The Final Countdown...

As the end of this season's HeroPress regular blog posts draws nearer, I thought we'd just have time to review my good, old Enjoyment Ratings Average (ERA) scores for a couple of programmes which reached their finales recently (namely Doctor Who and Supernatural)

Matt Smith's first season as The Doctor ended in spectacular style and with an ERA of 3.81 (rather sabotaged by the tedium that was The Beast Below and a couple of other quite mediocre episodes).

Let's see how that stands up to the previous four seasons of 'new' Who:

• Season 27: ERA 3.65 (Ninth Doctor + Rose)
• Season 28: ERA 4.03 (Tenth Doctor + Rose)
• Season 29: ERA 3.97 (Tenth Doctor + Martha)
• Season 30: ERA 4.2 (Tenth Doctor + Donna)

Given that I'm beginning to think I was drinking the corporate Kool-Aid during much of Russell T Davies' showrunning years (especially in the later years of David Tennant's time in The TARDIS, when I cut the show way more slack than I now feel it deserved), I'm confident that the show is in safe hands with the team of Matt Smith and Steven Moffat, and can only improve as both settle into their roles.

On the Supernatural front, season five scored an apocalyptic ERA 4.20.

The first four years racked up as follows:

• Season One - ERA 4.27
• Season Two - ERA 4.43
• Season Three - ERA 4.13
• Season Four - 4.34

Season Five was a great year, even though it's ERA dropped from below that of Season's One and Four, for the simple reason that that Supernatural was always sold to us as a five-year arc and the sudden announcement that the show had earned itself a sixth season threw the pacing of this fifth season off.

Knowing the show would be entering a sixth season undercut a lot of the "all-or-nothing" tension of Season Five as it headed towards its final confrontation between the Winchester brothers and Lucifer.

As I said in my review of the finale, it will be interesting to see where the show goes now after this grandest of all grand finales. I hope it doesn't just fizzle out with a succession of tired, old stories that don't amount to much - but the show's got an awful lot of live up to now!

I'd hoped to also bring you the final ERA score for K9's first season at this juncture, but thanks to DisneyXD's erratic broadcast schedule, I have no idea when that series is going to finish now - or even if the channel is going to screen all the episodes!

As it stands, the show is tracking at an ERA of 2.03, but in the last couple of episodes was showing signs of genuine improvement.

It's very unlikely it will ever rival The Sarah Jane Adventures (the closest Whoniverse show with a similar target audience), but there were a few instances where it was genuinely entertaining and showed tiny sparkles of possibility.