Doctor Who Series 2: Episode 4
The Girl in the Fireplace by Stephen Moffat
In Stephen Moffat's new story, a 51st century spaceship stalks a young woman from the 18th century, and the Doctor falls head over heels in love.
The Girl in the Fireplace opens with a shot of a spaceship, drifting. The TARDIS lands on the same ship -- it's deserted, adrift in the 51st century. It’s unclear where the crew have gone, but there is a doorway that leads to the palace of Versailles in the 18th century.
There the Doctor meets a young girl called Rannette who is being menaced by a clockwork courtier with a hand made of wheels and cogs that somehow manages to look distinctly threatening. He tells her that when she thinks of monsters under the bed, that she is to think of him.
Returning to the ship, when he goes through another doorway, he finds Rannette (David Tennant's real life partner Sophia Myles) grown up into a young woman. She kisses him, and he learns that he ‘snogged Madame Pompadour.’
Meanwhile, Mickey and Rose have gone exploring and found a human heart and an eyeball plugged into the ship. Stranded by an ion storm, the repair droids have harvested the crew.
As in The Empty Child, Stephen Moffat’s script focuses on machinery limited by its own programming; Rose and Mickey are captured by droids, while an 18th century woman is stalked by a spaceship from the 51st century, until she is old enough for the droid’s purposes. To find out why, the Doctor mind-melds with Rannette. But he gets more than he bargained for; he tells her that if there things she does not want him to see, she should imagine a door. She calls him ‘a lonely little boy,’ and ‘Time Lord.’
“How did you do that?” He says.
“A door once opened may be entered through from either direction,” she says, smiling.
It’s clear that there is more than just attraction – the Doctor has fallen head over heels in love with this extraordinary, captivating young woman, who understands far more about him and his life than he would like. When the monsters break through, Madame Pompadour rallies the screaming courtiers, and even as she is forced to kneel at the feet of the lead droid, she spits defiance to the last.
In the end, the Doctor has to strand himself in the 18th century to save Madame Pompadour from rampaging clockwork robots. “The monsters and the Doctor,” she says. “It seems one cannot have one without the other.” This line foreshadows beautifully Love and Monsters.
But in a heart-wrenching coda, Rannette finds one last portal for the Doctor, but even as she promises to follow him to the stars, she is unwittingly severing the link between them until it is too late. This is the same theme as highlighted in School Reunion, but run in stop-frame timescale for the viewer's benefit; in this episode, the viewer gets to watch what the Doctor has chosen to walk away from -- the aging of a loved one.
The episode ends with the TARDIS leaving, carrying a grief-stricken Doctor clutching a last love letter from a woman thirty-three centuries dead. The camera cuts to the outside of the ship again, where the episode opened, and a mystery is resolved.
