I recently bought the twentieth anniversary season Collection so thought that as well as watching the extras, I'd give the actual stories a gander as well. Some of them I'd not seen in ages. For an anniversary event,
season 20 can seem odd with its best stories leaning on the more abstract and its
less good ones the more traditional. Not exactly a great advert for the show’s
history but a suggestion of a new direction? Forty years distance does allow
the more nuanced feel of the season to shine rather more than had it been
rammed full of big action stories. There may seem to be long sequences were not
a lot happens but the better parts of the season are still rich in content if not
pace. So now its recently been released in a great big blu ray collection it’s
a good reason to re-watch. Here’s some thoughts on each of them from a 2023 perspective…
Arc of Infinity
Notwithstanding the
Ergon, I enjoyed this more than I thought I would. Fan lore suggests a third-tier
tale and while it’s definitely not in any danger of being an under rated
classic it does open the season with some verve considering the more thoughtful
pace of the rest of the stories. It’s a traditional offering with the added
luxury of location filming supported by a decent attempt from writer Johnny
Byrne to justify the location. Byrne’s behind the scenes interview hints at
aspects that perhaps were shunted to one side by the shopping list of contents
– Omega, Tegan coming back (having never really left), Amsterdam – that sit
awkwardly together. Coincidence is essential in fiction but the levels it rises
to here are somewhat implausible. The story does manage to froth up into a
decent thriller though would surely have been better had the antagonist been a
new character.
