‘Everything you think you know is a lie.’ Chibnall and Whittaker’s second series opens with an episode that recalls The Impossible Astronaut, with the Doctor and her team reassembling in the face of a global alien infiltration. But before we get to that we have some brief establishing sequences of the Fam back on home turf. Ryan has been lying about his illnesses; Graham is still in remission from his, and Yaz is apparently embezzling Sheffield taxpayers’ money to gallivant around the universe while pretending to be on secondment. ACAB indeed.

Best of all, we re-meet the Doctor in full goggles-and-apron mode, doing engineering work on the TARDIS. It’s a great image, and sets up Whittaker as a much more confident and credible Time Lord than in her often overly gawky first series. She gets a great sequence battling a killer SatNav and a couple of good hero moments firstly when she puts Stephen Fry’s officious C right about her new sex, and later when she confronts the Elon Musk-ish Daniel Barton at his own birthday party before giving chase on motorcycle and leaping on board a moving plane.

For once, Graham takes a back seat while Ryan and Yaz – still seemingly being set up as an item (note the scene where Ryan tells Yaz, ‘I’m never going to let that happen to you’) – go undercover to check out Barton at VOR HQ. But this plot largely turns out to be misdirection, because the real spymaster has been hiding in plain sight all along. We’re subtly clued in that there is more to O (a Carry On Spying joke) than first appears, like a lingering shot of him smiling after the Doctor arrives. But once you know he’s the Master there are a couple of clever moments: the ‘spymaster’ of course, but also his first words when he goes inside the TARDIS – ‘shut up’, presumably because the Ship recognises him even if the Doctor doesn’t.

I enjoy Sacha Dhawan’s performance a lot – his cliffhanger turn from diffident ex-MI6 analyst to visibly unhinged Time Lord supervillain is great (I love the way he tosses aside the matchbox containing the real ‘O’ because he’s done the joke and no longer needs the prop). He retains some of his previous incarnations’ sense of theatrics while bringing even more dangerously unpredictable malice than Missy.

This is a strong start to the series, doubling as a New Year special. It’s not perfect – the show’s reliance on South Africa means everywhere outside the UK (Alabama, Australia, San Francisco and the planet Desolation) looks the same. There’s a weird moment when the Doctor implies Yaz might have been possessed or duplicated (‘I don’t know… what happened to you’). Chibnall’s obsession with choppy globetrotting narratives is going to become wearisome, but that’s in the future. Here and now, this is good stuff. I wanted to know what was going to happen next.

Next Time: Spyfall – Part Two