Your Verdict on Under the Lake & Episode Ranking

Joshua Yetman reveals DWTV’s community episode score and ranking for the 3rd episode of Series 9.

Just over five thousand of you voted in Doctor Who TV’s polls last week for Under the Lake, the third episode of Series 9. Now it’s time to reveal the results. As usual we asked you to give the episode a score out of 10. The results are as follows:

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. Under the Lake received an average of 8.434. This is lower than both opening episodes, but it is still a very impressive score for an episode to receive.

So, three 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
• Before the Flood – TBC
• The Girl Who Died – TBC
• 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 is currently 8.505/10.

(1) Interpreting the score

The score received by Under the Lake is very admirable indeed. The following diagram should add some context as to where this episode ranks in the esteemed halls of the revived series to date:

The diagram above is a box and whisker plot, showing the distribution of episode means in the revival (based on the Rank the Revival polls earlier this year). The box in the middle represents the middle 50% of episodes in terms of quality (with the grey box being the lower quartile and the yellow box being the upper quartile) and the ‘whiskers’ represent the extremities of the revival, from Fear Her at the far left to Day of the Doctor at the far right. The black cross represents the score received by Under the Lake. Clearly, then, this puts the episode at the top region of the revival (in fact, to be more precise, it is in the top 20% of the revival, which is a very commendable place to be).

So, up there in the top 20% of everything in the last 10 years, what are the closest episodes to Under the Lake? Well, it’s a whisker below The Name of the Doctor (which received an average score of 8.445 on this site) and Utopia (8.447), but it managed to beat Bad Wolf (8.397) and The Stolen Earth (8.363). Overall this puts Under the Lake as the 29^th highest rated episode of the revival, at least with the current scores.

Now, for some more flash facts:

• Under the Lake is the 7^th strongest episode of Peter Capaldi’s tenure as the Doctor to date.
• Last week we saw The Witch’s Familiar become the highest rated Episode 2 of the revival. This week, Under the Lake continues that trend and has become the highest rated Episode 3 in the revival! However, this wasn’t too difficult to accomplish, as Episode 3’s don’t tend to perform that well amongst the DWTV community at all (the average Episode 3 score prior to Series 9 was a dismal 6.87).
• A considerable 26.80% of you gave Under the Lake full marks, though the 8/10 option was the most popular option with 27.72% of the vote. This marks the first time in this series that the 10/10 option didn’t receive the most votes (though only 38 episodes of the revival can lay claim to this).
• A simply massive 97.14% of you awarded Under the Lake with half marks or more (i.e. 5/10 or more). This is higher than both The Magician’s Apprentice and The Witch’s Familiar (95.07% and 95.46% respectively), and is the 19^th highest case of this in the whole revival.
• Under the Lake is the 8^th highest rated first part to a double-parter.

Finally, Under the Lake is officially Toby Whithouse’s best episode of the revival to date, smashing the previous leader, School Reunion (which received a community average of 8.010). The full Whithouse rankings are, currently, as follows:

• 1. Under the Lake – 8.434
• 2. School Reunion – 8.010
• 3. The God Complex – 7.764
• 4. A Town Called Mercy – 7.158
• 5. The Vampires of Venice – 6.778

Whithouse’s average writing score is currently 7.629, which puts him as the 10^th best writer of the revival (he jumps to 6^th place if you remove all one-off writers).

(2) The divisiveness of the episode

Under the Lake is one of the least divisive episodes of the revival. This is down to its simple, traditional story and lack of controversial material, and it ultimately received a very low standard deviation of 1.548. Remember, the divisiveness of an episode can be measured using standard deviation, a very handy statistic which measures how spread out votes are from the average.

To make sense of what this number means, I have generated the following rough scale 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 2 – not particularly divisive.
• Between 1.75 and 2 – only fairly divisive
• Above 2 – considerably divisive; opinions vary far and wide for such an episode.

So Under the Lake fits into the “not particularly divisive” camp. It is far less divisive than both The Magician’s Apprentice and The Witch’s Familiar, and currently stands as the 16^th least divisive episode of the revival. In Capaldi’s entire tenure to date, only Mummy on the Orient Express (1.357) and Flatline (1.532) have been less divisive, and, in the wider revival, Under the Lake is almost as harmonious as Human Nature and The Parting of the Ways. The high amount of 5/10+ votes we identified earlier is the primary mathematical driver of this low figure.

So, as for a divisiveness rank, we currently have:

• 1. The Magician’s Apprentice – 1.815 (most divisive)
• 2. The Witch’s Familiar – 1.758
• 3. Under the Lake – 1.548 (least divisive)
• Under the Lake – TBC
• Before the Flood – TBC
• The Girl Who Died – TBC
• 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

(3) Series 9 to date

So far, Series 9 has an average score of 8.505/10. It’s still too early to make any judgements about the series yet, but this is still a remarkable average score for the first three episodes. Indeed, this is the highest run of three consecutive non-special episodes since The Pandorica Opens – The Big Bang – The Impossible Astronaut.

Over the series, I will be measuring just how well Series 9 is doing through my rather informal ‘qualityometer’, which measures how much better Series 9 is doing compared to the pre-Series 9 revival average. Currently, it is 13.33% higher than the revival average of 7.505, and so the Series 9 qualityometer looks like this:

The grey dashed line was the Qualityometer last week, and the solid black line is the Qualityometer as it stands now. It has fallen ever so slightly (from 13.81%), as Under the Lake marginally pushed down the Series 9 average, due to the fact that it wasn’t as highly rated as either opening episode. However, Series 9 is still well within the green region of the Qualityometer, and Series 9 – as it currently stands, with just three rated episodes – is still the highest rated series of the revival by a considerable margin (though this is still an unfair comparison to make at this stage).

However, what is a fair comparison (bar the potential for recent episode syndrome to take effect) is looking at the average score of the first three episodes of each series, and ranking them accordingly. Series 9, with its current average of 8.505, doesn’t just lead this ranking, but it totally dominates it; the closest contender is Series 6 at 7.548. Of course, like I said before, recent episode syndrome may depreciate the Series 9 average score in the long-run, so let’s now consider it against something even more appropriate – the Series 8 initial scores. The first three episodes of Series 8 averaged 7.949 initially – so, on this basis, Series 9 is currently vastly outperforming Series 8.

(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. The initial projection for Under the Lake was 8.00/10. The historical poor performance of Episode 3’s pushed down the projection considerably, explaining the difference to the actual figure of 8.434. As it stands, this is a rather large error of 5.14%, which I deem unacceptable. Thus, this is the first time the Oswald Model has been considerably inaccurate, but at least the actual score was higher than the projected score instead of lower!

Join us next week when we get submerged into the statistics of Before The Flood. Will it drown its first part, Under the Lake, in the rankings, or will it merely be a shallow entry to the series? Until then, keep voting!