January 2, 2024

YOUR Verdict on “The Church on Ruby Road” – Not A Great Start

Church on Ruby Road

It’s time to reveal DWTV’s poll results for the 2023 Christmas special, “The Church on Ruby Road”, as voted for by you over the last week or so.

Results: How Excited Are You For the Ncuti Gatwa Era?

Before that, following “The Giggle” we asked you to vote on how excited you were for the new era from a choice of five. Here’s how you voted:

As we can see “Extremely” and “Highly” led the majority of votes making for a combined 65%. This is slightly down on the 13th Doctor’s era which came in at 67%.

“The Church on Ruby Road”: Score Breakdown

As always, we asked you to rate the episode on a scale from 1 to 10. We then took an average.

Several thousand of you voted, and the average score was 6.00. According to the Doctor Who TV score guide, this indicates the episode was generally considered to be in the “above average” range.
Although ‘above average’ may not seem terrible in isolation, this score is undeniably low when compared to the 179 episodes aired so far. In fact, it means “The Church on Ruby Road” is the 28th lowest-rated episode of the whole revival (according to the DWTV ranking polls taken in 2018). Specifically, it falls between “Nightmare in Silver” (5.99) and “New Earth” (6.04).
Among the 35 Doctor Who stories written by Davies to date, including those with co-writer credits, “The Church on Ruby Road” ranks as the third lowest, just above “The Long Game” and “Love & Monsters”.
Of all the revival-era Doctors, “The Church on Ruby Road” is the lowest-rated debut story, and by a considerable margin. The Thirteenth Doctor began with a score of 7.35.
The standard deviation – which is our measure of how divisive an episode is – was 2.96. DWTV considers episodes over 2 as “very divisive”, but we’re practically at “astronomically divisive” levels here. This is now the second most divisive episode of the whole revival era, surpassed only by “The Timeless Children”!
Overall: Whatever way you look at it, none of these stats make for great reading. The 60th anniversary specials showed promise with 3 consistently good (if not exceptional) scores, but this has slipped right back into Chibnall-era lows. Let’s hope we can chalk this up to an anomaly and things improve with the full series.