The only good thing about Robert Holmes’ departure as script editor of Dr Who is that it freed him up to write more episodes himself. Here he pens more proof that he was born to create Dr Who stories— and ironically, in part writes it only because he thought it was the last time he’d be able to contribute to the series (fortunately, he was mistaken).
The Sunmakers is a comedy episode, which is surprising if you only see a plot summary. It’s set in a very bleak, dystopian world run by an oppressive tyranny opposed by violent rebels who aren’t much more than criminals posing as freedom fighters (their big plan when the Doctor arrives is to rob an ATM). The basic plot (and the world in which it moves) could easily be the subject of a truly grim, dark story. But Robert Holmes, a fan of dark humor, makes it comical at every turn. The characters are over-the-top caricatures, and while that would be a flaw in a serious drama it’s perfect for the comedy Holmes is going for. The lead government official, Gatherer Hade, is a self-important but dim-witted buffoon. The actual dictator, known only as “the Collector,” is a hunched-over miser with a whiny voice who barely looks up from his ledgers to issue orders for public executions (though he really enjoys those: “This is the moment when I get a real sense of job satisfaction,” he says as Leela is wheeled off to certain death in the episode 3 cliffhanger).
The story is also, manifestly, a political satire— and yet the real genius of it is that you can never tell which side it’s on. By that, I don’t mean that it’s muddled and fails to make its point clear. Far from it. Nor is it that it “takes shots at both sides,” although that’s closer to the truth. What’s really going on is that Holmes, ever the master of science fiction world-building, succeeds in combining the designated villains of both the left and the right into a single political villain. The evil regime is a for-profit Company that employs the tools of a bureaucratic state to collect its profits in the form of taxes. Or it’s a socialist/totalitarian state that cloaks its political oppression in the jargon of profits and balance sheets. Take your pick: it’s both, or it’s neither. Meanwhile the rebels sometimes talk in Marxist jargon and sometimes like right-wing survivalists. Then at the end it turns out the whole situation is being run by a sort of galactic loan-shark who looks like “seaweed with eyes” and escapes by flushing himself down a toilet (okay, actually a drain in the motorized wheelchair that maintained his human form, but there’s no mistaking what we’re supposed to think about it).
The key to the satire is to know what motivated Holmes’ writing it: he had recently gone through a tax audit (a severe ordeal for a freelance writer with no head for accounting), and he thought he’d been screwed over by the BBC (in the whole politically-motivated mess that ended the Hinchcliffe/Holmes era of Dr Who). Believing he’d never have another chance to write for the BBC, he combined both the tax-collector and the BBC into one evil empire and fired the Doctor at them with both barrels.
At the end of the day, whatever you choose to conclude about the political satire of the story, you have to love an episode in which the Doctor defeats the bad guy by introducing a two percent, index-linked growth tax which wrecks the economy.
Details
- The production values let the story down a little bit. The story’s designer originally planned a kind of Aztec look to the story, but when the budget for sets ran low they ended up filming quite a lot of it at a factory (using both industrial and office areas of the building). The sets they did build had to be toned down— basically undesigned— in order to be compatible with the location shooting, but don’t match very well anyway, and an intended contrast between the bleak lower levels where “D-grade work units” live and the highly decorated luxury of the “executive levels” was lost in a general blandness. The bland look could have also worked, looking like the Eastern Bloc concrete of the Cold War era, but the Aztec-like designs were left in for a couple of sets, and for the costumes, which end up just looking peculiar.
- K-9 finally gets out of the TARDIS and participates in the story, but they haven’t quite figured out what to do with him yet. In several rather embarrassing “fight” scenes, guards have to very slowly and unrealistically settle themselves down in front of K-9 so that he can shoot them (even after seeing him do it to someone else).
- Leela gets a much better outing than in the last couple of episodes (in fact actress Louise Jameson names this her favorite episode). Robert Holmes created the character and so knows what to do with her. Her aggression is on full display, both in words and actions, and she’s not afraid to stand up to the Doctor on behalf of her way of doing things (after he forbids her from killing a guard she’s already knocked out, she says, “The last one I spared woke up and called his friends— that’s how I was captured!”). One great moment for her happens when she’s leading the rebels in an attack on the guards. We’ve learned at this point that the government stays in power by pumping anxiety-inducing drugs into the air to keep people too afraid to rebel. Leela finds herself inexplicably frightened, and because she’s used to trusting her instincts that brings her to a halt, assuming her fear means she’s sensed some actual danger. K-9 tells her about the anxiety drug. “You mean there’s no danger, just something in the air?” she asks, and when K-9 says yes, she’s able to just disregard the fear and go on.
- Complaints department: why is this episode called “The Sunmakers?” There is a passing mention that the evil Company built artificial suns to light and heat the world of the story (it takes place on Pluto) but the title would lead you to expect that suns and sunmaking would figure in the story in some way. They don’t.
Next Week:
“Underworld,” 4 episodes
