The Sun Makers

Dear Gary—

“Perhaps everyone runs from the tax man.”

Perhaps that is why I love The Sun Makers—here we have a villain that everyone can recognize and hate. And the Collector (Your Highest) is portrayed with such poetic stereotype by Henry Woolf, as is the Gatherer by Richard Leech.

Don’t get me wrong, Gary. I am a minority of one; the one person on the planet who actually appreciates the tax man. I like paying taxes. I feel as though I am paying my own way in this world. To my way of thinking, the tax dodger is one of the lowest forms of life. But taken to the extreme, as in The Sun Makers, the Collector (Your Sublimity) is as low as the dodgiest of the tax dodgers. It is the misuse, the misappropriation, the malfeasance of greed that is at the root of both your ordinary, run-of-the-mill tax dodger and your cartoonish Collector (Your Eminence). The tax dodger and the Collector (Your Elevation) both are cut from the same cloth (to my way of thinking).

And here I go again, Gary, and I am really sorry, but I have gotten off on a tangent. I feel the same about the whole anti-authority movement. In the absence of Authority you only breed bullies. It is the Bill Murray phenomenon. Bill Murray (to my way of thinking) portrays mostly bullies. And yet he is considered the hero, or the ‘anti-hero. ‘

Thankfully, in The Sun Makers, our hero tax dodger Cordo is not played by Bill Murray (rather Roy Macready).

And so in The Sun Makers you have my world turned on its head, but that’s OK because it is the Doctor’s world and not mine. The tax dodger Cordo is the hero and the Collector (Your Pinnacle) is the villain. But it really is a matter of bullies, isn’t it? Of the misuse of power and authority, whether that power is derived from the government, economy, or charisma.

In the case of The Sun Makers it is derived from the economy (“Praise the Company”).

The Company, the Gatherer, and the Collector (Your Colossus) are all just bullies who have risen to power. As in any social order, it is not the power that is corrupt, it is the people who use and abuse such power.

So much for my soap box of the week.

The Doctor, Leela, and K9 land on Pluto where they find a city, breathable atmosphere, and six suns, much to the Doctor’s surprise. “Pluto’s a lifeless rock.” Not anymore, and the Doctor is determined to find out the why and the how.

His answers start with Cordo. “It’s the taxes. I can’t pay the taxes.” (“Probably too many economists in the government.”)The peoples of Pluto, who are transplanted Earthlings bought more or less by The Company (Praise the Company), are being literally taxed to death. They are even taxed on the overtime that they work in order to make money to pay their taxes. These taxes are not only unjust but insupportable, not to mention unrepresented. I too would dodge those taxes. Unfortunately the only means of dodging are suicide or escape to a miserable existence in the under city.

“Then the people should rise up and slaughter their oppressors!” Leela shouts. But even Leela runs when the Gatherer approaches. PCM, an anxiety inducer, is being pumped into the air and the people are too afraid to rebel.

It is a simple enough story, but again it is the characters that resonate.

I’ll start with Leela. This is a stand out story for Leela, but then most of her stories are. I always knew that I liked the character of Leela and the actress portraying her (Louise Jameson), but I have grown to appreciate her depth and range in this most recent round of viewings beyond just a general liking of the role. I almost think that Leela/Louise is too good for Doctor Who; she often tends to outshine the Doctor, which is saying a lot given the fact that the Doctor is my personal favorite Tom Baker.

I think it is no accident that Leela is separated from the Doctor in many of her stories to follow a plot thread of her own making; and I know that K9 has seen new life with Sarah Jane, but in an alternate reality, and given the seeming abundance of K9 models, Leela/Louise could have teamed up with K9 for a spin off that might very well have rivaled Doctor Who. But you know, Gary, what they say of ifs and buts . . . .

And so I will stick with The Sun Makers.

From the opening TARDIS scene Leela establishes herself as a character apart from the Doctor. While the Doctor obsesses over winning at chess (“Even simple, one-dimensional chess exposes the limitations of the machine mind”), the ever instinctual Leela senses when something is not right. “Why didn’t you tell me,” the Doctor exclaims as he leaps to the TARDIS console. “I tried to but you wouldn’t let me,” Leela protests. “You didn’t.” “I did.” “You didn’t.” “I did!” “You didn’t.” “I did!” Leela will not back down, not even to the Doctor.

But she will conciliate. “Shush,” she tells K9 when she senses the Doctor’s irritation. And she will commiserate, “I’m sorry, K9, we won’t be long,” she assures the despondent tin dog who is rebuffed by the Doctor.

This TARDIS scene is mirrored with the roof scene as Leela tries to point out the suicidal Cordo to a preoccupied Doctor. The Doctor underestimates his companion. Leela is a primitive, but she is also intelligent and quick witted and nobody’s fool.

Leela’s plea to Mandrel and his motley crew of under city dwellers to rescue the Doctor is inspired. “You?” she scorns, “You have nothing, Mandrel.” Mandrel the puffed up leader of the under city. He has nothing and Leela knows it. “No pride; no courage; no manhood. Even animals protect their own. You say to me you want to live. Well I’ll say this to you: if you lie skulking in this black pit while the Doctor dies, then you will live, but without honor.” One by one she appeals to the under city rabble. Will you come, will you? No is the universal reply. Leela alone will face the danger. Leela has the courage, the bravery, the honor that Mandrel and his crew pretend to.

“I’ll come, Leela.” Leela and Cordo. Cordo the tax dodger. Cordo the meek and mild citizen who sacrificed all for the honorable decease of his father only to be crushed under by the tax burden of the unjust.

“Cordo, you are the bravest man here. Come.”

The lone Leela and Cordo lead a raid on the Correction Center to rescue the Doctor only to find the Doctor has already been released. However they do find and rescue Bisham. And here, Gary, I want to mention: with Tom Baker’s Doctor you can always see the wheels turning, and so too with Louise Jameson’s Leela. Confronted with the unexpected Leela ponders, assesses, and acts. “Check the corridor K9,” as she ponders the Doctor’s release and Bisham’s presence. “Are you fit enough to move?” as she assesses the new circumstances. “You’d better come with us. Come on,” as she reaches her decision and acts.

Leela, Cordo, Bisham, and K9. What a show they would have made.

Leela: “Ready? Forward.” Leela steps on the gas pedal and our intrepid quartet hurtles backwards. “Great Xoanan!”

Bisham: “Perhaps I’d better take over, Leela.”

What a look she gives Bisham as she concedes and changes seats. “All right. I will have the gun.”

A grazing wound from a blaster takes Leela down, but she is not down for the count. Even a straight jacket can’t keep Leela down. Defiant, never defeated.  Kicking and screaming she is carried in to the Collector (Your Amplification). “Tell this gorilla to take his paws off me” she demands. But she can also be reasonable. When the Collector (Your Voluminousness) asks why she led the raid on the Correction Center she responds straightforwardly, “Well, I heard the Doctor was in trouble, so I came to rescue him, but when I got there he’d been set free, so we . . .” “This interview is terminated,” the Collector (Your Globosity) cuts her short and she is again defiantly taken from the room kicking and screaming all the way.

Next we see her, Leela, still straight jacketed, is hanging from a peg on the wall at a 45 degree angle.
“Comfortable?” she is asked. “Do I look it,” she replies. Down but not defeated, always defiant. But the vulnerability is allowed it’s due.

Commander: “We haven’t had a public steaming for months.”

Leela: “A public what?”

Commander: “You don’t know about the steamer?” as he leaves the room laughing cruelly.

Hanging on the wall, straight jacketed, strong, defiant, but we are allowed a flash of naked emotion as she considers the unknown terror that awaits her.

The steamer is of particular delight to the Collector (Your Sagacity). “This is the moment I get a real feeling of job satisfaction,” he says in gleeful anticipation of Leela’s agonizing death screams. The Collector (Your Supernal Eminence) is more than a squinty eyed, nasal voiced, numbers cruncher. He is a sadist. It is more to him than just the mere death cry; it is the subtleties, “the deepest notes of despair, the final dying cadences. The whole point of a good steaming is the range it affords.”

But the Doctor disappoints him. The Doctor, K9, Cordo, Bisham, and, yes, Mandrel, team up to take over the main control room and to snatch Leela out from under the fiendish nose of the Controller (Your Promontory).

The sight of the Controller (Your Omnipresence) spinning himself in futile circles as he sees his best laid plans spiraling out of control (“I sense the vicious doctrine of egalitarianism”) is almost moving if he weren’t so despicable.

Gatherer Hade and his sidekick Marn are two more character studies. Hade with his sycophantic arrogance acts with conscienceless greed and blind egotism. Contemptible, yet played with the blunted edge of buffoonery.  I love his reaction when Marn states that the scanners are reporting that the Doctor is walking up and down the empty corridor in which they stand. “I don’t care what the scanners say,” Hade rejects her reading, but then . . . “I do care what the scanners say;” momentarily flustered out of his supercilious pose. But in his ignoble end, as he is hoisted above the heads of the mob and flung from the city rooftop, he maintains his pompous disdain: “Don’t you dare! I am an official of the Company!”

I have a harder time reading Marn. I think she is typical middle management, confident in her skills and proud of her work, suffering the fools above her. Opportunistic, she switches allegiance when the revolution catches up with her, but I’m not sure where her conscience falls. On the one hand, to do her job with the Gatherer well she must ignore it. But there is one moment when the Controller (Your Aggrandizement) is waxing eloquent about the dying cadences of the steamer when she squirms uncomfortably in her seat. But if she does have such twinges of conscience, it is unconscionable that she suppresses them, and so I will place her in the despicable column along with the Gatherer and the Collector (Your Grossness).

Mandrel is another case in point. Mandrel existing in the power vacuum of the under city is a bully. But when the Doctor enters the picture with conviction and a plan, Mandrel rises to the occasion and becomes a willing follower.

“What’s he doing here?” Leela asks in disgust upon seeing Mandrel in cahoots with the Doctor. But Cordo puts it in perspective: “We’ve sired a revolution, Leela. Down with the Company, eh fellas?” Mandrel is now one of the fellas, a revolutionary comrade in arms.

I have to say, Gary, that I love Cordo’s absolute glee at this point. From suicidal little Cordo with no “spirit left for fighting,” Cordo has transformed into a delightfully enthusiastic rebel. “Whee!” Even the more practical minded Bisham gets caught up in his excitement.

All that is left is for the Doctor to pull the plug on the Controller (Your Oratundity), and it is with poetic justice that he shrivels away, down into the hole in his mechanical chair as he realizes the bad news that his Company is bankrupt. “We are bankrupt. Business failure. Closure imperative. Cut losses. Liquidate. Immediate liquidation.”

Oh what a world . . .