MR 047: Omega

Welcome to the first of three stories really examining some of the greatest villains of classic who. Well, I say villains, but Omega isn't really a villain is he? And that's what this story is about. It's about history and legacy and how stories about famous people are perceived long after they're gone. It's something that you can't really examine in Doctor Who because it's a show about time travel. Historical figures are just regular characters. But the Time Lords have uniquely locked their own history from time travel. They zealously guard their history from both their own people and anyone else with time travel technology. So Time Lord historians have to rely on good old fashioned historical research rather than going into the actual history.

And I'm glad that I watched all of classic who first too, because I wouldn't be able to make heard nor tail of this story. I definitely didn't when I first listened to it over a decade ago and I didn't know anything about classic. Now, though, I know the two stories with Omega from classic. Thankfully, this one is much better than both of those.

We start on board a historical vacation ship. Apparently in whatever time period we're in now, "History is the new soap opera." People love historical re-enactments and all that juicy gossip about historical figures, whether the legends about them are true. Again, something that can only happen with Time Lord historical figures. I like the idea that actually time travelling into history is not popular anymore. It's just not as fun as a re-enactment. Like going on a roller coaster versus confronting actual danger. Real history is dirty, dusty, dangerous, you can't interact with anything, there's no toilets, and, worst of all, they don't serve snacks.

So now the Doctor is going on one of these re-enactment expeditions to the area of space where Omega detonated his stellar manipulator and exploded the star that allowed the Time Lords to invent time travel. There's a bunch of tourists on board including a couple of sweet old ladies, and a bunch of staff members, including the re-enactment actors. Only, this region of space is notoriously unstable, thanks to the exploded star, and people sometimes lose their minds a little. Nothing like that would ever happen to our heroes though right? Right?

In the official story, Omega's assistant, Vandekirian, sabotaged the mission on behalf of Rassilon. Why Rassilon wanted to sabotage the mission in the official history... who knows? However, Vandekirian felt guilty about his betrayal and cut off his hand. Omega did not accept his guilt and so cut off his other hand and put it in the stellar manipulator, later known as the "Hand of Omega." But, thanks to Vandekirian's sabotage, the ship was still destroyed and Omega was sent into the black hole and ended up in the anti-matter universe. Later, naturally, Rassilon boosted Omega's popularity by praising him as a fallen hero, as you do as a politician.

We get to see the re-enactment of that little tale when the company creates a full, life size replica of Omega's original ship, the Eurydice. However, the actor who played Vandekirian in the re-enactment is starting to act very strangely and tried to kill the actor who played Omega. He then got stuck in a garbage disposal where his hand was destroyed. It's all very odd as the Doctor figures that it's the dimensional instability.

The Doctor gets knocked out by the stewardess of the ship and he gets a strange visit from some sort of spirit Omega who asks for his help. He wants to go back to his own universe where he was a god, not here where he is nothing. It's interesting because Omega worked incredibly hard to get back to his own universe, yet it's not enough.

Only, something else strange is happening again. The real Eurydice has appeared out of nowhere. The Doctor and an historian have gone aboard it. The historian has spent his many lives (since he's a time lord) researching Omega's legend and his written several books and done several documentaries on him and other historical figures. A lot of his work is conjecture, naturally. Since history is so popular, he even has rivals and their books regularly sell out.

(Before I move on, there was a funny part in the book shop where a robot worker sees the Doctor looking at a book for more than two minutes and says he's stealing by reading it in the store and not paying for it. How very late stage capitalism of you robot.)

On the real Eurydice, there are strange creatures and Omega himself manifests to the Doctor as a ghost. The Doctor helps him rig his ship to go into the black hole and back to the anti-matter universe. We then find out that the stewardess wants to marry Omega for some reason, and go into his universe with him. The Doctor is pretty ok with all of this. The actor who played Omega is supposed to do the wedding because he was ordained as a priest as a publicity stunt for a show.

This is where we get some fantastic conversations between the Doctor and Omega. The Doctor talks about how Omega was one of his heroes and Omega talks about how he is perceived. How his legend is told. He talks about how stories get made up all the time that aren't true about history. This is some good stuff and Peter Davison actually does a fantastic job here. I'm very impressed with his performance in this story, just in general, but especially here in his conversations with Omega.

The actor who played Vandekirian is back and tells her about the strange creatures on the ship who Omega genocided. Omega is determined not to let his wife to be find out about the species he genocided because he feels shame and guilt over doing it, but she says she knows and doesn't care, which horrifies him all the more. How can you not care about the person you love having committed genocide?

The big twist in this story comes when Omega kills the actor who played Vandekirian and the history professor in front of the actor who played Omega. The Doctor is confused because he's a ghost, but a particularly corporeal one. The actor who played Omega holds a gun on the Doctor and is scared of him and Omega's wife to be tells him to stop asking questions. Until we hear the TARDIS noise and out steps... the Doctor. Duh duh duh!

The Doctor we've been following has been Omega the whole time, talking to himself. Omega used the Doctor's consciousness to escape his own universe in Arc of Infinity and in the process gained a copy of his body and mind. So he's been running around looking like the Doctor the whole time. That's where the stewardess found him and helped him when he wanted to get back into his own universe. He's so confused, though, that he doesn't know he's Omega or the Doctor. The two personalities are basically completely separate from one another. The Doctor side called for help from the Time Lords and the Doctor came to help.

But everything is extremely dimensionally unstable in this part of space, especially for non-Time Lords. The only thing that was keeping it stable was the historian's TARDIS, but now that he's dead, that TARDIS is sulking, sad that her Time Lord died. It's an interesting idea that TARDIS's just fade away and go to the end of the universe out of grief when their Time Lord dies because they're that psychically linked. Reminds me of The Doctor's Wife. The Doctor is able to make it stable again (presumably with his own TARDIS, I didn't catch that part).

He then confronts Omega and this is where we get the real story. There's some excellent flashbacks to Omega's memories. He remembers being in the Gallifreyan academy where his teacher gave him the worst possible grade because he believed his theories on time travel were dangerous. The grade, naturally was an Omega and so that became his name. He was friends with Rassilon who enacted a revolution to gain political power, even though Omega was hesitant about it. And in his memories, when he went to actually harness the power of a collapsing star to create time travel, Vandekirian warned him about a sentient species on the planet below who Omega would kill by collapsing their star, but according to his scans there is no species there. They're made of pure thought and so don't show up. Vandekirian sabotages the ship and tries to stop him by destroying his own hands (as they need the hand print of everyone on the crew to make the stellar manipulator work), but Omega does it anyway, cutting of Vandekirian's other hand and committing genocide for his work. That's why he's haunted by these strange beings on his ship. They're not real, they're echoes of that species that died.

Only, according to the Doctor, that's not what happened at all. HE killed that species accidentally in an unrelated adventure. Not Omega. And when Omega got a copy of the Doctor's memories it got jumbled up in his own. It relates to the central idea of the story. How stories and legacy are perceived. Was Omega a monster? Or a victim? I LOVE the idea that Omega can't stand the idea that he was just a victim. That Vandekirian had just gone insane or really was an agent of Rassilon and sabotaged his ship for no reason. Omega wants to be seen as a monster. Better a monstrous villain who influences the course of history than a tragic victim who has no control of their actions.

In the end, Omega gets his way. He gets to go back to his universe because his wife to be goes insane and sends his ship there. I love the ending, though, when it turns out one of the little old ladies was actually a secret Time Lord agent from the far future. They've somehow been able to go through the time lock and time travel into Time Lord history because they're a secret agency bent on preserving history the way they perceive it. You know, basically the CIA, but not the CIA for some reason. They're here to preserve the Doctor's reputation. The script gets flipped here. The Doctor is perceived as a great hero in their time and they don't want it known he committed accidental genocide and so they bring with them the only person who knows what really happened. I thought they were going to kill him, they did talk about having tried to wipe his mind before, but instead they take him forward to do historical re-enactments about the Doctor. And it ends on the agent asking for the Doctor's autograph, which is cute.

This was actually quite good. Omega, as a character, was always an interesting one, albeit underserved by the two underwhelming classic stories about him. This one goes much deeper into who he is at a fundamental level and it's great. He's a scientist at heart, not a warrior or a commander or a dictator or a megalomaniac. He just wanted to harness the power of an exploding star and he did, but he was sent into another universe to do it. This story does a fantastic job of portraying that, of portraying him in the sympathetic light that he deserves. Fantastic work and fantastic performance from Peter who plays both Omega and the Doctor. He does a great job of working out that he really is Omega before the Doctor shows up as well. Great twist to have the Doctor not actually be there at all until the last episode.

This is good stuff, but it definitely requires you to already be in deep with Doctor Who to truly appreciate it or even to understand what's going on. This is not a beginner friendly story and that's probably why it did nothing for me at the time, but it is good for those who are already fans.