Andrew Reynolds is a writer at Kasterborous Doctor Who News and Reviews - All the latest Doctor Who news and reviews with our weekly podKast, features and interviews, and a long-running forum.
Did Doctor Who Series 8′s The Caretaker take care of business?
Well, if he still hasn’t got your football back off the school roof, Billy, it’s never coming down. But if you mean the Doctor’s foray on the payroll at Coal Hill School, then once again we turn to overnight viewing figures, poll results, AI scores and Haruspication.
Prepare the Goat!
Turning to overnight viewing figures and once again the news is positive – the show netted 4.89 million viewers or 21.8% of the viewing audience; putting the show third for the day overall.
That score puts Doctor Who 22nd for the week – a slight dip from last week’s position of 20th overall.
That’s in keeping with the previous two weeks’ figures despite the show going head to head with The X Factor and its musically suspect chair-based nonsense, which incredibly managed to bag 7.7 million viewers or a 34.6% share of overall viewers.
Excellent. The nice thing about this series is that my opinions of Gatiss and Robert’s scripts have been turned around. – Vortexter
For those keeping score, that’s a drop of 0.7 million or 5.5% from last week and that seems more likely due to Strictly Come Dancing, whose launch edition cha-cha charred its way to the top slot with 8.1 million viewers or a 39% share of viewers, rather indicative of a general drop in viewers overall.
The X Factor’s decision to launch with an edition of the show on a Friday may also have contributed to this downward turn… well that and the cognitive dissidence you get from watching what appears to be a serious of hastily assembled reaction shots that have little bearing on the shot of warbling that preceded it – kind of like the Kuleshov Effect only with more Snow Patrol.
The Sunday repeat of The Caretaker on BBC Three had an overnight estimate of 0.27 million viewers, a 1.2% share of the audience.
Over in America land, Doctor Who was the top cable show for the week of September 22 -28 according to General Sentiment’s social TV chart – which measures a show’s popularity on various social media sites – beating the likes of South Park, Sons of Anarchy and perhaps it’s greatest coup, Wahlburgers.
That’s the figures but what about opinions?
The Caretaker had an Audience Appreciation Index or AI score of 83 – down slightly from Time Heist’s score of 84. Overall Doctor Who rated slightly higher with women rather than men and scored the highest within the 16-54 age group.
The score, out of a hundred, is compiled by a specially selected panel of around 5,000 people who go online and rate and comment on programmes.
However those 5,000 people aren’t you! Unless you’re a hive mind, in which case, I await assimilation, oh glorious new leader. So what did YOU think of The Caretaker?
Judging by our poll 44.03% of you thought it was ‘Quirky and entertaining’, 28.7% thought it was ‘great fun, Gareth Roberts’ best’ – putting the totally positive opinion at 72.73%, down slightly from Time Heist’s 81% smile rating.
Rounding out the numbers 17.31% thought it was ‘not the best this year, worth a rewatch’, 8.24% declared that ‘I never want to see it again’ and 1.85% screamed from their bathroom window ‘Gareth Roberts is dead to me, you hear?’ – much to the confusion of the neighbourhood cats.
Setting the comment scanner to ‘interesting’ (who set this thing to ‘spin dry?’) we turn once again to you and find MaryAnne declaring The Caretaker to be:
“An absolute cracker of an episode that had a wistful profundity beneath the sparking dialogue, funny scenes and lovely bits of business which Capaldi got to do in his caretaker role.
“All three leads were excellent tonight and the coda has got me very excited about where the series is heading. This run of episodes has been by far the best and most consistent in New Who. This episode has also almost erased the truly horrible School Reunion from my memory. Also think this one shades The Lodger as Gareth Roberts’ best episode but that may be down to the Moffat-y bits adding extra goodness.”
Harsh words for you, the generally well liked School Reunion but what of our present companion Clara Oswald? Emily B-C had this to say on Clara’s burgeoning character:
“Really liked this one. Helped move on the character development a lot but balanced this with great laughs. Not sure it is quite as good as The Lodger but miles ahead of any other Gareth Roberts’ episodes and nice to see the odd Steven Moffat zinger in the dialogue.
“The Missy part of the story was nicely added and something tells me that the story arc this year is going to be a lot better than the silly Impossible Girl nonsense. Jenna Coleman also continues to impress now that the writers have made her into a living and breathing character and the dynamic between her, the Doctor and Danny looks set to be intriguing. Think this episode is laying lots of clues for later use…”
And finally Vortexter shared his opinions, or rather, his new opinions on Series 8′s developments:
“Excellent. The nice thing about this series is that my opinions of Gatiss and Robert’s scripts have been turned around. I usually see them the weak episodes of a season but the latest script from both are very entertaining.
“The Blitzer was a very interesting threat and I would have loved to have seen lots of them poring across a scarred battlefield. An excellent episode indeed.”
So what did you think of The Caretaker? Was it the best episode so far this year? Do you prefer it to The Lodger? Or was it the strangest adaptation of a Harold Pinter play you’ve seen?
The post The Caretaker Audience Reaction & Poll Results appeared first on Kasterborous Doctor Who News and Reviews.