Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary - watching Doctor Who one episode a day from the very start...
Day 489: The Sun Makers, Episode Three
Dear diary,
I’m finding The Sun Makers to be a bit of an odd one, truth be told. Not in a bad way, simply in the sense that it seems to be getting a good deal better as it goes along. In my entry for Episode One, I complained that the direction wasn’t quite as interesting as I’d like it to be, and that you don’t get a real sense of the location when we’re out on the rooftops because there’s no model shots to help us along. Today, though, it’s like they’ve taken all that criticism on board!
The cliffhanger reprise has that lovely shot as the camera pans around the corner where Leela and her comrades are hiding, and you get to see the real length of the corridor behind her. I can’t say that I really picked up on just how nice this moment is, but I’m glad that I’ve noticed it today because the rest of that scene goes on to give us some really - really - nice shots. Use of selective focus when looking at K9 (there’s one moment when we get a real close up on his ‘nose’, and another where we watch his tail dip) and on Leela as she lies wounded on the floor feel almost filmic in nature, and they’re really rather great. It helps that they’re being shot on film, and that’s always a sure-fire winner with me.
We’ve then even got a shot of the city as a model! It’s hardly the best model that Doctor Who has ever given us (indeed, it’s far from the best model this decade), but it does help to give a scale to the world we’re inhabiting. There’s something oddly retro about it - that sense of ‘this is what the future will look like as decreed in the 1950s and 1960s - with all the skyscrapers and connecting beams, and I rather like that. I’m wondering now if there might have been a shot of this during that first episode that I simply missed, because it seems strange to build the model and then only show it at this late stage.
The only thing I am coming away from the episode feeling a little down-hearted at is some of the sets. Now that I seem to have ‘switched on’ to the direction being used here (it’s not as though they saw the work in the early episodes and then changed the way it was done, because it would have all been filmed in one big ‘block’, although I suppose they could have changed between locations), I’m really loving the use of the various locations. They give the underworld of the city a real industrial feel, and I completely believe that this world exists under those enormous tower blocks. I love the concrete tunnels as much as I love the sterile while corridors way overhead, and I love the sense of realism that it gives the story.
But then you enter sets like the control room above the steamer, or the correction centre. They’re all bloody peach! They don’t look like the kinds of technology that I expect to find in this world at all. I grew up on a farm, though it had long ceased operating as one by the time I was born. Right at the back of the main yard there’s an enormous barn. The roof has half caved in, and it’s reached a point now where the structure is so covered with Ivy that you can’t see a single inch of the brickwork below. Truth be told, it looks a bit like a Krynoid looming over the other outbuildings.
When I was young, I used to be fascinated by this place. It was a forbidden world of adventure and exploration. I wasn’t allowed in because of the roof being in such a precarious state (frankly, I’m surprised it’s still holding up now in places. I imagine that’s the work of the ivy), but I could peer through the cracks in the big, metal doors. It was full of old decommissioned farm machinery. Great big vats, three or four meters tall. Bits of equipment that had stood in this place for ten, twenty, even fifty years in some cases. By the time I was a teenager and old enough to decide that of course I was going in, I realised that if you worked your way around the back, there was a great big opening in the wall. Finally, I made it in there to look at all this stuff up close.
I know what you’re thinking - I’m supposed to be talking to you about The Sun Makers. But I am! Because all this equipment is exactly what I expect to find in this ‘control centre’. Rusting, and ancient. Crumbling away in places. You’ve got plenty of dials and readouts in this one, but they feel false. They’re too comically overrides and made out of numerous pastel colours. I want real dials. Little readouts behind panels of glass (cracked, of course), and little switches and levers to control all the operations. In short, I want this area to look as out-dated and industrial as the rest of the city does. It’s the only thing which is taking me right out of the story.
By contrast, the more I see it, the more I love the Gatherer’s office. It’s an odd kind of corridor that leads you in (something like a rib-cage, but it works!), and the whole thing feels like a set… but that’s just right for it. It’s supposed to feel different to the rest of the city. I also can’t help but like the hideout of the rebels deep down in the under city. It’s very stripped down and minimal, but those ‘pipes’ which lead up and out look fantastic, and I can really believe that they connect to the locations we’ve seen above. I don’t think that we’re going to be seeing many (if any) new locations in the final episode, but I’m hoping that if we do, they’ll be falling into the category of things I love rather than the things that feel like they’re letting me down.
