6DA Purity Undreamed Out Now Spoilers OK

Again, I don’t buy based on art or marketing. I buy based on writers, characters and situations. I mean  I can acknowledge a nice looking cover but it does’nt influence if i buy the audio or not.    

Actually, at the end of Reverse Engineering, she talks to the Doctor about how the process could have been used to improve humanity. So she's not so much anti-eugenics as against how it was being used.

Finished this, and even though I did enjoy the first set, this was miles better imo. Where Water Worlds shoots itself a bit in the foot setting everything, Purity is more assured and better balanced. The first two episodes have similar setups, but both feel different in execution, and allow us to understand Patricia.

In regards to Patricia, Imogen Stubbs is great, and really sells the role. I did see some people say that her attitudes in the third episode we’re out of the blue, but I could t disagree more. From the beginning she is very resistant to those around her, and there are quite a few points in the stories where blantant micro-aggressions from her come up(sneering comments, annoyance at accommodating Hebe in the first ep).

Finally, while the major twist at the end didn’t feel very original, it’s a good opportunity to tell some interesting stories, so I look forward to Volume 3 immensely!

Chronomancer- Yeah, I get what everybody is disliking about this set and the story arc.
The setup is really clumsy.
So we get this really weird vendetta of the two rival aliens, a bunch of even weirder co-incidences to have the new big bad getting the hands on some piece of alien time tech only to lead to a sudden cliff-hanger. Boom.
And Pat's reactions were also pretty weird. I get some of her issues with the future- in the future, some of our problems still exist, there are still disabled people and not all is a pure and perfect utopia.
What I did not get was- so is she supposed to be a xenophobic Nazi? Is she a Darwinist who wants to create a master race?
She is supposed to be a anthropologist- if she hates other people and people who are different so much, why exactly did she pick that subject and even pursue it to become professor?
Why has nobody called her out on it before?
What exactly does she want? It is never made clear or discussed.
Why does she feel that way? What exactly is her deal and story?
It is just "You are disgusting, I hate people like you, now go away!"
I mean, I kind of get the point that it is disappointing that even in a bright future, people with disabilities still suffer for it, but they seem to have made some progress and now they get at least hover chairs....
But I actually had hoped for a better point than "xenophobic Nazi person is going to wipe imperfect people out"- because, let's face it, there will always be imperfection.
So yeah, this is handled VERY clumsily.

I am still curious how they are going to resolve this, but I really hope they do it in a more elegant and meaningful way.
Otherwise, I still enjoyed this set more than 9th Doctor Old Friends.

In general- I really enjoy Hebe as a companion. She is really good. She reminds me a bit of Lucie Miller and Flip, but is less annoying than Lucie could be and definitely has more bite than Flip.
And yes, some longer stories, maybe even 3 hour long ones, would be cool.

So I just did The Mindless Ones and my main reaction is…is that it?

The 1 hour format really shouldn’t be alien to Big Finish at this point, but somehow this felt like they’d never done it before. We skip over Hebe and Patricia’s infiltration of the sinister office so Hebe can catch us up later, we skip over who the aliens are and why they’re even here doing their evil plot (and why is Sheffield Hallam uni of all places their ground zero for conquering the world’s minds?) and so ultimately it feels a bit unfinished. I think I get what they’re going for, taking aim at the corporate appropriation of “well-being” language just to make people better workers, but the plot itself just missed the mark. 

I did like the slight twist that Hebe’s friend’s lifestyle changes weren’t actually anything to do with mind control though. Nice little subversion. 

Chronomancer

Hmm…okay. The time traveller squabble fight is really neither here or there. Villain wants to unleash something with an alien name for universal domination for reasons, and oops destroy Sheffield too. It’s nothing special but it is well paced, so it’s fine.

The Patricia subplot is really the point of this story. Now on the one hand I get what they’re doing here. At uni I did meet someone who happily identified themself as “alt-right” who was incredibly polite and personable and frankly if you met him outside of politics you’d never have picked up on it (well, unless you looked at their social media for more than five minutes…yeah…). But point being someone appearing entirely personable and yet having these kind of disturbing views…yep I get it. The way these views came out did feel a bit sudden, but I guess that’s a limitation of the pacing as with a four parter they could’ve devoted some serious time to her rising horror at the future, as opposed to her freaking out within a minute of arriving.

What worked less for me is Patricia immediately throwing all subtlety out the window and branding herself “Purity”. It just feels incredibly big step to go from where she was (microaggression central with these sentiments bubbling furiously under the surface) to an all out time travel crusade in pursuit of “Purity”. 

I think whether I continue this arc will be review based. Water Worlds I felt a lot kinder towards on revisit, but this set was very unsteady.

I really like this one. Especially the last story