April 24, 2017

Your Verdict on The Pilot

Joshua Yetman reveals what DWTV readers made of the Series 10 opener.

Series 10 has officially begun and, with it, a new barrage of statistics and analysis is set to follow in its wake. As always, DWTV will host a poll for each episode of this series, asking you to rate the episode on a scale from 1 to 10. The thousands of scores will then filleted, pulped, and sifted by myself to provide meaningful statistics.

This year, the results will be presented in a slightly different way. These weekly articles will reveal the basic poll results along with some rudimentary statistics, but the real juicy statistics will be saved for a pair of articles sometime after the series has concluded.

The Pilot: Stat Rundown

Over four thousand of you voted, and the average score was 7.842. This is not indicative of a masterpiece, but it does show that The Pilot was fairly well received on balance.
This score leaves The Pilot as the 59^th highest rated episode of the revival (according to the DWTV polls of the past). Broadly speaking, that puts it in about the middle of the revival as far as quality is concerned. More specifically, it is sandwiched between Army of Ghosts (7.802) and The Angels Take Manhattan (7.863), so that’s the benchmark set by this episode.
The standard deviation – which is our measure for how divisive an episode is – was 1.715. This is relatively low, and is the 33^rd least divisive episode on record. After the extraordinarily high standard deviations achieved by episodes in Series 9, representative of some hugely polarising episodes, it’s refreshing to see what might be the start of a more congruous series.
Finally, The Pilot is the 6^th strongest opener of the 10 series in the revival to date. As the top five are all of Moffat’s other opening episodes, this is his weakest opener yet, though all of his opening episodes still dominate the RTD era offerings.