I Watch TV: The Omega Fctor

 

The Omega Factor

Journalist Tom Crane follows a lead to Edinburgh, staying in his brother’s flat (his brother goes out of the country on business). Crane’s an expert on the occult and he’s tracked down Drexel, an old cult-leader, now running an occult bookstore under another name. Confronting Drexel, Drexel vaguely threatens him when asked to prove his magic powers. Later Crane finds himself haunted by visions. He’s invited his wife up to Edinburgh for the weekend; he thinks he sees her with a man before she arrives. Later, while driving, he sees things and crashes the car, killing his wife.

Crane is recruited by Scott-Erskine, a mysterious figure who works for the British Government. He is sent to Department 7, a secret psychic research organisation, headquartered in Edinburgh and overseen by Dr Roy Martindale. Martindale is ruthless, always pushing to get results. Crane finds himself drawn to Dr Anne Reynolds, a physicist with the Department who is an old friend of Crane’s wife. Crane turns out to have psychic sensitivity himself; though the Department seems to be helping him train with them, his main objective is to find Drexel.

Crane insists on intervening in various events at Department 7, with Rynolds sometimes backing him and sometimes Martindale’s approach, which tends to not interfering unless there’s something that benefits his research. Crane’s efforts to find Drexel, as well as other events point towards a conspiracy acting against them, which uses the recurring symbol of an Omega (Ω). The stakes are occasionally mentioned – mind control, and how the first country to get it will win… everything (from 1979, the Cold War is in full swing).

Each episode explores a psychic phenomenon of some sort such as tulpas, hypnosis, brainwashing, extra-sensory perception, telekinesis, poltergeists, out-of-body experiences, possession etc. Sometimes Crane’s psychic sensitivity is the key to finding out what’s going on, sometimes it gets them into trouble, and sometimes it’s what saves them. The whole thing is quite dark; one episode had students experimenting with devil worship, which spins out of control to someone burning alive, knife violence and hypnotic suggestion. This got made into a cause celebre by Mary Whitehouse and her National Viewers And Listeners Association, who thought it “thoroughly evil”.

Watch This: Paranoid occult thriller, pre-figuring many modern paranoid thrillers
Don’t Watch This: Ten crammed episodes with an ambiguous ending; why not watch a modern TV show instead?