Arc of Infinity Part Four

The one where the Doctor chases himself around Amsterdam...

There are a good many things wrong or disappointing about Arc of Infinity, but one of the biggest is the waste of some potentially great actors. Director Ron Jones managed to get Leonard Sachs, a veteran actor with a frighteningly impressive CV stretching back almost five decades, as well as Elspet Gray, a future baroness whose work with husband Brian Rix gave her an instinct for comedy timing. But they get virtually nothing of any great note to do or say (particularly Gray), and to be fair don't really bring anything of their own either. Their delivery is leaden and unengaged, although Sachs does seem to burst into life in part 4.

Yes, they're playing stuffy, uber-formalised Time Lords, but that doesn't mean they can't have self-expression, or a bit of individuality. Michael Gough manages to make Hedin both urbane and ruthless, almost sympathetic perhaps, but Sachs, Gray and Max Harvey (Zorac) are content to wander numbly through their scenes. All credit to Paul Jerricho for making the Castellan a more recognisable character, so it'll be good to see him return in The Five Doctors.

With Omega now in charge of the Matrix, and his fusion booster thingy giving him more power to transfer fully from his anti-matter dimension, time is running out. The Doctor rather wonderfully - and angrily ("WAIT IN THE TARDIS... please!") - sends Nyssa to her room so that he can enter the Matrix to try and reason with the madman. On the face of it, the Doctor entering the Matrix sounds rather exciting, especially with the crazy, surreal scenes from The Deadly Assassin part 3 in mind. Sadly, the Fifth Doctor entering the Matrix merely means popping a CSO crown on his head and returning to the awful wibbly-wobbly world of looking like an upturned tortoise in a black void. I'm officially underwhelmed.

While in the Matrix, Omega summons Tegan to wobble in the void, and warns her not to tell the Doctor where she is. "Tell him the precise location and you will die!" threatens Omega, to which Tegan promptly blurts out that she is in Holland, Amsterdam, "JHC"! But Omega does not kill Tegan, because his threats are obviously very hollow.

The Doctor and Nyssa rush to Amsterdam in the TARDIS, with only the three letters JHC as clues. Flicking through a telefoon directory, the Doctor identifies JHC as a youth hostel, but because they're both aliens and don't have any guilder, they have to search each and every youth hostel in Amsterdam on foot. Now, this is not what I was expecting from the final episode of the opening story of Doctor Who's 20th season. If the Terileptils hadn't destroyed the sonic screwdriver in The Visitation, then none of this running around the streets of Amsterdam would be necessary, the Doctor could have just zapped the telefoon to give him unlimited calls. I know producer John Nathan-Turner wanted rid of the sonic so the Doctor had to be more resourceful, but this isn't the most exciting plot as a result!

Don't get me wrong, Amsterdam looks lovely (sometimes gloriously sunny, sometimes drably damp), and it's a great location to have our heroes hurtling about, over bridges and along cobbled streets, in pursuit of danger. But one thing I've been wondering since Arc of Infinity began is: why Amsterdam? I get that it was a great place to film Doctor Who overseas, but within the story's narrative, why are we here? Colin and Robin were holidaying there, and Tegan was coming to meet Colin. I get that (even if it is monumentally convenient). But why is Omega's TARDIS there?

The answer is that "Amsterdam is located on the curve of the arc, below sea level to maintain pressure for fusion conversion". Amsterdam is not the only place on Earth, let alone the entire universe, that is located below sea level, so this makes the coincidence of Tegan turning up even harder to swallow. Basically, they're in Amsterdam because that's where they wanted to film, which is not a good reason within the narrative. At least with Paris, the Doctor and Romana were holidaying there.

I'll try and move on because I could spend a lot of time on this. But I seem to stumble with every scene in this episode. Like, why does Tegan think telling the Doctor "JHC" will lead him to where she is, in Omega's TARDIS in a crypt behind a fountain at Frankendael? Surely it would have been better to blurt out "fountain at Frankendael" or something similar? There is absolutely no good reason why going to the youth hostel will lead the Doctor to Omega.

Out of the blue it's revealed that Robin left a note at the youth hostel in case he missed Tegan at the airport, and it is this note which directs the Doctor to Frankendael. But even this doesn't work, because Robin was no longer staying in the crypt at Frankendael, he was staying at the youth hostel. So why leave a note for Tegan at the youth hostel saying he can be found at the crypt when he's actually staying at the youth hostel? I'm baffled.

It's a mess, but let's move on (if I can). I do like the scenes of the Doctor and Nyssa running through the streets of Amsterdam. When the Doctor knocks over the poor woman with her shopping, he's so funny, expressing profuse apologies but desperate to move on! And later, when they find the Dutchman lying dazed on the street after encountering Omega, he stops to check him ("He'll be alright"), but when Nyssa and Tegan stop to check him, he snaps "He'll be alright!" I love it when the Fifth Doctor loses his cool. We tend to think of him as quite a mild-mannered Doctor, but he's actually quite short-tempered, and carries his temper close to the surface.

The Doctor and Nyssa finally find the crypt, and disable the fusion booster. They are hilariously hindered by the emergence of the Ergon, which wrestles with the Doctor awkwardly until Nyssa manages to zap the creature with the matter converter. The Doctor claims the Ergon was one of Omega's less successful experiments in psychosynthesis. Too right.

Inside his TARDIS Omega finally manages complete transfer, via some icky scenes where his head goes all squidgy and leaks a gooey substance. It's not explained why Omega's head is melting, but it's a reasonably good effect and satisfyingly hideous. Despite the power overloading and the TARDIS burning out, Omega takes on the physical form of his bonding partner, ie the Doctor, and so begins a mad dash through the streets of Amsterdam once more, our heroes (now including Tegan) in pursuit of the renegade Time Lord.

Some might uncharitably say the chase scenes are padding, rather blatantly showing off the foreign location, but there's no argument that it's all good fun. It starts off with a robed Davison stealing the clothes from a Dutch gardener so he's less conspicuous, which means the Doctor and co are now trying to find a boiler-suited blond somewhere on the streets of Amsterdam. It's like trying to find a needle in a haystack, but luckily everywhere Omega goes, he attracts attention. After a rather unsettling visit to a steam organ (where Davison gives Omega some vital humanity by showing him learning to smile and find music pleasing thanks to a wordless connection with a little boy), the renegade starts to revert to his anti-matter self, his skin turning green and mottled. The bond isn't stable!

As the mutating Omega hurtles through the streets, startled women scream at his appearance, dogs chase and bark at him, and chefs drop their waste bins at the sight of him. They finally corner Omega, now played by Ian Collier again, at the end of a pier. All of this chasing about has been monitored on Gallifrey by Borusa, Thalia, Zorac, Damon and the Castellan, who do bugger-all to help the Doctor in his race to save the universe. Couldn't they send some troops to help in the city-wide search, or a gadget of some kind that could trace Omega? Just leaving the fate of the universe to the jogging skills of a Time Lord, a Trakenite aristocrat and a human air hostess (sorry, former air hostess) is pretty irresponsible.

As Omega reverts to anti-matter, the bond weakening, the Doctor resorts to using the Ergon's matter converter to zap the villain out of existence. Collier makes the most of Omega's death throes, managing to make it look and sound horrifically painful (which it would be). And so the first of the Time Lords is defeated again, this time not by the combined mental forces of three Doctors, but by the Ergon's gun. Is he really dead? "Well, he seemed to die before," says the Doctor, "yet he returned to confound us all." Omega has yet to reappear in the TV series, but he has had plenty of other adventures in spin-off fiction, including Big Finish's well-loved audio Omega (2003).

A rushed final scene does little to satisfy my basic need for closure. The Time Lords and Gallifrey are just forgotten about (Maxil didn't appear in part 4 at all), and Tegan makes a telefoon call off camera to check up on her seriously injured cousin Colin and his bezzie mate Robin. Colin will be out of hospital in a couple of days and back on his way home to Brisbane. No farewell scene, just a phone call, which is a bit off considering she flew 200 miles to see Colin.

By the end, Tegan is reunited with Nyssa and the Doctor, the former far more pleased about it than the latter. Tegan says she was sacked from her job (a colloquialism I wouldn't expect Nyssa to understand, but whatever) and this just makes me desperate to know what the bolshie Aussie said or did to make her lose her dream job. This was answered in the 2016 audio The Waters of Amsterdam, where it was revealed she struck a passenger who was waiting by the door rather than his seat as the plane landed. That's my Tegan!

The Doctor's visible displeasure at having Tegan as his travelling companion again is disappointing, because if nothing else, she livens things up and brings some much-needed humour and realism to the TARDIS team. I'm really not sure I could endure very many more adventures with just the Fifth Doctor and Nyssa, I'd be too bored. Tegan is a breath of fresh air, and I'm glad she's back. As Season 20 gets underway, she is finally a willing adventurer rather than a reluctant passenger as before. Her moment of realisation that she can't swap the universe for her old life back (beautifully illustrated in one scene toward the end of Time-Flight) is built upon here, and I for one am glad.

Arc of Infinity is a mess. It has a great central idea, but it loses most of its strengths in director Ron Jones's interpretation. It's poorly edited and paced, and there are some seriously questionable decisions made by script editor Eric Saward (logic goes out the window too often) and creative designers Marjorie Pratt and Dee Robson (drab Gallifreyan sets and The Ergon). Some of the performances are distinctly absent (Sachs, Gray and, despite his aesthetic attributes, Neil Daglish as Damon), and Roger Limb's score is pretty bland too. It's partially saved by a breathlessly enthusiastic Peter Davison, and the Dutch location work, but overall, it's a lacklustre way to open any season, never mind the twentieth.

First broadcast: January 12th, 1983

Steve's Scoreboard
The Good: The use of the Dutch location.
The Bad: The Doctor's sour reaction to being reunited with Tegan. What a grump.
Overall score for episode: ★★★★★★☆☆☆☆ (story average: 4.8 out of 10)

NEXT TIME: Snakedance...

My reviews of this story's other episodes: Part One; Part Two; Part Three

Find out birth/death dates, career information, and facts and trivia about this story's cast and crew at the Doctor Who Cast & Crew site.

Arc of Infinity is available as part of a BBC DVD box set. Find it on Amazon - https://www.amazon.co.uk/Doctor-Who-Time-Flight-Arc-Infinity/dp/B000R20VKA