November 12, 2021

YOUR Verdict on “The Halloween Apocalypse” – Almost Good

It’s time to reveal DWTV’s poll results for the first episode of Series 13, “The Halloween Apocalypse”, as voted for by you over the last week or so.

“How Excited Are You For Series 13?” – Results

First, before we reveal the episode score, a week before Doctor Who returned to our screens we asked you to vote on how excited you were for the new series from a choice of five. Here’s how you voted:

Oh, dear! As we can see, this was a fairly split result between the “Extremely” and “Not at all!”. Unlike with Series 12’s result though, “Not at all!” came out top in the end with 31.02% of the overall result. No doubt the mediocre reception Series 11 and 12 received from voters contributed a large factor here, and perhaps the clashing timing of the announcement of RTDs return.

“The Halloween Apocalypse”: Score Breakdown

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

A few thousand of you voted, and the average score was 6.94. According to the Doctor Who TV score guide, this indicates the episode was generally considered to be just shy of the “Good” range.
This leaves “The Halloween Apocalypse” as the 100^th highest-rated episode of the revival (according to the DWTV ranking polls taken from 2018). More specifically, it is situated between “Tooth and Claw” (6.95) and “Gridlock” (6.93).
This is the lowest scored opener of Chris Chibnall’s three series, behind “Spyfall P1” (7.43) and The Woman Who Fell to Earth (7.35).
“The Halloween Apocalypse” is the 2nd lowest scored opener in the revival to date, only ahead of “New Earth” (6.04).
The standard deviation – which is our measure of how divisive an episode is – was 2.43. Though scores over 2 here are still considered highly divisive, it’s actually the 3rd least divisive episode of the Chibnall era.
Overall, a bit of a mixed bag. Compared to the other series openers “The Halloween Apocalypse” performed poorly, but for a Chibnall era episode it rates towards the higher end of the scale.