15x4. The Sunmakers
Writer: Robert Holmes
Director: Pennant Roberts
Script Editor: Robert Holmes
Producer: Graham Williams
Synopsis: The TARDIS
materializes on Pluto, where a dictatorial corporation (known only as
"The Company") has kept a human population in near slave-labor
conditions while using an elaborate system of taxes to monopolize
wealth for themselves. After making contact with a mostly demoralized
gang of criminals, the Doctor and Leela become involved and help to
jumpstart a popular revolution.
Review: "The Sunmakers" is an
odd balance between gritty realism and light satire, though it mostly
works. On one hand, the villains of the piece -- the Collector and
Gatherer Hade -- are both supremely over-the-top characters. The
Collector is utterly self-serving and an unabashed sadist whose
diminutive stature and nasal voice would not leave him out of place on
a Saturday morning cartoon, and Hade is a pompous motormouth who
manages to take both self-satisfied grandstanding and pathetic
sniveling to new heights. (At one point, he screams in distress that
the Collector wants to pay reward money for the Doctor's capture out of
his personal account, then protests that he was only exclaiming his
happiness at the proposition.) The script also manages to avoid a
simplistic "taxes are BAD" message by having the regime be a company
rather than a traditional government.
Meanwhile, some of the criminals-turned-revolutionaries could almost have come out of Blake's 7 (interestingly,
Michael Keating, best known as the timid thief Vila Restal, plays one
of them). Not all of them are very honorable or sympathetic, and their
agenda is mostly one of self-preservation at first. Mandrell, their
leader, holds Leela as a hostage at first and eventually even orders
her executed, an order not carried out at least partly because most of
them are afraid of her. Others who later join the revolution do so at
gunpoint, and the Doctor arguably engages in a bit of propagandizing
himself by broadcasting a false report that the revolution's progress
is further along than it actually is. The revolution also takes a dark
turn towards the end when Hade is murdered, despite the Doctor's
urgings that the leaders of the Company simply be arrested.
Robert Holmes, who scripted the serial, fleshes out this society with
some interesting details. The Company is spoken of with an almost
religious reverence at times, and the frequent use of the word
"gratified" similarly suggests some sort of organized indoctrination.
We also learn that the population is kept subservient partly through
the clandestine dissemination of a drug called PCM that induces
anxiety, and that Bisham was arrested for "curiosity" after he took
some pills intended for executives (presumably some sort of antidote to
PCM). I also picked up a few faint echoes of 1984
(though maybe just because I read it recently): Bisham states that he'd
rather die than endure the fate of a prisoner (calling to mind Room
101), and the way that the outlaws and discontented citizens have been
kept frightened, limited in their vision, and unaware of their
collective strength recalls Winston Smith's belief that "if there is
hope, it lies in the proles." And, of course, Bisham's arrest for
curiosity would be an almost textbook case of "thoughtcrime."
The Doctor and Leela are their usual entertaining selves, and Holmes'
script also helps to give K-9 something of a personality (he had been
kept off-screen for most of "Image of the Fendahl," largely because his
addition to the cast had not been established in time). Tom Baker, as
you might expect, gets plenty of humorous moments in a script with
significant comedic elements, but he manages to pull it off without
giving the impression that the Doctor sees the entire situation as a
joke. There are a couple of ways in which the mix of satire and
realism doesn't quite work, however. First of all, the
demoralized, self-serving criminals make the transition to confident
revolutionaries a little too easily -- okay, so the Doctor can be
pretty convincing, but it's as if they've all had a personal philosophy
transplant. And second, on a related note, we never quite know what the
Doctor thinks about some of the bloodier aspects of the revolution that
eventually emerges -- one presumes that he disapproves of some of the
gunpoint conversions and the murder of the Gatherer, but the script
doesn't really give him an opportunity to react.
Still, "The Sunmakers" is an effective outing, and it succeeds as the
first attempt to tell a story in a decidedly different style from what
we had become used to during the Philip Hinchcliffe era.
Rating: *** (out of four)