Vienna Salvatore has a problem. It involves murder. And it’s going to change her world forever.

Vienna is consistently one of the most interesting Doctor Who spinoffs and this is the best season yet. The format adjustment, with one story written by one author across three episodes, pays particular dividends and gives everything room to breathe. In particular, this feels like a real ensemble with Annette Badland, Samuel Harris, Colin McFarlane and Edward Harrison all getting nice meaty characters to sink their teeth into. Badland and Harris, as the fantastic Mama Val and Ratz, Vienna’s erstwhile prison allies, are especially good fun. More fun still is Edward Harrison as Prosecutor Grover. Grover is big fun, the Sterling to Vienna’s Nate for Leverage fans and I’d love to see him return in later seasons.

Better still, Guy Adams goes to great pains to give all these characters arcs of their own. This isn’t a world of carboard cutouts with occasional characters. All these people feel real, and that makes the villainous turn of the third part especially effective. Adams and director Scott Handcock use the medium as the message and the result is a villain who is elementally frightening in the way all good villains are. All of this unfolding in and around a gloriously nasty take on the traditional ‘Prison! In! Space!’ model.

The icing on the unusually violent cake is the final act which sees everything resolve in a manner that evolves the central relationships of the show, feels earned and necessary and sets up a subtly different dynamic. It’s an audacious move – actually two audacious moves – and the quality of talent in front and behind the mic means both of them are executed to perfection.

Verdict: Clever, funny, nasty and morally complex, this is the best season of Vienna so far. It’s also a great entry point so if you want a story you can get your teeth into, start here. 9/10

Alasdair Stuart