Your Verdict on The Woman Who Lived & Episode Ranking

Joshua Yetman reveals DWTV’s community episode score and ranking for the 6th episode of Series 9.

Just over five thousand of you voted in Doctor Who TV’s polls last week for The Woman Who Lived, the sixth episode of Series 9, written by new-to-Who Catherine Tregenna. Now it’s time to reveal the results. As usual we asked you to give the episode a score out of 10, and the pleasantly smoother score distribution of this particular episode (at least compared to the previous episode) is presented below:

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

The Woman Who Lived received a good average score of 7.715, which is a score in the lower end of Series 9 as it stands thus far (although it stands considerably above its preceding part, The Girl Who Died), but it is still a score that sits comfortably in the upper echelon of the revived series, as we will explore in more detail shortly.

So, with half of episodes in Series 9 currently rated, 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 Woman Who Lived – 7.715
• 6. The Girl Who Died – 7.461
• 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 slightly to 8.146/10.

(1) Interpreting the score

The Woman Who Lived is the fifth episode this series to have an average score higher than the pre-Series 9 revival average of 7.505/10, with only The Girl Who Died falling below this threshold so far. To show the exact position of The Woman Who Lived more clearly, presented below is our trusted ‘box and whiskers’ representation of the revived series, with the relative position of The Woman Who Lived demarcated by the black cross:

To reiterate, 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. 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 Woman Who Lived is in the top 46% of episodes in the pre-Series 9 revival, and would be the 59^th highest rated episode of the revival using the current scores. It sits comfortably in the upper quartile of the revival, as shown above.

Regardless of where it stands overall, however, the average score of 7.715 received by The Woman Who Lived should still be commended. According to DWTV’s scoring system, this score sits between the designations of ‘good’ and ‘very good, in fact being closer to the latter. I don’t normally emphasise the absolute significance of the scores but, in light of recent events, I feel I need to make it abundantly clear that this is far from being a bad result. Some fans seem to have developed the mindset that an average score below 8/10 is nothing short of an unmitigated disaster, and this is certainly not the case.

Just consider the episodes which were rated similarly to The Woman Who Lived to see my point. 2008’s fan-favourite historical The Fire of Pompeii only scored marginally higher than The Woman Who Lived, with an average score of 7.772. The Woman Who Lived scored higher than positively received episodes such as The Lodger (7.688), Father’s Day (7.645) and Last of the Time Lords (7.641), and came close to beating The God Complex (7.764). In other words, The Woman Who Lived has ended up being ranked alongside not necessarily the greatest episodes of all time, but certainly amongst some damn great episodes. And that’s nothing to complain about.

Now, for some more flash facts:

• Out of the 19 episodes of the Capaldi era to date, The Woman Who Lived would rank 12^th, between Death in Heaven (7.889) in 11^th and Time Heist (7.563) in 13^th.
• What if we compare the score achieved by The Woman Who Lived to the initial scores received by Series 8 and 9 episodes to date? Doing so, the episode is the fourth lowest rated score of the past two years, but only on an initial basis, being rated higher than Robot of Sherwood but not quite as high as The Caretaker.
• So how does The Woman Who Lived rank amongst the other Episode 6’s of the revival? Well, before Series 9 the average Episode 6 score was 7.11, a good figure but, relative to other slots, very low. As it stands, The Woman Who Lived is the second highest rated Episode 6, being beaten only be the slot dominator that is 2005’s Dalek. The Woman Who Lived pushed up the Episode 6 slot average to 7.18.
• The Woman Who Lived had a modal score (i.e. most common score voted) of 9/10, the first episode in the series to achieve this particular score. That said, all the 8/10, 9/10 and 10/10 votes were very close and formed nearly two thirds of all votes cast.
• 90.03% of you gave The Woman Who Lived half marks (5/10) or more. This is a relatively low figure compared to the rest of the revival (this is only the 87^th highest case of this in the revival). It is still higher, however, than the proportion The Girl Who Died attained (88.75%).

(2) Considering the overall story

Whether or not The Girl Who Died / The Woman Who Lived can be considered a double-parter is a matter of opinion. In actuality, it’s more of a hybrid between the single-parter and the double-parter storytelling structures, but in this analysis I will consider The Girl Who Died / The Woman Who Lived as a double-parter in order to gauge some additional statistics.

As such, the average score of the story is 7.588. It should be obvious that this is the lowest rated double-parter of Series 9 to date. Considering the whole revival, The Girl Who Died / The Woman Who Lived is the 16^th highest rated double-parter to date (of which there have been 22), being sandwiched between The End of Time above and Rise of the Cybermen / The Age of Steel below. 16^th place is not a spectacular result on the face of things, but double-parters tend to be much more positively received than single-parters, and so 16^th place is still a great place to be, especially seeing as the average score of 7.588 is still above the pre-Series 9 revival average of 7.505.

Furthermore, this is the 12^th double-parter in history to have a higher rated second part than first. The gap between the two parts – 0.2546 – is the 6^th highest difference in quality between parts in the revival, and the highest difference in this series to date.

(3) The divisiveness of the story

Just like its preceding episode, The Woman Who Lived received a rather high standard deviation of 2.178. 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, we have another considerably divisive episode on our hands, although, thankfully, it not as divisive as The Girl Who Died. This high score is possibly down to the mixed reception to the plot element of The Woman Who Lived, or perhaps the character-driven nature of the story didn’t appeal to some. As it stands, this is the 15^th most divisive story of the revival. For context, it is almost as divisive as Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS (2.203) and Night Terrors (2.182), but is more divisive than The End of Time, Part 1 (2.171) and Daleks in Manhattan (2.170). This is a considerably divisive neighbourhood of episodes!

So, at the halfway mark, the divisiveness rankings of Series 9 currently stand as such:

• 1. The Girl Who Died – 2.235 (most divisive)
• 2. The Woman Who Lived – 2.178
• 3. The Magician’s Apprentice – 1.815
• 4. The Witch’s Familiar – 1.758
• 5. Before the Flood – 1.723
• 6. Under the Lake – 1.548 (least divisive)
• The Zygon Invasion – TBC
• The Zygon Inversion – TBC
• Sleep No More – TBC
• Face the Raven – TBC
• Heaven Sent – TBC
• Hell Bent – TBC

(4) Series 9 to date

To commemorate the halfway point of the series, we shall go into slightly more detail in this section than usual.

The relatively low result of The Woman Who Lived pushed down the Series 9 average from 8.232 to 8.146. Consequently, the Qualityometer, our informal measure of how much better Series 9 is doing compared to the pre-Series 9 revival average, has fallen for the fourth week in a row, from 9.68% better than the pre-Series 9 average (the dashed grey line) to just 8.54% better (the solid black line), as shown below:

To contrast the 8.54% figure to other series, the next highest series is Series 5, standing at 3.7% above the revival average, followed by Series 4 at 3.4% above the revival average. The lowest rated series is Series 2, standing at 5.4% below the revival average.

The Qualityometer is still firmly in the green region, however, so Series 9 is still performing very well indeed, and is still a considerable percentage above the revival average. Furthermore, it is still by far the highest rated series of the revival, though it is still too premature to fully comment on that. Instead, let’s consider how the first 6 episodes of Series 9 compare to the first 6 episodes of each of Series 1 through to Series 8:

• Series 9 – 8.146
• Series 8 – 7.639
• Series 5 – 7.524
• Series 2 – 7.455
• Series 6 – 7.404
• Series 7 – 7.382
• Series 4 – 7.238
• Series 1 – 7.178
• Series 3 – 6.528

So Series 9 currently stands miles above the rest of the series in the revival. Of course, this isn’t a particularly fair comparison as we are contrasting initial scores (Series 9) to long-term scores (Series 1-8), the former of which tend to be overstated compared to the latter. To remedy this as best we can, let’s compare the initial ratings of the first 6 episodes of Series 9 to the initial ratings of the first 6 episodes of Series 7 (excluding The Snowmen) and Series 8, which is all the data I have access to:

• Series 7 – 8.052
• Series 8 – 8.064
• Series 9 – 8.146

On this basis, Series 9 is still performing strongly, and better than its two predecessors at this stage in the series, although it is not as far above its competition as it was under the previous basis.

Finally, as it currently stands, Series 9 is also the most consistent series of the revival, at least so far. Consistency can be measured as the standard deviation of all the episode means in a series. As Series 9 has yet to have a truly lowly rated episode, and a truly highly rated episode, this fact makes sense.

(5) 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. Just like last week, the prediction for this week was well off the mark.

The initial projection for The Woman Who Lived was 8.15/10, but the actual figure was significantly less at 7.715, representing an unacceptable error of 5.59%.

Hopefully I will have better luck with The Zygon Invasion, which is predicted to yield 8.10/10 initially.

(6) Tregenna Face-off: Poll Results

Moving on from the main poll, DWTV asked you to rank the Tregenna stories in both Torchwood and Doctor Who. The rankings are as such:

Remember, the lower the rank the better. Thus, Out of Time has been ranked as the highest rated Catherine Tregenna story, beating the newest entry into second place. The fairly close nature of these rankings – at least compared to other writers who have been ranked similarly so far this series – suggests Tregenna’s stories are all – pretty much – similarly well received.

So, halfway through Series 9, it’s safe to say that it’s performing fantastically! Will the second half live up to the bar set by the first? Only time will tell. So join us next week when we get to grips with the statistics of the first episode of the second half, The Zygon Invasion. Will it conquer all, or retreat to the bottom of the rankings? Until then, keep voting!