January 4, 2018

Your Verdict on Twice Upon A Time & Christmas Special Ranking

Joshua Yetman reveals what DWTV readers made of the 2017 Christmas special.

It’s been a hell of year for Doctor Who. With the advent of the first female Doctor, the return of John Simm’s electrifying Master, the first TV multi-Master story, the reappearance of the original Mondasian Cybermen, and the return of the First Doctor himself, 2017 was surely iconic for this timeless programme.

It concluded, of course, with the 2017 Christmas special, Twice Upon a Time, which featured the simultaneous departure of lead actor Peter Capaldi and showrunner Steven Moffat in a reserved, reflective and, above all, hopeful piece of television. But the key question is what you – the DWTV community – thought about the episode.

As always, DWTV has asked you to vote your score – out of 10 – for the episode, and the statistics can now be revealed based on a healthy turnout of 3,159 votes:

Twice Upon a Time: Stat Rundown

This was a well received episode, averaging 8.007. This places the episode in 57^th position out of the 144 episodes of the revival thus far, so it’s comfortably in its upper echelon, and comfortably sits just below School Reunion and above The Pyramid at the End of the World. That said, although the score is perfectly strong in its own right, the score does feel slightly disappointing for what was not just a regeneration story, but a multi-Doctor story as well.
Twice Upon a Time is the 5^th highest rated episode of 2017 (out of 13 episodes), the 19^th highest rated episode of the Capaldi era (out of 40 episodes), and the 26^th highest rated episode of the overall Moffat era (out of 84 episodes).
The standard deviation of the episode – the measure for how divisive an episode is – was 2.131. The rule of thumb is that a standard deviation above 2 signals that the episode was very divisive, and Twice Upon a Time is, in fact, the 26^th most divisive episode on record, being equitably divisive as The Lie of the Land was last year (which had a standard deviation of 2.146).
The Moffat era concludes with an overall average of 7.687. The RTD era had an average of 7.477.

2017 Rankings

The complete 2017 rankings are as follows:

World Enough and Time – 9.048
The Doctor Falls – 8.491
Oxygen – 8.484
Extremis – 8.417
Twice Upon a Time – 8.007
The Pyramid at the End of the World – 7.988
The Pilot – 7.842
Thin Ice – 7.814
Empress of Mars – 7.724
The Eaters of Light – 7.667
Knock Knock – 7.487
The Lie of the Land – 7.156
Smile – 7.095

The 2017 average was ultimately 7.940, rendering 2017 as the second best year of the revival for Doctor Who after 2015! The lack of any episode below 7/10 further indicates that this was a year without a true dud, at least by statistical consensus.

Christmas Special Rankings

In addition to the polling of Twice Upon a Time, DWTV asked you to rank all 13 Christmas specials, from The Christmas Invasion to Twice Upon a Time, from best to worst. From these collective rankings, a weighted average rank was calculated for each special – the lower the rank, the better. These ranks are shown below:

In a very interesting turn of events, the RTD era Christmas specials have faired relatively strong, with an overall average rank of 6.26, contrasted with Moffat’s Christmas specials (which have an average range of 7.34). This is very curious because, if you look at the actual average scores attained by these Christmas specials in the polls of DWTV past, the top six (including Twice Upon a Time) are all Moffat specials.
Also, the fact that the commonly scorned The Doctor, The Widow, and the Wardrobe outranks 2016’s The Return of Doctor Mysterio is another unexpected result. Mysterio, though far from a fan favourite, scored far higher than Wardrobe in the original polls. Has fan sentiment really shifted that much?

Conclusion

In conclusion, then, Peter Capaldi and Steven Moffat bowed out in a gracious and perfectly enjoyable story, and the stats grind to a halt for another few months. However, the future is very bright. Series 11 implicitly promises some of the most interesting – and important – stats of the modern era, as we become formally acquainted with Jodie Whittaker’s Thirteenth Doctor and an era shepherded by a whole new showrunner – Chris Chibnall. How will the DWTV community react to this brand new, brave era? Only time will tell.

Until then, thank you for voting!

Series 10: