"an empty vengeance at best"

DOCTOR WHO AND THE SUNMAKERS
by Terrance Dicks

First published 18 November 1982 (1), between Time-Flight and Arc of Infinity (2)

Lewis Bastion, writing the Black Archive on ‘The Sun Makers’, views this as ‘one of the most revolutionary Doctor Who stories to have made the air’ (3), an ‘anti-colonial tract’ (4) that models its regime on the East India Company (5), focuses in on the evil of ‘the commodification of human life under Company rule’ (6) and then just has the Doctor tear it all down. El Sandifer shares much the same view stating: ‘The Doctor shows up and overthrows the government because it’s a bunch of bullying profiteers using bureaucracy to justify torture. And because they drove a man to suicide’ (7). Dicks appears a little more ambivalent.

    One of the most notable differences between the broadcast episodes and the novelisation comes with the death of Gatherer Hade. On TV, Hade is thrown from a roof to cheers, inviting, according to Bastion, ‘the audience to regard Hade’s fate as deserved and proportionate’ (8). In the novelisation, Dicks has most of the crowd turn ‘away in disgust’ and shuffle away ‘a bit shamefaced’ (9), guilty that, with the Gatherer’s murder, ‘things had got out of hand, gone a bit too far’ (10). Around this moment, the novelisation also gives a stronger sense that there is envy as well as revolutionary zeal behind the action, the work-units offended by ‘The very sight’ of the ‘sleek and plump’, ‘rich and arrogant’ Hade in his ‘rich and brightly coloured’ clothes’ (11), plus it turns the crowd into bullying mob, taunting the Gatherer with the name ‘old rubber guts’ (12) and, almost inspired by coining this nickname, throwing him off the roof to ‘see if old rubber-guts will bounce!’ (13). Bastion also points out that ‘Dicks […] removes Veet from the Doctor and Leela’s departure scene’ (14), as if her involvement in this scene means she must be kept separate from our heroes and excluded from any bonhomie and talk of the future.

    Bastion attributes this change to ‘Dicks’ concern for the people the Doctor leaves behind’ versus ‘Holmes’s relaxed attitude to the fact that revolutions break things’ (15). Dicks can’t imagine any hope for the future in a society which sees nothing wrong in murdering Hade and so has ‘most’ of them instantly learn the lesson that this is an unacceptable act, one for which perhaps the implied few who don’t learn their lesson were always more responsible and one which certainly means the ringleader Veet must be marginalised going forwards.

    There is a second string in Dicks’s resistance to Holmes’s more carefree storytelling, one that’s clearer when looking at Sandifer’s rather than Bastion’s take. In Dicks’s telling the Doctor doesn’t overthrow the government ‘because it’s a bunch of bullying profiteers’; he does it because, after Leela is captured, he thinks it’s ‘The most effective way to free’ her and, should she fail to survive long enough, it would at least ‘be a fitting revenge’ (16). This, to be honest, feels a little unDoctory, and it feels like Dicks sees that danger, having the Doctor later reflect ‘If Leela was dead, it would be an empty vengeance at best’ (17); having done that, Dicks finally gives into the moral Sandifer sees at the heart of Holmes’s tale, deciding it’s worth overthrowing this regime anyway because it had ‘driven someone like Cordo to climb on to that parapet’.

    This all feels like Dicks is rather unfairly overwriting Holmes’s original tale with his own anti-revolutionary anxiety. It also means that he’s turning Leela into a peril monkey – the exact role Dicks frequently and gleefully states in interviews is the core purpose of female companions – whose plot function is to get captured in order to motivate the Doctor’s actions. This is all terrible. It’s also very surprising from Dicks, who’s never, over more novelisations than anyone else, previously shown any desire to alter others’ stories and who, in recent years, hasn’t seemed sufficiently invested in the stories to want to make them his own anyway. I can only assume Dicks doesn’t intend to do quite this. Some explanation might be found in the fact that, according to Doctor Who Monthly, the job of adapting ‘The Sun Makers’ was apparently approached with some trepidation due to fears ‘it might go over the heads of most readers’ (18). In attempting to spell out more clearly characters’ motives, Dicks may have unconsciously rewritten them.

    There is, however, an unexpected (if not redemptive) upside to be found in Dicks’s unprecedented butchery of the tale, one that’ll hopefully be made clearer after a quick look at a bit of script reinstated by the novelisation (19). Whilst trying to rescue the Doctor, Leela encounters three people ‘waiting to be erased’ (20) and Cordo assures her ‘they won’t bother us’ because ‘Their lives are over’ (21). This is the verdict of the Company, based on their no longer meeting ‘their output quotas’ (22); it also seems, combined with their being described as ‘motionless’ (23), to be the verdict of those waiting for erasure – they’re already acting as if they’re gone. The clarity with which this paints exactly what the Company has done to humanity is striking but it also works to cast a new light on what happened to Cordo’s father at the start; I suddenly saw what it seems Bastion had always realised – that Cordo’s father was erased and the point of a Golden Death is ‘to avoid the pain inflicted by cruder forms of execution’ (24). All this becomes crystal clear in the moment Leela cuts through ‘the proper terminology’ and identifies what’s happening as ‘murder’ (25).

    While the Doctor finds trouble thanks to ‘insatiable curiosity’ (26) and is later motivated by pragmatism and vengeance, Leela sees the horror in ‘this casual acceptance of planned extermination’ (27) and reacts with accordant brutality – shooting attendants ‘without hesitation’ (28) and hurling her knife into guards backs (29). Bastion identifies ‘The Sun Makers’ as the story that doesn’t reject Leela’s initial instinct – the clearer the situation becomes, the more ‘the Doctor endorses her violent solution to Pluto’s problems’ (30), and the one time he doesn’t, insisting on hypnotising rather than killing a guard (31), it goes wrong and nearly gets everyone killed.

    It’s possible this shift of focus onto Leela was somewhere in the script, maybe as an artefact of plans, according to Shannon Sullivan, to kill her at the climax (32). Perhaps Dicks does it himself in tribute to this being, as I’d never have realised without Jim Sangster, her final story to be novelised (33).

    Sangster also points out that Dicks has been responsible for every novelisation to feature Leela, and there does seem to be some fondness for her as a character. There’s a nice detail during the opening Tardis scenes where Leela interprets the Doctor and K9’s chess game as a ‘ritual to propitiate the TARDIS’ (34) and therefore the Doctor’s increasingly bad mood when he’s losing as evidence ‘the ritual was not going well’ (35). More pertinently, not understanding the specifics of what Cordo first tells them on the rooftop, she interprets his story as if it were a more typical Doctor Who setting and assumes the Gatherer must be a ‘monster […] coming to eat him’ (36).

    That said, if Dicks gives good Leela, he gives even better K9: while winning at chess, his ‘eyes [glow] triumphantly’ (37); he talks ‘excitedly’ when he overhears the prospect of a walk (38); he lets out ‘an electronic whine of disappointment’ (39) when he realises the Doctor and Leela are beyond his reach down a ladder; and repeatedly asks if his efforts are satisfactory until he gets the affirmation he craves (40). His most developed moment comes when he has to find a way to follow the Doctor and Leela out of the Tardis: his impatience is clear from the way he ‘waited and waited and waited’ (41) but, refusing to acknowledge such feelings, instead uses convoluted logic to decide ‘the Doctor would land in trouble within a very short time’ and so will need him ‘to rescue him from the dangers into which his rashness had led him […] as soon as possible’ (42). Thus satisfied, K9 immediately just exits the Tardis and starts scouring every floor for the Doctor and Leela.

    Less successful characterisation occurs beyond the regulars. I’m rather uncomfortable with the way Mandrel is introduced as ‘one of the ugliest-looking men the Doctor had ever seen’ (43) and, though I quite like the sense he’s not all he pretends to be from his disquiet when preparing to torture the Doctor – a mild admonishment from the Doctor ‘froze Mandrel’s blood’ (44); the Doctor quickly identifies a lack of ‘conviction’ when it comes to threats (45); and he seems stuck for what to do in the absence of the Doctor ‘begging for mercy’ (46) – the speed with which he switches to believing in the possibility of revolution is as underdeveloped as on TV despite the ability to see inside his head.

    Even more unsatisfying, but probably drawing directly on the script rather than a tweak by Dicks, is Marn. On TV, I’d always read her as recognising that the Gatherer is an idiot but also knowing better than to be anything other than sycophantic. It’s very difficult to present evidence for this view, but Lewis Bastion at least seems to have viewed her the same way (47). Here, the slightest hint of infraction shocks her ‘to her conformist core’ (48), plus she seems to genuinely revere the Gatherer (49), value his recognition (50) and think him a clever man (51). She seems to genuinely mourn the passing of the Company (52) and, though Dicks also gives her a moment of truly embracing the revolution (53), it seems even then it’s the act of shouting a new slogan that’s ‘enjoyable’ and she’s simply found a new doctrine to adore.

    I want to end on the Gatherer, however. Dicks presents him rather well, especially when the Doctor immediately susses he’s ‘cunning’ and ‘status-conscious’ but too inadequate to be the real power on Pluto (54), but the moment when he and the Doctor first meet, and the different ways Holmes and Dicks try and manage it, reveal a problem either with both the TV and prose versions of this story or, unfortunately, with me. On TV, as well as pronouncing mahogany wrong, the Gatherer is shown to be foolish by not knowing ‘which bit of a raspberry plant to eat’ (55). Now, I needed Lewis Bastion to point this out for me because, though I’m perfectly aware that you eat raspberries, it didn’t strike me as immediately absurd that people might also eat the leaves and, were it possible to do so, I can imagine them as far more plentiful and less perishable than the fruits. Mahogany, meanwhile, though the mispronunciation’s a nice gag, isn’t really anywhere near enough a common enough word for me to have ever assumed the Gatherer was undermining himself here. Dicks, I think reasonably, decides that the mahogany joke won’t translate well to the page and that explaining about raspberry leaves and fruit might get rather trample the point, opts to substitute the Doctor identifying the leaves by their scientific name and then pointing out that Hade is ' unfamiliar with Latin’ (56). To his credit, this time I got the joke. But the joke is that Gatherer Hade doesn’t know Latin. If that makes him ridiculous then I’m also ridiculous.

    Look, don’t get me wrong. I get that Holmes likes to use the Doctor to undermine bureaucracy by making it ridiculous; what’s more, I like it. But this moment suddenly makes me remember that the period of the show Holmes and Dicks worked most closely and consistently on was the Pertwee era during which the Doctor would pull rank by mentioning his mate Tubby Rowlands or belittle other scientists for not being several thousand-year-old aliens. It doesn’t seem very satisfactory if your best shot at ridiculing the rich and powerful is essentially for their not being posh enough. In fact, it feels more like embracing the Victorian disdain for the nouveau riche than it does any actual attempt to speak truth to power. You might well think I’m barking up the wrong tree here, but bear in mind that when the Doctor proposes bunging a plug in the Collector’s chair, it’s ‘a champagne cork’ (57) he happens to have in his pocket and, looking closely at some stills from the TV serial, that might well be what was scripted (58). Dicks might have defanged Holmes’s revolutionary tale, but I’m not sure Holmes had quite worked out the right place to sink his teeth in the first place.