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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