YMMV / Doctor Who S15 E4 "The Sun Makers"

• Anvilicious: Robert Holmes is not exactly subtle about showing his contempt for tax collectors in the script. He begins the story with a character who is forced to work 21 hours a day to pay his debt to the taxman, and is told by the Tax Gatherer that he should be grateful to them. The alien species behind the Company is called the Usurians for crying out loud! To fully hammer it home, he ends the story with a bit of Wish Fulfilment: the oppressed, overtaxed populace flinging the Tax Gatherer off from the roof of a skyscraper to his death.
• Broken Aesop: The story is supposed to be a right-wing allegory about how taxation is bad, written by an openly Conservative writer. However, ignoring a few throwaway flippant comments made by the Doctor, the story is really about the evil of taxation that targets the poorest in society, and societies that strip away social safety nets so the untaxed rich can rake in massive profits. The reason for this situation is privatisation, where every utility (including sunlight) is run by corporate interests and the government is viewed only as an extension of the MegaCorp. At the very least, it comes across as left-wing in an Occupy kind of way. If you choose to read into the fact that the Doctor wins by inspiring a populist revolt to execute their leaders while quoting Karl Marx, it becomes actively Communist. Not what you'd expect from something written by a Margaret Thatcher supporter in 1977.
• Complete Monster: The Collector is a Usurian representative of the Company, who moved humanity's population from the exhausted Earth to first Mars and then Pluto, setting up a series of artificial suns. The Collector has created a brutal dystopia in which the humans are effectively slaves, where every aspect of their lives, including breathing, are taxed, often creating a vicious cycle where they are forced to work extra shifts to pay their debts, increasing their debts through dependence on stimulant drugs, until they are Driven to Suicide. Ordinary citizens are forbidden to see the sun, rebellion is kept in check by lacing the atmosphere with a chemical that keeps everyone in a constant state of fear, and crimes are punished by constant torture at "correction centres". The Collector plans to ultimately abandon the humans when they cease to be profitable, leaving them all to die when the suns run out of fuel. He sentences Leela to execution by boiling alive, gleefully noting "This is the point where I get a real sense of job satisfaction". Ordering mandatory time off so that the workers have to listen to her screams, then orders them to work unpaid overtime to make up for the drop in production. He treats even his elite with contempt, bullying his underling, Hade, and using his personal guard as a Human Shield during a rebellion. To end the rebellion he attempts to gas the city, killing even those still loyal to him.
• Genius Bonus: The Doctor at one point when offered something to eat asks "Rubus idaeus?" and is told, "No, raspberry leaves". Rubus idaeus is the scientific name for the red raspberry.
• Narm: The way Hade adds Marns' name to the end of his sentences makes it sound like the actor is trying a poor Jamaican accent.
• Retroactive Recognition: Goudry is Vila Restal. In fact, director Pennant Roberts suggested Michael Keating for that role having worked with him on this serial.
• Signature Scene: Gatherer Hade getting hurled to his death from the roof of a skyscraper.
• Values Resonance: In 1977 it was a right-wing allegory about how taxation is evil, but in modern times, it's a left-wing Occupy allegory about how forcing the tax burden on the poor to benefit big corporations is evil. Complete with a gas that makes everyone afraid being pumped into everyone's houses— an allegory for news media, which has become much more omnipresent and sensationalist since 1977.
• What Do You Mean, It's Not Political?: It's well known that the story is about the evils of taxation and written by a Thatcher supporter, but, since the actual story presents the issue more as "untouchable mega-corporations and corrupt bankers have bought out the government and are draining money out of the poorest to boost their own profits while keeping the population constantly afraid via media to distract them," modern critics tend to read it as a satire on the evils of privatization, or as a rallying cry for Occupy-style anti-capitalism. Privatization was just around the corner in 1977, and the Occupy movement was 35 years away. Is it more likely that Robert Holmes was secretly hard-left and able to see the future, or that he was ramping up the setting's systemic injustice to the point he accidentally broke his own right-wing aesop? Or even that he was aiming for a Both Sides Have a Point aesop of the kind that South Park would became famous for decades later, showing that for all the problems excessive taxes cause, allowing private businesses to operate totally unregulated would lead to the same problems, just in a different way?

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