YMMV / Doctor Who S30 E4 "The Sontaran Stratagem"

• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • Or Hilarious in Hindsight depending on how you view it. The situation presented in the cold open of a woman being driven to her death due to an unknown force essentially hacking her car and taking it over. Ever since the advent of self-driving cars, there have been concerns about hackers being able to remotely hack their way into cars using these same methods.
  • It also calls to mind the iPhone's Apple Maps, which in its first version became infamous for its often inaccurate directions. There were instances where the directions would tell a driver to turn when there was no road to turn onto, and sometimes following the directions blindly did indeed lead people into driving their cars into lakes, especially at night or when visibility was poor.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: Luke Rattigan resembles nothing more than the teenage Tony Stark seen in Captain America: Civil War, another cocky teen genius. The actor even looks like the age-shifted Robert Downey Jr..
• Magnificent Bastard: General Staal "The Undefeated" is a Sontaran general who wants to win a 50,000 year long war with a rival species known as the Rutans. Staal manipulates Luke Rattigan into helping him design an automobile system called ATMOS, which will release poison gas while creating human clone soldiers that will be used as weapons to win the war. Staal lures in several UNIT soldiers to be hypnotized before having them capture and sedate Martha Jones, using a clone of her to help disable UNIT's nuclear missile, preventing the air from being cleared of the ATMOS gas. When the Doctor ends up foiling Staal's plan, Staal simply resorts to the basic Sontaran invasion stratagem which will serve as an act of victory. When the Doctor threatens to blow up the Sontaran ship, which will kill Staal and his soldiers, Staal happily allows the Doctor to do so as long as Staal gets the final victory by ensuing the Doctor goes down with him.
• Unintentional Period Piece: This episode prominently features Clone-Martha with a PDA, something that would be replaced by smartphones if this episode was made today.

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