The Omega Factor: Visitations
In the second episode of The Omega Factor Tom Crane is introduced to the work of Department 7 and its immediate boss Roy Martindale. The episode foregrounds the reality that Crane’s concern is to find out how his wife died. He also discovers that both his friend Anne and his brother have been working for Department 7 without telling him, including the white room experiments his brother has been doing on him without his consent. You will note the clear lack of ethics in this episode and I think it is to set up Crane as an innocent, almost a victim; building on the strange way his wife died in the first episode.
A full house of techniques and alleged phenomena familiar to the 1970s occultism craze are introduced. Of course Crane gets an extraordinarily high score guessing the zener cards. The episode makes great use of Electronic Voice Phenomena, disorted voices recorded on tape unheard as they were being recorded, which were being investigated at the time. It is not made explicit but some of the phenomena around photographs could have beeen influenced by Ted Serios’s thought photographs, which had been ‘investigated’ in the least controlled experiment in world history in the 1960s, but were all the rage in the weird books of the seventies.
However the climax of the episode is that Department 7 investigate an allegedly haunted house which has actually belonged to the government but every use it has been put to has resulted in all sorts of strange things happening, people turning violent, and even suicide. It is revealed to Crane and us before this happens that the house had also been the setting for a magical order run by Crane’s magical opponent Drexel who promised him a manifestation in the first episode. The investigation goes about as badly as you would expect in the circumstances.
Even before they go to the house the Department go to see one of the Special Branch officers in hospital who had been working in the house and had unexpectedly murdered one of his colleagues. He has no recollection of the murder, and to Crane’s surprise he has seen this man among the photographs that Martindale had had Crane psychically project to a man in the next room. Suddenly the man tried to kill Martindale, so obviously the workers have to stand together and kill the boss.
I love the mixture of actual measurable science, contemporary pseudo-science and popular psychicism that the show uses. It makes a very effective combination, although I have no way of determining whether this effect was deliberate or even how many viewers would have understood the distinction I’m making. At one point in the episode Crane even goes to see a psychic in an attempt to contact his wife. He must have contacted her through the spiritualist church because she mentions that she usually only sees people at church. However afterwards Crane comments that she is one of the real psychics in contradistinction to the fake ones. In true fairground psychic tradition the psychic tells Crane that he has darkness around him and is in danger.
One of the reasons I wanted to go back through this series is that I felt I had lost the thread of the plot, and as so often, wanted to regain it by watching the series with the sort of attentiveness needed to write a blog post. So I think there’s a possible criticism that the series is perhaps rather hard to follow and the episodes contain a lot of events. For example, in this one the entire episode could have been directed more to the investigation of the house, rather than introducing the episode by separate experimentation on Crane.
The early scenes of the episode also feel rather as if they’re just about the paraphenalia of 1970s parapsychology and don’t really serve the greater plot arc.
Otherwise this episode is a fantastic drama, involving real suspense and strong emotion.
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