Girl in a Bubble

Purity Unbound #1

Released: 30 August 2023

Listened: 9/18/23

The third boxed set starts with Hebe back in the crew, but not the Hebe you remember. Instead, it looks like Patricia has had another go at remaking reality, more or less successfully. Disability is unheard of, but Hebe still exists, having been “kept safe” in her home pretty much since birth, with Ron as a guardian/companion. That gives Toby Hadoke more to do, but it appears that Elise (also a wheelchair user) doesn’t exist this time around. It looks like keeping Hebe under her thumb allows Patricia’s alternate timeline to exist. Of course, what looks like a utopia on the surface is actually dystopian underneath: much of poetry and literature is banned, and there are “homes” for people whose disabilities are the result of injury or age. There’s a lot of running around on the Doctor and Mel’s part trying to figure out the timey-wimeyness. It’s partially successful because Colin Baker manages to lend a nice sense of urgency to the technobabble, but ultimately they’re talking about rather arbitrary time-travel “rules,” so there’s only so much gravitas it can have. And we’re clearly connecting the segments of the story together tightly, because there’s a bizarre cliffhanger ending.