N.B. there might (or might not) be spoilers in this article!

Sarah Jane spent all those years travelling with the Doctor, so she knows the potential risks of crossing your own time line – she even acknowledges it in The Temptation of Sarah Jane Smith. Perhaps though, she hasn’t seen the Back to the Future movies (especially Part II). If she had, she might have withstood the Trickster’s titular temptation a little more easily then she does here.

“She [Aunt Lavinia] did the best she could, but she was always so busy. Never in one place long enough to lick a stamp.”

Sarah Jane, The Temptation of Sarah Jane Smith, Part One

Frankly though, if you’d been orphaned as a child – let alone a baby, as in Sarah Jane’s case – would you be able to resist the opportunity to go back in time to see your parents? Sarah Jane’s succumbing to the allure of that temptation is at the core of this episode.

There’s plenty of fun to be had here too, often in the dialogue, whether’s it Sarah Jane and Luke claiming to be Victoria and David Beckham or Mrs King’s observation on Rani’s mid-noughties teenage attire – ‘Can that really be the fashion in the Punjab?’ – or Luke’s knowing there was something wrong with his Mum when ‘she didn’t even complain when Steve Wright came on the radio!’

But The Temptation of Sarah Jane Smith is very much Sarah Jane’s episode. The scenes with her Mum and Dad – emotional, poignant, possibly even a little sentimental – are some of the best we’ve seen in The Sarah Jane Adventures. Thematically yes, it might be similar to Doctor Who Series One episode Father’s Day, but there’s nothing wrong with exploring such a powerful subject again.

And while the Rani and Clyde alternative future timeline might ultimately be a little uninvolving – perhaps it needed a President Biff? – there’s more than enough happening back in Foxgrove in 1951 to keep you entertained.