Sylvie and Dora confront Epiphany’s Janus face. The festive agitator Lord of Misrule parleys with William Holman Hunt’s sanctimonious painting ‘The Awakening Conscience’. Episode 17 is awash with mock legislature, fallen women and cosmological contrariety.

A female monarch, a boy writer, a podcast, numerologically united. In Purity & Danger’s sixteenth episode, Thomas Baty, alias Irene Clyde, dares to dream of gender utopia in Beatrice the Sixteenth’s desert dynasty, and a sixteen-year-old John Kennedy Toole begins The Neon Bible, his first work of fiction. Four to the power of two equals Tavi Gevinson’s internet juvenilia, teen pregnancy, an aristocratic third gender and the picaresque year of 2016.

Sylvie and Dora take to bed. They curl up in the sticky embrace of the Great Bed of Ware, a 16th century bedstead from an oversexed Hertfordshire town, and are rudely awakened by the Russian Sleep Experiment, a creepypasta about chemically-induced insomnia in the Soviet Union. Rolling around on the kingsize mattress of sleep history, Sylvie and Dora lie with the biphasic medieval period, 20th century amphetamine-fuelled warfare, and millennial internet folklore.

Sylvie and Dora saddle up and take the Purity & Danger outfit West. They journey from Texas, site of Larry McMurtry’s 1985 frontier epic Lonesome Dove, to Hollywood, where the streets are paved with rhinestones and the spangled Nudie Suit was first donned. On the way, they shoot the breeze about all manner of cowboy: homesteading and homosexual, roughhousing and robotic.

Sylvie and Dora start a Facebook group, turn up the volume and wait for the guests to arrive. On the eve of Sylvie’s birthday, the girls dig into the birthday cake, symbol of childhood nostalgia, and wash down its bittersweet taste with the adolescent hedonism of Project X, the 2012 mock cinema verité film that prompted a spate of teen hooliganism and generational Pavlovian response to Kid Cudi’s Pursuit of Happiness.

Sylvie and Dora watch pensively as the study of the damned and the study of the doomed fight for the crumbs of scientific merit. A bridled nail-tail wallaby, the last of its kind, chews on a flake of a substance that looks like beef which fell from the sky moments prior. What, if anything, does the anomalous disclose?

Purity & Danger loses its virginity and finds it again. Sylvie and Dora, made to live as hermits in the desert, atone and are permitted to part the thighs of chastity. They are greeted by two glistening objects: the chastity belt, fetishist’s plaything moonlighting as moral insurance for medieval husbands, and the ring, seal of wifehood and girlfriendom.

Twin sets of twins wash up on the shores of Purity & Danger. Sylvie and Dora see quadruple as they introduce the silent June-Alison and Jennifer Gibbons, prodigious child authors unjustly imprisoned at Broadmoor, to the deafening Dora and Leonora Hazard, cockney chorus-girls born from the imagination of 1970s fairytale-spinner Angela Carter. Special thanks go to June-Alison Gibbons, who kindly contributed her own words for this episode’s visualisation.

A scandal breaks as two Hollywood veterans are scooped up from the cutting room floor. Sylvie and Dora clutch their pearls at Kenneth Anger’s spurious history of cinema’s Golden Age and Anita Loos’ blonde-bashing memoir of industrious coquettedom, stopping along the way to discuss the loveable scamp, the tactical bob and the ethics of excess.

Donald Barthelme’s incontinent colossal father and Giulio Romano’s tempestuous sons of Gaia both crash to earth in narratives of giant vanquishing. Sylvie and Dora explore giants in their various guises — the bellicose, the libidinous, the grotesque, the innocent and the divine — and defend the honour of each.