Your Verdict on The Zygon Inversion & Episode Ranking

Joshua Yetman reveals DWTV’s community episode score and ranking for the 8th episode of Series 9.

Over five-and-a-half thousand voted in Doctor Who TV’s polls last week for The Zygon Inversion, the eighth episode of Series 9, written by Peter Harness and Steven Moffat. Now it’s time to reveal the results. As usual we asked you to give the episode a score out of 10, and the (simply incredible) results are as follows:

Carried by one of the most invigorating and well-acted speeches in Doctor Who history, the sheer concentration of 10/10 votes is completely understandable and reasonable. Still, this is, quite simply, a legendary statistical event, as only 4 other episodes in history – Blink, The Eleventh Hour, The Day of the Doctor and Listen – have attained 50% or more 10/10 votes.

Anyway, I’m sure you’re very familiar by now with the modus operandi of these articles; each week we’ll be taking these votes and working out the average score, among other statistics. We will then use these averages to rank the episodes and get a rough idea of its placing in the series.

The average score for The Zygon Inversion stands at an utterly staggering 8.994, a score that was painfully close to breaking the 9/10 threshold for the first time since The Day of the Doctor. Regardless, this is still the highest rated episode since The Day of the Doctor.

This astonishing score easily puts The Zygon Inversion as the highest rated episode of Series 9 to date, positively smashing The Witch’s Familiar’s – which had retained its position at the top since it was broadcast – into second place. So, with two thirds of Series 9 now officially rated, the rankings look like this:

• 1. The Zygon Inversion – 8.994
• 2. The Witch’s Familiar – 8.603
• 3. The Magician’s Apprentice – 8.479
• 4. Under the Lake – 8.434
• 5. The Zygon Invasion – 8.325
• 6. Before the Flood – 8.181
• 7. The Woman Who Lived – 7.715
• 8. The Girl Who Died – 7.461
• Sleep No More – TBC
• Face the Raven – TBC
• Heaven Sent – TBC
• Hell Bent – TBC

The Series 9 average has lurched upwards yet again, from 8.171/10 to 8.274/10.

(1) Interpreting the score

I’m just gonna come out with it straight away: The Zygon Inversion is the 8^th highest rated episode in the history of the revival. It has landed itself a position in the glorious top 10 of episodes, and it has officially given Series 9 its first truly “acclaimed” episode, a designation I personally define as a community average above 8.75. Every series in the past has attained at least one “acclaimed” episode by this definition, and Series 9 has lacked such an episode – until now.

I don’t think this highly commendable achievement can be stressed any better, but, as always, the position of the episode relative to the rest of the revival is shown in our trusted box and whiskers diagram:

To clarify for any newcomers, this diagram represents the spread of episode quality in the revival. The box in the middle represents the middle 50% of all the 117 episodes between Rose and Last Christmas in terms of quality, distinguished into an upper quartile (the yellow section) and a lower quartile (the grey section), with the line between them being the median (i.e. the episode right in the middle of the rankings, which happens to be Time Heist). The ‘whiskers’ represent the absolute extremes of the revival, from The Day of the Doctor at the far right, to Fear Her at the far left. All the sample data for this diagram comes from the Rank The Revival census carried out earlier this year. The position of The Zygon Inversion is demarcated by the black cross. Clearly then, it’s sitting very close to the peak of the revival.

Up there in the most consecrated of quality echelons, The Zygon Inversion managed to vanquish acclaimed episodes such as The Pandorica Opens (which received a score of 8.949/10) and The Family of Blood (which received a score of 8.928). It was also remarkably close to beating one of the most adored episodes in the revival – Silence in the Library, which attained a score of 9.004. When an episode is knocking on the door of classics like this, you know it means serious business.

Now, for our usual round of flash facts:

• The average score of 8.994 received by the Zygon Inversion is the highest initial score received by any episode since The Day of the Doctor. Only Dark Water’s initial score of 8.954 comes close.
• Considering the most recent scores available (i.e. initial scores for Series 9, and Rank The Revival scores for Series 8), The Zygon Inversion is officially the highest rated episode of Peter Capaldi’s tenure as the Doctor so far. It pushes Listen into second place. The average of Peter Capaldi’s era is now 7.918, which is still higher than any other Doctor in the revival, adding further evidence to the statement that we are currently experiencing a Golden Age of the show.
• How does The Zygon Inversion compare to other Episode 8’s? Well, it should first be noted that Episode 8 is an enormously strong slot, in fact being the third strongest slot of them all. It is especially strong in its RTD era contributions, including behemoths such as The Impossible Planet, Human Nature and Silence in the Library, and also strong in er… just one of its Moffat era contributions, in Mummy on the Orient Express. I’ve already let slip that The Zygon Inversion failed – albeit by a very small margin – to beat Silence in the Library, and so Series 9 has failed this week to dominate an episode slot, taking second place instead.
• As stated in the introduction, only four other episodes in the history of the revival have attained more than 50% of the votes in the 10/10 score option. The Zygon Inversion ultimately ranks 4^th, behind The Day of the Doctor, Blink and The Eleventh Hour, but ahead of Listen. Furthermore, 96.8% of you have given The Zygon Inversion halfmarks (5/10) or more.
• It is – once again – safe to say that Peter Harness has outdone both of this previous episodes, Kill The Moon and The Zygon Invasion. He is now the 9^th highest rated writer of the revival, albeit a fairly inconsistent one. I, for one, greatly anticipate his next contribution to the show.

(2) Considering the overall story

Considering The Zygon Invasion / The Zygon Inversion as an overall story, it averages a very impressive 8.659/10. This puts this story as the 5^th best double-parter of the revival, between The Pandorica Opens / The Big Bang in 4^th place and Bad Wolf / The Parting of the Ways in 6^th place.

However, it is the second most inconsistent double-parter, with the difference in the scores between the parts – a massive upwards increase of 0.669 – second only to Dark Water / Death in Heaven, which fell by 0.760. In this instance, it at least went up, so it’s not complete bad news in this respect (‘better up than down, I always say’).

And, for the third time this series, the second part of a double-parter has been ranked higher than the first part. Out of the 23 double-part stories in the revival to date, 13 of them now have stronger second parts.

(3) The divisiveness of the story

With its incredible speech and the emotive performance of Peter Capaldi, I did not expect this episode to be particularly divisive, and, in actuality, it wasn’t. It received a relatively low standard deviation of 1.600.

To reiterate, 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. The higher the standard deviation, the more divisive the episode.

To make additional sense of what this number means, I have generated the following rough scaling system 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, the vast majority of people conform to it.
• Between 1.5 and 1.75 – not particularly divisive.
• Between 1.75 and 2 –fairly divisive
• Above 2 – considerably divisive; opinions vary far and wide for such an episode.

So The Zygon Inversion isn’t a particular divisive episode according to this scaling system, and it is certainly less divisive than its preceding part. It is the 21^st least divisive episode of the revival, being similar in divisiveness to Deep Breath (1.593) and Smith and Jones (1.616), fairly harmonious episodes.

It is not, however, the least divisive episode so far this year – that remains as Under the Lake. The full divisiveness rankings of Series 9 currently stand as such:

• 1. The Girl Who Died – 2.235 (most divisive)
• 2. The Woman Who Lived – 2.178
• 3. The Zygon Invasion – 1.984
• 4. The Magician’s Apprentice – 1.815
• 5. The Witch’s Familiar – 1.758
• 6. Before the Flood – 1.723
• 7. The Zygon Inversion – 1.600
• 8. Under the Lake – 1.548 (least divisive)
• Sleep No More – TBC
• Face the Raven – TBC
• Heaven Sent – TBC
• Hell Bent – TBC

(4) Series 9 to date

Series 9 continues to reap excellent results, with its average score pushed up to a very impressive 8.274/10 as a result of The Zygon Inversion. This is higher than the Series 7 first-eight-episode initial average of 7.865, and the Series 8 first-eight-episode initial average of 8.109. It’s safe to say, then, that Series 9 is continuing to perform magnificently.

For the second time in as many weeks, the Qualityometer – our informal measure of how much better Series 9 is doing compared to the pre-Series 9 revival average – has risen, and by quite a fair bit, from 8.88% better than the pre-Series 9 revival average to 10.25% better:

It’s great to see the Qualityometer back into +10% territory, a position it can hopefully retain by the end of the series.

(5) Evaluating the projections

A few months ago, I produced a set of statistical projections for the initial community averages of each upcoming episode in Series 9. The purpose of this was to compare them to the actual results as they became available, in order to gauge how sensible it is to use statistical models to forecast such potentially unpredictable variables.

The estimate using my Oswald Model was 8.20, which represents an unacceptable error of 8.86% now that we know the actual figure of 8.994. To my defence, it was a fairly realistic projection given Steven Moffat’s involvement with the episode, the strength of the Episode 8 slot in the past, and the typical strength of the second part of a double-parter, but no conceivable method of statistical projection could have predicted that speech, nor the acclaim it received.

This is why most of my projections have been fairly off the mark. Although I still believe there is some fundamental basis in using historical performance to project future performance, the public opinion of so many episodes are swayed and determined by moments of remarkable acclaim or quality (or a lack of it) in said episodes, moments which could not possibly be foreseen or predicted without rudimentary clairvoyance.

(6) Best Zygon Story – Poll Results

Moving on from the main poll, DWTV asked you to rank all three Zygon stories in Doctor Who history –Terror of the Zygons, The Day of the Doctor, and The Zygon Invasion / The Zygon Inversion – in order to determine which ones gives the red, suckery shape-shifters the best showing in the past 52 years.

The average weighted rankings are as such:

Remember, the lower the weighed rank, the better. Thus, the latest Zygon entry, The Zygon Invasion / The Zygon Inversion, is officially the highest ranked Zygon story. It’s fairly interesting to see a poll where The Day of the Doctor comes last, but, as its Zygon subplot was a fairly small part of a very busy episode, its position makes sense.

(7) Conclusion

The Zygon Inversion has clearly presented us with some legendary statistics, the kind of results that occur once in a blue moon. It’s incredible to see an episode break into the top 10 of the whole revival, and provoke such an incredible response that 52.2% of you would deem it worthy of full marks. I think that’s an enormous testament to the writing talent of Moffat and Harness is conjunction with the sheer acting ability of Peter Capaldi to produce one of the most iconic scenes in Doctor Who history.

Join us next week when we delve into the statistics of the controversial Sleep No More, which will undoubtedly present a very different story to the laudable results of The Zygon Inversion – perhaps offering a complete inversion…ahah. Jokes aside , I honestly feel Sleep No More has the potential to be one of the – if not the most – divisive episode in Doctor Who history, with an initial reaction that is ridiculously polarised.

Only time will tell so, until then, keep voting!