What You Thought of The Magician’s Apprentice: Reaktion Roundup

Christian Cawley 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.

The results are in. Doctor Who is back – but was it really all that good? Did The Magician’s Apprentice feel like a season opener, or was it more of an acquired taste?

We’ll get the bad stuff out of the way first: the show pulled in a disappointing 4.8 million viewers. In the age of delayed viewing and BBC iPlayer, this may not seem a problem, and consolidated figures may well show that around 10 million viewed in the UK. The problem is, that a figure like 4.8 million is a nice one for the press to latch hold of. They love overnights, regardless of whether they have become an outmoded measure or not, and can use this figure to humiliate Doctor Who and the BBC.

Perhaps we’ll come back to this later in the week. Let’s stick to the point, and take a look at the AI, the audience appreciation index, for which The Magician’s Apprentice scored 84, which isn’t bad for Doctor Who. Meanwhile on BBC America, the Series 9 opener was Doctor Who‘s biggest US premiere for the key 18-49 demographic, with 2 million watching in total.

Certainly you, our own readers, enjoyed the episode overall. In our post-broadcast poll, 781 people voted, with the results as follows:

Great, really enjoyed it. 50.32% (393 votes)
Best opener ever! 30.22% (236 votes)
Okay. Was expecting more. 9.09% (71 votes)
Didn’t work for me. Move on, Moffat! 5.38% (42 votes)
Hope it improves next week. 4.99% (39 votes)

But despite the resounding positivity of the vote, the comments tell a different story.

bonobobananas: I do fear that the program I love I disappearing up it’s own behind. Just take a step away from your keyboard and consider: How many new fans do you think that episode will have generated? Could anyone who wasn’t a fan understand any of that?

Doctor Who is becoming so obsessed with clever ‘Who history’ that it has forgotten the simplicity of the idea. A man in a box with all of time and space to play in. Let’s get back to that eh?

BrittlePacker: I ought to have disliked Twelve’s mad party behaviour ( smacked a bit of Eleven, who I never got to appreciate) but Capaldi pulled it off with great aplomb. I’m not a fan of the companion becoming Ms Supercompetent, deferred to by the highest authorities between lessons, but I’ll let it pass, because overall the episode had me gripped.

Of course I knew who the boy was, but my heart still skipped a beat on his name. Of course the cliffhanger Isn’t what it seems, but you know what? As a very small girl I knew the Doctor wasn’t really going to have his head chopped off in The Masque of Mandragora. Didn’t stop me gasping then, didn’t stop me tonight either. When the show enables me to suspend disbelief like that, I would say it’s done it’s job.

Capaldi – superb. Coleman – terrific. Gomez – a thoroughly nasty hoot. The main guest star – fabulous. I look forward to more exchanges between him and the Doctor, they’re spectacular together. Moffat – doing what he always does, winding people up. I loved it, and I have only one major complaint. Next week is an awfully long time away!

Edward Delingford: Capaldi totally owns it. Been great reading so many comments tonight about people who admired but didn’t love his doctor last year absolutely loving him tonight. It’s a pitch perfect performance and reminds us again that this show stands shoulder to shoulder with the best things on television anywhere. I am really speechless to describe Capaldi’s performance tonight but will urge my drama students to look at it to see a master craftsman can convey so many different emotions so effectively. The almost cocky way he made that rock God moment awesome showed me that we are just on another level in terms of acting now.

As you can see, The Magician’s Apprentice has inspired some amazingly strong opinions. But then, it’s Doctor Who, right?

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