Your Verdict on The Magician’s Apprentice

Joshua Yetman reveals how Doctor Who TV readers voted in last week’s polls.

The Magician’s Apprentice Average Score

Nearly eight thousand of you voted in Doctor Who TV’s polls last week for The Magician’s Apprentice, the first episode of Series 9. As usual we asked you to give the episode a score out of 10. The results are as follows:

Each week we’ll be taking these votes and working out the average score. We’ll then use these averages to rank the episodes and get a rough idea of its placing in the series. The Magician’s Apprentice received a hearty average of 8.479, thus kicking off the rankings as such:

• 1. The Magician’s Apprentice – 8.479
• The Witch’s Familiar – TBC
• Under the Lake – TBC
• Before the Flood – TBC
• The Girl Who Died – TBC
• The Woman Who Lived – TBC
• The Zygon Invasion – TBC
• The Zygon Inversion – TBC
• Sleep No More – TBC
• Face the Raven – TBC
• Heaven Sent – TBC
• Hell Bent – TBC

(1) Interpreting the score

What does this 8.479 actually mean, however?

Well, firstly, The Magician’s Apprentice received a community rating nearly one whole point above the revival average! To put this 8.479 average directly into context, it means that the DWTV community regard The Magician’s Apprentice slightly more than Utopia and The Name of the Doctor, but not quite as much as Day of the Moon or Midnight. To refine the context to Series 8, The Magician’s Apprentice is higher rated than 9 episodes that aired in 2014, and so has become the 5th highest rated episode of Peter Capaldi’s era to date. Overall, The Magician’s Apprentice – as it currently stands – would be the 25th highest rated episode of the revival, and would represent the top 18% of the revival in terms of quality.

Furthermore, The Magician’s Apprentice ranks as the third highest opening episode of the revival, only being beaten by The Impossible Astronaut and The Eleventh Hour. And it should be noted that the top five openers of the revival are all of Moffat’s openers as showrunner, emphasising just how popular he is at kicking off each series!

The Magician’s Apprentice is also the third highest rated Dalek episode (when only episodes that feature the Daleks as the primary focus are considered), only being beaten by Dalek and The Parting of the Ways.

However, it only ranks as Steven Moffat’s 15th best episode of the show (and so – in the grand scheme of things – it’s, remarkably, an “average” Moffat episode). That’s an extraordinary testament to Moffat’s writing talent.

So – in a nutshell – the episode has done very well indeed!

Note: the source of all these interpretations is the “Rank the Revival” poll results from earlier this year.

(2) The divisiveness of the episode

The divisiveness of an episode can be measured using standard deviation, a very handy statistic which measures how spread out votes were from the average. In short, The Magician’s Apprentice has a standard deviation of 1.815. To make sense of what this number means, I have generated the following rough scale for interpreting standard deviation in the context of Doctor Who episodes:

• Less than 1.5 – very high agreement amongst the fanbase; whatever the overall opinion is of this episode, positive or negative, most people conform to it.
• Between 1.5 and 1.75 – not particular divisive.
• Between 1.75 and 2 – fairly divisive
• Above 2 – very divisive; opinions vary far and wide for such an episode.

So The Magician’s Apprentice fits into the “fairly divisive” camp. The divisiveness can be explained numerically by considering the distribution of votes. Approximately 5% of the votes were for the 4/10 option or below, whilst the 10/10 option received the most votes by far, highlighting a relatively significant differential in opinions.

To add some more context, The Magician’s Apprentice is as divisive as episodes such as The Poison Sky and Listen.

(3) Other statistics

95.07% of you gave The Magician’s Apprentice a score of 5/10 or more, which is significantly higher than the revival average of 90.43%. Furthermore, 36.05% of you gave The Magician’s Apprentice full marks, a very high proportion indeed that is well above the revival average of 19.69% – in fact, The Magician’s Apprentice has the 22nd highest proportion of 10/10 votes in the revival!

(4) Evaluating the projections

A few weeks ago, I produced a set of statistical projections for the initial community averages of each upcoming episode in Series 9. The projection for The Magician’s Apprentice was 8.60, representing an error of 1.4% now that we have the actual figure of 8.48. That’s an error I’m happy with! It’ll be interesting to see the long-term behaviour of this episode in future polls; I have a feeling it may end up being an episode which improves with time, as opposed to deteriorating with time as most episodes have done in the past.

Is the Doctor Right to Kill Davros? Poll Results

Moving on from the main poll, DWTV asked you whether or not the Doctor is right to kill Davros, a scenario posed by the shocking cliffhanger to The Magician’s Apprentice. The votes were split, much more so than the comment section indicated, but in the end 58.83% of you thought the Doctor was not right to kill Davros:

Face-off: The Impossible Astronaut vs. The Magician’s Apprentice

In the third and final poll of the week, DWTV pitted The Magician’s Apprentice against The Impossible Astronaut, the opening episodes of the second series of each of Moffat’s Doctors, which was a very close poll indeed. Despite the fact The Impossible Astronaut has a higher average rating than The Magician’s Apprentice (as we noted earlier), 52.87% of you felt, regardless, that The Magician’s Apprentice was the better episode:

Is this down to recent episode syndrome, or is it truly better than the Series 6 classic? Only time will tell, but this poll – if anything – shows an enormous appreciation for the Series 9 opening episode.

Join us next week when we delve into the statistics of The Witch’s Familiar, and see if it can topple The Magician’s Apprentice out of 1st place!