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.

The Sun Makers Part Three

The one where Leela is sentenced to public execution by steaming...

Louise Jameson really is the star of this story, and I'm not surprised to learn that it is her favourite of the nine she recorded. Leela is so well characterised, and gets some good, strong scenes, even if they don't really move the plot along (what plot there is). The start of part 3 sees Team Leela (the savage, lofty Bisham, timid Cordo and tin dog K-9) take on two MegroGuards in their buggy, but it's one of those sedately choreographed and directed fight scenes which makes it look like under-rehearsed children in the playground (there were similar problems in The Invisible Enemy).

The guards are predictably useless, as almost all guards are in the science-fiction genre, being unable to hit a barn door at three paces, but perfectly capable of waiting patiently to be shot down by a rubbish laser beam. There's no urgency or jeopardy in the way these fight scenes are staged, and the buggy Leela and co commandeer is no better than Doctor Who's most infamous of rubbish vehicles, The Happiness Patrol's go-kart. It's pathetically slow, but all the guards can manage is a glancing blow to Leela's forehead.

The Sun Makers Part Two

The one where the Doctor enjoys the delicacy of a raspberry leaf...

In my review of part one I mentioned my dislike for Tony Snoaden's set design, especially for Gatherer Hade's office, as it reminded me heavily of the 1981 children's educational series Chock-A-Block. Not everybody will get that reference, but a quick Google Image search will show you what I mean. But the likenesses don't end there: as well as the Chock-A-Block computer looking like Snoaden's set design for The Sun Makers, there's also the jumpsuit costume design (Chock-A-Bloke and Chock-A-Girl look like they could be Marn's contemporaries), the Chock-A-Truck that's like the buggies driven by the MegroGuards, the data blocks inserted into Chock-A-Block that look like Plutonian ConSumCards, and the way the kids' series presenters watch clips on a little TV monitor, rather like Hade and Marn observing their tracker.

The thing is, The Sun Makers predates Chock-A-Block by four years, and as far as I can tell, the two share no production personnel. So it's perhaps just a massive coincidence that the two seem so alike to me, but the fact is the similarity ruins my ability to see The Sun Makers for itself.

The Sun Makers Part One

The one where the Doctor and Leela prevent a suicide...

There's nothing as certain as death and taxes, and it's very clever of writer Robert Holmes to combine the two in the opening scene of this new story! D-grade foundry worker Cordo is informed by a woman speaking from a hatch high up in a wall that his father has died. Cordo seems happy about this, as it was reportedly a "fine death". But when somebody dies on this world, it means there's a price to pay, and in this case it's a death tax. Cordo is sent to the Gatherer to pay the tax for his father's "golden death", but when he gets there it seems the tax has gone up, and he owes 117 talmars instead of the expected 80.

It's a lot to take in about this new world all at once, but there's a maturity to the writing which is sadly not reflected in the design. Tony Snoaden's corridors, and especially the Gatherer's office, are like something out of 1981 children's show Chock-A-Block, as are the costumes by Christine Rawlins. I mean, it's 'a look' I suppose, but not really one I appreciate. To me, it looks cheap. The design of the Gatherer's office is so haphazard, it barely looks designed at all. Mismatching colours and shapes and angles, all colliding to make one big mess. The only striking thing about it is the use of Aztec iconography as emblems, which was apparently a nod to the work of Mexican propagandist art, but to me it just adds to the mush of ideas.