Your Verdict on The Girl Who Died & Episode Ranking

Joshua Yetman reveals DWTV’s community episode score and ranking for the 5th episode of Series 9.

Just over five thousand of you voted in Doctor Who TV’s polls last week for The Girl Who Died, the fifth episode of Series 9, written by Jamie Mathieson 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 considerably chaotic score distribution of this particular episode – as expected – is presented below:

Each week we’ll be taking these votes and working out the average score. We’ll then use these averages to rank the episodes and get a rough idea of its placing in the series.

The Girl Who Died sadly received an average score of 7.461, which puts it at the bottom of the series to date, and also puts it in the lower half of the episodes in the revival (as we will see shortly). This is a pessimistic outlook to have, however, as 7.461 still represents midway territory between good and great as per DWTV’s scoring system, but its relatively low size compared to the previous four episodes will lead to disappointment for some, myself included.

So, four episodes into Series 9, the rankings look like this:

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

The Series 9 average has fallen sharply to 8.232/10.

(1) Interpreting the score

As stated earlier, the average community score of 7.461 received by The Girl Who Died is slightly below the pre-Series 9 revival average of 7.505. It is the first episode of the series, and the first episode since In The Forest of the Night, to fall below the revival average. To show its exact position more clearly, presented below is our trusted box and whiskers representation of the revived series, with the relative position of The Girl Who Died demarcated by the black cross:

For those of you that are new to this series, let me briefly explain what this diagram is trying to show. The box in the middle represents the middle 50% of all the 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, by the way). 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 poll series carried out earlier this year.

As it stands currently, The Girl Who Died is in the top 55% (ergo bottom 45%) of episodes in the pre-Series 9 revival. Due to the strength of the first four episodes of this series, this figure worsens if you widen the field to include all episodes to date.

So, more precisely, where does The Girl Who Died stand amongst its episodic peers? Well, it has been rated slightly higher than Series 7’s Hide (which received an average of 7.396) and Series 3’s Smith and Jones (7.385), but it is not quite as highly regarded as the very first episode of the revival, Rose (which received an average of 7.485) or Series 4’s Planet of the Ood (7.534).

I personally love all these episodes, so The Girl Who Died, despite its disappointing standing in Series 9, can still hold its head high against the rest of the revival, at least in this author’s opinion.

Overall, The Girl Who Died would stand as the 67^th highest rated story of the revival, at least using the current scores.

Now, for some more flash facts:

• Out of the 18 episodes of the Capaldi era to date, The Girl Who Died would rank 14^th, only ranking above The Caretaker (7.108), Kill The Moon (6.809), Robot of Sherwood (6.545) and In The Forest of the Night (5.324). The next highest episode is Into the Dalek (7.540). These figures use the long-term scores collected in the aforementioned Rank The Revival poll series.
• But what if we compare the score achieved by The Girl Who Died to the initial scores received by Series 8 and 9 episodes to date, which many would argue create a better comparison (and do)? Well, that paints a different, more pessimistic picture. In short, The Girl Who Died has received the second lowest initial community rating of Series 8 and Series 9 to date. Only In The Forest of the Night received a lower initial rating (6.482). Excluding Forest, this is the lowest initial score since Series 7’s The Rings of Akhaten, an episode which received a similar polarising reaction. Even the divisive Robot of Sherwood performed better than The Girl Who Died initially (Robot of Sherwood received 7.513 initially).
• So how does The Girl Who Died rank amongst the other Episode 5’s in the revival? Well, firstly, it is important to note that the Episode 5 slot is the third weakest episode slot (only the Episode 3 and 7 slots are worse on average). Even then, The Girl Who Died is only the fourth strongest Episode 5, which is still currently dominated by Series 5’s Flesh and Stone.
• Despite the fact The Girl Who Died performed worse than Under the Lake / Before the Flood, all three of these episodes have the same modal score (i.e. the score with the most votes) of 8/10. 29 episodes in the revival to date also have a modal score of 8/10. However, The Magician’s Apprentice and The Witch’s Familiar are still the only episodes this year with modal scores of 10/10.
• Only 88.75% of you gave The Girl Who Died half-marks or more (i.e. 5/10 or more). This is the 35^th lowest case of this in the revival, and is by far the lowest 5/10+ proportion of the series to date (the next lowest was The Magician’s Apprentice at 95.07%). The Girl Who Died also has the lowest proportion of 10/10 votes and highest proportion of 1/10 votes of the series (and, in the latter case, by a considerable margin). A part of me is considerably disheartened that 4.24% of you found this episode irredeemable, but that statistic stands.
• If you consider The Girl Who Died as the first part of a double-parter (which I personally will in these articles), then it is the 7^th worst first part to a double-parter in the revival.
• It should be fairly obvious that this is Jamie Mathieson’s worst episode to date (although, to be fair, he has only written three episodes, and his previous two episodes did set the bar very high indeed), ignoring the co-writing element. The score received by The Girl Who Died pales in comparison to Mummy on the Orient Express (8.831) and Flatline (8.649) from Series 8. Still, Mathieson has only fallen from the 3^rd strongest writer of the revival to the 4^th strongest, so his overall standing hasn’t been hurt that much by this episode.

(2) The divisiveness of the story

This is where things get truly bad. The Girl Who Died received a painfully high standard deviation of 2.293. To reiterate, the divisiveness of an episode can be measured using a statistic called 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 loose 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, ladies and gentlemen, we have a considerably divisive episode here, and that’s putting it lightly. The Girl Who Died is officially the 8^th most divisive episode of the entire revival.

Shockingly, it’s more divisive than the incredibly polarising Let’s Kill Hitler (2.282), the community-and-egg-splitting Kill The Moon (2.235), and the love-or-loathe Journey’s End (2.151). In fact, it is the second most divisive episode of Capaldi’s tenure to date, only being beaten by the incredibly inharmonious In The Forest of the Night, but not by much (said episode had a standard deviation 2.347).

Some of us speculated that this would ultimately be a divisive episode, but not on this level, and certainly not top ten material. The large proportion of 1/10 votes is the principle mathematical driver of this high standard deviation, but most of the votes are fairly spread out amongst the score options and are fairly unconcentrated, also contributing to the high figure.

Plainly, The Magician’s Apprentice is no longer the most divisive episode of the series, and, as for a divisiveness rank, we currently have:

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

The most divisive episode in Series 9 to date is 44% more divisive than the least divisive.

Still, every series in the revival has had at least one episode with a standard deviation of 2 or more (in fact, for some series, like Series 6, it was practically the norm), so this result shouldn’t be taken as catastrophic for Series 9, especially seeing as the previous four episodes all had good standard deviations. But a top ten ranking on the standard deviation scale is certainly not an impressive accolade to possess for The Girl Who Died.

(3) Series 9 to date

So far, Series 9 has attained an average score of 8.232/10, which has sharply fallen from last week’s 8.424/10 due to the negative influence of The Girl Who Died. Consequently, the Qualityometer, our informal measure of how much better Series 9 is doing compared to the pre-Series 9 revival average, has fallen drastically, from 12.25% better than the pre-Series 9 average to just 9.68% better, as shown below:

Regardless, the first five episodes of Series 9 still represent the 7^th strongest run of 5 consecutive non-overlapping episodes in the revival. Furthermore, Series 9 is still miles above the other series of the revival (when comparing, potentially inappropriately, the Series 9 initial scores to the Series 1-8 long-term scores). Additionally, it is still trumping the Series 8 overall initial average of 8.095, and the first-five-episode-average of Series 8, which was 8.118, though the gap has certainly narrowed.

That said, there is a distinct downward trend to the community ratings which, with the exception of The Witch’s Familiar, have been falling week-on-week without fail. The Woman Who Lived should break this downward trend judging by its initial reaction, so hopefully it will just be a coincidental feature of the data, and not a predictor for the remainder of the series. I truly hope this, as Series 9 has so far lacked a true outstanding and acclaimed episode (i.e. an episode above 8.75/10, in my formal definition) which every series has achieved with at least one episode, so hopefully the second half has some real stunning surprises for us that will stand amongst the greats of each series.

(4) Evaluating the projections

A few weeks ago, I produced a set of statistical projections for the initial community averages of each upcoming episode in Series 9. For the last few weeks, it’s been fairly accurate. And now, it’s been cataclysmically erroneous.

The initial projection for The Girl Who Died was 8.40/10, but the actual figure was nearly a whole point less at 7.461/10. This is a terrible error of 12.6%.

The projection was so high because both Jamie Mathieson and Steven Moffat had a very high historical storytelling record under their belts, pushing up the projection, and the episode was modelled as the first part of a double-parter, which boosted the projection much higher than what it would have been had it been modelled as a single-parter.

Perhaps this actuality is a summary of the episode as a whole – high expectations, unexpectedly low results.

(5) Mathieson Face-off: Poll Results

Moving on from the main poll, DWTV asked you to rank the three Mathieson stories of the revival. The results, presented below, conform exactly with the order of preference when dictated by community averages:

So, the incredibly popular Mummy on the Orient Express dominates this poll, to no big surprise. Mummy on the Orient Express is one of the most unique episodes of the revival, being one of only two episodes on record to have a higher long-term average than initial average (the other is The Day of the Doctor), defying recent episode syndrome as a concept. Its incredible popularity is sufficient to beat the comparably popular Flatline in the rankings, and, as expected, The Girl Who Died pulls up last. It simply cannot compete with either of Mathieson’s Series 8 masterpieces.

Join us next week when we analyse the results of the halfway episode of Series 9, The Woman Who Lived, which will be a slightly special edition of this series where we go into more detail about how the first half of Series 9 has been performing. Will The Woman Who Lived rectify the polarisation caused by its proceeding part, or will it continue the questionable Series 9 downward trend identified earlier? Until then, keep voting!