Doctor Omega (series)

Doctor Omega is an ad hoc franchise of prose and audio stories created by various publishers based on the titular character, created in 1906 by the French writer Arnold Galopin in the novel of the same name.

Premise
The original Doctor Omega novel focused on the titular Doctor Omega, a mysterious inventor who took his neighbour Denis Borel and his handyman Fred on a trip to Mars in a ship he had constructed, the Cosmos or Excelsior depending on the edition, whose outer walls were constructed with a special material allowing it to repel Space and Time and thereby travel through the aether.

Later works featuring Doctor Omega altered the status quo in various way, often introducing new companions for the Doctor, such as the aeroplane pilot Amelia Midnite. In The Doctor Omega Chronicles, the Doctor no longer flies the spaceship Cosmos but a timeship of his own design called the Galopin (in allusion to the character's creator). In Doctor Omega's Parallel Adventures, meanwhile, Doctor Omega and Denis travel to parallel universes aboard a new ship, The Tuner, shaped on the outside to resemble a large boulder because "it is the one thing which would fit anywhere".

Origins
Galopin's Le Docteur Oméga was initially standalone, spawning as its only related work of fiction a serialised reworking of the original story, published in 1908-1909 under the alternative title of Seekers of the Unknown. However, in 2003, it was unearthed by Doctor Who historian and writer Jean-Marc Lofficier, who noticed that the character of Doctor Omega as depicted in the illustrations bore an uncanny resemblance to William Hartnell's First Doctor — with the plot itself also bearing some resemblance to the plot of a typical Doctor Who story. Lofficier consequently created an English version of Doctor Omega, half-translation and half-retelling, with a new cover by Gil Formosa whose design evoked the classic 1973 cover of Doctor Who in an Exciting Adventure with the Daleks. The book was released in 2003, celebrating the 40th anniversary of Doctor Who, by Black Coat Publishing, with a foreword from Terrance Dicks. A more faithful, unabridged English translation would later be released by the similarly-named but distinct American publisher, Black Cat Publishing.

The primary intent behind the changes was to allow for the possibility that Doctor Omega was no human scientist, but rather an alias taken on by the actual First Doctor some time before the events of An Unearthly Child; Omega now mentioned offhand that he had a granddaughter, and noted that he was not the only one to have created a space-time vessel out of stellite, mentioning that "his people, from another... country", had created ships whose exteriors were made of stellite. The descriptions of two of the species of Martians encountered by Doctor Omega and Denis were also altered to suggest that one evolved into the Ice Warriors and the other into H. G. Wells' Martians; a suggestion was added in the text that Doctor Omega and Denis had travelled back several billion years as well as in space, thus retconning away Mars's depiction in the original text as still being full of life in 1905.

Development as a "pseudo-spinoff"
The character has since appeared regularly, from 2006 onwards, in the series of shared-universe short stories Tales of the Shadowman, edited by Jean-Marc and Randy Lofficier and which featured a variety of public-domain literary characters; one, The Dynamics of an Asteroid, was the work of notorious Doctor Who writer John Peel. A selection of these short stories were compiled in a standalone Doctor-Omega-focused anthology also published by Black Coat Press, Doctor Omega and the Shadowmen, in 2011. This book again sported a Target-esque cover.

In 2014, a four-disc audiobook of Doctor Omega and the Fantastic Adventure to Mars, based on the faithful American translation of Galopin's novel, was released by Explore Multimedia; it saw John Guilor, who had voiced the actual First Doctor the year prior in TV: The Day of the Doctor, take on the part of Doctor Omega. He returned to the part in 2017 in The Silent Planet, a full-cast audio drama written by John Peel was published by Who Dares Publishing alongside a brief prequel-comic, and advertised as the first in a series called Doctor Omega's Parallel Adventures. Its premise was that Doctor Omega was travelling sideways into other universes in an effort to escape "his own people", once again relying on the implication that Doctor Omega was the Doctor.

Although as of, further releases in Doctor Omega's Parallel Adventures have failed to materialise, this was not the end of Doctor Omega at Who Dares Publishing, as, in 2018, they inaugurated a series of novels entitled The Doctor Omega Chronicles. These featured a different status quo from Doctor Omega's Parallel Adventures as well as a completely different Doctor Omega logo, and implications that Doctor Omega was anything but a human were purged from the marketing. This series had John Peel as a chief editor and Andrew Skilleter as a cover artist, with Skilleter also contributing the design of Doctor Omega's new timeship the Galopin (with input from 3D artist Chris Walker-Thomson), closely inspired by the ship featured on Skilleter's cover for John Peel's Doctor Who book The Gallifrey Chronicles.

Acknowledgement in the DWU
Despite its plentiful behind-the-scenes connections to licensed Doctor Who media and in-story implications of being itself set in the DWU, references from Doctor Who to Doctor Omega have been scarce, barring the theory put forward by Lofficier and later by Who Dares Publishing's official website that the Galopin novel may indeed have been an influence on An Unearthly Child. However, an imaginary Doctor Omega TV series, serving as a counterpart to the place occupied in the 20th century TV landscape by Doctor Who Magazine itself, was mentioned in several Lethbridge-Stewart releases.