December 8, 2023

YOUR Verdict on “The Star Beast” – A Solid, If Not Exceptional Start

It’s time to reveal DWTV’s poll results for the first 60th anniversary special, “The Star Beast”, as voted for by you over the last week or so.

First, though, let’s look at the other two poll results…

Following the first special, we asked you to tell us what you thought of the new title sequence. Here’s how you voted:

As we can see, it’s a hit, with just over 80% voting either “Good” or “Great”.

Then, we also wanted to know what you made of the new TARDIS interior. Here’s how you voted:

The new interior was an even bigger win, though, with 70.41% voting it “great” and another 18.15% voting it “good”.

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

Several thousand of you voted, and the average score was 7.07. According to the Doctor Who TV score guide, this indicates the episode was generally considered to be in the “good” range.
This leaves “The Star Beast” as the 97th highest-rated episode of the whole revival (according to the DWTV ranking polls taken in 2018). Specifically, it falls between “War of the Sontarans” (7.06) and “The Unicorn and the Wasp” (7.08).
Among the 32 Doctor Who stories written by Davies so far, including those with co-writer credits, “The Star Beast” is ranked 20th. This positions it slightly towards the lower end of his contributions.
Davies first era episode “Rose” was ranked slightly higher with an average user score of 7.45.
Comparatively, RTD’s second era begins with a slightly lower score than Chris Chibnall’s opener, “The Woman Who Fell to Earth,” which garnered an average user score of 7.35.
The standard deviation – which is our measure of how divisive an episode is – was 2.72. DWTV considers episodes over 2 as “very divisive”. It’s worth noting that it has been over six years now since we’ve seen an episode score a standard deviation below 2, highlighting an ongoing trend of divisive episodes.
Overall: A solid, if not exceptional result to kick off the new era. It will be interesting to see how RTD’s second era develops moving forward.

The ranking for the 2023 specials so far looks like this:

With just one episode on the list, clearly there is not much to see here yet!

Join us next week to analyse how “Wild Blue Yonder” fared. Perhaps we’ll see the first score to rise above an 8/10 in 3 years…