The Omega Factor: Night Games
Content warning: suicide
This third episode of the series brings up several of protagonist Crane’s key concerns from previous episodes.
Initially he has the concern about his brother’s involvement in Department 7’s work. Crane, asleep, psychically picks up on his brother experiencing an apparition of soldiers in historic dress, becoming very distressed and being rescued by modern day soldiers.
It turns out that the army has been conducting experiments using sonic rays to make people experience these things and for mind control. Crane is immediately onto this but naturally meets a solid wall of no information at all from the army, except for one soldier who leaks information to him. Based on this Crane sneaks into an army base and questions the visibly very unwell major who was in charge of the experiments, and who reacts very unpredictably to being questioned. Unfortunately he kills himself after Crane talks to him and Crane ends up in no end of hot water. It also appears that Drexel, Crane’s nemesis from episode 1, was involved in the experiments which were started by the US army.
Crane obviously wants more than ever to get to the bottom of what is going on.
You will readily see that this episode is a bit different from the preceding two, in that while science fiction and psychic abilities do appear, the emphasis is much more on government secrets. I haven’t really covered it to keep my symopsis clean, but there is also a heavy strand of Crane not being sure who he can trust. This show has been described as a precursor of the X-Files, and truly Crane settles into the Fox Mulder role in this episode with a vengeance. We are also encouraged to wonder what position on this the various people within Department 7 would take. At any rate it is clear that some conflict is definitely on the way.
I really liked this episode: it actually managed a lot with as far as I can see no special effects. The scenes on the moor and on the army base were especially effective.
I just have one criticism, which is that I have watched the episode a couple of times to write this post and my summary above is considerably simplified from the plot line in the episode, which tends to be a bit over-complicated in my opinion.
Otherwise, an interesting episode of this series, which progresses the plot in a new direction and demonstrates this show’s influence on The X-Files.
This blog is mirrored at
culttvblog.tumblr.com/archive (from September 2023) and culttvblog.substack.com (from January 2023 and where you can subscribe by email)
Archives from 2013 to September 2023 may be found at culttvblog.blogspot.com and there is an incomplete index to the tags used on the Tumblr version at https://www.tumblr.com/culttvblog/729194158177370112/this-blog
There is an index to posts on the Substack version here: https://culttvblog.substack.com/p/index-of-posts?r=1q6qo6&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&triedRedirect=true
About this blog: https://culttvblog.substack.com/about
Vote Green for real hope and real change! greenparty.org.uk