Day 238 — August 26th 2021
The Sun Makers Parts Three and Four
The Sun Makers — Part Three
Louise Jameson continues to be on fire in this episode. I wonder if this might be her favourite story from her time on the programme, because she’s really going above and beyond putting in an incredible performance. The way she enters the Collector’s office kicking and screaming is incredible and I could watch this all day. I know I said it yesterday but we really were lucky to have such an incredible actress giving her time to our silly little show.
Her confrontation with the Collector is probably the highlight of this episode; there’s just so much in there to enjoy, and I love her being questioned;
Collector: ‘How did you get to Pluto?’
Leela: ‘By accident, as usual.’
Collector: ‘Answer respectfully!’
Leela: ‘The Doctor brought me in a machine called a TARDIS, if that leaves
you any the wiser.’
Collector: ‘What is the Doctor?’
Leela: ‘He is a Time Lord.’
The Collector is such an unusual character that I don’t quite know what to make of him, beyond the fact that I’m enjoying his addition to the story. He only had a single brief scene in Part Two so this is the first time we’ve really seen him in action and it’s such a bizarre performance. Henry Woolf only made this one appearance in Doctor Who but I think that’s probably for the best because it makes the character stand out as all the more unusual. I think that, as with the Gatherer, he feel so right for this worlds simply because he stands so at odds with the drabness outside.
Which brings me neatly to my next point. I touched on it yesterday, but the set design in this story really is poor, and I think we’re at the stage now where it’s actively harming the tale. We see out heroes make it to the Control Centre today and it all just sort of looks a bit plastic and playschool. I just don’t buy it at the nerve centre for this entire civilisation. I mentioned that last time I watched this story I remember saying it should look more like the rusting machinery in a barn, and I can see exactly where I was coming from with that. It would fit in with the actual location work much better than the studio sets do here.
But I wonder if I was thinking the wrong way. I don’t think it should look all rusty and run down — I think it should actually go the other way. The Control Centre should look about as high-tech as you can possibly make it. This should be an example of where all the money in this civilisation has gone, while the workers’ areas downstairs are the drab places left to rot. I keep thinking of that line from The Long Game where Suki says she’s heard the walls of Floor 500 (on the Satellite in which she lives) are made of gold. In that instance it turns out not to be the case, but here I wonder if it should have been?
The same is true of the Collector’s office. It’s one of the poorest sets in the story. There’s so much space to the set — it must have taken up a chunk of room in the studio — but there’s sort of nothing to it. It looks empty, but not in a pleasing minimalist way. I’m watching today and thinking that it should look like the room in which Number Six meets Number Two for the first time in The Prisoner. They’ve gone for a similar design — a large open space with the person in the middle — but there is looks impressive and striking while here it’s as though the money has run out. Maybe they should raise the taxes?
The biggest issue that the set design is causing is that there’s no differentiation between different parts of the city. I’m sure that someone suggested early on that the Collector’s palace is in an entirely different building, but I don’t get any sense of that here. It looks just like any other room we might visit. The same is true for the Correction Centre, which is apparently directly beneath the palace. It looks the same as the Control Centre which is supposed to be somewhere else entirely. I feel like there needed to be a bit more put into the design to make everywhere a little more distinct.
Still, it’s only a minor quibble, and I want to return to Leela before I wrap this one up, and say how much I love her relationship with K9. There’s a really interesting situation at this stage of the series which I’d totally forgotten — Doctor Who doesn’t like K9 and considers the machine a nuisance while Leela is totally besotted by it. All the same Leela can find K9 just as frustrating from time to time. I especially like the scene today in which K9 fishes for praise;
K9: ‘Satisfactory, mistress?’
Leela: ‘Yes, K9. What do you want, a biscuit?’
I think what really makes it is that we get a close up of K9’s tail dropping as Leela scolds him. I meant to mention yesterday how much I loved his tail wagging when she emerged from the underground city, and it’s nice to see that sort of thing continuing here. It’s a little thing, but it makes me smile!
There’s plenty of other things I could praise in this episode; from the way Leela is ‘hung’ from the wall in the Correction Centre to the great mugshots of Doctor Who which are distributed as part of a news story about the bounty on his head. The images sadly don’t seem to have survived, which is especially a shame because there’s very little photographic material from this story on the whole. I’m going with another 8/10 here, but noting that I think were the sets better this would be pushing higher than that.
The Sun Makers — Part Four
I’m really saddened that this episode has dropped off a little for me from the previous three. It’s still been enjoyable — and I’m still giving a 7/10, so it’s not a massive decrease — but it all sort of wrapped up a bit too easily for me.
Doctor Who broadcasts a message to say that the rebellion has been successful and… well, that’s it. Trouble over. I’d have loved to see a bit more of the actual battle, with people fighting in those great long white corridors, or even better fighting their way up that concrete tunnel as the guards try to force them back down. I wonder if this one might work better as a novel, where you can really play up sequences like that?
We also get the reveal here that the Collector isn’t just a slightly creepy human character but rather a squiddy alien from the planet Usurius, and I don’t feel like we needed that reveal, especially as we don’t really get to see his true form outside a brief shot of him shrinking into a little green blob. I think I’d have been far more interested had it simply turned out to be one batch of humans working against the others. It’s the kind of political angle they’d have gone for quite hard in a Malcolm Hulke script, and I wonder if that was ever the plan for this one? The revelation that he’s an alien has no bearing on the plot, given that he vanishes only seconds later.
I’ve already mentioned it during Part Three, but Henry Woolf really does put in an incredible performance as the Collector. It’s such a bizarre way of playing the part and it gets dialled up even further in this episode. There’s a fantastic bit early on where he takes out his frustration by driving his mobility scooter round and round in circles while the Gatherer bleats on at him. I’ve not really commented on Richard Leech as the Gatherer, and while it’s certainly true that his performance isn’t as noteworthy they make a great pair together throughout the story. They’re not quite a classic Robert Holmes double act, but there’s certainly shades of that mentality in there, and I’ve really enjoyed watching them. There’s something surprisingly dark in the Gatherer’s death, too, which feels somehow fitting for the story — it’s the only time you ever get any real sense of the revolution in progress.
There’s one other thing I want to touch on for this episode before I wrap things up, and that’s the return of humour to the story. There’s been some all the way through, of course, but this episode feels more consciously funny than any of the previous three. I laughed proper hard at the moment when Doctor Who hypnotises a guard to sleep… only to realise that Leela has slipped under his trance, too. Our two regulars have been just missing each other for a fee episodes, so I’m thrilled to have them back together here and on such great form.
The Sun Makers has proven a surprise hit for me, and I’m pleased — it feels like just the tonic I needed after two days of not enjoying a story, and especially knowing that I’m about to go into a story with one of the worst reputations in the programme’s history…
