Leah Brotherhead

Review by Jacob Licklider

Water Worlds and Purity Undreamed comprised the start of a brand new story arc for the Sixth Doctor and Mel, ushering in the new era of box sets for the characters under the helm of producer Jacqueline Rayner and script editor Robert Valentine. Purity Undreamed ended with the “reveal” of the story arc’s villain through slightly messy means, more importantly new companion Hebe Harrison being written out of time as if she has never existed and the implication of a rewritten future timeline where a eugenics regime has deleted any sense of disability. This implication is dark and executed at least a little messily, simplifying disability quite a bit to physical disabilities. The third set, Purity Unleashed, creates an interesting setup, it’s the Doctor and Mel searching for the infraction in history that led to Hebe’s disappearance and the further development of Patricia McBride, played by Imogen Stubbs, as Purity. While the three episodes in this set only work in the confines of this being the third set in this story arc, the timing of this set actually helps lessen some of the issues I had in particular with the previous set. Purity Undreamed was a set that as the title states is the character of Purity becoming real and not just the biases, conscious and subconscious, of Patricia McBride, yet it ends without much of a sense of the character’s villainy. Purity Unleashed is quick to rectify that in the two appearances of the character in the back to stories included, making it quite the shame that this wasn’t released soon after Purity Undreamed, the nine month wait not so much keeping tension as just questioning what exactly was going on.

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Review by Jacob Licklider

Old Friends ended the first series of Ninth Doctor Adventures with a genuinely brilliant series finale that felt like a lead in to Rose, something my review of that set had some pushback since it had already been announced that Series 2 would essentially be continuing where Series 1 left off with the Ninth Doctor still travelling alone. Now Series 1 spent quite a bit of time developing the idea that this was one continuous series, including by designing the covers to mimic the single DVD releases of Series 1 of the show. Series 2 seems to be less a full series with a central character arc for the Ninth Doctor and more of a series of themed box sets with new styles of cover art, this first one being from the wonderful Caroline Tankersley, with the theme of going Back to Earth. It’s three stories set at various points in Earth’s history, mainly in the past ranging from the early 17th century to the early 1990s, with one story having some pieces in the modern day, but not really. All three of the authors here do an excellent job of taking their piece of Earth and doing something interesting with it, overcoming my initial hesitation of going into a set not really following up the character development of the Ninth Doctor within the first few minutes of the first story.