The Sun Makers is the 95th serial. The first episode of the 4 part serial started airing on November 26 1977. It was written by Robert Holmes and directed by Pennant Roberts. Tom Baker and Louise Jameson are the Doctor and Leela. K-9 is their robot dog. K-9 does get up to much in this story. He does shoot a guy at one point.
The Tardis sets down on top of a 1000 meter tall building where they observe a man, Cordo, about to jump to his death. The Doctor stops him with a jelly baby. Turns out they're on Pluto way far into the future. The humans have moved there after they pooped up the Earth. Some aliens help with the move and now the humans are their drugged slaves forced to work in the alien factories.
That's the Gatherer and his assistant Marn. He collects the taxes. When we meet him the first time he's collecting death taxes from Cordo. His dad has just died and he can't pay the newly increased death duties and extra surcharges. The Gatherer tells him he needs to work extra shifts but he's already working 21 hours a day. The company games the system so the workers are always under their thumbs. They used to do that a lot in human history. Look it up, it's pretty heinous. I'm sure it still goes on in one form or another.
There's an underground society living in the sub-basements of the city. Cordo leads the Doc and Leela to the rebels where William Simons is the head guy Mandrel. That's him looking at that candle. I had just seen him in Cribbs a couple of weeks back. The Doctor, Leela and Cordo join the rebels and that's really the start of the revolution. There's the usual running about and getting captured.
You can see Leela stuck up on the wall and the Doc trussed up on a table in the Correction Center. Louise says in the making of featurette that they left her up on the wall while the company went to tea. Everyone seems to have one of those stories. Of course they escape over and over again. The revolution moves along and the Gatherer eventually gets tossed off a 1000 meter building. He was a dick. They shot all the roof stuff on a big factory in Bristol. It was cold there. Louise said in the featurette that between takes Tom would wrap her up like a mummy with in his scarf. After the workers take over the city the Doc, Leela and K-9 bugger off. It was a fairly entertaining story even though they were preaching to the choir here. "Down With The Company." Louise Jameson says it's her favorite serial but she had a lot of scenes on her own in this one and she and Tom Baker still didn't quite get along in those days.
That's some set stills from the Photo Gallery. Nice to see the sets without the actors in the way. Top left is the Gatherer's office and the other is the rebels HQ.
The Correction Center is on the left above and the other is a sub-basement set. Most of the other sets are plain hallways and the like.
The commentary with Tom Baker, Louise Jameson, Pennant Roberts and Michael Keating was ok. There's a good making of featurette with several cast and crew. The featurette on composer Dudley Simpson was interesting. He got sacked from a long run at Doctor Who in 1980. The new producer was "cleaning house". Over the years Dudley did plenty of work for the BBC. There's a nice photo gallery with black and white pictures from the production and some nice color set stills. There's some outtakes, a trailer, info track and Radio Times listings.
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