The Sixth Doctor Adventures: Purity Unleashed from Big Finish Review

Over the last year, we’ve been introduced to a whole new era in the Sixth Doctor’s life. Not only are we getting more adventures with him and Mel, but we’ve also been introduced to a new companion Hebe Harrison, played brilliantly by Ruth Madeley. Like Madeley, Hebe uses a wheelchair and this has put her at odds with another character from the previous two boxsets Professor Patricia McBride who, at the end of the last series, used a time-suit to remove Hebe from existence as well as begin her cleansing of the world of anyone she would deem as undesirable.

This is where Purity Unleashed picks up with its opening story, Broadway Belongs to Me! written by Matthew Sweet. It’s a nice way of opening the series, not really tying into the events of the previous set beyond the Doctor and Mel following temporal anomalies in the hopes one will lead them to Hebe. The pair soon find themselves caught up in a play going on at a local theatre on Broadway which sees Mel as the star. This leads to some time-travel problems, with the Doctor and Mel having to travel back a few weeks so that Mel can rehearse for the show. But this isn’t a normal Broadway show, it’s a fascist piece of propaganda, which really upsets Mel to have to be a part of it.

Like this sets main villain, fascism plays a big part in this story, with many of the supporting characters going to meetings with Nazi themes as this story is set just before the outbreak of WW2. Luckily Sweet doesn’t get too caught up in the messages again fascism, it’s something we all know is extremely wrong but so many people still agree with what far-right people are saying. Instead, he focuses on the Doctor and Mel’s disgust at what is going on around them. But the lack of the main villain does make this an odd story to be placed first, given where this set goes, I think it would have made sense for it to be the second episode, just to break up the action a little bit.

Where this story really shines is in its banter between the Sixth Doctor and Mel. It’s clear from the get-go that Sweet has a great handle on the two characters. Mel is desperate to find Hebe while the Doctor seems intent on taking a slower and steady route, while still trying to have some fun along the way. However, it does become clear that this fun isn’t at Hebe’s expense, its the Doctor trying to cope with the idea of a companion having been wiped from existence and feeling time slowly creeping up on his memories of her too.

Despite the fascist themes here, Sweet is rightly determined to keep it a light story, not dwelling on the darker themes that run throughout this story, they are evident but he doesn’t play too much with them. The idea of Mel being forced to sing a prejudiced Broadway musical number is horrible but it does play to actress Bonnie Langford’s musical background and she brings that to Mel as well as her disgust at what time is forcing her to do. But a lot of Big Finish’s problems with stories set in America also come to the fore here with some weak and dodgy accents that can be a little too distracting, but just try to accept it as part of the campy feel and Broadway Belongs to Me! can be enjoyed as a light-hearted romp.

Purification by Chris Chapman is the second of the three stories which sees the action properly picking up from where the last set left off, with the Doctor and Mel chasing Patricia through time. Patricia as we know has been quietly tweaking time to fit her ideals of a “better” world and her latest scheme brings her to the early 1900s and an ill-fated voyage to the artic. Patricia manages to stop one of the crewmembers from getting aboard Captain Scott’s ship and someone who was supposed to die doesn’t. He then goes on to have a life with a wife and daughter thanks to Patricia and her acts as an evil Fairy Godmother.

Purification isn’t as cut and dry as the Doctor and Mel first think though as they find people’s lives literally in the balance but to kill them or fix the timeline would mean murdering them, they find Patricia is gaining ground on them. This story belongs to Imogen Stubbs who plays the mad Patricia, and her performance is as exciting as it is uncomfortable to listen to. There is a strong sense of righteousness and glee in her character’s actions and it’s hard to hear the Doctor and Mel losing against her plans to bring purity to the world.

Her path of disrupted history is interesting to hear occurring around the characters, the Doctor and Mel are completely helpless against her and it’s a shame that the hour-long runtime didn’t leave much room to explore these settings or other characters. We never learn what happened to the characters we met in the correct timelines, but Chapman’s story moves along at such a pace that doesn’t bother us too much. Really Purification could have been a great two-part story, given how the final story in this set recycles this one and follows some similar themes. Had it been a two-parter it would have had the room to explore the ramifications of Patricia’s plans further. Nonetheless, Purification is a great look at the character and mindset of Patricia McBride and Imogen Stubbs steps up as one of the best original villains Big Finish has ever created.

The final story in this set is Ian Potter’s Time-Burst. It’s a shame that this story follows something of a similar storyline to Purification but just takes things a little slower than the breakneck speed Chapman’s story did. The Doctor and Mel discover Patricia as the Matriarch of The Patrician Works facility, trying to recruit people from the Industrial Revolution period in Sheffield. And to make matters worse, one of the worst natural disasters in English history is about to occur.

Potter spends a lot of time with a husband and wife, Patrick and Mary, who also get caught in Patricia’s web but as we later discover have a bit more to do with what’s going on than we might first have thought. Thanks to Patricia’s meddling, the timelines are gradually becoming more and more unstable and the Doctor begins to fall through them, finding himself one minute in the 1700s and then in the 2000s. But as the time instabilities increase, then so does the technobabble and Potter is clearly forced to hide behind that same technobabble to get around the time instabilities instead of admitting they are because he needs to keep the Doctor and Mel separated for the cliffhanger.

Much of the opening episode moves slowly. The Doctor is trying to recover from time queasiness, Patrick meets Patricia and Mel befriending Mary and helping her around the house when Mel realises that Mary is pregnant. But this isn’t necessarily a bad thing as we do get to know this family in much the same we did the family in a previous Big Finish outing The Peterloo Massacre, knowing the families makes these natural disasters feel even scarier and raises the stakes even higher. Where this portion of the story might feel weaker is that the Doctor and Mel are separated so gone is their chemistry and while Colin Baker and Bonnie Langford are both excellent and handle themselves well on their own, the fantastic chemistry they’ve had over the previous two stories isn’t strictly here this time around.

Potter does make sure episode two moves along at a much greater speed, though it might not have to have been so breakneck if some of this urgency had been incorporated into the opening episode. It soon becomes clear that we’ve got a problem of predestination and as the dam bursts and water floods into the surrounding towns and villages, Potter focuses a little too much on turning Patricia into a stereotypical villain, something she hadn’t been before, resulting in her ranting, raving and shouting rather than her cold and frighteningly methodical calmness and ease she conducted herself within the previous episode.

While Time-Burst is a competent story, it doesn’t quite manage to reach the heights of the previous two stories and I’m not quite sure where the problems are, we’ve got strong characters – even if they aren’t particularly interesting, a strong script, great performances and a natural disaster – something which Big Finish always does fantastically well. I think the issue comes from the ending, which is rushed and descends into a vortex of chaos that was incredibly hard to make sense of.

But it is clear through all three of these episodes just what a ball Colin Baker and Bonnie Langford are having. And Imogen Stubbs makes for a fantastic villain, even if the final story does threaten to undo that. She explores her character’s villainy with just enough drama and restraint and while Patricia’s desire to see a “pure” world come to fruition makes for sometimes incredibly hard listening, she is definitely the highlight of this set. But for fans of Hebe Harrison, then you might be a little disappointed because she doesn’t appear until the final moments which leads into another cliffhanger.

One wonders if this was supposed to be a reintroduction to the proper Hebe before Ruth Madeley started filming her upcoming scenes in the Sixtieth Anniversary and so this cliffhanger was then hastily included, especially since things seem to wrap up quite nicely otherwise.

This boxset will be better enjoyed having heard the previous two sets, Water Worlds and Purity Dreamed as this set won’t work completely as a whole set on its own and listeners might find the plots to be a little muddled otherwise. But if you have listened to the previous Sixth Doctor sets, you’ll get a lot out of this, even if we are still left with more questions than answers…