YOUR Verdict On “Arachnids in the UK” – Oh dear…

It’s time to reveal DWTV’s poll results for the fourth episode of Series 11, as voted for by you over the last week or so.

“Arachnids in the UK”: Stat 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 5.91. According to the Doctor Who TV score guide, this indicates the episode was generally considered to be in the “Average+” range. While that doesn’t sound too bad on paper, a score this low after only a week or so of voting is rare. In fact DWTV hasn’t seen this happen since 2015 with “Sleep No More” (which scored marginally higher)! And if we look at the score in the wider context of all of the episodes in the revival, this episode did very poorly.
• “Arachnids” is now the 12th lowest rated episode of the whole revival (according to the DWTV ranking polls taken from earlier in 2018). So the episode only narrowly missed falling into the bottom ten episodes! More specifically, it is situated between “Kill the Moon” (5.95) and “Night Terrors” (5.84).
• This is Chris Chibnall’s worst rated Doctor Who episode yet, including his work pre-showrunner. His previous lowest was his first story “42” (6.31).
• The standard deviation – which is our measure for how divisive an episode is – was 2.60. As with every episode of Series 11 so far, there was significant polarisation between voters. This rose again following last week’s already high number. “Arachnids” is not only the current most divisive story of the run, but it’s up there with the most divisive episodes of the whole revival.
• All in all, coming right after the high score of “Rosa”, this is a very disappointing result for the series.

Series 11 Episode Ranking (So far)

After four episodes, the Series 11 episode ranking looks like this:

• 1. Rosa – 7.94
• 2. The Woman Who Fell to Earth – 7.35
• 3. The Ghost Monument – 6.84
• 4. Arachnids in the UK – 5.91
• X. The Tsuranga Conundrum – TBC
• X. Demons of the Punjab – TBC
• X. Kerblam! –  TBC
• X. The Witchfinders – TBC
• X. Episode 9 – TBC
• X. Episode 10 – TBC

The weak performance of “Arachnids” has pushed down the series average to 7.01.

Conclusion

Join us next week when we examine the results of “The Tsuranga Conundrum”, the fifth episode of Series 11. Can Chris Chibnall reverse his poor fortune this week? Only time will tell. Until then, keep voting!

• See the results for episode 1 here.
• See the results for episode 2 here.
• See the results for episode 3 here.