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The Strange Case of Doctor Omega

Did A 1906 French Novel Inspire The BBC Series 'Doctor Who'?

By Matthew KresalPublished 6 years ago 4 min read
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Artwork from the original 1906 publication of 'Le Docteur Oméga' with the title character pictured at right.

For years as a Doctor Who fan, I've been vaguely aware of something called Doctor Omega. No, it isn't a spin-off of the long-running British science fiction series. In fact, it predates the BBC series by more than a half-century. Originally published in French as Le Docteur Oméga in 1906, this early science fiction novel with its tale of interplanetary exploration featuring a title character who is an old man with white hair certainly would seem on the surface to be quite like William Hartnell's First Doctor. Yet is there more to it than that? Is Doctor Omega the predecessor to Doctor Who?

Well, it depends on which version of it you happen to be reading. Many fans (including many of the reviewers on Goodreads) will have encountered the 2003 edition published by the Los Angeles based Black Coat Press, the one "adapted and retold" by Jean-Marc Lofficier and Randy Lofficier. Rather than being a straight translation, that edition appears to have played up the Doctor Who angle and made quite a few changes (as per the "adapted and retold" line). It is that edition, more than the original work, that seems to have led to numerous spin-offs involving the character. It's a move that's proven quite lucrative if not perhaps utterly faithful to the original work.

William Hartnell's First Doctor from 'Doctor Who'. Credit: BBC

Knowing this, I decided to track down the straight French to English translation if one was even available. Thankfully, Black Cat Press put it out in time for Doctor Who's fiftieth anniversary in 2013. Reading that recently has been an interesting experience, though not the one I was quite expecting.

There are some similarities with Doctor Who, it has to be said. The title character, an eccentric older man with white hair, definitely has shades of the First Doctor to him just from that description alone though the novel makes it quite clear he is a Frenchman and not a Time Lord from the planet Gallifrey in the constellation of Kasterborous. That's something even more striking given the illustrations included from 1906, which shows a most remarkable resemblance to actor William Hartnell. Doctor Omega's dialogue also has a ring of Hartnell First Doctor to it much of the time, making it all the more striking.

There are additional moments of familiarity, as well. The large portion of the novel set on Mars also has some of the travelogue feel found in many of the longer stories from the era such as Marco Polo or The Keys Of Marinus. The fact that the story is told in the first person by one of the Doctor's companions, a middle-aged French violinist named Dennis Borel, brings up memories of the first ever Doctor Who book which told the first Dalek story that was told from the point of view of Ian Chesterton. With all that in mind, it isn't hard to see why the Lofficier's and so many others have drawn connections to the BBC series.

Yet in reading the original work without it being "adapted and retold" what struck me wasn't the connections to Doctor Who at all. Instead, Doctor Omega as a novel seems far closer to 1906 than 1963. That would be HG Wells' SF classic The First Men In The Moon which author Arnould Galopin is almost certainly doing a pastiche (if not outright rip-off) of Wells' tale with his depiction of the journey to Mars and the encounter with the Martian monarch late in the story. There are shades of Jules Verne as well as the Doctor's craft Cosmos being very much like the famous Columbiad seen in From The Earth To The Moon and its sequel Around The Moon. If anything, Doctor Omega has far more in common with those works than a BBC TV series.

Doctor Omega and his companions meet the Martian monarch in this original 1906 illustration.

What is also clear is that Galopin's novel is very much a product of its time. While his Mars owes much to Wells and it has the prerequisite touches of genre fiction, it might as well be the Africa of countless adventure novels of the same period much of the time. Indeed, for all of his similarities to the First Doctor, our lead character has no problem making the occasional reference to primitive peoples while carrying a gun and threatening to massacre the short grey Martians at one point. Elsewhere, the narrator has no problem making similarly vaguely racist comments that, while not out of place in polite society in 1906, very much date the novel more than a century later. All works of "art" are, of course, the product of the era in which they are created so if one can look past that, there's an interesting read.

So is Le Docteur Oméga the long-lost predecessor to the BBC's Doctor Who? For my money, the answer is "no." While there are points of similarity, there aren't enough for me to draw a direct line between the two and the fact that the work didn't appear in English until after the turn of the twenty-first century further undermines the case. That said, it certainly feels like a proto-First Doctor story at times in the same way The First Men In The Moon does today. So for those who are interested in early SF or stories that inspired the steampunk genre, I wholeheartedly recommend the novel.

Just don't be expecting a TARDIS or a sonic screwdriver.

science fiction
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About the Creator

Matthew Kresal

Matthew Kresal was born and raised in North Alabama though he never developed a Southern accent. His essays have been featured in numerous books and his first novel Our Man on the Hill was published by Sea Lion Press in 2021.

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