The Sun Makers - Episode 2

Interesting stat welcomes me as I watch this episode on my DVD as it was announced that this episode was the 36^th most watched episode of the week. How? I am perhaps being harsh on this story but I just thing that Robert Holmes is indulging himself a bit here and its defeinetly not one of his finest stories. It’s not like ‘The Space Pirates’ or ‘The Krotons’ but it’s not a classic. I know that people might like the satirical slant in this but if I want satirism then I will watch ‘The Thick of It’ or ‘Spitting Image’.

We meet the Collector (played by Henry Woolf), the first thing we actually see is him face down looking at some figures. When he first speaks the voice is rather annoying but this might have been the intention. It was quite fun to watch the Collector and Hade interact, Hade continues to amuse me and it seems like in the first scene between him and the Doctor he has found his intellectual equal.

Mandrel gets even less likeable in this episode but it’s not because he tries to kill Leela but just because every time I look at him I just think of Ventress in Heartbeat and how nice he was in that. Even though this was made about 15 years before Heartbeat started, it’s the reverse of normal typecasting. What I would say about this group of unlikeable rebels is that it’s the sort of group that I could see Leela living with after she had left the Doctor. It would have made for a far better exit than the one she actually got. Leela does get a fair share of the action in this episode. It’s funny because its another episode where the Doctor and Leela don’t share a scene. Leela is very strong in this episode and the Doctor seems to have become a bit clownish in this episode. He starts off being tied up and his best bit comes when he’s talking to Mandrel and gets quite angry with him about Leela’s absence.

The first scene between Hade and the Doctor is quite fun as Hade is acting all nice and gives the Doctor the money he was trying to get at the beginning of the episode. I was wondering whether the Doctor would know whether he was being set up or not but it looked like in this episode that he was blissfully unaware. I suppose it keeps the story going a bit to have the Doctor not have worked out he was being played.

The location scenes are quite good considering that they are all corridors but the downside to them is that when K9 is blasting down them he makes one hell of a racket. Maybe some dubbing would have worked better in this instance. The other alternative is to just cut K9 out of the story altogether. Lets be honest, K9’s contribution to the story so far has been limited at best. If it weren’t for the racket he was making I wouldn’t have noticed him in the serial.

The episode doesn’t drag which is a surprise to me as I don’t think that there is anything that grabs me in the way that other stories in this season have. This is definelty a better episode than the first but not by much of a compliment.