Omega

The Monthly Adventures #047 - “Omega" by Nev Fountain

The Villains Trilogy is a notable moment in the history of The Monthly Adventures, being the first of a formula that would eventually dominate the range, being a series of three tangentially linked stories released consecutively. Eventually, trilogies would be the main format of the Main Range, with short arcs or even just sub-themes running rampant throughout the series’ schedule. However, it begins here, as a short celebration of Who’s biggest antagonists for the show’s 40th anniversary: Davros, creator of the Daleks, the Master, nemesis of the Doctor and… Omega. A founding father of Gallifrey and the main antagonist in a story only viewable through rose-tinted glasses and whatever the hell Arc of Infinity was meant to be. I guess there’s no singular figure to associate with the Cybermen (plus we’ve only just had Spare Parts) so I suppose he was the next best thing but I still wouldn’t consider him one of Doctor Who’s most iconic villains. But, I suppose one should not judge a story by its cover, only by its text.

Called to “the Sector of Forgotten Souls”, the Doctor finds himself aboard a tour shuttle belonging to Jolly Chronolidays, the tour company that treats history like a soap opera. But as they enter the last known location of a legendary Time Lord, troubling realities begin to arise.

(CONTAINS SPOILERS)

I suppose any story’s greatest strength is its writer, so who on Earth did Big Finish choose to write an Omega story of all things. Our author for today is Nev Fountain, a recurring writer for the audios who seems to be held in pretty high esteem, penning fan favourite stories such as The Kingmaker or Peri and the Piscon Paradox. This is apparently his first foray into the audios, so how does he fair? Well, in my opinion, he fairs incredibly well. The personality this script holds is immaculate. It’s not in your face quirkiness like Bang-Bang-a-Boom! but is instead made up of subtly humorous landscapes built off  quips and big personalities, such as a hypocritical Time Lord historian who keeps advertising his book to the Doctor, or two old ladies who won’t stop criticising how unrealistic real history looks compared to the fabricated stuff. It’s a heightened reality that is only a little more outlandish than the real world, and it makes for a plot and identity that is incredibly easy to digest. Not only that, but we have a brilliant cast heading our story, with Ian Collier returning as Omega from Arc of Infinity along with his booming vocals and Conrad Westmaas making an appearance a few audios before his debut as C’rizz. They make for an excellent group of characters, all of who are interesting or fun or sympathetic or wholly insane; Fountain clearly has a strength when it comes to writing personality and dialogue. As for the story, it is the weakest link for me (which seems to be a recurring theme in these reviews) but I’d say the first half was really good. It took the form of a bizarre murder mystery with no murder, where the Doctor tries to solve the mysteries behind little oddities scattered throughout the story until somebody eventually does die and the whole thing comes to a stunning reveal. There have been a number of twists in Big Finish so far, they do seem to be a favourite of the range. Even in the very first entry, we had one of the main characters revealed as the story’s villain, and yet this might be the best one so far - it truly blew me away when I first heard it. Turns out, up until the halfway point, the “Doctor” we had been following had been the Omega from the end of Arc of Infinity, who used the Doctor’s bioprint to escape the antimatter universe. He then had a mental breakdown, and took on the Doctor’s personality, meaning this entire time, all the murders and sabotage and strange events were being committed by who we thought was our philanthropic hero. It’s a brilliant moment that is set up absolutely perfectly, every unanswered question slotting into place. It’s one of those reveals that was under your nose the whole time, especially since only the Doctor actually saw Omega (with the exception of the mad Sentia, who is on Omega’s side) so it’s perfectly possible for him to have just been switching voices. It was the highlight of the story for me and probably the thing that will stick with me longest now I’ve finished it.

However, following the big reveal, things begin to falter. I think the main problem is that Omega wanted to do too many things at once. It wants to be a fun murder mystery, but also a meditative exploration of Omega’s character, but also a dissection of insanity and the psyche, but also a high-octane countdown to disaster, but also a love story whilst having multiple Time Lords knocking about and people being psychically prompted to recreate moments from Omega’s fated voyage and historical reenactments going too far. It moves from one story, to another story, to the next, never stopping and never resting with too many ideas for its own good. And by the end, there’s so much going on, so many characters switching personalities and deceptions colliding that the whole thing gets ridiculously convoluted and you just end up going “wait, when did that happen?” over and over again. Like the day is saved because the Doctor prompts the mad Sentia to switch personalities so that she releases the hostages she’s taken, which I don’t think was set up and, if it was, it was incredibly brief. And the other thing I take issue with is Omega himself. Being the title character, you know we’re going to have to see a lot of him and the main story will have to surround his experiences, but I just don’t particularly gel with it. It grounds him heavily in reality and makes him feel far more human than he should be. Take The Three Doctors for instance, there, he is almost a legend, even when we see him, this monolith of a person, driven insane by his time in an antiverse, a mad god with no reigns. He is imposing as he is threatening, his ambiguous past helping in establishing him as a living myth. Here, he’s just another Time Lord, and went to school like any other. Not only that, but it explains that the name “omega” is a nickname stemming from a really bad grade he got once (for some reason, Gallifreyan grading systems rely on the Greek alphabet). So basically a human equivalent would be getting called “F-” - I think this is dumb and somewhat turns him into a joke, even if Fountain thought he was being clever. Making him so tangible and so life-like removes his mystique and turns him into a somewhat underwhelming antagonist, I think it misses what made him such an imposing character. I think this is where Fountain’s sensibilities as a writer actually trip him up, because giving everybody a lively personality isn’t actually a net positive and sometimes it can diminish the impact of a villain. I feel like this is the Doctor Who equivalent of Disney forcing an antagonist to be morally grey against the script's will - it just doesn’t work.

Omega was an interesting if unfulfilling time. I have heard it’s the worst of the Villains Trilogy and if it’s only up from here on out, then I’m sold. It honestly has a lot of potential and if it just bit off enough for it to chew and focused a little, I think we’d have an all time classic here. Both aided and failed by its idiosyncrasies, Fountain’s writing style seems suited to a quainter story than this, and I think things might’ve been a little different with a better premise or another writer.

7/10

Pros:

+ Written with distinct style and humour that made the whole thing incredibly fun

+ Great vocal performances lending themselves to a good cast

+ First half was an interesting mystery with good pacing

+ The third act reveal was absolutely brilliant

Cons:

- Tries to be too many things at once

- Story gets too clever for its own good and becomes convoluted

- Omega is not as imposing and interesting as he could be

22.09.2022

Meh. Lore, I guess. But I find the play pointless, really.
The twist is cheap, the implication of the Doctor committing another genocide (accidental this time) is a curious one, but not really explored.
The origins of the name "Omega" are hilarious though. 1.5/5

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.

It's no secret that Omega is my favorite Doctor Who villain. I love the angst and the lore and the anger and the irony and all of the juicy, juicy drama tied up with him. The Three Doctors is one of my top stories in the entire show. Arc of Infinity has Omega. Time's Crucible, in all it does, finds time to stick Omega in there. The Infinity Doctors- part of a previous anniversary- gets my vote of quality in large part due to the excellent AU Omega content. And this story is no different. It plays further into Omega's madness and backstory than ever before. It presents all the possible ways that Omega's history could've played out, and it tells us a little of the Gallifreyans before Omega and Rassilon came to power.

All of the characters in this are excellent, and everything comes together in shocking and unexpected ways. I can highly recommend this audio to anyone looking for a good Big Finish to start with. It's untied to any audio story arcs going on, and it's free on Spotify, and it's completely excellent.
And it is a crime that Nev Fountain has written so little else.

This is part of a series of reviews of Doctor Who in chronological timeline order.

Previous Story: The Waters of Amsterdam

I'm not sure I understood everything in this story, but I certainly enjoyed it. This story gives us so much Time Lord lore, it's brilliant. It (obviously) expands the most on Omega but it still affords a lot of depth to the Doctor and Rassilon which I really appreciate. Ian Collier does a genuinely fantastic job as Omega, the scenes where him and the Doctor are exchanging stories in particular stand out to me.

Peter Davison is also really great in this and him and Collier's performance greatly accentuate the twist-reveal in this story. That was one of the best cliffhangers I've witnessed in Doctor Who and will really make me re-evaluate how I view this story on relistens.

Omega is a character with incredible potential and I think it's safe to say that this story realises that to the fullest, it looks especially good considering Omega's outings on TV aren't the best of quality. Absolutely fantastic outing for 5's first solo adventure.

Next Story: The Burning Prince