| Chapter The 199th, which depicts some taxing times for the Doctor. Taxing, see? Tax? (I couldn't resist it, sorry.) |
Plot:
The Doctor, Leela and K9 land on Pluto, finding it mysteriously habitable because of artificial suns in its orbit. The humans living there are controlled by a civil administration, represented in the story by the Gatherer, which works them and taxes them hard on behalf of a company run by aliens, represented by the Collector. The Doctor and Leela persuade low level worker Cordo not to kill himself because of his debts, and join him and some other more unsavoury rebels in overthrowing the regime. The company (from the planet Usurius) found the Earth made uninhabitable by the humans, and did a deal to rehouse them in the solar system using its artificial sun technology to make other planets habitable. Having exhausted the resources of Mars, they moved again to Pluto. As well as by crippling taxes, the populace is also controlled by anxiety-inducing gas pumped into the atmosphere. By a lucky fluke, the Doctor is thrown into contact with a couple of people who know lots of information about this gas, and who help him to shut it off. The newly emboldened humans rebel, and the Doctor does some clever financial tinkering wrecking the company's profits, and making the Collector revert to his true form, a green puddle of liquid. The Gatherer is summarily executed by being thrown off a skyscraper, which seems a bit extreme but there you go. The TARDIS team leave the humans preparing to make a journey back home to Earth.
Context:
Having been forced to watch the last classic Who 4-parter in one go without pausing or rewinding (see the Context section of the post here for more details), and having enjoyed that story seen in such a way, I thought I'd experiment with that approach again for The Sun Makers, even though I have obtained a new functioning remote control for the TV and Blu-ray player now. With the family abed late one Saturday evening, and with a chilled glass of a rather nice white wine to sip, I embarked on The Sun Makers. I managed to the end of the first episode before I stopped things. It no doubt had something to do with the wine and the late hour, but I couldn't watch any more without a break. I watched the next three episodes back to back when feeling fresher on the Sunday morning. I'm not by any means saying that this story is too difficult to follow; the opposite, I think: it's so generic a plotline that my brain, emboldened with a little dutch courage, rebelled at the thought of having to watch more than 25 minutes. After that, I went on holiday for a week to Oxford (no Doctor Who story was ever filmed or set in Oxford, or even had any kind of link to the place, so I didn't pick a Doctor Who story to view and contented myself with watching a couple of Inspector Morses to say "I've been there" whenever a dreaming spire was on screen). Once I was back home, I had the Web of Fear Blu-ray to watch as I wanted to talk about it in the Deeper Thoughts section of this blog post (and I do - see below). The storyline of The Sun Makers was confirmed as simple enough for me to remember it clearly when writing this a couple of weeks after the fact.
First Time Round:
The Sun Makers has the distinction of being the final Tom Baker Doctor Who story I caught up with during my years of collecting and watching classic Who. I'd missed Tom's tenure altogether when it first aired, as I didn't become a fan and regular viewer until Peter Davison had taken over. As such, the main source of catch-up was the VHS range, and it was very generous with Tom Baker titles from early on. There's a lot of them though, and they form a few discrete phases, some of which are more popular than others. His first three years are well regarded, as is his final shiny season when Doctor Who fully moved into the 1980s; but there's felt by some fans (by no means all, but sufficient to have influenced the release schedule) to be a slump in the middle. The VHS range favoured the bookend years of Baker over two of the three years in between. This was the period produced by Graham Williams, and excepting his second year in charge (the Key to Time season, which came out on video relatively early on in 1995), his stories are rightly or wrongly seen as those where there was a reduction in quality both in scripting and production values; subsequently, most of these stories came out later, in the arse end of the range. Before the VHS range got to these ones, the satellite and cable TV channel UK Gold showed them, cycling through all Baker's stories multiple times over the years. For a brief period in the late 1990s I had the channel as part of my cable package and managed to watch other Tom stories that I hadn't seen before. I'd just missed the Sun Makers, though, and I got rid of UK Gold before they cycled round again. So, it was in 2001 when the VHS was released that I finally got to see this story (and I remember nothing about that first watch). All those other underwhelming stories I'd seen from UK Gold came later in the range, though. So The Sun Makers is either seen as the worst of the good 'uns, or the best of a bad batch.
Reaction:
The possibly apocryphal tale is that writer Robert Holmes received a big tax bill, which prompted his writing of this story. He was at the end of his long period as Doctor Who's script editor, handing over to successor Anthony Read, so I would have thought he'd have only just stopped being a salaried BBC employee on PAYE rather than a freelancer where there might have been any doubt about the amounts in his tax return. I'm not au fait with his contractual status or financial situation, though, so perhaps it is true. Otherwise, he was just reaching for an innovative and interesting hook for another Who story after having written so many in the years since his first contribution to the show in the late 1960s. Tax anyway seemed to be an obsession in the UK in the 1970s, maybe it's an obsession in the UK all the time. The basic percentage rate of income tax was in the mid thirties at the time; it seems high from the vantage point of 2021, but historically, it wasn't particularly outstanding a figure. I am one of those do-gooder lefties that thinks of taxation as a good thing, as long as it's not regressive (which in The Sun Makers, of course, it most definitely is). Perhaps with people like me in mind, Holmes - or the production team around him influencing him to tone his ideas down - hedges his bets.
The big villain of The Sun Makers is a global (multi-global, in fact) company which has the civil administration in its pocket. So, whatever political wing you are looking on from, you aren't alienated and can find a root cause of the issues that meets your own prejudices. Dictatorships purporting to be democratic governments with disastrous and destructive fiscal policy could emerge from both left and right leaning ideologies. Where, then, is the satirical searchlight of The Sun Makers aimed? Is the Gatherer the main one to blame? He is an official who leads a civil administration, so he is supposed to represent the people. Instead, he makes an elite strata of the society rich (including presumably the security staff we see keeping people in line) at the expense of all the others, who are kept in place with anxiety-inducing agents in the air, and kept working because of excessively regressive taxation. But the Collector is the Boss Bad of the story, and he confirms that his company is responsible for fiscal policy, so he sets the tax rates. The Collector has the power, and the Gatherer is merely enacting policy that's passed down. Tax is only as bad as the things it pays for, of course. On Pluto, it is paying for the artificial suns that make life possible, as well as the profit margin, and the running costs are high. Without that, everyone will die. So, no matter how badly it is being managed, the taxation is essential. Is the message of the story that major utilities should be nationalised rather than managed by private enterprises, and anyone wanting to make a profit out of such utilities should be treated with suspicion?
Or maybe the people themselves are to blame for making the Earth uninhabitable in the first place, leaving them at the mercy of the company's "commercial imperialism". Environmental concerns and metaphors for colonialism had been mainstay themes of Doctor Who stories throughout the 1970s, so maybe the stuff about tax is just window dressing. The satirical searchlight roams wildly throughout The Sun Makers and doesn't stay too long upon any one element; it's not really making any particular point. The story mechanics show this: at heart, the story has a boilerplate 'rebels overthrow tyrannical regime' plot and it doesn't deviate from it. What the tax and corporate stuff does bring is some spots of wit here and there. Referring to the Collector's personal guard as the "Inner Retinue" is particularly clever. Then there's "Perhaps everyone runs from the taxman", and the Gather's presumably more sci-fi vehicle called a Beamer, and the P45 corridor (another theory about this story is that it's Holmes's barbed farewell to the corporation that he'd been overworked by in his years as script editor, having just received his own P45 on leaving the role). It also allows for a fun ending, where the company - and its boss - literally goes into liquidation.
Connectivity:
Both stories see the Doctor trapped in a small space in the cliffhanger at the end of the first part (a cubicle in The Sun Makers, the Pandorica in the news series 5 finale). That's about it. The Usurians - one can scarcely believe it - failed to be namechecked as one of the many baddies in the alliance in The Pandorica Opens, but I suppose they could have been in a ship up there somewhere, whirling about above Stonehenge.
Deeper Thoughts:
It has a character called The Collector in it, so... I went into the politics, such as they are, of The Sun Makers as much as they require above. There aren't are other deeper thoughts inspired by the story. So, instead I'm going to use this space for some mini-reviews of some Doctor Who product I've been consuming recently, all of it connected to the second Doctor, Patrick Troughton. I was going to wait until the next Pat story came up to blog, but that's going to be The Evil of The Daleks when I see the imminent animated version. As I've been lucky enough to acquire tickets to the BFI screening of said story, I will want to write up that event, which will not leave room to talk about these other things I've collected. It's a shame, as one of them is the novelisation of The Evil of the Daleks, so it would have fit quite well. I obtained this, and the novelisation of the other David Whittaker scripted Patrick Troughton Dalek story The Power of the Daleks, after swearing I never would. But as a dog returns to his vomit, a fool repeats his folly, so the Bible says. I couldn't bear any longer to have an almost complete collection - every classic series story novelised except these two. I'm not fussy about specific editions or anything, I just want to have and be able to read every story that was on TV. These two came out in 1993, quite late on when a range of original Doctor novels had already started in parallel; they had relatively limited runs, and have never been reprinted. As such, it cost a reasonable sum of money to get them. If you're prepared to do that, though, they aren't that hard to obtain.
The prose by John Peel (not that one) is unfussy and gets on with telling the stories, with just enough character insight added regarding motivations. This is as expected; Peel was the trusted fellow in the late 1980s and early 1990s when it came to novelising Dalek stories, but he wasn't the type to take too many liberties with the text. I think that he occasionally pushes a little too hard on some emotions (for example, Ben's suspicion of the Doctor, and Polly's sometime irritation with Ben) that should have been more subtle, but that's just personal taste. In Power, he clearly feels there needs to be an explanation of why there is discontent in the Vulcan colony, creating the factions amongst the humans that the Daleks exploit. To add more explanation, he does a bit of retroactive continuity, and says that the colony is run by IMC (an immoral mining concern featured in the later TV story Colony in Space). It's neat but, I think unnecessary. It's better, in a way, to leave the reasons behind the humans' disunity unexplained as it almost suggests that the Daleks are so powerful and evil that they could overcome any group of flawed, backbiting humans. These are quibbles, though, and it was a great treat overall to finally read these books. I was very careful flicking through these paperbacks as they were so expensive, but the point was to read and enjoy them rather than just put them on a shelf to look at forever. The only book published as part of the original novelisation range that I don't have now is The Paradise of Death (a prose version of a Jon Pertwee starring radio serial made for Doctor Who's 30th anniversary) that came out around the same time as those two Dalek stories. I wonder how long I'll hold out before I crack and buy that too.
The other item I want to tell you about is a new release on Blu-ray, so it was considerably less expensive. This was the special edition of The Web of Fear. It's a two disc set with lots of extras (the DVD release was a bare bones release without such additional material). I covered the story for the blog before here, so won't go into detail of the story apart from to state that it's still great and looks better than ever on Blu-ray. The story's third episode is still missing from the archives (except for the off-air soundtrack) and that previous version had a photo reconstruction to bridge the gap. This new version has an animated third episode instead, one that uses a new approach. This involves creating the characters as "skins" rather than multiple drawings and applying these skins to moving 3D stick people models that can emulate motion-captured movements by actors, and presumably be directed by computer, or react independently based on AI too (that's what it looks like to my uneducated eye anyway). The result is odd, to say the least, but you do get used to it. My first impression was somewhat unfavourable, it was like I was watching a pastiche of a Thunderbirds-like marionette show. It would be a disservice to the talented people involved in Thunderbirds to compare it directly, this was more like an exaggeration for laughs. I think this is because quite a lot of the movements by the animated Doctor Who characters are too big; where they are smaller, it works much better. I'm putting this down to teething problems with the new technology and am excited to see how they can refine it, and what they do next, though some people (based on online comments I've seen) hated it.
The new approach was deployed, according to the printed notes in the packaging, because a more 3D presentation would better fit in with the episodes either side. What hooey! Lots of stories have previously come out with gaps bridged by 2D animation (or even flatter, still image slide shows) and it didn't cause too many problems. The colour version of the episode can be viewed standalone elsewhere in the set, and it is much less jarring when seen on its own. The truth is more likely to be that this new approach (known as Shapeshifter) is less resource intensive and may open up possibilities to be able to do complicated stories with lots of characters, which may be prohibitively difficult to create with more traditional approaches. This is pretty much confirmed by a representative of Shapeshifter Studios on a featurette talking about the animation on the second disc of the set. If the movement can be made more controlled, the remaining issue will be with likenesses - the 'skin' approach is less likely to always look perfectly like the original actors compared to the more controlled 2D animation illustrations. Some of the animated episodes over the years have had some questionable likeness anyway, though, and if it means that more stories can be animated, I'd be happy with the trade-off.
The animation is the main draw of this release. Other than that, there are making of documentaries and episode commentaries that are at the high level of quality we've come to expect. There's no info text subtitle track, which is a shame; maybe that will be added in future when this story is included in a Patrick Troughton Blu-ray season box-set. I am more and more thinking that a 26 box-set series, covering every season of classic Who on Blu-ray, with missing episodes all animated, is an inevitability, let alone a possibility. I hope that the complaints about the animation of Web of Fear episode 3 don't impact that. What would help, I think, is to have an alternative branched option of a photographic reconstruction for those that don't like the animation style. This emphatically is not the case on the Web of Fear set. The old reconstruction is included, but on the extras disc, separate from the other episodes. One would have to switch between discs partway through to see the recon in situ with the other episodes. Rectify that, and I think any naysayers will be placated, and - you never know - we may get a lovely Shapeshifter-ised version of The Highlanders or Marco Polo, before too long, and thereafter season box sets for the first six black-and-white years of Doctor Who too.
In Summary:
Doesn't achieve greatness despite a fun script, but nonetheless is not too taxing to watch. Taxing, see? Tax? (I couldn't resist it again, sorry.)
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