stuffy bureacrats, Lords of Time who rule time from office cubicles. It’s an irony of Time Lord existence that lets us see the truth behind the Second Doctor’s words, back in The War Games, that he originally fled his home planet because for all their power, the Time Lords just never actually do anything.
The Earth side of the story, featuring Tegan and her cousin’s friend, is the weaker side. As Terrance Dicks observed in the Pertwee-era writer’s guide, “Any scene with the Doctor in it is inherently more interesting than any scene without him. The camera should never leave his side unless the story permits no alternative.” Until episode 4, the Doctor is not present for Tegan’s adventure, and it suffers accordingly. Some of the new series’ companions have been given enough character development to carry a story like that, but in the Classic era that just wasn’t the case. Tegan and friend can’t do much except mark time until the Doctor arrives.
And, it must be admitted, the alien at work in Amsterdam, called an Ergon, is pretty silly, looking like nothing so much as a giant plucked chicken. The Doctor eventually calls it “one of Omega’s less successful efforts at psychobiogenesis.” It’s also one of Classic Who’s less-successful efforts at scary monsters.
Details
- The story was written by Johnny Byrnes, who previous wrote The Keeper of Traken. He was commissioned by Eric Saward and given three requirements for his story, which had come down from on high (that is, from JN-T): use the Amsterdam location, which had been arranged ahead of having any story in mind, use Omega as the villain, and bring Tegan back on board the TARDIS. Byrnes describes it as a challenge to fit all three together, but liked the commission for that reason: “I think challenging constraints are what lead to good storytelling,” he says. He ended up having the pumps that keep below-sea-level Amsterdam from flooding become the reason Omega picked the location, needing water under pressure to extract hydrogen as a power source. Byrnes admits he never found a good way around the improbable coincidence of having Tegan get involved, but coincidences like that happen all the time in series fiction, so it doesn’t bother me.
- Tegan gets a new look for season 20, partly coming from actress Janet Fielding and partly from JN-T. In season 19, as part of his general desire to give every character a distinctive costume, he kept Tegan in her air stewardess uniform the whole season. But he also had an idea of giving her a distinctive hairstyle which he hoped would start a trend (yes, JN-T hoped Dr Who could start a hairstyle trend). The hairstyle Tegan ended up with is just not distinctive enough for you to even imagine, looking at it, that it had that goal. But Janet Fielding describes how her hair was so over-processed that shards of it would break off in the breeze, so she seized a chance to escape. Between her season 19 contract and that for season 20, the BBC neglected to pay her a retainer. That meant the production office couldn’t tell her things like “you have to keep your hair long” during the hiatus, which if she was on retainer they could, so in order to preempt the Tegan hairdo she had it cut very, very short.
- Tegan’s new costume, however, came straight from the mind of JN-T. It was a white “boob tube” top with a light jacket, and a pair of white shorts, and is entirely hideous. JN-T wanted Tegan to be sexy, saying part of the companion’s job was “to keep the Dads watching along with the kids.” Fair enough, Fielding replied (however reluctantly) but the costume just wasn’t sexy, it was awful. “It was completely wrong for my body shape,” she says. Nevertheless, Tegan will be stuck with it for the season.
- The antagonistic Captain Maxil was played by Colin Baker, who up to that point had almost always played villains on TV. Baker would go on to play the Sixth Doctor, the first time that an actor was cast as the Doctor after previously appearing in the series. (Peter Capaldi is the second.) Baker had costume troubles of his own in Arc of Infinity: to indicate Maxil’s rank, the helmet of his guard uniform was given a large feather on top, which unfortunately was too high to go through the doors of the Gallifrey sets. The director suggested he carry the helmet under one arm. This actually works with the character: Maxil is overly self-important and the fact that he won’t just leave the helmet behind somewhere if he doesn’t want to wear it becomes a nice little touch adding to the character. Colin Baker, meanwhile, thought that the helmet tucked under his arm with its large feather looked like he was carrying a live chicken, and during rehearsals he started to pet it while quietly making clucking noises, which made it very hard for the other actors to get through their lines without cracking up.
- Maxil shoots the Doctor in the episode 1 cliffhanger, leading Colin Baker to later say, “I didn’t do it to get his job!”
Next Week
“Snakedance,” 4 episodes.
