Your verdict on Heaven Sent & Episode Ranking
Joshua Yetman reveals DWTV’s community episode score and ranking for the 11th episode of Series 9.
I hope you’re sitting comfortably for this one…
A whisker off six thousand of you voted in Doctor Who TV’s polls last week for Heaven Sent, the eleventh episode of Series 9, written by showrunner Steven Moffat. As usual, we asked you to give the episode a score out of 10, and the results are as such:
As usual, we asked you to give the episode a score out of 10, and the results are as such:
Wow. Quite simply, wow. Heaven Sent has enraptured the community here on DWTV and provided us with some astonishing results that live up fully to the title of the episode. These results – and all the subsequent statistics that I will impart with unreserved glee – are truly heaven sent.
Anyway, as you know by now, each week we’ll be taking these votes and working out the average score, among other statistics. We will then use these average scores to rank the episodes and get a good idea of its placing in the series.
This week, Heaven Sent achieved one of the most remarkable averages ever attained in the history of the revival, a magnificent 9.344, placing it first in Series 9 by a mile, and second in the whole revival.
So, with only Hell Bent left to be rated and ranked in Series 9, the dazzling ratings and the corresponding rankings of Series 9 currently stand as such:
- 1. Heaven Sent – 9.344
- 2. The Zygon Inversion – 8.994
- 3. Face The Raven – 8.800
- 4. The Witch’s Familiar – 8.603
- 5. The Magician’s Apprentice – 8.479
- 6. Under the Lake – 8.434
- 7. The Zygon Invasion – 8.325
- 8. Before the Flood – 8.181
- 9. The Woman Who Lived – 7.715
- 10. The Girl Who Died – 7.461
- 11. Sleep No More – 5.955
- Hell Bent – TBC (Announced 14 December)
Just look at this list. This is the amazing legacy of Series 9. Collectively, these episodes now average 8.208, a considerable jump up from last week where the average was 8.095. Although we still haven’t fully recovered from the damage dealt by Sleep No More (before Sleep No More the average was 8.274), Heaven Sent did a fantastic job as a partial antidote.
(1) Interpreting the score
Coming straight out with it, Heaven Sent is the second highest rated episode in the revival. Ok, I already admitted that earlier, but it’s such an exciting sentence to write that I just had to write it twice. I’d write it a billion times if I could!
Furthermore, Heaven Sent is the highest rated episode within a regular series, and also Moffat’s highest rated non-special story.
Its overall placement of second is an extraordinary, legendary achievement. In achieving this position, Heaven Sent managed to beat Silence in the Library / Forest of the Dead (which attained average community scores of 9.009 and 9.003 respectively), The Empty Child / The Doctor Dances (9.058 and 9.041 respectively), The Eleventh Hour (9.051), and it even managed to – by a very small margin – beat Blink, one of the most famous and acclaimed episodes in Doctor Who history (Blink attained an average of 9.329). I repeat, it beat Blink.
The only episode that can still overcome Heaven Sent is the 50th anniversary special, The Day of the Doctor, but the gap between said episode and the newly inducted second ranking episode isn’t that large. The Day of the Doctor attained an average score of 9.401, only 0.057 points above Heaven Sent.
If the success of this episode needs any further reinforcement, our box and whiskers diagram can be used to show exactly where Heaven Sent has fallen amongst the scope of the pre-Series 9 revival:
To clarify for any newcomers (if you are new, welcome to the series. Better late than never!), 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. The position of Heaven Sent is demarcated by the black cross. All the sample data for this diagram comes from the Rank The Revival census carried out earlier this year.
Clearly then, Heaven Sent sits right at the pinnacle of the revival, as it should. As defined in the previous paragraph, the whiskers represent the absolute extremes of the revival; if Heaven Sent had managed to close the small gap between itself and The Day of the Doctor, it would have ended up actually redefining said extremities, which is probably a once in a decade event. That’s how well this episode did…in case it’s not abundantly clear already!
Now, for our usual round of flash facts:
- The placement of Heaven Sent has pushed The Family of Blood from 10th to 11th place in the revival rankings. Why am I telling you this specific fact? Well, it now means that the top ten episodes of the revival are all written (or co-written in one case) by Moffat. All of them, his. I think that stresses just how much of a brilliant writer Moffat is in the eyes of the fandom!
- As far as initial scores go, Heaven Sent has the highest on record (records only go as far back as A Good Man Goes to War, however). The Day of the Doctor only received an initial (adjusted) score of 9.173, only achieving a higher score of 9.401 in the long-term, interestingly making it one of the few episodes to go up in appreciation over time. I wonder if Heaven Sent will perform similarly.
- Plainly, Heaven Sent is the highest rated episode of Capaldi’s era to date!
- A huge 71.65% of you gave Heaven Sent full marks. This is the second highest case of this in the revival, again after The Day of the Doctor (which attained 73.16%).
- A strong 97.02% of you gave Heaven Sent half marks or more. This is only the 20th highest case of this in the revival, and the second highest in the series after Under the Lake. It ranks relatively low in this respect because of the proportion of 1/10 votes, which stands at an uncomfortable 1.44%, which will contribute somewhat to the divisiveness figure of this episode (see section 2).
- It’s been said already that Heaven Sent is the highest rated non-special episode of the revival, so it should go without saying that it dominates the Episode 11 episode slot. It nearest competitor was last year’s Dark Water. That means Series 9 currently dominates three episode slots – Episode 2, 3 and now 11.
- However, the Episode 11 (and 12) slots are a bit of a meaningless comparison now that we have 12 episode runs instead of 13. So, perhaps, it’s better to compare Heaven Sent against other part 1’s to finales (momentarily ignoring the three-part format to this finale). In this case, Heaven Sent is still highest (again, obvious), beating The Pandorica Opens into second place.
- Heaven Sent is only the 8th episode in the revival to break the 9/10 threshold.
(2) Divisiveness
Heaven Sent didn’t receive a record low standard deviation, however. Mostly thanks to the 1/10 fringe votes, the standard deviation of Heaven Sent is 1.554, which is still a low figure, but probably not the low figure we were expecting.
To clarify, 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 Heaven Sent fits – barely – into the “not particularly divisive” category. As it stands, it is the 17th least divisive episode of the revival, being sandwiched between Flatline in 16th (it achieved a standard deviation of 1.532) and Bad Wolf in 18th (which had a standard deviation of 1.585). It is not the least divisive episode of the series, however; Under the Lake still holds that crown, but only by a very small margin!
The full divisiveness rankings of Series 9 currently stand as such:
- 1. Sleep No More – 2.775 (most divisive…ever)
- 2. The Girl Who Died – 2.235
- 3. The Woman Who Lived – 2.178
- 4. The Zygon Invasion – 1.984
- 5. The Magician’s Apprentice – 1.815
- 6. The Witch’s Familiar – 1.758
- 7. Before the Flood – 1.723
- 8. Face The Raven – 1.716
- 9. The Zygon Inversion – 1.600
- 10. Heaven Sent – 1.554
- 11. Under the Lake – 1.548 (least divisive)
- Hell Bent – TBC
(3) Series 9 to date
As stated earlier, Heaven Sent has continued to alleviated the damage dealt on the Series 9 average by the terribly received Sleep No More, pushing up the Series 9 average to 8.208.
As a consequence of the increase in the Series 9 average, the Qualityometer – our informal measure of how much better Series 9 is doing compared to the pre-Series 9 revival average – has also risen, from 7.86% better to 9.37% better than the pre-Series 8 revival average of 7.505:
With just one last episode to be rated by the community, I can only wonder one thing, looking at this diagram – will the Qualityometer go up or down after Hell Bent? To go up, Hell Bent must receive a score higher than the current average of 8.208.
For those that are interested, the maximum the twelve-episode average could be is 8.358. Conversely the lowest it can be is 7.524 (though that’s a hugely unrealistic extreme, brought on the virtually impossible event where everyone votes 1/10). This means the final Qualityometer percentage will be between 0.25% and 11.36%. Even when it’s down to the wire, then, there is significant potential for movement in the Qualityometer. However, given Hell Bent’s mostly positive reaction so far, the position of the Qualityometer will almost certainly be towards the higher end.
(4) 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 Oswald Model correctly predicted that Heaven Sent would be the highest rated episode of the series (unless Hell Bent gives us one hell of a surprise next week), but underestimated its score. It gave a projection of 8.69, which represents an unacceptable error of 6.97%.
Ah, and the accuracy of the model started out so well…
(5) Face-Off: Listen vs. Heaven Sent – Poll Results
Moving on from the main poll, DWTV asked you to vote for your favourite experimental Moffat episode from this series and the last, pitting Heaven Sent against Listen.
In what can only be described as a landslide, Heaven Sent won, carrying nearly 86% of the vote:
Heaven Sent’s victory is consistent with the community averages score received by each episode. Listen currently averages 8.841, much lower than the average score of 9.344 achieved by Heaven Sent.
(6) Conclusion
What an episode. What a result!
The plethora of illustrious statistics acquired by this episode will allocate it an eternal place in the Doctor Who history books. This is a legendary episode of Doctor Who, the kind of episode that only happens every few years or so, and this episode is a legend amongst legends. I give you Heaven Sent, the second highest rated episode in the revived series of Doctor Who, one of the eight episodes ever to get an average above 9/10, and the third acclaimed episode of the series (using my personal definition of ‘acclaimed’ as a score above 8.75). To play yet again on the convention of its name, it truly was heaven sent.
Join us next week for the last article of the series (at least before Christmas), where we will finally complete the rankings of the series with the score of Hell Bent, an episode that is proving to be positively received, but colossally divisive. Will Series 9 fall at the last hurdle, or will it be capped off with a final, resounding result? Only time will tell so – for the last time – keep voting!
