Doctor Who A-Z #123: Arc of Infinity (1983)

Season Twenty is an odd one in Peter Davison’s run. There isn’t a story like The Caves of Androzani or Earthshock which fans at the time rallied around; the best script by a mile is Christopher Bailey’s Snakedance, and Bailey’s vision of Doctor Who was simply too personal and strange for anyone to hold it up as a model for the series to follow. Yet in some ways it’s the easiest of Davison’s series to enjoy. Former script editor Christopher H Bidmead doesn’t contribute a script, neither – due to the postponement of his planned season-ending Dalek story – does current script editor Eric Saward. The result is a season where we get to see what the Fifth Doctor’s era might have been like without the two voices that tend to drown out everyone else. There’s still too much continuity – producer John Nathan-Turner decided that, for the twentieth anniversary season, every story should have an old villain. For once, though, these recurring monsters aren’t used as the springboard for a self-consciously gritty epic. There’s an emptying-the-toybox thrill to the continuity this year, as well as an eagerness to go for deep-cut baddies – the Mara, the Black Guardian, Omega – that the later seasons under Saward’s stewardship would overlook.

That’s what the overall season feels like, anyway. In practice, it gets off to a very bad start with Arc of Infinity. It’s a shame, because there are some promising ideas here. The reason for bringing back Omega – he kicked off the tenth anniversary series, so why doesn’t he kick off the twentieth anniversary one? – is head-slappingly reductive, but some attention seems to have been paid to his unique characteristics. The rest of the Davison years offer up Cybermen who act like Daleks, Silurians who also act like Daleks and a Master who seems to want to be the Meddling Monk, but despite a natty redesign Omega, at least, remains an antimatter creature imprisoned by the Time Lords and desperate for revenge. Even the subtext of The Three Doctors, early drafts of which called the villain “Ohm” to signify his status as an upside-down Doctor, is preserved as Omega transforms himself into a replica of the Doctor.

That transformation, though, happens in the final episode, which as Episode Fours go would be a pretty good Episode One. I like the Amsterdam setting, and find the objection to stories like this and The Two Doctors – essentially, that they have no “reason” to go abroad – a bit puzzling; shouldn’t a series with as wide-ranging a format as Doctor Who get out of the UK a bit more often? But that final episode is the only one that makes any use of it. Prior to this, Amsterdam is the setting of a truly odd subplot in which two backpackers, one of whom sounds like a kind of pubescent John Major, decide to sleep in a crypt and one of them gets shot by something that looks like a giant hen.

You’re right, there is a lot to unpack there, and the backpackers sleeping in a crypt are the least of it. They might be Doctor Who‘s first textually gay characters – the show never says as much, but it’s hard to read the story any other way – and the crypt is a clear attempt to ride the then-young trend for slasher movies full of horny kids doing stupid things. The hen is the Ergon, which the Doctor later explains as “one of Omega’s less successful attempts at psychosynthesis”. (Phew, that’s that one cleared up!) Its purpose seems to be converting people from our universe into anti-matter, which is necessary since the entire plot hinges on the assertion that anti-matter cannot make contact with matter without causing a universe-destroying cataclysm. How, exactly, the Ergon appears to hop back and forth is anyone’s guess, and by the time it’s shown wrestling the Doctor it would be fair to assume writer Johnny Byrne has got sick of trying to work around this, in the same way that Red Dwarf eventually got sick of preventing Rimmer from touching anything. There are a few moments like this, and Byrne might well be the only writer oblivious enough to try and do a ticking-clock story involving the Time Lords, a race who definitely have some sort of mechanism to get around tight deadlines.

Indeed, if the Time Lords weren’t in such an inexplicable hurry, they could have sorted the whole affair to their satisfaction. Their main concern is that Omega could destroy the universe if he enters it in anti-matter form; they’re also worried that he seems to be trying to merge with the Doctor in order to safely breach our universe. Their solution to this double bind is to execute the Doctor immediately, before Omega can take over his body. The minor flaw in this plan, you will note, is that if it had succeeded it would have forced Omega to blow up the entire universe, which is the kind of risk even Anatoly Dyatlov would consider a bit steep. What’s wrong with waiting until Omega takes over the Doctor’s body, then executing him, ridding Gallifrey of two of the most persistent thorns in their side in one fell swoop?

The answer to that is that the plan would have worked, and Arc of Infinity is nothing if not a story in which people need to keep fouling up in order to keep things going. Much attention has been paid to the retrospectively amusing fact that Maxil, the Time Lord guard in charge of keeping the Doctor prisoner, is played by Colin Baker; Peter Davison later quipped that Baker seemed a bit over-eager to shoot him. Less attention has been paid to the fact that Maxil decides to imprison the Doctor in his own TARDIS, a plan which really calls into question Maxil’s efficiency as a security agent. Given this, it’s a real testament to how dozy the Fifth Doctor is that it still takes him the thick end of two episodes to escape.

There’s so much of this stuff to unpick – the mechanism whereby Tegan rejoins the TARDIS crew is one of those absurdly huge coincidences that makes the Doctor Who universe feel temporarily very small – and it is often laid at the door of John Nathan-Turner’s much-complained-about ‘shopping list outlines’ for writers. Here’s the thing, though: if you’re writing for Doctor Who, your heart should sing when you get a memo that reads “Time Lords + Omega + Amsterdam location shoot + Tegan rejoins”. What is this show about if not the collision of unlikely elements? Hell, the first two elements already have a ready-to-go connection. The blame absolutely lies with Byrne, whose other two stories are, if anything, even worse than this. Given a complicated brief, his instinct is to make it pointlessly over-complicated, and then to waste vast amounts of screen-time on technobabble-rammed explanations that don’t clarify a single thing.

The implication that Gallifrey has cells of Omega loyalists is a nice, logical extrapolation from his portrayal in The Three Doctors, but it is just an implication, never explored in any depth. Worse, the reason why someone would feel pity for this lunatic – his unjust removal from Gallifreyan history – is left unspoken. The audience for this serial are implicitly fans who can remember Omega’s pre-established position in Doctor Who lore, an assumption that would make the show less and less popular as the 1980s wore on. In the short term, things would pick up – the next story’s Snakedance. But that, as noted above, couldn’t be used as a model for Doctor Who going forward. The bigger problem is that this was; next year, Byrne would come back with a similarly catastrophic season opener, and its “come on, you remember this one!” approach to continuity would become the show’s standard mode.

Next: Snakedance (1983)

Graham’s Archive – Arc of Infinity

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