The Sun Makers is the fourth serial of the 15th season of the British science fiction television series Doctor Who, which was first broadcast in four weekly parts on BBC1 from 26 November to 17 December 1977.
The Fourth Doctor and Leela arrive on the planet Pluto just in time to prevent one of its citizens, Cordo, from committing suicide over his tax bill.
The monopolistic energy company on Pluto is using its economic stranglehold to extract ever growing taxes and those who refuse to pay are forced to live in the dark tunnels of the Undercity.
Their first target is the main control area where the Company engineers PCM, a fear-inducing drug piped into the air supply, which helps keep the population servile.
Gatherer Hade, investigating reports of citizens going onto the roof to look at the city's sun, is thrown to his death from the top of his Megropolis, and his underling, Marn, joins the revolution.
Before the Collector can implement a plan to exterminate the population of Pluto with poison gas, Cordo and the lead rebels help the Doctor defeat the remaining members of the Inner Retinue.
Many of the letters and numbers used to denote the labyrinth of corridors in the city, for example P45, allude to well-known tax and Governmental forms, and the abbreviation used to refer to the suppressant gas 'PCM' also stands for Per Calendar Month.
The actor who played the Collector, Henry Woolf, had deep bushy eyebrows, very reminiscent of the then-Chancellor of the Exchequer, Denis Healey.
[4] The BBC's Audience Research Report recorded a positive reaction from contemporary viewers, who were pleased the story and characters were more realistic, as well as finding the serial entertaining and well-developed.
[5] Paul Cornell, Martin Day, and Keith Topping wrote of the serial in The Discontinuity Guide (1995), "A clever script is balanced by a straight-forward plot, although the subtlety of some of the jokes will be lost on a younger audience.
"[6] In The Television Companion (1998), David J. Howe and Stephen James Walker praised the "high level of sophisticated humour" that satirized the tax system.
[5] In 2010, Mark Braxton of Radio Times also gave The Sun Makers a positive review, calling it very successful in terms of the writer's objectives and described it as "playful, witty, ingenious".
Dicks chose to tone down the scene in which revolutionaries cheer as they hurl one of their former oppressors from a roof, reducing the apparent horror so that the rebels concerned feel that their actions have gone "a bit too far".