The Omega Factor: Powers of Darkness
Content warning: this episode has a graphic scene of someone burning to death
This is, I think, my favourite episode of the series, just because I would single it out for its atmosphere of mixed experimentation and shock. It feels a bit different to the others. The reason for this may be something I haven’t mentioned yet, which is that the ten episodes of this series each have a different writer. Regular readers will know that I don’t tend to get on well with anthology series, and while I obviously like this series because I’m writing about it, I think that probably the series having a single plot arc, would have been improved by having a single writer for its ten episodes. In the perennial comparison to the X-Files, that series of course went on for 97 series and had umpteen different plot strands, so could only reasonably have had multiple writers.
The episode starts with three people, who turn out to be students, holding a seance with fingers on an upturned wine glass and the alphabet placed around the table on pieces of paper. It turns out not only that their fourth housemate has had a nervous breakdown and is in a psychiatric hospital, but the boy has been doing experiments for money with Martindale at Department 7. They have a dramatic end to the seance, and we are immediaely taken to the hospital, where we discover that Crane’s brother is also a patient.
I don’t follow things as well as I used to, but I’m not entirely clear how the brother ended up in hospital.
At the doctor’s request Crane and Anne give one of the students a lift home. Crane once again glimpses the woman who was in Drexel’s bookshop in the first episode, but of course she’s disappeared when he gets out of the car to look. The student they are giving a list to has also spotted her (cue spooky music). She tells Crane and Anne how she and her friends have an interest in spiritualism, and talks about their strange experiences. The student who has had the breakdown has been taking datura as part of these experiments.
There is a distinctly puritanical streak to this episode, to my mind. Everyone in the episode who joins in occult experiments, taking drugs, or anything else that humans do, ends up mad or dead, and this is clearly a judgement on their activities. The look of the rest of the show is completely 1970s Britain, but interestingly the students are presented in a slightly different look. They mostly wear older looking clothes (think All Creatures Great and Small) and their tenement is dressed with a wealth of old furniture and decorations. Of course it’s quite common for students to dress in vintage stuff, and I think there may have been a craze for the look at the time, but this means the students look very different from everyone else, in televisual terms they’re coded as either more formal or from the past. I don’t have a satisfactory interpretation for this difference in presentation, I’m afraid, and will probably think of one after I’ve posted this.
The episodes references several discredited parapsychology cases which were all the rage at the time (Bridey Murphy and The Bloxham Tapes) which sets the episode perfectly in the white hot milieu of uncritical 1970s parapsychology. Another thing which comes up is spontaneous human combustion, which is not only a wild thing even to discuss, but is a positive roller coaster ride to actually film for a TV series. Continuing their experiments the students have a failed go at hypnosis: failed, that is, until they find they’ve hypnotised the girl who Crane gave a lift, by mistake. Of course Crane walks straight into this and sees what happens which is a remarkable exhibition of the actress’s histrionic gift.
She talks about having been a witch and being burned at the stake. Our POV immediately goes back to the hospital where we see the student on fire and bursting into Crane’s brother’s room, as if he wasn’t ill enough. The student dies. There is a complete mystery to how the fire started, which is treated by the show as spontaneous human combustion, and that in itself is treated as a thing which happens. Then we go straight to the show’s next funeral. Jenny, the student who was hypnotised, is distraught with worry that in some way she made their friend catch fire. She talks about having something going on in her head, and says she doesn’t know who she is. She talks about having been in the cemetery in a previous existence, and asks to be hypnotised again to go back to her previous self. Honestly, it’s very hard to see this episode as being positive about the events in any way: it’s very clearly a warning not to mess about with parapsychology.
Of course we know full well that the regression is going to be a disaster, and suddenly she’s one of the North Berwick witches being burned at the stake and King James is involved (hope she had a bible for him to sign, that would be really rare collector’s item). She wanders off so Department 7 ring the police to report her missing and probably mentally ill.
In the final scene, Crane psychically locates Jenny in a church; when they get there they find she thinks she is a dead witch and is doing some sort of ritual at the altar (I think the likely source for her actions is the 1970s literature on Wicca). They get Martindale from Department 7 who gives Crane a drug and Crane psychically rescues Jenny from Drexel (who, remember, is already dead) who appears, and he stabs Drexel with a knife. Jenny is better at the end of this.
I have a criticism of this which is that I think the ending is rather weak in comparison to the excellent build up. The reason for this weakness is that the episode has given a theoretical explanation in parapsychology for everything else which has happened in the episode but not for this. Suddenly, the entire cast is doing things which have previously been presented as dangerous, and there isn’t a justification for it.
That said, this episode got one of the highest endorsements a TV programme of this era could get. The BBC’s duty office log recorded a call on 11th July 1979 from Mary Whitehouse, self-appointed arbiter of all that is decent and moral and professional disapprover:
‘I am almost lost for words. I want to complain about The Omega Factor being shown in family viewing time before nine o’clock. It contains scenes of hypnosis, the supernatural, and a man apparently burning to death. It is one of the most disturbing programmes I have ever seen on television. I know that you are moving away from physical violence but now you are moving into the realms of psychological violence.
‘Incredible. And the programme ended with violation of the church with black magic and witchcraft. You may quote me when I say someone must have gone off their heads.’
The BBC acknowledged that the episode breached guidelines for what could be broadcast before the 9pm watershed. The producer was reprimanded and a second series was never commissioned.
Regular readers will remember how The Goodies spent episode after episode setting out with the intention of getting a complaint from Mrs Whitehouse, with no success, ultimately being forced to make an episode actually starring a parody of her. I think what the BBC should have done was check what they were broadcasting before the watershed and this show should obviously have been afterwards.
I like this episode hugely for its atmosphere and the keenness the students bring to it, despite a relatively weak ending in my opinion.
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