With the 1983 season being the 20th one, producer JNT asked his superiors if transmission of the series could be held back to the autumn so that it would be broadcast around the time of the anniversary on 23rd November. His BBC bosses declined the request, but plans were initiated to produce an anniversary special for later in the year.
In the meantime, scripts were developed by JNT and script editor Eric Saward. JNT would later claim that the decision to have some element of the show's past in every story was a conscious one, and was used in publicity for the season - but we now know that it was only later that this coincidence was pointed out to JNT by Ian Levine, the fan who was beginning to make his presence felt as a sort of unofficial continuity adviser.
The 10th Anniversary season had featured The Three Doctors, though this wasn't the actual anniversary story. (It began broadcast in December of the year before the anniversary, and technically it was the interconnected Frontier in Space and Planet of the Daleks which were felt to be the real anniversary episodes).
The Three Doctors had as its villain the legendary Time Lord Omega (though strictly speaking he was blasted into the anti-matter universe before the Gallifreyans became Time Lords). To launch the new series, it was decided to bring him back. The character was fairly fresh in people's minds, as The Three Doctors had been one of the repeats shown as part of The Five Faces of Doctor Who run, just before Davison's first season. Now the obvious people to resurrect the character were his creators - Bob Baker and Dave Martin. However, their writing partnership had broken up a couple of years before, and besides JNT had an aversion to using writers who had worked on the show prior to him taking over the producership.
The task of resurrecting Omega instead fell to Johnny Byrne, the creator of Nyssa, who had previously written The Keeper of Traken and who had been JNT's first choice as script editor when he took over.
Omega's inclusion pointed towards a Gallifrey setting for the story, but JNT also wanted to film abroad. The City of Death had been very successful, and canny budgeting (by JNT himself) had meant that a story could be filmed overseas so long as it entailed minimum cast and crew, and they didn't venture too far afield. The BBC already had a production base set up in Amsterdam, thanks to the soap opera Triangle. This rather unglamorous soap was set around a North Sea ferry service, going between England, France and Holland - hence the name.
It was therefore decided that Byrne's story should be set partly in the Dutch city, with the script designed to show off as much of Amsterdam as possible, so as to justify going there. The problem was that Byrne then had to come up with a reason for the city's inclusion. The earlier Paris set story had revolved around the theft of the Mona Lisa, so the location was intrinsic to the plot. The best that Byrne would manage was that some piece of technology vital to Omega's plan had to be operated somewhere below sea level.
Something else Byrne had to incorporate into his script was the return of Tegan. It had looked as if the Doctor and Nyssa had run off without her at the end of the previous season - never to be seen again - but it had always been planned that she would be reunited with them at the start of the following season. She has now lost her job - the one he was always going on about over the last year - and so has decided to cheer herself up by joining her cousin Colin, who is travelling around Europe with his friend, Robin, when they hit Amsterdam. A lot of stories rely on coincidence, but this pushes that a little too far. The backpacking youths are reminiscent of An American Werewolf in London and other horror movies, and their decision to spend a night in a creepy crypt only adds to the horror vibe.
The other half of the story is, as we've said, set on Gallifrey. It links directly with the two previous Gallifrey stories in that it features the character of Borusa - now President proper, rather than just the power behind the throne. We also have another Castelan, who is not terribly nice (as with his predecessor Kelner). What we don't get is Leela or Andred, though the Doctor does at least ask after his old companion. K9 is absent as well. Byrne instead comes up with two entirely new old friends of the Doctor - the technician Damon, and Hedin, member of the High Council. Once again, as with two of the last three visits to his home planet, the Doctor finds himself on trial from his own people (The War Games and The Deadly Assassin).
Arc of Infinity is also another of those evil doppelganger stories. Every Doctor apart from Pertwee had met an evil version of himself (whilst Pertwee had to make do with evil doppelganger of all his friends). Omega needs a body in the universe of matter in order to cross over between dimensions, and he elects to use that of the Time Lord who had defeated him last time. Prior to Davison taking on the double role, Omega is played not by Stephen Thorne as you might have expected but by Ian Collier, who was last seen playing dippy hippy Stu in The Time Monster. We also don't get the same costume as seen back in the 1970's. This naturally annoyed fans at the time, and since. If you're going to bring back a classic villain, then do it properly. The only reason for not having Omega look or sound like Omega is that they wanted to keep the fans guessing as to who this villain might be. They simply name him as "the Renegade" for the first two episodes (remember that the series was being shown twice weekly at this stage, so the Radio Times covered two episodes per week). It's just a pity that at least one tabloid newspaper stated who the villain was going to be when they printed the publicity photos of the TARDIS crew messing about on bicycles in Amsterdam several months before broadcast.
Another failed attempt at engendering mystery was with Omega's secret helper on Gallifrey. Out of a relatively small cast of characters who it could have been, it was far too obviously Michael Gough's Councillor Hedin.
One unintentional nod back to The Three Doctors was in giving Omega a poorly realised monster as an accomplice - then the Gellguards, and here the boney chicken-like Ergon. The Doctor even comments on how rubbish it is.
Next time: one of the series' rare proper sequels. Lots more Buddhist references as the Mara make their return...
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