August 23: The Sun Makers Parts Three & Four

Today's Saturday, and while Peter Capaldi is making his debut tonight as the twelfth Doctor, I'm finishing up The Sun Makers.

Having established this society and its woes in the first two episodes, Robert Holmes sets about engineering a revolution via the Doctor and his new friends.  Of course, it's not just for altruistic, "humanity should be free" reasons: the Company has captured Leela (in a sequence that highlights the problems with shooting interiors on location on film, as it makes them obviously locations and thus there's less of a sense of being inside a building, at least according to the visual grammar of the show in this era) and prepared to execute her publicly via steaming, a particularly gruesome, non-fantastical-sounding death.  And that's largely it for this episode.  Part three also gives us some nice moments with the Doctor and his friends taking over Main Control (where the anxiety-inducing drug PCM is pumped through to all the work areas) and quickly convincing the two technicians working there to join the revolution, and there's also a subtle effort to make the people living in the Undercity more sympathetic and less nasty, so that we'll be more inclined to be on their side by the end.  Plus, this episode gives us a lot more of the Collector, as he gleefully looks forward to Leela's death ("This is the moment I get a real feeling of job satisfaction.  Are the microphones wired in?" the Collector asks.  "All round the condenser, most Merciful. We're looking forward to excellent duodecaphonic sound," Gatherer Hade replies, making, it seems an oblique reference to then-popular Quadraphonic sound (an early form of surround sound).  "Then we shall hear within a few seconds," the Collector responds happily) and slyly arranges for the Doctor's capture via an incentive of 5000 talmars paid to anyone who has information about him -- 5000 talmars out of Hade's account, which Hade seems none too pleased about.  Nasty cliffhanger, though, as Leela looks about to be killed by the steaming.

The Doctor confronts the Collector. (The Sun Makers Part
Four) ©BBC

Fortunately, she survives and heads back to Main Control with the Doctor (which includes, near the end of the sequence, an utterly bizarre moment where everyone calls out for K-9 for roughly thirty seconds before he reappears), and the revolution begins in earnest, as the PCM wears off and the workers start to go on strike.  This does lead to a genuinely unpleasant moment, though, as the workers grab Gatherer Hade and throw him off the roof to his death.  This might have worked better if Hade had been genuinely unpleasant, but we just see him act a bit like a buffoon and not really doing anything evil (beyond the excessive taxation).  It's thus a shock to see him killed so unpleasantly.

Meanwhile, the Doctor heads off to the Collector's palace and sabotages things before having a nice long chat with the Collector about things, and so we get a nice info-dump as a result: "Tell me, how did you get control of humanity?" the Doctor asks.  "A normal business operation," the Collector replies.  "The Company was looking for property in this sector, Earth was running down, its people dying.  We made a deal. ... We moved them all to Mars, after our engineers had made that planet habitable for their species."  "And then taxed the life out of them," the Doctor says reasonably.  "I mean, to recover your capital costs."  "Quite so, quite so.  Then, when the resources of Mars were exhausted in their turn, we created a new environment for them here on Pluto," the Collector says.  It's too late for the Collector, though; the Doctor had already fed into the system a "two percent growth tax into the computers; index linked," which ruins the economy and sends the Collector into such a shock that he dissolves in his chair and down into the workings inside; as a Usurian, see, the Collector is a type of poisonous fungi that looks "sea kale with eyes", and his human form was an affectation.  Still, humanity is no longer under the Company's thumb, and they can get on with resettling the Earth.  A petty moment in the TARDIS later (where the Doctor causes a tremendous lurch inside, causing the chess game he was losing against K-9 to topple over) and it's off to the next adventure.

It's not a terrible story by any means, but the tone of The Sun Makers is definitely uncertain.  The cast is starting to latch on to the jokes (and this is by no means the witty tax satire you've been led to believe -- other than a few moments in part one and the occasional reference here or there, the whole thing unfolds more or less the way one would expect a typical Who story to), and while it's not quite at the expense of everything else yet, it does lead to some odd and wholly unnecessary moments (such as the aforementioned K-9 "joke").  The problem is that, under that humorous surface material, there's a much darker story lurking.  The idea of being taxed to death (and beyond) is a new one for Doctor Who, and a lot of mileage could have been derived from exploring this further.  But because there's been an edict from above to make the show less scary, and because the design looks frankly rather cheap, the impact of this has been minimized, and what we're left with is a fairly well-written but ultimately generic story.