Your Most Anticipated Series 9 Episode Revealed
Resident statistician Joshua Yetman reveals your most anticipated story.
Earlier this week, DWTV asked you to rate all seven upcoming stories of Series 9 from most anticipated to least anticipated, and the results are in! Approximately 2,350 of you voted in this poll, and weighted average ranks have been calculated by pooling together everyone’s first, second, third, etc. choices. This average rank is weighted by the number of votes for each position (1st through to 7th) – the lower the rank, the higher the anticipation. However, you needn’t worry about the numbers themselves (though a quick explanation is given in the next section), more the order of stories they imply.
(1) The results
Without further delay, the results from most to least anticipated are:
- The Magician’s Apprentice / The Witch’s Familiar – 2.01
- Heaven Sent / Hell Bent – 2.99
- The Girl Who Died / The Woman Who Lived – 3.78
- Under the Lake / Before the Flood – 4.38
- The Zygon Invasion / The Zygon Inversion – 4.58
- Sleep No More – 4.87
- Face the Raven – 5.17
These are displayed more clearly in the following graph, which is presented in broadcast order:
So what do these numbers mean? Well, take The Magician’s Apprentice / The Witch’s Familiar, which has an average weighted rank of 2.01. This means, weighing everybody’s votes for these episodes, the average ranking was just over 2nd place for this story. However, these weighted averages don’t really take into consideration the distribution of votes for each story, and can be misleading on the surface, and so we will break down some of these distributions in the next section.
Anyway, considering the order given by these average weighted rankings, The Magician’s Apprentice / The Witch’s Familiar is far and away the most anticipated story of the series, which seems like a reasonable result. After all, it’s the first story in Series 9 and the one that’s consistently been on our radar for many weeks now, and what more is there to look forward to than the story that kicks this series off good and proper?
That said, Heaven Sent / Hell Bent, the finale, comes in a strong second place. Given everything we’ve learnt about this finale to date, what with the one-hander Heaven Sent and the companion departure likely to be seen in Hell Bent, this position, again, seems very reasonable.
On the other end of the results, Face the Raven comes up bottom in the rankings as the least anticipated story of the series, a result which certainly surprised me. Perhaps it’s a lack of faith in new writer Sarah Dollard, or perhaps its premise hasn’t intrigued that many people, or perhaps the other stories in Series 9 just sound so much better in comparison, it’s hard to tell. But it seems Mark Gatiss’ very titillating Sleep No More has piqued enough interest to not come bottom, as initially expected.
(2) The breakdown of 1st ranked stories
The Magician’s Apprentice / The Witch’s Familiar is the most anticipated story amongst 45.4% of respondents (over a thousand of you!). Out of all the votes for the 1st ranked story, this is by far the largest proportion. Coming in second, and conforming to the results in the previous section, was Hell Sent / Heaven Bent, which was the most anticipated story for 29.7% of you. So the opener or the finale – just on their own – are the most anticipated stories for three quarters of those who voted!
The other five stories of Series 9 split up the remaining quarter fairly equally, though only 3.7% of respondents said Face The Raven was their most anticipated story, which trails behind every other story yet again. It should also be noted that more of you have Sleep No More as your most anticipated story than The Zygon Invasion / The Zygon Inversion, which again suggests that Mark Gatiss’ latest story has sparked significant interest in parts of the fandom (either that or The Zygon Invasion / The Zygon Inversion has sparked little).
All these proportions are summarised in the below graph:
Furthermore, amongst the votes for the second most anticipated story, both The Magician’s Apprentice / The Witch’s Familiar and Hell Sent / Heaven Bent come up top yet again, nabbing well over 50% of the votes.
(3) Divisiveness in the rankings
We can analyse the proportions for each rank to determine whether there are any stories that are particularly divisive at this stage (based purely on anticipation, of course). What do I mean by this? Well suppose a story got a lot of people saying it was their most anticipated story, but also a lot of people saying it was their least anticipated story, with little in the middle – this would be considered a highly divisive story, at least based on anticipation, as it would be polarising people into two camps. On the other hand, if a story had a huge amount of people saying it was their most – or least – anticipated, than this story wouldn’t be that divisive at all.
To measure divisiveness in the rankings, we shall resort to using our trusted pal, standard deviation.
Taking the standard deviations of the results reveal that Heaven Sent / Hell Bent is actually the most divisive story in terms of anticipation, and looking at the results quickly explains why. As said before, 29.7% of you say Hell Sent / Heaven Bent was your most anticipated story, but 12.5% of you also said it was your least anticipated story, with little in the middle, polarising the results considerably.
Under the Lake / Before the Flood is also rather divisive, due to the fact its results are probably the most spread out of any episode (i.e. the proportion who voted Under the Lake / Before the Flood their first, second, third, etc. most anticipated episode were all fairly similar).
Conversely, The Magician’s Apprentice / The Witch’s Familiar is the least divisive story in terms of anticipation, mostly because a whopping 75% of you have it as your first or second most anticipated story of the series, and only 1.2% of you have it as your least anticipated.
(4) Conclusion
Overall, the opener and the finale being the most anticipated stories conforms to expectations, for these stories often contain the greatest thrills, exciting moments and revelations in a series.
In any event, it will be very interesting to see if these anticipations transpire as a correct ranking of the series, or are completely wrong. Only time will tell.
And, hopefully, the large anticipation for The Magician’s Apprentice / The Witch’s Familiar will be rewarded and not lead to disappointment. Whether or not this is the case will finally be revealed – well, at least for the first part – this very evening. Let’s hope it not just manages to meet this high anticipation, but smash it completely!
