Helen Raynor

A returning companion, a returning classic monster, and a plot built entirely out of satnavs. “The Sontaran Stratagem” is a solid, workmanlike first half — it doesn’t have the ambition of the season’s best, but it moves briskly, it brings Martha Jones back in a way that respects where she was left, and it lands a genuinely uncomfortable argument about the Doctor and the military. Also the Sontarans are enormous fun, which covers a multitude of sins.

Martha Jones, UNIT Officer

Martha walked out of the TARDIS on her own terms at the end of Last of the Time Lords, and the show has been sensible about what she did next. She’s finished her training, she’s a doctor, she’s engaged, and she’s working as UNIT’s medical officer — and it’s she who summons the Doctor, on her own authority, because something on Earth needs him.

That’s a good look for her. The Martha who left was hollowed out by a year of walking a conquered planet and by loving a man who wouldn’t look at her. The Martha who comes back is composed, senior, and completely over it. Freema Agyeman plays the reunion with real warmth and zero yearning, and the show is smart enough not to reopen the wound.

The best gag in the episode is Donna and Martha meeting, with the Doctor visibly bracing for a catastrophe that never arrives — the two of them get on immediately and start comparing notes about him, which is his worst nightmare. It’s a small scene and it does a lot of work.

There’s a nastier thread running under her return, though. The Sontarans take a copy of her — a clone grown in a tank, loaded with her memories, walking around UNIT wearing her face and carrying her clearance. It’s a well-worn science-fiction idea, but the episode wrings one genuinely good chill out of it: the sight of Martha’s own body suspended in a growth vat while her duplicate carries on with her shift two floors up, and not a single person in that building noticing the difference. That’s the horror of it. She’s one of the most capable people they have, and she’s been replaced by lunchtime.

ATMOS

The threat is a nicely mundane one. ATMOS is a device fitted to four hundred million cars worldwide: a satnav that also reduces exhaust emissions to precisely zero. It’s cheap, it’s ubiquitous, it’s in every vehicle on the road, and — as the Doctor points out with the weariness of a man who has seen this a hundred times — nothing that good is free.

Two things are wrong with it. The satnavs have started driving people into rivers, killing anyone who investigates the company too closely, which gives the first act a decent thriller pulse. And the emissions system is doing rather more than filtering. There’s something genuinely modern about the paranoia here: a piece of consumer technology, willingly installed by hundreds of millions of people, quietly turned into a global weapon by the company that supplied it. The show doesn’t labour the point, but it’s there.

The opening death is the best-directed thing in the episode: a man alone in his car, doors locked by a system he paid for and trusts completely, being driven calmly into a river by a pleasant female voice reading out directions. No monster, no ray gun, no warning — just a machine following its instructions while he hammers on the glass. It’s exactly the sort of small domestic horror this show does better than almost anyone, and it establishes the threat far more effectively than any amount of fleet-in-orbit spectacle manages later.

Sontarans and a Clever Boy

The Sontarans themselves are a delight. Squat, potato-headed clone warriors who bellow “Sontar-Ha!” in unison, who genuinely cannot conceive of a fight not being glorious, and who are lethally vulnerable to a well-aimed tennis ball at the probic vent on the back of the neck. General Staal — “Staal the Undefeated” — is played with tremendous relish, and the writing gets the joke exactly right: they aren’t stupid, they’re just so completely governed by their own warrior code that it can be used against them. A species that cannot resist a duel is a species you can manipulate.

Their human collaborator is Luke Rattigan, a teenage genius with a private academy full of gifted students and an ego the size of a small country. He’s an effective creation — a boy so convinced of his own brilliance and so starved of actual respect that a race of alien soldiers telling him he’s special is enough to buy his entire planet. He’s insufferable, which is the point, and there’s real pathos underneath it: the Sontarans obviously despise him and he can’t see it. His academy is a good detail as well — a country house full of brilliant teenagers he has personally assembled and cannot relate to for thirty consecutive seconds, every one of them visibly sick of him. Rattigan wants to be worshipped by people he’s decided are beneath him, which is precisely the lever the Sontarans use to pick him up and carry him about.

Soldiers

The most interesting thread is the Doctor and UNIT, and it’s genuinely prickly. He works with them and he does not like them. He bristles at the guns, at the salutes, at Colonel Mace calling him “sir,” at the whole apparatus of an organisation that solves problems by shooting them. Mace, to his credit, pushes back — these people are defending their planet, and the Doctor’s disdain for how they do it is easy to hold when you can leave whenever you like.

There’s no neat resolution offered, and the episode is better for it. Given what we watched him do to the Family, and the flames he stood in during The Runaway Bride, his squeamishness about soldiers is a rather more complicated position than he’d like it to be.

Meanwhile Donna goes home, and it’s the warmest material in the hour. She sees her mother, who is as deflating as ever, and her grandfather Wilf, who is thrilled. Since Partners in Crime the show has quietly been building the Nobles into the most grounded family the series has had, and Donna’s realisation that she can pop home whenever she likes — and that she’s been away three months by their clock — is a lovely, human beat.

Which makes the cliffhanger land properly. The ATMOS devices activate worldwide, gas pours out of four hundred million exhausts at once, and Wilf is sitting in a locked car in his own driveway with the doors sealed and the fumes rising. Somewhere in there is a Martha who isn’t Martha. And an entire Sontaran fleet is in orbit, delighted.

What The Sontaran Stratagem Leaves Us With

Efficient, entertaining setup with one genuinely thorny idea. Here’s what it plants:

Martha, recovered. Back with a job, a rank and a fiancé, treated by the script as a professional rather than a loose end. Her exit is honoured rather than undone.
The Sontarans, done right. Absurd and lethal in equal measure, with a warrior code that’s both a joke and a genuine weakness. Best classic-monster revival since the Cybermen.
Consumer tech as the weapon. A free gadget in every car, installed voluntarily, weaponised remotely. Uncomfortably plausible.
The Doctor versus the army. A real argument the episode refuses to settle, and one that’s harder for him to win than he thinks.
The Nobles. Wilf and Sylvia keep the season’s feet on the ground, and putting Wilf in that car is a very effective way to make a global catastrophe personal.

Rating: 3/5 — Sturdy rather than inspired, with some clunky dialogue and a middle section that marks time. But the Sontarans are a joy, Martha’s return is handled with care, and the cliffhanger is a good one.

Four hundred million cars pumping poison into the sky, an old man locked in his own Vauxhall, and a fleet of very short soldiers who could not be happier about any of it. Part one done.

Last week ended with a squid-headed creature in a Dalek casing declaring itself the future of its species, and I said I couldn’t tell whether that was brilliant or ridiculous. Having watched the resolution, I can report: it’s both, and the proportions aren’t in its favour. “Evolution of the Daleks” has one of the best ideas the show has ever had about its oldest enemy, and it surrounds that idea with a muddle. Picking up straight from Daleks in Manhattan, this is a frustrating hour — genuinely thoughtful in places, faintly embarrassing in others.

The Dalek Who Felt

The good stuff first, because it’s very good. Dalek Sec, having folded a human into himself, starts changing — and not in the way he planned. He wanted human resilience and human cunning. What he gets is human feeling. He begins to hesitate. He begins to sympathise. He looks at the plan to hollow out a thousand people and finds, to his own horror, that he no longer wants to do it.

That’s a magnificent idea, and it puts a proper tragedy at the centre of the episode. Sec isn’t redeemed exactly — he’s a war criminal having a conscience installed against his will — but he becomes something genuinely new: a Dalek arguing that his species must stop being what it is in order to deserve to survive. Eric Loren plays him with a weary, halting sadness that sells it far better than the costume has any right to allow. His pitch, when he finally makes it, is genuinely unsettling coming out of that mouth: a Dalek standing in a sewer arguing that a race incapable of love or doubt or hesitation has already lost, and that the only way forward is to become partly the very thing they’ve spent a million years exterminating. Strip away the tentacles and it’s a decent argument, honestly made. Which is exactly what makes what happens next so grim — there is nobody in that room capable of hearing it.

It also rhymes beautifully with the last time this show put humanity inside a Dalek. Back in Dalek, a lone survivor absorbed Rose’s DNA, felt something for the first time, and found the contamination so unbearable that it destroyed itself. Sec goes the other way — he embraces it, and argues for it — and the result is no less fatal. Either way, the show’s position is consistent and bleak: a Dalek that feels cannot go on being a Dalek, and its own kind will not permit it to be anything else.

Mutiny in the Sewers

Which is exactly what happens. Thay, Jast and Caan watch their leader develop a conscience and diagnose it, correctly by their standards, as a malfunction. The Cult of Skaro was created to have imagination, and the moment imagination produces something that isn’t ruthless, they revolt against it.

The mutiny scenes are the best in the episode — Daleks debating heresy in the dark, deciding their commander is no longer pure enough to lead, chaining him up like a prisoner. When Sec finally dies, it’s throwing himself in front of a blast meant for the Doctor, and the Doctor’s reaction is the right one: not triumph but real grief. “You were the only one of them who could change.” An entire potential future for the species, shot by its own side for the crime of hesitating.

Lightning on the Empire State

The plot around all this is where things wobble. The gamma strike arrives, the Empire State Building’s mast does its job, and the Doctor — in a moment of glorious nonsense — clambers up and grabs the conductor at the critical instant so that his own Time Lord DNA gets swept into the mix. It’s a huge, silly, wonderfully Doctor-ish gesture, and it pays off in the episode’s best conceptual beat: the resulting Dalek-human army, ordered to kill, stops and asks why. Free will, smuggled in via a lightning strike. Daleks undone by a question.

Martha, it should be said, has a very good episode. She’s the one who works out what the mast is actually for, she improvises the way to get everyone up to it, and she spends a long stretch of the hour organising frightened people while the Doctor is somewhere else entirely. The self-reliance she found alone in a stolen car in Gridlock has hardened here into something closer to command, and the show barely pauses to remark on it — which is precisely the right call.

Unfortunately the hybrids themselves are a hard sell — men in period suits doing stiff Dalek voices, gunning each other down in a stairwell — and the climactic battle never looks like anything other than a handful of people in a corridor. The episode’s ambitions keep outrunning what it can actually put on screen.

The one part of the ending that lands without qualification is Solomon. Facing down the Daleks, he tries the only thing he knows: he steps forward, unarmed, and appeals to them as one living thing to another with a genuinely moving little speech about shared humanity. They kill him mid-sentence. It’s brutal and completely correct — a decent man’s decency counting for precisely nothing — and Hugh Quarshie makes it hurt.

Thay and Jast are destroyed, and Dalek Caan, alone and cornered, throws himself into an emergency temporal shift and vanishes. The last Dalek in existence, again, gone to who knows when. The Doctor lets him go, and there’s something tired in the way he does it, like a man who has had this exact conversation too many times to believe it’s the last.

It’s worth noting how differently this Doctor handles them now. There’s no gloating and no grandstanding, just an offer made flatly and without much hope, and a weary shrug when it’s refused. Whatever the Time War took out of him, the part that used to relish beating the Daleks seems to have gone along with it. He isn’t hunting them any more. He’s simply tired of them, which is somehow a bleaker place for the show to have arrived at than any amount of shouting.

There’s a warmer coda for Laszlo, whose half-converted body is failing until the Doctor improvises a fix, and who gets to walk back into Hooverville with Tallulah and be accepted by the people there. After an hour of grim arithmetic, one man getting to keep his life is a decent note to end on.

What Evolution of the Daleks Leaves Us With

Terrific ideas, rickety execution. Here’s what it plants:

A Dalek with a conscience. Sec is the most interesting thing the show has done with the species in years, and killing him off with his own side’s blessing is a genuinely tragic move.
Purity as a death sentence. The Cult would rather die as Daleks than survive as something else, which is both entirely in character and the whole reason they keep losing.
Free will as a weapon. The Dalek-humans refusing an order because they can now ask “why” is a lovely, elegant resolution — better than the fight it triggers.
Solomon’s death. The bleakest beat of the two-parter, and the one that earns its emotion outright.
Caan, still out there. One Dalek left, running again. The show can’t seem to finish with them, and by now that feels like the point.

Rating: 2.5/5 — Carries the season’s most interesting single idea and fumbles nearly everything around it. The Sec material and Solomon’s death are genuinely strong; the hybrid army, the stairwell shootout and a good deal of the dialogue are not. A two-parter I admire more than I enjoyed.

A Dalek who learned to feel and was executed for it, and a man in a shanty town who died talking about peace. There’s a very good episode buried in this one. It just keeps getting interrupted by men in suits shouting “exterminate.”

The Sontaran Stratagem: Every Car on Earth