Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary - watching Doctor Who one episode a day from the very start...
Day 610: Arc of Infinity, Episode Three
Dear diary,
When I said yesterday that I’d forgotten that the Doctor was kept out of Amsterdam for a while in this story, I don’t think I really appreciated just how long he’d be away! We’re three-quarters of the way through the story, and he’s still trapped on Gallifrey! He knows now that Tegan is involved in events, but hasn’t actually met up with her yet in the physical world, and I’m really enjoying that aspect of the tale - I was banging on about needing a story away before Tegan rejoins the TARDIS crew and in some ways we’ve got it, because dragging out the time they spend apart is really helping it to feel as though their worlds are being slowly brought back together again. I think if I’ve one complaint, it’s that Tegan just happens to stumble in to these events by chance, and then Omega is surprised (but delighted) to realise that there’s a link with the Doctor. I think I’d rather have Omega actively seek Tegan out as a bargaining chip, because there’s an awful lot of coincidence going on here!
Outside of the Doctor and Tegan being kept largely separate, I’m struggling to find very much that I’m enjoying about Arc of Infinity, I’m sad to say. Everything just seems to be plodding along, and there’s just nothing that’s pulling me in to the story. Even though the scenes on Gallifrey have now come to a head and the High Council have learned that - yes - there’s a traitor among them and they even have proof that it could well be the Lord President himself… everyone seems about as interested as if they’d put a new pot-plant in the council chamber. And not even a nice, extravagant pot plant with silver leaves that was hand-reared on the south side of a Gallifreyan mountain range: just a regular one that the Castellan picked up from the garden centre. Reduced.
I think it’s because I’d like there to be almost more of an Agatha Christie feel to these events. You’ve got a small number of suspects, various evidence, and deaths that have been brought in to cover up said evidence… you could really make something from that, and it seems a shame that there isn’t a great deal done with it. Even when Nyssa is pleading for time to try and clear the Doctor’s name, there’s no real sense of energy about it, everyone is just milling about and trying to keep themselves busy until this cliffhanger arrives.
Despite all of this - I have to admit that I quite like a lot of the effects in relation to Omega himself. I love that he often appears in negative, when everything else on the screen in positive (a great way to represent him as ‘antimatter’ in a ‘matter’ universe - though imagine if The Three Doctors had done the reverse! yikes!), and the kind of ‘vortex’ effect that gets applied to him when he’s materialising is also a great effect. I used to have a copy of one of the old ‘In Vision’ magazines for this story, and the back cover was a full-page image of Omega inside the green-tinted TARDIS, and I think that image wormed its way into my mind, because I can’t see that here without thinking of the magazine!
I’m also quite keen on the costume they use here, too. I’ll admit that on the whole I do prefer the look of the one he wears for The Three Doctors, but there’s something rather beautiful about the design of this one, too. The same can’t really be said for his pet Ergon, though. I think the Gel Guards were a somewhat more successful creation! That said, I’ll at least give them points for trying. It may look like a giant, feather-less chicken, but it at least looks a million miles away from being ‘human’…!
