The Sun Makers Part Four

The one where the Doctor meets a talking sea kale...

The one point at which I find myself quite enjoying Henry Woolf's performance as the Collector is when he's talking about the enjoyment he gets from the duodecaphonic sound of a public steaming. "The deeper notes of despair, the final dying cadences. The whole point of a good steaming is the range it affords." At that moment, the Collector is a nasty little git, a villain worthy of booing. As the Doctor says, he's a "fish-blooded sadist". But otherwise, he's just a silly Davros rip-off with remarkable eyebrows.

Naturally, the Doctor manages to rescue Leela from the steam chamber (entering like Agent Mulder with a searching torch beam). After that, it's Team Doctor all the way as he rallies the rabble and orchestrates a way to overthrow the Company. The plan is to rig the public address system to issue some fake news that the rebellion is succeeding, and in tandem with the reduction of PCM in the air, this should incite an uprising among the workers, and result in an actual successful rebellion.

At last, after three episodes of bumbling about, the Doctor is spearheading some actual change. There's plenty of pointless padding along the way though, proving that Robert Holmes had a really interesting idea, and some great world-building concepts, but not enough actual plot to fill it out. The plot essentially boils down to: Doctor arrives, finds evil rulers suppressing the population, sides with the underdog and inspires rebellion. We know this plot of old - we've seen it before, we'll see it again - but there's not much else built onto this apart from the whole taxation theme. The story needs more.

What it doesn't need are the scenes of pointless things happening, like when everybody starts calling out for K-9, or the two MegroGuards who rush in to the Control Centre only to be instantly overcome, or the Collector going round and round in circles in his wheelchair ruing the interference of the Doctor, or the hypnotising of the palace guard, or the needlessly protracted opening of the Collector's safe. It's all just fluff, and often not very entertaining fluff. And what's in the safe anyway? Much is made of opening the door, and the security beam that disables Leela, but there's no actual explanation as to its relevance or contents (we're to assume it's Company money, but we're not shown or told this).

Some other quick observations:

• I love the bit where Cordo shows that he feels like a new man now the PCM is reduced. Roy Macready makes the time to show Cordo as a different man altogether, quite an exuberant, trigger-happy and, crucially, much braver man who has merely been suppressed by anxiety until now. It's a nice touch by Macready.
• It's hard to believe the camp MegroGuard (played by Tom Kelly) who finds the rebellious workers in the tunnels would be able to keep anybody in line, with or without PCM!
• That old joke of the Doctor accidentally hypnotising his companion is wheeled out again. It's used a few times over the years, notably with the Brigadier during the Third Doctor's era. It never gets funny.
• When the workers hurl Gatherer Hade off the roof of Megropolis 1, I must admit I cheered along with them. But the implication is dark: as annoying as he is, that poor man has to fall 1,000 metres before he splats to the ground below. It's a truly gruesome death. I'm not sorry to see the back of Richard Leech's awful performance though.

Sixteen minutes in to part 4, the Doctor finally meets the villain of the story, but the face-off sadly lacks the tension you'd want. The Collector is essentially a comedy villain, and as Tom Baker seems to be moving from his serious, brooding Hinchcliffe phase into his silly, wise-cracking Williams persona, there's no sense of confrontation at all. The Doctor fiddles with one of the Collector's big red buttons, but this only results in a comedy sound effect. And he manages to establish who the Collector is, and what the Company's plan is, but it's all done with such light-hearted jollity that you don't feel like there's a threat at all.

The Collector is a Usurian (oh, the subtlety), a race of creatures listed in Professor Thripsted's Book of Flora and Fauna of the Universe as "poisonous fungi". The Usurians are apparently sea kale with eyes, but they have a desperate calling to make money. They somehow infiltrated the people of Pluto and moved them all to Mars while they set about altering Pluto's surface to be more habitable. To do this, they constructed six artificial suns (hence the otherwise obscure name of the story), then when Mars had been exhausted, they moved all of the Plutonians back to their homeworld and used PCM to suppress the population, and ultimately make tonnes of money. The Collector says the Usurians tried war, but it was not as effective as employing economic power.

The way the Collector is finally defeated is not very clearly explained, certainly not for the younger viewers (and even a good few adults!). The Collector seems to overload with the idea that the Company has negative growth and begins to shrink down and smaller until he disappears through a hole in his chair. This is a chair that now looks like a commode, which the Doctor promptly plugs up so the sea kale with eyes can't get back out. And that's that. There's no explanation as to what to do with the Usurian, or what the rest of the Usurian race will do when they find out what's happened. The fall of Megropolis 1 is shown to be representative of the fall of the Usurians' entire Plutonian empire, and that's that.

After a grand farewell from everybody and their uncle atop the tower block, the Doctor goes some way to explaining what he did to defeat the Collector back in the TARDIS. He alleges he introduced a 2% growth tax, index-linked, which ultimately blew the economy. Leela fails to understand, and asks if he "did something clever". That's one way of explaining what he did, I suppose. "Something clever" is a lazy way to end the story. "Something clever" is a phrase which says something but means nothing. "Something clever" could be used to explain how the Doctor defeats the bad guys every single week, but most of the time the writers come up with a proper, reasoned explanation. "Something clever" is just Robert Holmes rushing to finish the story off.

The Sun Makers is a formulaic runaround which looks terribly cheap in studio, but refreshingly industrial on location. The two don't match. Holmes's script is fiercely intelligent and mildly witty, but some of the cast send it all up and ruin the impact. The two don't match. Tony Snoaden's set design looks cheap, like a children's playground in a studio theatre, and there are characters who are there, but don't do anything: Goudry, Veet, Synge, even Marn and Bisham to an extent. It's just 'people saying things', and at the centre of it all is Tom Baker bumbling about with a big grin on his face cracking jokes and offering the wrong sweets.

The best thing about The Sun Makers is Louise Jameson's compelling performance as Leela. She takes the whole thing deadly seriously, and turns in some stunning scenes while most about her are there for the laughs. Overall, The Sun Makers is a disappointment, and certainly does not deserve the admiration fandom often awards it.

First broadcast: December 17th, 1977

Steve's Scoreboard
The Good: As dark a demise as it is, I must admit to enjoying seeing Gatherer Hade chucked off the top of the tower by cheering rebels.
The Bad: The villain is actually a talking sea kale with eyes which shrinks into a commode. And fans think a talking frog on a chair is silly.
Overall score for episode: ★★★★☆☆☆☆☆☆ (story average: 5.3 out of 10)

"Would you like a jelly baby?" tally: 13

NEXT TIME: Underworld...

My reviews of this story's other episodes: Part One; Part Two; Part Three

Find out birth/death dates, career information, and facts and trivia about this story's cast and crew at the Doctor Who Cast & Crew site: https://doctorwhocastandcrew.blogspot.com/2014/07/the-sun-makers.html

The Sun Makers is available on BBC DVD. Find it on Amazon - https://www.amazon.co.uk/Doctor-Who-Sun-Makers-DVD/dp/B004VRO87O