Last month, after having finished posting trivia summaries for all Season 4 episodes, I decided to pose a question to social media: Which is the best Cabot Cove episode from this season? And this was quickly followed by: Which is the worst Cabot Cove episode from the season?
In the table below, I summarized the results by giving the raw number of votes. The episodes are ranked from best to worst:
| Episode | Facebook Best | Twitter Best | Facebook Worst | Twitter Worst |
| 7. If it’s Thursday, it must be Beverly | 38 | 15 | — | — |
| 12. Who threw the barbitals in Mrs. Fletcher’s chowder? | 22 | 8 | 9 | 2 |
| 18. Benedict Arnold slipped here | 7 | 5 | 3 | 3 |
| 2. When Thieves Fall Out | 4 | — | 12 | 1 |
| 10. Indian Giver | 4 | — | 32 | 8 |
The question of best Cabot Cove episode was first posed on the Facebook group “Murder, She Wrote Fans”. As can be seen in the above table, the seventh episode “If it’s Thursday, it must be Beverly” was the standout winner. I subsequently asked the same question on my Twitter profile, which confirmed these results.
There are two important differences between the Facebook poll and the Twitter poll. On Facebook, people could vote for more than one episode, whereas this was not possible on Twitter. Additionally, on Twitter, I could only put four options to vote for; that meant I had to place episode 2 and episode 10 (being the lowest scoring episodes on the Facebook poll) were put together in a category labelled “other”, which received two votes in total.
Once it was established what the best episode was, it was time to ask the reverse question. The polls for worst episode did not include “If it’s Thursday it must be Beverly” in the running. Here, too, there was a clear loser: “Indian Giver” received the most votes for worst.
But it’s interesting to note that there is some contention regarding the episodes that ranked in the middle. For instance, whereas “Who threw the barbitals in Mrs. Fletcher’s chowder?” came in second place for best episode, it also received quite a few votes for worst episode.
Stay tuned for polls for best and worst of Season 5 once I’ve done all my episode trivia summaries for that season.
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