Your Verdict on The Witch’s Familiar & Episode Ranking

Joshua Yetman reveals DWTV’s community episode score for the 2nd episode of Series 9 and last week’s other poll results.

Just over six thousand of you voted in Doctor Who TV’s polls last week for The Witch’s Familiar, the second episode of Series 9. Now it’s time to reveal the results. 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 Witch’s Familiar received a very impressive average of 8.603, putting it comfortably above The Magician’s Apprentice, and, thus, it currently tops the series. So, two episodes into Series 9, the rankings look like this:

• 1. The Witch’s Familiar – 8.603
• 2. The Magician’s Apprentice – 8.479
• 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

The Series 9 average is currently 8.541/10.

(1) Interpreting the score

The score received by The Witch’s Familiar is very impressive indeed. The following diagram should add some context as to where this episode ranks in the esteemed halls of the revived series to date:

The diagram above is a box and whiskers plot (this might bring back some memories of GCSE Maths for some!), showing the distribution of episode means in the revival (based on the Rank the Revival polls earlier this year). The box in the middle represents the middle 50% of episodes (in terms of quality), and the ‘whiskers’ represent the extremities of the revival, from Fear Her at the far left to Day of the Doctor at the far right. The black cross represents the score received by The Witch’s Familiar. Clearly, then, this puts the episode at the very top region of the revival (in fact, to be more precise, it is in the top 15% of the revival, which is a very commendable place to be).

So, up there in the top 15% of everything in the last 10 years, what are the neighbouring episodes to The Witch’s Familiar? Well, it ranks slightly below Dark Water (which received a score of 8.648) and Flatline (8.649), but slightly above Midnight (8.574) and Day of the Moon (8.546). As far as neighbourhoods go, this is probably the Chelsea of Doctor Who episodes, so it’s a testament to the strength of The Witch’s Familiar that it managed to get this high!

Now, for some more flash facts:

• The Witch’s Familiar is Moffat’s 14th best episode overall (excluding co-writes), but it is the 8th best episode he has written as showrunner.
• The Witch’s Familiar is the 5th strongest episode of Peter Capaldi’s tenure as the Doctor.
• The Witch’s Familiar is the 3rd highest rated Dalek episode (only considering episodes where Daleks are the main enemies), behind Dalek and The Parting of the Ways. It pushes The Magician’s Apprentice into 4th place.
• Having beaten Day of the Moon, The Witch’s Familiar is officially the highest rated Episode 2 of the revival!
• A whopping 39.20% of you gave The Witch’s Familiar full marks, higher than the 36.05% of 10/10 votes given to The Magician’s Apprentice. That’s makes The Witch’s Familiar the episode with the 20th highest proportion of 10/10 votes!
• 95.46% of you gave The Witch’s Familiar half-marks or more (5/10 or more). This is the 39th highest case of this in the revival.

(2) Considering the overall story

Let’s consider The Magician’s Apprentice / The Witch’s Familiar as an overall story. Its average is 8.541/10, which puts it as the 7th best double-part story of the revival (of which there have been 20), ahead of Dark Water / Death in Heaven (which averaged 8.269) in 8th place, but below The Impossible Astronaut / Day of the Moon (which averaged 8.604/10) in 6th. So, in the battle of the opening-double-parters-for-a-Moffat-Doctor’s-second-series, The Impossible Astronaut / Day of the Moon wins, albeit by a fairly small margin (excuse me whilst I relish in this victory).

It’s also another case of the second part of a double-parter outperforming the first part. There are now eleven cases of this, compared to nine cases where the first part outperforms the second part (although the average for a first part is still slightly higher than the average for the second part).

Furthermore, the fairly significant gap between the scores of The Magician’s Apprentice and The Witch’s Familiar is the 8th highest in the revival, although, at least, the gap is down to an improvement in quality between the parts as opposed to a decline.

Finally, The Magician’s Apprentice / The Witch’s Familiar has trounced the only other Davros story in the revival, The Stolen Earth / Journey’s End, which received an average of 8.157 between both its parts. So, we have our definitive Davros story of the revival, but is it the definitive Davros story of the entire show? See section (6) for the answer!

(3) The divisiveness of the story

The divisiveness of an episode can be measured using standard deviation, a very handy statistic which measures how spread out votes are from the average. In short, The Witch’s Familiar has a standard deviation of 1.758. 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 2 – not particular divisive.
• Between 1.75 and 2 – only fairly divisive
• Above 2 – very divisive; opinions vary far and wide for such an episode.

So The Witch’s Familiar fits into the “fairly divisive” camp, although only marginally. Plus, it is not as divisive as The Magician’s Apprentice, which had a standard deviation of 1.815. To put the standard deviation of 1.758 into the context of the revival, The Witch’s Familiar is almost as divisive as Army of Ghosts, but more divisive than Amy’s Choice. Neither of these episodes are particularly divisive, so it emphasises that The Witch’s Familiar was strongly liked by a significant proportion of the fanbase, and that most people closely agree with its average score. Furthermore, it is the 37th least divisive episode of the revival.

So, as for a divisiveness rank, we currently have:

• 1. The Magician’s Apprentice – 1.815 (most divisive)
• 2. The Witch’s Familiar – 1.758 (least divisive)
• 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

(4) Series 9 to date

So far, Series 9 has an average score of 8.541/10. It’s obviously too early to make any judgements about the series yet, but this is a remarkable average score to kick off the series with, and – as it stands – is head and shoulders above every other series in the revival. However, it is completely unfair to make that comparison just yet, but I retain strong hopes that this series may ultimately prove itself as the king of the revival.

Over the series, I will be measuring just how well Series 9 is doing through my rather informal ‘qualityometer’, which measures how much better Series 9 is doing compared to the pre-Series 9 revival average. Currently, it is 13.81% higher than the revival average of 7.505, and so the Series 9 qualityometer looks like this:

With every episode, we will show the effect on the qualityometer. Hopefully it will stay firmly in the green!

(5) 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 initial projection for The Witch’s Familiar was 8.48, representing an error of 1.5% now that we have the actual figure of 8.60. This is another error I’m happy with, and I believe the results are starting to demonstrate that past results may indeed be an accurate projector for the future!

Rather scarily, I accurately projected the scores for The Magician’s Apprentice and The Witch’s Familiar – just in the wrong order! I projected The Magician’s Apprentice to receive 8.60/10, and The Witch’s Familiar to receive 8.48/10, but, in actuality, it was the other way round, and exact to two decimal places! Well isn’t that wizard?

(6) Ranking the Davros Stories: Poll Results

Moving on from the main poll, DWTV asked you – as part of Will Atkinson’s excellent article earlier this week – to rank all the Davros stories in the history of the show. The weighted ranks have been calculated, and the results are as such:

 

Remember, the lower the rank, the better. Thus, Genesis of the Daleks is still the definitive Davros story of the whole show, and by quite the considerable margin, though the newest entry, The Magician’s Apprentice / The Witch’s Familiar, takes a very admirable – and well deserved – second place.

Join us next week when we delve deep into the statistics of Under the Lake. Will it be a damp squib, or will it be an oasis of storytelling brilliance? Only time – and a large collection of Excel spreadsheets – will tell!