Wednesday, 9 October 2019

Who Reviews Arc of Infinity by Tony J Fyler



Tony’s on the Arc.

Arc of Infinity opened up Peter Davison’s second season as the Doctor, and goodness me, but it did a lot.

It brought back a previously one-shot enemy from Jon Pertwee’s era for another adventure – itself a risky business, especially when that one-shot was The Three Doctors. It took us back to Gallifrey for the first time since The Deadly Assassin – always a risky business, because Gallifrey can end up looking almost  uniquely unimpressive if you translate it from ‘Planet of the all-powerful Time Lords’ to ‘Something you can build in a studio.’ It took the show out of the UK on overseas filming for the first time since City of Death, and for no technically better reason than it hadn’t been done in a while, meaning lots of shots of the Tardis crew cycling round Amsterdam. And it brought back Tegan, who’d been unceremoniously dumped at Heathrow Airport at the end of Time-Flight, just one story after the team had lost Adric to the Cybermen’s plans in Earthshock.

So – quite a lot to be getting on with then.

The plot mostly involves the return of Omega, the visionary Time Lord engineer responsible for the Time Lords’ ability to time travel, and something of a childhood hero of the Doctor’s. Last seen being literally not all there in The Three Doctors, he had drained energy from Gallifrey to the point where the only hope for the planet was to send three incarnations of the Doctor to his world of anti-matter to stop him.

This time around, the plot at least made a little more sense – Omega, still all anti-matter but with a brand new outfit so as not to let on who he was too early, has found a traitor on the Time Lord High Council, who’s prepared to jeopardise the planet again just to give the engineer a pathway back into the universe. This, it transpires, involves body-imprinting on the Doctor. The whole ‘Arc of Infinity’ thing is basically a region of space-time where odd crossovers are possible because the Arc shields antimatter, and one end of the Arc is in Amsterdam, on Earth.

This is where colossal amounts of coincidence kick into play in Johnny Byrne’s script, because Tegan’s cousin, Colin, has gone backpacking to Amsterdam. And then, he’s gone missing. Meaning Tegan goes to find out what the hell has happened to him. Meaning she crosses paths with the Doctor again, just in time for a lift back to the rest of the universe. Colin, incidentally, has crossed paths with one of the most unfortunate ‘monsters’ in Davison’s era – the Ergon. Or the Space Chicken, as it was less-than-fondly-known until Matt Smith crossed paths with an even more literal – but thankfully rather more invisible – space chicken in Vincent And The Doctor. The Ergon, bless it, looks like the last chicken nugget in the shop on a Saturday night, and it’s the slave of Omega, who’s messing about in Amsterdam because of the aforementioned antimatter shielding properties of the Arc.

Meanwhile, the Doctor and Nyssa hightail it to Gallifrey to raise the alarm about possible shenanigans with antimatter, the Doctor gets very nearly put to death as a traitor, and runs afoul of an angry guard captain with feathers in his hat, by the name of Maxil – played by future Doctor, Colin Baker. The traitor on the High Council is forced to play their hand and reveal themselves, but all rather too late to be effective. Omega, having got the details of the Doctor’s body print, is up and about and looking almost but not entirely like Peter Davison, running around the streets of Amsterdam. Cue a chase sequence which exists more or less only to get the most out of the potential of Amsterdam filming and one extraordinary sequence: Omega, revelling in having flesh again, and company, and being in touch with other people after countless centuries alone, stops to watch a sideshow, and smiles, and interacts with a young child who is kind to him. And there, right there, is where Arc of Infinity breaks your heart. There’s much talk in The Three Doctors of how Omega should have been revered among his people, and how the loneliness of his existence in the antimatter universe has driven him stark raving bonkers, but there in that sequence, in a mirroring of a similar moment in Frankenstein, where the monster encounters kindness and responds to it, we see the potential of a happy outcome, and for perhaps the briefest of seconds we wonder if the Doctor has the right to take it from him. Our hero is our hero because of his capacity for sacrifice. Would he not sacrifice himself for one of the greatest heroes of his people, to give him the chance to live again after all this time?

But of course, the question is based on a faulty premise. In that moment, yes, Omega is sweet and kind, but he’s done a lot of unspeakable things to get there, and he doesn’t really care for life except his own. He’s taken the Doctor’s bioprint, rather than asking for it, rather, perhaps, than begging for it. If he’s given the opportunity to live again, how long will it be before people start to die, victims to his overweening sense of self-importance and entitlement?

When the Doctor seems to kill him, seems to send him to an oblivion he ultimately chooses, Arc of Infinity actually does something quite remarkable – it seems to close a loop of character-story that The Three Doctors, while not exactly leaving open, did not satisfactorily rersolve. Where the earlier story turned the potential of Omega into a raging, raving beast, Arc of Infinity brings him back from that and makes him a figure of compassion again, and even gives him a kind of acceptance and closure at the very end. Along the way, it’s arguable that Arc of Infinity gives us one of Nyssa’s strongest moments when she prepares to commit treason to save the Doctor’s life, and while the décor of Gallifrey is simply dreadful, it also brings together a strong cast of Time Lords, including Leonard Sachs as the latest Borusa on the block, Michael ‘Celestial Toymaker’ Gough as Councillor Hedin, Elspet Gray as Chancellor Thalia, Colin Baker as the fuming Maxil, and Paul ‘No, Not The Mind Probe’ Jericho as the Castellan. That only one of them would return for The Five Doctors, and that it would immortalise Jericho for that line, is an unfortunate reality, but while still looking like a naff place to live and work, Gallifrey had rarely been as well-populated with strong character actors before. Deadly Assassin, maybe, but it was by no means a regular thing.

Overall, Arc of Infinity – and Snakedance too to some extent – is a bright spot in Peter Davison’s second season before everything gets all heavy with the Black Guardian trilogy and the generally snarky days of Turlough. It’s an example of what Davison’s Fifth Doctor could do with a slightly less full Tardis and more room to breathe, and for the majority of the story, it’s a Davison dream-team of just the Doctor and Nyssa, pushing along their strand of the story and, like Tom Baker and his Romanas before them, elevating the essential conversations of life and time travel to a less emotional, more factual and scientific level without having to dumb things down for their friendly pet human. Add the reclamation of Omega and the high-ranking acting talent of the Gallifreyans, and it makes for a pacey, enjoyable watch. With perhaps just a smiiiiidgen too much schlepping about Amsterdam to justify the overseas shoot.


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