March 11, 2020

YOUR Verdict on “The Timeless Children” – The Most Divisive Episode Ever

It’s time to reveal DWTV’s poll results for the tenth episode of Series 12, “The Timeless Children”, as voted for by you over the last week or so.

“The Timeless Children”: Score Breakdown

As always, we asked you to rate the episode on a scale from 1 to 10. We then took an average.

A few thousand of you voted, and the average score was 5.87. According to the Doctor Who TV score guide, this indicates the episode was generally considered to be just shy of “above average”.
This score leaves “The Timeless Children” as the 15th lowest rated episode of the whole revival (according to the DWTV ranking polls taken in 2018). More specifically, it is situated between “Arachnids in the UK” (5.91) and “Night Terrors” (5.84).
This is the second episode this year to have a modal score of 1/10. The first was “Orphan 55”.
The two-parter has an average score of 6.59. That makes it the 2nd lowest ranked finale of the revival, behind Series 11’s.
The Chibnall era has now seen 7 of the 21 episodes so far enter the bottom 20.
The standard deviation – which is our measure for how divisive an episode is – was 3.61. Before the Chibnall era, scores above a 2 were relatively rare, but to go above a 3? That’s unprecedented. Yes, the Chibnall era has shattered all DWTV records. In fact this is such a divisive episode it has blown away all other contenders by a considerable margin. To put this astronomical score into perspective, the previous most divisive story was “Resolution” with 2.90. “Hell Bent” was a 2.83. So “The Timeless Children” is now easily the most divisive episode ever. That’s unlikely to be beaten any time soon…
Overall: What can you really say about this? This is obviously another poor result. Though realistically was anyone expecting any different? A story that retcons the origins of the Doctor and Gallifrey was always going to be extremely controversial, leading to massively polarising voting. The best thing you could say about all this is, it’s not quite the lowest rated episode of the Chibnall era. Small victories, eh…

Series 12 Episode Ranking

The complete Series 12 episode ranking looks like this:

1. Fugitive of the Judoon – 8.01
2. The Haunting of Villa Diodati – 7.56
3. Spyfall, Part 1 – 7.43
4. Ascension of the Cybermen – 7.30
5. Spyfall, Part 2 – 7.01
6. Nikola Tesla’s Night of Terror – 6.71
7. Can You Hear Me? – 5.94
8. The Timeless Children – 5.87
9. Praxeus – 5.43
10. Orphan 55 – 4.97

And so Series 12 ends with a final average score of 6.62. This means that this run was actually rated ever so slightly worse than Series 11. It also means Series 12 is now the lowest ranked series of the whole revival. The second lowest ranked is Series 11 with an average score of 6.70, and the 3rd lowest is Series 2 with 6.98 (not counting specials).

Hopes were high at the start of this year, and at least an episode managed to break an 8/10, but that was the exception rather than the rule. With Chibnall and Whittaker already confirming they’ll be back for Series 13, some serious improvements will have to be made to avoid another repeat of this undesirable outcome.

Conclusion

Well that’s it for another series, but that’s not it for the poll results. Next week we’ll be looking at results for our other “The Timeless Children” poll where we asked whether the canon was added to, or destroyed. It’s sure to be another interesting one…