Your Verdict on Oxygen & Episode Ranking
Joshua Yetman reveals what DWTV readers made of the fifth episode of Series 10.
The fifth episode of Series 10 saw the return of Jamie Mathieson, a relatively new writer who has received critical acclaim for his strongly written and often fairly horrifying stories in Series 8 and Series 9. His latest contribution – Oxygen – certainly continued Mathieson’s penchant for horror, and it’s now time to evaluate the performance of this episode as far as the DWTV audience was concerned.
Oxygen: Stat Rundown
- The average score for Oxygen was 8.484, meaning that Series 10 has finally pumped out an episode that scored above 8/10! In addition, it is the first episode to score over 8/10 here on DWTV since Heaven Sent, and so it goes without saying that it’s the highest rated episode of Series 10 to date.
- The average score of 8.484 indicates that Oxygen is the 29th highest rated episode of the revival, a position where it is surrounded by episodes such as The Magician’s Apprentice (8.479) and Day of the Moon (8.546), and is only an iota or two away from Midnight (8.574), so it’s truly in an esteemed echelon!
- Oxygen is Jamie Mathieson’s third best episode out of the four he has written or cowritten to date. Thus, even though Oxygen earned a highly respectable score in its own right, it still doesn’t quite match up to his Series 8 entries (Flatline – 8.649 – and Mummy on the Orient Express – 8.831), though it is a sizeable step up over his Series 9 cowrite with Steven Moffat (The Girl Who Died – 7.461). Regardless, these scores show that Mathieson is a hugely popular and highly consistent writer, and it makes him the second best writer of the revival (considering only writers who have penned at least two episodes) with only Paul Cornell averaging higher.
- The standard deviation of this episode – which is our measure of how divisive an episode is – was 1.561. This is the lowest of the series to date, and is the 18th least divisive episode in the revival!
Series 10 Ranking
So far, the Series 10 episode rank looks like this:
- Oxygen – 8.484
- The Pilot – 7.842
- Thin Ice – 7.814
- Knock Knock – 7.487
- Smile – 7.095
- Extremis – TBC
- The Pyramid at the End of the World – TBC
- The Lie of the Land – TBC
- The Empress of Mars – TBC
- The Eaters of Light – TBC
- World Enough and Time – TBC
- The Doctor Falls – TBC
The strong performance of Oxygen has pushed up the Series 10 average to 7.744, which would make Series 10 the fourth highest rated series. Furthermore, with an average episode standard deviation of 1.709, it is the least divisive series so far. However, with the arrival of a high stakes three-part story that started with Extremis, this may be all about to change…
Conclusion
Join us next week where we will examine the results of Extremis, the first part of the so-called “Monk Trilogy”, which is sure to be a fairly divisive episode judging by the initial reaction. Until then, keep voting!
- See the results for episode 1 here.
- See the results for episode 2 here.
- See the results for episode 3 here.
- See the results for episode 4 here.
