THE OMEGA FACTOR (1979) – This eerie BBC series combined the best elements of Doomwatch with Department S and injected supernatural scares that anticipated the much later series Twin Peaks and The X Files.
James Hazeldine, remembered as the snarky butler from The Musgrave Ritual episode of Jeremy Brett’s Sherlock Holmes, starred as Tom Crane. Tom was a reporter whose untapped psychic abilities bring him into conflict with an Aleister Crowleyesque villain named Edward Drexel (Cyril Luckham) and an organization called Omega.
Crane’s wife is killed through Drexel’s machinations, motivating him to give up journalism and join Department 7, a secret British government agency which researches the supernatural and the paranormal.
Louise Jameson, famous from Tenko and as Leela on Doctor Who, is Dr. Anne Reynolds, a physicist colleague of Tom Crane’s. She was a friend of Tom’s late wife and through her he discovers that he has been under Department 7 surveillance since he was a boy because of his nascent psychic powers. Continue reading
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