Another Cutaway Comic and this one is a sequel to Vengeance. We find Omega entertaining himself on his world when a ship, Eltralla, crashes and brings with it device which begins to drain Omega’s psychic powers. In attempting to stop this, he becomes involved in a rebellion aboard the ship. It has been pirating around the galaxy and taking people as slaves from wherever it lands.

Omega helps but ultimately puts his own needs first which gives us quite an interesting characterisation of him. He isn’t the mad god of The Three Doctors yet, although there are glimmers of that. But we also have the man who was the scientist who was a pioneer amongst his people. He isn’t inherently evil. Selfish maybe. Arrogant, definitely. But this is a characterisation which marries well with what we see in Big Finish’s Omega. Someone who was abandoned by their people in a place with little hope and clung on through sheer willpower alone. The loss of his physical form is also started in this story.

The art is again by John Ridgeway and is as evocative as what we had in Vengeance. Ridgeway’s aliens are an odd breed - all the colours of the rainbow with strange head shapes and other physiology. They are extremely effective especially in a story where the ship has obviously taken people from many different worlds. The captain of the ship is grotesque in both her manner and her physicality. There is a series of panels where she punches Omega and he slaps her back which are brilliantly drawn with her facial expressions alone revealing a lot about the character.

I rather like the fact Omega has been drawn to vaguely resemble a young Brian Blessed as that, of course, ties in with the casting for the audio.

Apparently Ridgeway did his own colouring for this story (unlike Vengeance which was done by a colourist) and I think it shows because you can see he has chosen the colours carefully to depict this world.

Although this is a short story (it is paired with a Sutekh story in the release) it is an intriguing window into Omega’s life prior to The Three Doctors which manages to honour the character we know whilst creating an early life for him which makes sense.

Certainly of the various expanded universe material I’ve explored featuring Omega, the Cutaway Comic and Big Finish stories have been the most successful at taking the character from TV and building on him in effective, meaningful ways.