family, who unknowingly bought one of the five special synths, Mia, after she had been kidnapped and reprogrammed. With the Hawkins asking all the questions and experiencing all the dilemmas of life with synths on our behalf, the show's science fiction element always felt firmly tied to reality.

A big part of the intrigue lay in the mysteries of the past, the gradual unravelling of how these synths came to be and how all the characters related to one another. Now that we know the Edward Scissorhands-style back-story, the big mystery of series two lies in the future: what happens when all other synths become sentient?

A year or so further on from the last episode, Niska (the blonde synth who was working in a brothel before she went rogueand killed a client, sparking the intense synth-hunt at the core of the first series) is living as a human in Berlin. She is in possession of a very important hard drive - the one with the code that could wake up every synth in the world.

Where the scope of the first series was deliberately small - one family, one group of synths - series two goes big picture. The synth awakening is global: first a worker down a mine in Bolivia gains consciousness, then another working in a factory in Nottingham.

Those ones find their way to the tremendously cagey synth guru Leo who, with series one heroes Max and Mia, is hiding out in an abandoned farmhouse in the south of England - the three survival experts