Season 15, Episode 4 | 4 parts | First broadcast: 26 November – 17 December 1977 | Writer: Robert Holmes | Director: Pennant Roberts
Cast
- Tom Baker as the Doctor
- Louise Jameson as Leela
- Henry Woolf as the Collector
- Michael Keating as Goudry
Summary
Arriving on a distant colony of humanity relocated to Pluto, the Doctor and Leela find a population crushed under an oppressive taxation regime enforced by the sinister, profit-driven Company. As they uncover a scheme in which the artificially warmed planet’s inhabitants are worked to exhaustion and taxed into submission for the benefit of an alien overseer known only as the Collector, the Doctor helps spark a citizens’ revolt against the bureaucratic machinery keeping them enslaved.
Interesting Facts
- Writer Robert Holmes conceived the story as a pointed satire of Britain’s tax system and bureaucracy after a frustrating personal experience with tax authorities.
- Many of the story’s fictional taxes and terminology were drawn directly, sometimes almost verbatim, from real contemporary British tax law.
- It is one of the more overtly political and satirical stories of the classic series, using science fiction as a thin veil for social commentary.
- The Company’s oppressive control of atmosphere and heating on Pluto anticipates later dystopian corporate-state themes explored elsewhere in science fiction.
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