From Table 3, we see that:

• Surprisingly, Joel becomes the first male of Series 21 to win an episode! He had his best episode to date, accumulating 20 points by the end of the episode. Joel won the episode despite being disqualified and receiving zero points for the “custard, mustard” task.
  
• Armando had his worst episode to date. He only accumulated 10 points in total, landing in 5th position for the episode. His disqualification in the “custard, mustard” task certainly did not help with his episode score.
• Kumail continues his high performance streak and is graded as having a “very good” episode; he earned 18 points and finished in 2nd in the episode. This is comparable to his performance in the prior Episode, in which he earned 19 points.
• Joanna had a “bad” mediocre episode, accumulating 17 points and placing 3rd.
• Amy had a “very bad” episode; she was awarded 16 points and placed 4th. This episode score matches Amy’s score in Episode 1 where she placed 2nd. The men have certainty showed some improvement since this series premiere.

This is the first episode in this series that we have a royal flush in episode rankings; that is we have seen 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th and 5th positions in the episode. All prior episodes have seen one tie in at least position.

Amy has finally achieved her royal flush in task points. She has now been awarded the full range of points (0 to 5 points) at least once by the Taskmaster so far in the series.

Armando was awarded an almost uniform distribution of points in this episode alone; he was awarded 0 to 4 points once during this episode for his task.

Joel was awarded an impressive 5 points for 4 out of the 5 tasks in this episode (80%). It is perhaps no surprise that he won the episode with this success rate. Whether Joel deserved 5 points for many of these tasks is debatable though. He was lucky to get 5 points for the “boring to exciting” task, his teammates had a big part in them winning the team live task, and he should have been docked a few points for not repeating the final two words in each sentence in the “multitask” task. But I am not the Taskmaster, so my opinion really doesn’t matter does it… His 5 points for the prize task was thoroughly deserved however!

Kumail did not receive anything less than 2 points in this episode, and his task points distributions is becoming skewed to the right, and peaking on 4 points. Those Hollywood muscles are certainly paying off now…

From our trusted Series Tracker (Figure 6), we can see that:

• Amy maintains her position as series leader with 74 points.
• Joanna is closely behind Amy in 2nd place with 70 points.
  • Amy should be worried about losing her lead; a 4 point lead could be squandered if she has a less than stellar episode.
• The female-male gap is still significant at 11 points. The men must try consistently harder in order to catch up to the women.
• Kumail still maintains his 3rd position in the series with 59 points. It’s those muscley Hollywood hands which have allowed him to maintain this position for a 2nd week in a row.
• Joel sneaks into 4th position for the series having had an excellent 4th episode; he has currently acquired 56 points and is only 3 points behind Kumail.
• *Armando unfortunately slips into 5th place following a disastrous Episode 4, and only has 49 series points.
  • He has also widened the range of male contestants points; the 10 point difference to 4th place means that it will be more difficult for him to get out of 5th place.

From Figure 8:

• The cast of Series 21 are conformers for the most part. Their average episode scores and the associated standard deviations are not extreme compared to prior contestants and series of Taskmaster.
  • This makes sense as this series has been relatively light on gimmicks and unusual tasks (no negative penalisation scores, no joker mechanics which allow the doubling of points, no bonus points being awarded).
• Series 4’s Mel Giedroyc and Series 2’s Jon Richardson are the noticeable new additions to the outlier club. Existing members include Series 1’s Roisin Conaty and Series 14’s Dara Ó Briain.
  • Mel’s induction into this club is due to Episode 3 in her series, in which she was awarded 3 points in total. This incredibly low episode score is largely attributed to the “Transfer water from one fishbowl to another” task, in which she performed badly and was also penalised for eating chocolate. The live studio task of that episode was also winner takes all, which also didn’t help.
    • This explains the outlier observation, prior to this episode, Mel’s score ranged from 16 to 20. Following this episode, Mel’s average episode score is dragged down, and volatility increases.
  • Jon’s outlier membership can be seen as a limitation of this approach and the data. We are calculating the average episode score and standard deviation from only two observations.
• In terms of the episode performance volatility for Series 21, the current order at 40% of the series is: Kumail (most volatile), Joanna, Joel, Amy and Armando (least volatile).

For each member of the Series 21 cast, who are they most similar to from contestants of yore (the similarity neighbourhoods based on episode performance and volatility in Figure 9).:

• Amy is in a neighbourhood of three 1st place series finishers, one 2nd placer, and one 3rd finisher.
  • Her nearest neighbours are Series 14’s Sarah Millican (2nd) and Series 8’s Lou Sanders (1st).
• Armando lives in a neighbourhood consisting of one 2nd placer, two 3rd placers and two 5th placers.
  • His nearest neighbour is Series 17’s Nick Mohammed who placed last in his series; that might be a hard pill to Mr Swallow.
• Joanna lives in a neighbourhood of high achievers. Neighbours have placed 1st (two), 2nd (two) and 3rd (one) eventually in the series.
  • She is considered most similar to Series 19’s Mathew Baynton, who was crowned champion of his series, despite some difficult and revealing times.
• Joel has neighbours which finished in the lower half of the series scoreboard. There are four 5th placers, and one 3rd placer.
  • Series 20’s Sanjeev Bhaskar, who finished last in his series, is the nearest neighbour to Joel.
• Kumail has “mid-of-the-leaderboard neighbours”. He has one 2nd placer, one 3rd placer, and two 4th placers.
  • His nearest neighbour is Series 8’s Iain Stirling who placed 2nd in his series. There is hope for Americans that they will be represented well!