Analysing The Top Doctor Who Stories (DWM 2014)

Guest contributor Thomas Capon offers an in depth analysis of the top episodes from DWM’s recent poll.

Previously we’ve considered the 1998 DWM

survey and the 2009 DWM Survey. Today the results of the most recent survey were released and are viewable here on DWTV. We’re going to look at the results in a bit more detail and at the same time do some comparisons to the results of previous surveys from both DWM and here at DWTV.

Top 10 Comparisons

You’ve no doubt already seen and analysed the results of the top 10 stories and the bottom 10 stories. Rather than look at them in any detail, here’s some tables for comparison:

Best

2014	2009	1998
The Day of the Doctor	The Caves of Androzani	Genesis of the Daleks
Blink	Blink	The Talons of Weng-Chiang
Genesis of the Daleks	Genesis of the Daleks	The Caves of Androzani
The Caves of Androzani	The Talons of Weng-Chiang	Pyramids of Mars
City of Death	The Empty Child	The Robots of Death
The Talons of Weng-Chiang	Human Nature	Remembrance of the Daleks
The Empty Child	Pyramids of Mars	City of Death
Pyramids of Mars	City of Death	The Tomb of the Cybermen
Human Nature	The Robots of Death	The Evil of the Daleks
Remembrance of the Daleks	Bad Wolf	The Web of Fear

Worst

2014	2009	1998
The Twin Dilemma	The Twin Dilemma	The Twin Dilemma
Fear Her	Timelash	The Space Pirates
Time and the Rani	Time and the Rani	Timelash
Timelash	Underworld	The Underwater Menace
Time-Flight	Time-Flight	Time-Flight
Underworld	The Space Pirates	Time and the Rani
The Space Pirates	The Underwater Menace	Underworld
The Dominators	Paradise Towers	Paradise Towers
The Rings of Akhaten	Fear Her	Delta and the Bannermen
The Space Museum	The Dominators	The Gunfighters

Average Rankings

Below are the calculated average placing of a story from each Doctor’s era. This time I’ve converted these numbers into an index so that they are comparable with the other surveys.

Doctor	2014 Average Ranking	2014 Index	2009 Index	1998 Index
1st	148	0.61	0.61	0.62
2nd	111	0.46	0.49	0.45
3rd	99	0.41	0.46	0.46
4th	112	0.46	0.47	0.43
5th	135	0.56	0.56	0.50
6th	170	0.71	0.72	0.62
7th	145	0.60	0.66	0.58
8th	152	0.63	0.68	0.56
9th	95	0.39	0.37	X
10th	109	0.45	0.39	X
11th	121	0.50	X	X

Note: Multi-doctor stories and Mission the the Unknown as part of the era of the incumbent Doctor at the time of airing.

Looks like the different Doctor’s era rankings are fairly consistent. Most noticeable increase is the +0.12 jump between 1998 and 2009 for Paul McGann’s Eighth Doctor and the most noticeable decrease is the -0.06 for the Seventh Doctor between 2009 and 2014.

Let’s compare how the Doctor’s eras rank (from the 2014 survey) against the actual Doctors (using the Favourite Doctor results from the same survey)

Doctor	Rank by Doctor	Rank by era
1st	9	9
2nd	4	4
3rd	5	2
4th	1	5
5th	6	7
6th	11	11
7th	7	8
8th	10	10
9th	8	1
10th	3	3
11th	2	6

This produces some surprising results. Eccleston’s 9th Doctor did fairly poorly in the Favourite Doctor survey despite the fact that his era as Doctor is ranked as the best while both the Fourth and Eleventh Doctors did well in the Favourite Doctor survey despite their eras doing less well in the story survey.

‘Spearman’s rank coefficient’ is a mathematical method of measuring correlation. It gives a value between 1 and -1 where 1 is total agreement and -1 is total disagreement. Using this, we discover that the correlation is 0.58 which makes sense. There is a bit of correlation but also clear signs of variation.

Regeneration Story Rankings:

1. The Day of the Doctor (1)
2. The Caves of Androzani (4)
3. The War Games (12)
4. Bad Wolf (13)
5. The Stolen Earth (35)
6. Logopolis (62)
7. Planet of the Spiders (81)
8. The End of Time (82)
9. The Tenth Planet (85)
10. The Time of the Doctor (95)
11. The TV Movie (152)
12. Time and the Rani (239)

Notes: Brackets show the story’s overall ranking out of 241. The Stolen Earth and The Day of the Doctor have been included on this list even though they weren’t strictly speaking a ‘Hand over the key to the TARDIS’ episode.

Has The Caves of Androzani finally been beaten as the ultimate regeneration story? Not really if we’re honest. Just because the story has a regeneration doesn’t really make it a ‘regeneration story’. Let’s do a little comparison between the classic regenerations (as the 1998 survey obviously doesn’t have the newer regenerations) to see if there has been much change in the fanbase’s taste over time.

Regeneration	2014 ranking	2009 ranking	1998 ranking
The Caves of Androzani	1	1	1
The War Games	2	2	4
Logopolis	3	3	2
Planet of the Spiders	4	5	5
The Tenth Planet	5	4	3
The TV Movie	6	6	6
Time and the Rani	7	7	7
	Correlation with 2014:	0.96	0.82

It is clear that there is a strong correlation over the years with tastes having changed very little in the past 16 years and virtually not at all in the last 5.

Season Average Ranking

In this section, we’re going to look at each season and find the average ranking for a story in that season.

Top 5 Seasons

Doctor	Season	Average Ranking
3rd	7	48
4th	13	54
4th	14	62
3rd	10	79
2nd	5	81

The Baker, Hinchcliffe and Holmes combination again dominates this list with two of the top three seasons being from their era but this time misses out again to Season 7. Interestingly New Who fails to get into top 5 this time.

Bottom 5 Seasons

Doctor	Season	Average Ranking
7th	24	225
6th	23	168
5th	20	160
1st	3	159
6th	22	158

While Douglas Adams manages to escape the bottom five, yet again both of Colin Baker’s seasons also make this list along with McCoy’s first season. Season 20 also retains its position with newcomer season 3 completing the list.

Full List

These results are particularly lengthy, so click to expand show

Again there is strong correlation between now and 1998 with even stronger correlation between now and 2009.

Overall correlation between surveys

I’ve made a table for you to see the overall correlation between the surveys:

	1998	2009	2014
1998	X	0.95	0.92
2009	0.95	X	0.97
2014	0.92	0.97	X

This shows that the 2005 reboot has done very little to change fan tastes. Rather newer fans tend to agree with the fanbase as to which stories are exceptional and which are poor.

DWM and DWTV: Best of Matt Smith

Recently as a community DWTV carried out a survey/poll and came up with a ranking of Matt Smith’s episodes. Let’s compare those results against DWM’s.

Again due to length please click to expand full results: show

I work the correlation out to be 0.93 which indicates that there is a strong agreement between the readers of DWM and DWTV concerning Matt Smith’s era as the Doctor.

Me and DWM

For those interested further in my views, I also worked out my correlation with the readers of DWM which came out as 0.69. So I’m in general agreement with some noticeable differences. If you want your Spearman’s rank coefficient to be calculated: email me your story rankings: doctorjohnhurt@gmail.com (I can’t guarantee that you’ll get a reply. Depends how many people email me their rankings and how clear your rankings are.)

Conclusion

I hope you’ve found these set of articles interesting and fun. There’s always more you can do with numbers so what are you waiting for? Open up a spreadsheet and start calculating. We ranked the stories by Doctors, why not try companions, enemies or setting. Go experiment!