The Girl In The Fireplace: Ranking - 63

 

The Girl In The Fireplace

(Series 2, Dr 10 with Rose and Mickey, 6/5/2006, Season 8, showrunner: Russell T Davies, writer: Steven Moffat, director: Euros Lyn)

Rank: 63

   'Rejected DW story ideas: 'The Man in the Microwave' in which the 11th Dr mimes to Marcel Marceau via a microwave door. ‘The Woman In The Washer’ in which the 6^th Doctor causes a civil war when he asks to have his coat dry-cleaned. ‘The Dog in the Dryer’ in which the 4^th Doctor has to rescue K9 from the tumble dryer of doom. 'The Gorilla in the Grill' in which the 12th Dr has his eyebrows singed talking to a sentient ape. 'The Ghoul In The Fiat Place' in which the 13th Dr makes a hand gesture to a ghostly car driver at a car show via a glove compartment'. 

While I’ll always have a bigger soft spot overall for the Dr Who stories of the 20th century compared to the 21st there are, I would say, four things that new-Who always does that bit better: the 50minute running times that leave no room for the sagging middles of the 100-150minute days of old but also makes episodes feel that bit more substantial than the 22minutes of old, the in-depth look at the doctor and companion’s lives beyond what we see in the Tardis, the romances (until the 1996 TV Movie the closest the mostly asexual Dr ever came to love was an Aztec making a cup of coca for him in an accidental engagement ceremony that seems to have put him off love for seven whole regenerations) and, most surprisingly of all, time travel being a key part of the plots rather than just something the Tardis does at the start of stories. There is no tale of the 21st century that better sums up what this series can now do which it never could before than second series story ‘The Girl In the Fireplace’ where everything, if you pardon the expression, runs like clockwork for a memorable, highly emotionally charged story, arguably the first that you absolutely cannot imagine in the old era. 

 There are several reasons why ‘Girl In The Fireplace’ is the most obvious story for the production team to have made in 2006 though. The first one is the project Russell T Davies and David Tennant had been working on when the BBC gave the green light to the first series of revival Who, ‘Casanova’. At the time Tennant had been viewed as rather a classical, serious actor having grown out of his teenager apprenticeship doing comedies (some of them, like the asylum radio series ‘Takin’ Over The Asylum’, superb; the rest less so) but this series saw a new side to Tennant’s acting skills as the bawdy, rowdy, sexed up aristocrat taking Paris by storm one party at a time. Once you’ve seen it you instantly see where this story came from and it plays up Tennant’s flirty style, enthusiasm and sex appeal no end and as the easiest ‘source material’ to hand for a lot of writers it set in stone quite a lot of his character as the Doctor too. Set a mere fifty years after the events of this story and using many of the same personnel (Russell liked surrounding himself with people he knew well and taking them on as many projects with him as possible) it feels at times like a dress rehearsal (not least because Tennant did the pickup overdubs back to back with voiceovers for the first series of ‘Dr Who Confidential’). Russell hadn’t known much about 18th century France before getting the commission but had become fascinated while researching the piece and had far too much material to fit into a three-part serial. One of his ideas that he really wanted to use was Madame De Pompadour who was a character in the first draft, before Russell felt he didn’t have enough space to do her justice. The other was the idea of the ‘Turk’, an apparently mechanical being often referred to as the world’s first robot, who was taken to all the best parties and did it’s party trick of beating the guests at chess. It was revealed years later to be a hoax, with a child hidden inside a number of clockwork cogs that looked as if they were working, though technically there’s no reason it couldn’t be a clockwork droid from the future (although this surely begs the question why a chess-playing child who could beat all the adults wasn’t a big draw in and of itself and why they had to pretend clockwork anything was playing chess).This seemed to Russell to be an obvious idea for a Who script combining costume drama with technology. Especially given that Madame De Pompadour was exactly the smart, funny, sassy, sexy, strong heroine role model Russell wanted for the series that children would be interested in. Perhaps not wanting to just end up re-writing ‘Casanova’ again Russell farmed the script out to Steven Moffat to write, figuring that romance and monsters sounded right up his mate’s alley. Moffat, however, was never fond of historicals (this is the only one he ever writes for TV if you discount the moon landing bits of series 7 and the WW2 bits of ‘Doctor, Widow and Wardrobe’) and though he came up with the idea of the clockwork droids to match the story of The Turk his heart wasn’t in the idea and he ended up straying from the brief, figuring that his younger self would get bored at a pure romance story and that he’d better bung a spaceship in for good measure.

 Instead his sources were two actually rather similar books published half a century apart: ‘Tom’s Midnight Garden’ which had a big hit in the 1950s with it’s tale of a girl who plays with a boy on holiday with his relatives who never seems to grow old, before turning out to – spoilers – be the old lady he’s been staying with and Audrey Niffenhogger’s superlative novel ‘The Time Traveller’s Wife’ (published just before the revival, in 2003) where a little girl meets her future husband who already knows him and falls in love, while worrying about where he might be at any one moment. This is a story so influential on Moffat’s ‘plots told in the wrong order’ way of thinking’ that he’ll end up producing his own version of the book for TV in 2022 (an under-rated series with much promise hampered by the lack of chemistry between the two leads, the expectation of a second series that saw Moffat muck around with the ending of the book to keep things going a bit too long and the ridiculous wig worn by the male lead to signify his different ages). There are two big differences between the source material and ‘Girl In the Fireplace’ though. One is that both parties are innocents to what’s going on, the Doctor as clueless as Madame Reinette for most of the episode (and arguably past it, given he doesn’t have the final establishing shot of the spaceship the viewers do) without either side trying to lead the other. The second is that, far from being the passive 18th century female sat around waiting for life to catch up with her Madame De Pompadour is an equal partner, certainly far more than Rose ever was, being the one person to take the opportunity of the Doctor’s occasional ‘mind info dump’ technique to walk through the ‘door’ in his mind and find out about his life. You suspect, had they got together properly and escaped to another age, she’d have been the one wearing the trousers whatever gender the Doctor happened to be at the time. There’s another source much closer to home too: the 4th Doctor story ‘Warrior’s Gate’ which is like a tripper more unhinged version of this story with robots, smashed mirrors and time running at different speeds either side of it, but this one has a romance to hold the parts together and isn’t quite as, well mad.

 How we end up here is the most convoluted DW plot twist of them all on paper but it somehow works on screen: the Tardis has landed on a 51st century spaceship being controlled by clockwork robots programmed to prepare their ship and damaged in an ion storm; given that its been named ‘The SS Pompadour’ by a future Earthling who clearly knows their history the robots logically conclude that they need Madame De Pompadour’s actual brain to make it properly work again. Frankly, Queens Victoria and Elizabeth got lucky given the amount of transport that’s been named after them down the years. Time is running at different speeds so to Madame De Pompadour a curious Doctor appears to flit in and out of her life for decades at a time. Aside from obvious exceptions, like ‘The Ark’ (where the Tardis lands in the same place 200 years apart) and ‘Day Of The Daleks’ (where a bunch of time-travelling guerrillas try to change the world at the point where it all went ‘wrong’, only to accidentally cause their misery instead) no old Dr Who story had ever played about with time in quite this way, as if it was a main character: usually time in Dr Who ran from A to B to C, occasionally C to B to A, whatever timezone we happened to be in. For this story, though, time is taking place in two separate alphabets and in the seconds it takes for the Dr to say his ABCs Madame Pompadour has aged in decades. The only contact between the two is a fireplace – it is a genuine matter of record that Madame De Pompadour had a revolving fireplace in her childhood bedroom, allegedly a secret passageway for love trysts by adults in court; it was a very Dr Whoy starting place for the script and doubles as a metaphor: back in the 19th century people had as much sex as the people on ‘Love Island’ today if not more, but the closest they came to talking about it in public was the use of extended metaphors like fires for their growing feelings (just as people in the 21st century have a lot of sex and gossip about it in private while TV shows often show it graphically but still has to be careful what they say – cleverly this script has Rose pick up on the idea that old Pompydo is ‘basically a Camilla’ and that tells you everything you need to know; to show you how close to time this was Charles had only just married her and made her Queen the year before on the week ‘The Unquiet Dead’ went to air. A tale of opportunistic creatures who breath a lot of hot air and maintain the living at the point of death it seemed a rather uncomfortable coincidence at the time. Incidentally William has a ‘Rose’ of his own to have affairs with these days). The scene wher the Doctor remotely turns off the fire, because it isn’t needed anymore, says more than a long speech ever could about his loss and grief. The fact that having the Doctor turn up like magic, Reinette referring to him as her ‘imaginary friend’ and being not unlike Father Christmas, a mysterious stranger delivering goodwill via chimney across the years who never ages, is a lucky bonus (William Hartnell, for one, always said the Doctor was Santa Claus crossed with The Wizard of Oz). 

The Doctor and Pompy don’t get much of a chance to chat (they only talk half a dozen times before – spoilers – she snuffs it) and theirs is a more chaste relationship than you’re probably expecting from the legends (for instance that wine goblet the Doctor has during his scene rescuing Rose and Mickey? Traditionally in French slang that’s a ‘Pompadour’ – a cup that was allegedly based on the exact dimensions of Reinette’s breasts, not that they can mention that on a teatime show for families. So instead we get a second Moffat script in a row that uses dancing as a euphemism for sex and an un-made bed in the background of one scene, though for all we know the Doctor was just a bit tired after riding a horse through a mirror…long story). A cut scene makes this implicit as a 19-year-old Reinette says there’s no way she can be left alone with a strange man given her status so she must be dreaming, ‘My education has been entirely within the confines of a convent – my dreams, in consequence, have not’. In real life, though, Pompadour was probably colder and more calculating than she is here – or at least that’s how the men she knew wrote about her), but it ‘feels’ real despite the short time they have together – real enough for us to think that the Doctor really will abandon Rose for her in order to take the ‘slow path’ away from time travel. She is genuinely taken by the Doctor’s boyish charm and experienced authority while he in turn is piqued by her nobility and morals in an age of debauchery and sin (despite being the mistress of Louis XV). They’re both victims of an awful mistake, good people trying to do the right thing and similar in so many ways, people who hold power that makes ordinary people jealous but who are at heart(s) deeply lonely and searching for the sort of connection they can’t have in their strange, weird lives. Had this been any other era it would have seemed ‘morally wrong’, but this is an era of concubines all sharing the time of the important people in power and while we get lots of lines about Pompy being Louis’ (no not the orang-utang in ‘The Jungle Book’, the King stupid!)’s ‘favourite’ you get the feeling he wouldn’t be that heartbroken if he finds out she has another lover (as it happens he wasn’t that keen on having mistresses at all but who felt he had to have somebody around to keep up appearances or people would talk: this is an age when Kings had to have mistresses to boast about their virility and prove to their kingdom they could produce lots of heirs in case they ever ended up at war – Louis might just have been the only European King of the past 300 years emotionally faithful to his Queen. 

Reinette was a hit not just for her looks but for her intelligence, because her family had paid for an extended costly education at a day when girls having lessons beyond housework was unusual). Daft and unlikely as it may be, brief as it is out of necessity to fit so many plot elements in, weird as it seemed at the time when the Doctor had only ever had one rather chaste kiss (in ‘The TV Movie) and had now been kissed three times in six stories, it ‘feels’ real and the chemistry between them is palpable (there’s a theory that each successive regeneration is the Doctor becoming the person his dying self wishes he/she had been: this might be why the 10th Doctor is suddenly sex-mad after the defensive and cold 9th Doctor ends his life effectively kissing Rose as a means of saving her life and ending his in ‘Parting Of The Ways’). The Doctor’s decision to stay in Madame De Pompadour’s world, going to the lengths of riding a horse through the timelocked walls of the spaceship, is one of the hardest dilemmas this Dr has to face (no other Doctor would ever risk his or her liberty purely for love – Dr 10’s shock that he ‘has to get a job’ in this world is one of the story’s best lines, beaten by his adoption of the horse, named Arthur, that he treats like every other companion and who he has to tell not to wonder off the way he always does: a cut scene had him rescue the horse from a cruel master who thrashes him. Oh and according to the old tradition – and as pointed out in the excellent ‘About Time’ guidebooks which dedicates a whole essay to it- Arthur has to be counted as a full companion now he travelled with the Doctor through time, which used to be the old measure of who counted and who didn’t. Which admittedly was a bit of a fudge to accommodate Katarina and Sara Kingdom from ‘The Dalek’s Masterplan’ rather than an exact science: after all, that would mean Liz Shaw doesn’t count as a companion at all). Far from hooking up with a brazen hussie, the Doctor’s always been about fitting into other cultures so he sees Reinette for who she is not what she represents - it’s only Rose, with her very 2006 moral outlook, who finds the whole idea of futile lovers shocking (and this from someone whose still keeping Mickey hanging around). 

 All of which is a bit of a slap in the face for Rose who, for the second episode in a row, is confronted by the awful realisation that while she might be special she isn’t the Dr’s one and only. Something Mickey understands only too well. In other words what we get isn’t a love triangle so much as a love square (typical, DW doesn’t do romances for most of its history and then the Dr’s got two on the go at once; no wonder the 10th Dr gets a reputation for broken hearts).I hate to say it but the Dr’s relationship with Madame P makes a lot more sense than the Dr falling for a 19 year old shopgirl, however similarly kind and courageous Rose might be (the Doctor clearly has a thing for blondes). That’s the one place where this story messes up badly I think: Rose is traumatised by the events of ‘School Reunion’ and all but ready to storm off after meeting Sarah Jane and yet rather than get mad with the Doctor or insanely jealous of her rival instead she rather meekly helps Pompadour out with explanations and sits around waiting for the Doctor. It just doesn’t fit what we know of her (Rose’s biggest fault is the way she manipulates the people around her whenever she wants to feel needed – usually Mickey). Had this been an actual Russell script you sense that’s where all the drama would have come from, with things told more from Rose’s point of view, but Moffat is always cheekily poking fun at his friend’s happy couples and splitting them up: across his four years as a guest writer he pairs Rose up with Captain Jack (‘The Empty Child’) and gives Donna a simulated family that means she forgets all about her ‘best friend’ (by contrast the Doctor and Martha never look more like a couple than during their Blink-and-you-miss-it scenes in ‘Blink’, which isn’t how Russell thought of them at all). It’s a pity, too, that during Mickey’s one and only bona fide trip in the Tardis that isn’t the following story about him leaving (‘Rise Of the Cybermen’) he barely gets a word in edgeways. You would think, too, that he’d be able to aim a few digs in about Rose effectively doing exactly the same thing and friend-zoning him after the Doctor came along: instead he’s the sensitive soul at the end who realises the pain the Doctor’s just been through and distracts Rose so he can have time alone, apparently knowing him better than she does. His reaction is slightly ‘wrong’ too – till now he’s been deeply protective of Rose even after the Doctor’s swept her off her feet, but his comments here are more ‘wahey up the lads’ than concerned for her welfare. It’s a wonder he doesn’t ask for the fireplace addresses of Louis’ other mistresses. As a result the scenes with the two of them fall a bit flat, bar the one great one where the Doctor turns up to rescue them, apparently drunk on banana daquaris. 

 Though they actually end up having very little screentime the robots are a clever addition to the Dr Who universe: having them be powered by clockwork is clever in that it was the big obsession of the 18th century (with some amazing clockwork robots that seem impressive now never mind 300 odd years ago). This is the first – and arguably best – time Moffat does the old ‘childhood phobias of things under the bed’ trick and it all helps add to a very rounded, clever script that links the different scenes up in the different eras well (such as the Doctor asking Reinette where the ticking is coming from if her clock is broken, then scrambling their circuits with wine-oil coming back from a party). Also, this is a story where the ‘baddy’ to all intents and purposes, is time itself with the speed at which Reinette is aging every time the Doctor is on the other side of the time portal: the use of clockwork constantly ricking away really adds to the feeling of time closing in and ticking down relentlessly. The assembly of whirring cogs really is ‘beautiful’ as the Doctor succinctly puts it, though I always found the period wigs a bit silly: it’s not like the robot cares about blending in or even necessarily understands that its gone back in time (it could have been worse: Moffat’s scripts said that the robots would be a walking wig, but this was changed by producer Phil Collinson, officially on the understanding that it would make shooting from lots of cameras difficult and, un-officially, because it looked silly and too much like ‘Cousin It’ the hairball from ‘The Addams Family’).

 It’s the Doctor, though, who shines like never before: Tennant had a great speech in his first story and was a lot of fun in his next three but here is where he gets to do heavy emotions and drama for the first time and he’s superb. While many writers for this second series, Russell included at first, just make the 10th Doctor a chattier less ‘emo’ version of the 9th Doctor that talks a bit quicker Moffat is the first to really breathe life into this new creation and for my money is the best writer for Dr 10, even if his madly sexed up vulnerable version isn’t quite the way the other writers see him. Despite this story being so close to ‘Casanova’ here the 20th Doctor isn’t the easy breeze of that story but a storm trying to regain his balance and always looking for someone or something to save him from himself. There’s a pain behind the eyes, a contradiction between what he says and how he clearly feels that makes him oddly human, perhaps more (in Moffat’s hands) than all the other Doctors. What you notice now, after seeing Tennant as the touchy-feely Doctor 15, is how closed off the 9th and 10th Doctors both were. He just sulks here and doesn’t cry, doesn’t talk it out after grief, he just tells Rose he’s alright when even Mickey can see that he isn’t but knows there’s no point in talking to him in this mood. The tearful ending when the Doctor is (spoilers) too late and arrives on the day of Pompadour’s funeral (the King watching from a window because it would have been against protocol to attend if you’re wondering), where Tennant barely says a word and Louis does all the talking, is heartbreaking and all the more so for what came before it. Tennant was clearly having great fun returning to his Casanova roots, rattling off Russell T’s wry words at a million miles an hour and surrounding himself with women in a series that generally had him brushing shoulders with men; not least because he was dating actress Sophia Myles at the time - just as with ‘The Doctor’s Daughter’ where he stars across his actual wife-to-be Georgia Moffat you can see the chemistry they have from space; she was already a friend of Tennant after working on a 2002 episode of ‘Foyle’s War’ together and they were an item before the end of rehearsals. Though maybe tenant had a rival? The script gives Madame Du Pompadour quite the stage direction, describing her as ‘knock a hole in the wall gorgeous, with cleavage that men could start a war over’. 

 The story leaps forward at such a pace that you don’t have time to pause and enjoy the scenery, which is a shame because it’s all rather lavish. The first childhood bedroom is in Tredegar House, a genuine 17th century mansion and a regular Who location, the palace grounds are in Dyffryn Gardens, Glamnorgan, that’s Culverhouse Cross in Cardiff standing in for Versailles and the ballroom is Ragley Hall in Warwickshire.Rather than create the costly dress madame Du Pompadour is wearing in that scene it’s actually Helen Mirren’s dress in the film ‘The Madness Of King George’ and recycled for ‘The Aristocats’ (the live action one, not the feline Disney version!) Like most Who historicals, though, it really feels as if you’ve travelled back in time and are watching the real thing, with an impressive and quite dazzling array of pomp and colour. You can really tell Moffat did his research (and if you’re wondering August 1727 ‘was a bit rubbish’ because of a filed harvest that year that led to a lot of people in Versailles going hungry, albeit not in Reinette’s social class). On the other side of the time portal, admittedly we’ve had better and more interesting spaceships in Dr Who before and since, but then the budget had to give somewhere (a lot of it went on the stunt with the horse which was nearly dropped for cost several times: Ragley Hall had a very expensive period tile floor and understandably didn’t want a whacking great horse breaking out of a mirror onto it while they didn’t want to risk Tennant’s neck in the stunt so they filmed the scene in four bits and stuck it together with chromakey: the Doctor (on a mock rocking horse contraption), the horse itself, the breaking mirror and the ballroom: this is, I believe, the most disparate elements combined in one scene to date). It still doesn’t look quite right despite all the expense, but that’s more the decision to show the scene in slow-mo (the crew clearly figuring that after spending so much money on it we might as well linger on it): this scene ought to have been explosive and violent, instead of looking like an action replay. 

 Mostly the script is every bit as lavish, barely wasting a word as it hurtles along at high speed and nailing every single one of its emotional plot beats so that everything feels natural even in a plot gabbling along at high speed. Typically for Moffat there are quotable lines galore: ‘You and I both know Rose that the Doctor is worth the monsters’ ‘You’re not keeping the horse – but I let you keep Mickey!’ and Reinette’s speech as she peers into the Doctor’s mind and sees him not as the lord of time and oncoming storm Rose has just described but a ‘lonely little boy’. There’s just one line that doesn’t fit: The King’s dismissive ‘she always wished you’d visit her again – but you know how women are’ (sexist, as the times surely were, but for all the wrong reasons: Reinette was far less emotional than Louis was and he has no idea of the Doctor’s history to expect him to know about women beyond his own. This has till now been an impressively feminist script for the subject matter – it seems odd Moffat lets it all fall in one throwaway line that really didn’t need to be there). That shouldn’t spoil things though; even by Moffat standards it’s very clever, intricately mirroring multiple scenes and with threads running through them all, a very satisfyingly rounded piece of writing. There’s just one scene that really doesn’t work: the one where the Doctor follows Madame Du Pompadour to her world and spies on her while she talks to her friend Katherine. It slows up the action for one thing, is the one scene that feels stalkerish with the Doctor keeping an eye on reineete without her consent (some fans have seen this episode as the Doctor ‘grooming’ madame De Popadour’ from a child but that’s clearly nonsense: she starts flirting with him, but only when she’s nineteen – though this scene in the palace gardens does feel a tad uncomfortable) and because while it’s just about feasible Madame de Pompadour would have a friend with dark skin (Angel Coulby, Guinevere in the excellent ‘Merlin’, in her first proper TV role) given that France was more classist than racist in the 1800s, it was so unusual there’s no way it wouldn’t have been written down by someone in court. The scene adds nothing and it seems a real head-scratcher why it’s there at all. 

Instead I wish they’d used another real life story from the history books: when she was born Reinette was far from a natural figure to be the King’s mistress, but a fortune-teller told her, aged nine, that one day she would marry the King – she left him some money in her will, saying she’d never forgotten it (so she’s used to the idea of people seeing through time already; how fun would it have been if they’d had a glimpse of the Doctor and spaceship too). I wish there were other scenes too with more detail for King Louis (Ben Turner is too good an actor to waste on just two scenes – he knew Sophia well after being at sixth form college together and they share a lot of chemistry too), and his own convoluted, complicated relationship with his mistresses, or the Queen (who actually liked Reinette and considered her the best of her husband’s ‘loose women’ or the fascinating characters at court in this era (Voltaire is mentioned but not seen), her patronage of France’s first encyclopaedia, or that we’d seen her interest in the arts which, with Louis’ backing, she sponsored at an age when Royalty just didn’t do that sort of thing She’s a truly fascinating character it would have taken a full series to do justice, but Moffat only gets to hint at half of that here: you come away from this episode with the sense that she was an extraordinary woman for standing up to the King and the Doctor, not for what good she did on her own independently. It’s a shame the Turk isn’t here in the script (for the story that might have been have listen to possibly the best Big Finish ‘Blake’s 7’ story ‘The Turing Test’, in which the Turk turns out to be Avon!) You also get the sense that when the Doctor’s not there Reinette is a melancholic loner, hiding her triste with the King in secret – this couldn’t be far from the truth according to the history books, where everyone wanted to be her friends, for reasons noble or otherwise. There’s some confusion over the ending too: some fans have tried to explain it to me as sort of timey wimey idea but honestly I don’t see why the Doctor couldn’t simply pilot the Tardis back to a part of Reinette’s life when he wasn’t there – he could simply hide in a cupboard when he knew he was coming so as not to disrupt the timelines. 

 This is, incidentally, Dr Who’s fourth and to date final trip to France: other episodes have involved the Massacre of the Hugenots, The French Revolution and the Jagaroth invasion of Paris, so this is a rare story where France actually seems like a place you want to visit. Which leads to the other problem with this story: this is an age that, had the Doctor landed here in the 1830s in any other context, he’d have hated and had it been on any other planet but Earth he’d have tried to overthrow this era, full of pompous pontificating people in wigs lording it about while their people starve; Marie Antoinette and her ‘let them eat cake’ line is only a fraction after this one and you’d think the Dr would have made some reference to all the waste going on in this society somewhere in between all that snogging. It is, of all the time periods the Doctor visits, the only one where he isn’t in immediate grave danger he would have hated and felt lost in: there’s no room for his open-hearted multicultural views here. Plus he’d have hated having to wear a wig at court and messing his hair up. There’s a clever scene where the Doctor starts to think that maybe his decision to join Reinette wasn’t the greatest idea he ever had and wondering how he’s going to get money; I just wish there was a scene after this where he discovers just how much he hates this era (albeit not Reinette). The timing between the Doctor’s side of the fireplace and Reinette’s also seems to vary depending on the big emotional plot beats the script needs: for instance there’s no way seven years have passed in the few seconds it takes him to gleefully run through the restored fireplace and prepare to go back again (plus this is the Doctor: he clearly knows that he’s only going to get seven years with her before she dies). Her decision to have the fireplace moved to court also seems a tad neat: this didn’t happen in real life and seems more a desperate ‘get out of jail’ free card. 

Still, compared to a lot of the ‘Davies et machina’ endings in series two it’s positively a work of art. Still, that’s all small fry compared to one of the very best stories of the new series, one that has all the usual Moffat trademarks of being clever and full of twists you don’t see coming, but also has a really big heart and what is still, for my money, the best and most believable romance in all of Dr Who (though Amy and Rory come close it has to be said). In many ways it’s the best of both worlds: it’s firmly in the Davies era of big emotions and grand gestures but it’s also the first real sign of the intellect and playfulness of the Moffat era to come, when people are more conundrums to solve and plot elements to move into place than people. You can see a lot of Amy to come in Reinette: she’s feisty, argumentative, yet soft and spends a good deal of this story waiting for the Doctor, staring out the window in just the same way as Amy’s younger self. There’s a feeling of doom, of tragedy of warped destiny here in comparison to Russell’s scripts which are all about good people doing good things to make things better for everyone – in Moffat’s scripts good people are prisoners as much as the bad ones (‘Empty Child’ is a special case, Moffat writing to Davies’ style much more, albeit with more scares). Moffat never writes as well under his own steam as showrunner as he does under Russell: all that extra pressure is distracting and writing one script a year is very different to writing four and editing another nine. Mostly, though, that’s because the two’s weaknesses cancel each other out: Davies’ characters and ideas offer a warmth Moffat sometimes lacks on his own (with a few key exceptions, most of them involving Amy and Rory) whilst without a Moffat script to push his characters to their limits Davies’ creations can sometimes get a bit too cosy. What should on paper be another ‘grating’ story about a timeloop and robots ends up being well lit, a story that’s on fire throughout and where practically every scene is a winner, with more character development for the Dr within 50minutes than whole series arcs. This episode deservedly won the coveted HUGO scifi award (won by such luminaries as Isaac Asimov and Arthur C Clarke - Jefferson Starship once got a nomination too for their record ‘Blows Against The Empire’ - a year after ‘The Empty Child’ and a year before ‘Blink’ won the same award) – and you can see why this story did so well: its somehow very fitting to the 18th century timeline and to the 2006 era it was made in all at once (when Niffenhogger inspired many timetrack jumping dramas like this one but none anywhere near as good). The result is a triumph, easily the best story of the sometimes patchy second season and really roved Steven Moffat’s status as the second, maybe even best, writer on the Who team. 

 POSITIVES +It’s easy to see why David Tennant fell for Sophia Myles: she handles what’s actually a horrifically tricky part for any actresses with ease and bags of charm. A lesser actress could have made this mistress a blonde bimbo, a weak plaything of all the men around her or a sexed-up version of Rose (that’s pretty much how the women in Casanova are portrayed after all and probably more what Russell had in mind). Actually the similarities between the two women in the Doctor’s life (at least in this story – there are so many more to come!) are striking: Reinette’s mother was considered coarse by the standards of the day and very of her time, with a ‘dubious past’ that makes Jackie look classy, but Pompadour lost a lot of that through her desperate drive to do better. She caught the King’s eye when she – deliberately – bought an estate near where he used to hunt and wore her best dresses when she knew he’d be near; in return he sent her a gift of venison and an invitation to court – not the most obvious chatup line but in 19th century that was practically a marriage proposal. France Instead she has a quiet dignity and class and its clear she ends up as Louis’ mistress out of ambition to better her family’s standing rather than her own. . She even gets to lecture the Dr at one part and her remarks clearly sting, far more than Rose’s barbs do: despite her obvious lust for the Doctor she never loses her sense of propriety and decorum and her corsets remain tight right to the end. Admittedly Sophia looks nothing like the portraits of the ‘real’ Pompadour but for once that doesn’t matter: she’s so obviously the right person for this part that the artists must have just got that ‘wrong’ or something.. She was the only person considered for the role: Moffat wrote the language with her in mind given that one of his sons was obsessed with the ‘Thunderbirds’ live action film (in which Sophia played Lady Penelope’) and seeing the character as much the same, posh yet flirty. 

 NEGATIVES - The Doctor needs to prove to Pompy very quickly that he really is a timelord who walks in eternity. The plot doesn’t give him room to demonstrate this the way he usually would so instead, out of nowhere, he suddenly develops the ability to clutch someone’s forehead and send all sorts of random memories into their skulls. Though not the worst example of this in the series it is the first and comes out of nowhere; what’s more we’re only four stories after the ‘Bad Wolf’ arc when Rose said that having lots of knowledge in her head was killing her, so why the Doctor suddenly thinks it’s safe to fill up someone’s head that doesn’t have the advance knowledge of technology and space-time travel Rose does is a mystery (not quite the same I know but similar enough to make him pause surely; Pompadour’s fine, as it happens, which is lucky – especially given how much it would have changed history if she’d blown a gasket). And no, telling us ‘he doesn’t make a habit’ of this technique isn’t fooling anyone: just think how many lives would have been saved in, say, ‘Web Of Fear’ or ‘Caves Of Androzani’ if he’d gone ‘oi I’m the Doctor and you shouldn’t lock me up just yet, we’re all in deadly danger’ and, say, mind-melded with Sharak Jek or the people in charge of the London Underground. 

BEST QUOTE: ‘It is customary, I think, to have an imaginary friend only with one’s have a childhood, you are to be congratulated on your persistence’. 

 PREQUELS/SEQUELS: Like the rest of series two ‘Fireplace’ got its own minute-long prequel known as a ‘Tardisode’ available as a webcast or as a mobile download (service speed and cost notwithstanding!), this one written by Gareth Roberts. A crashing ship is damaged by an ion storm – the crew look relieved that they have their androids there to help them. Unluckily for them the ship’s storm have damaged the ship’s computers and it’s the clockwork droids from the story. Suddenly they feel even more cut up about things! A blurry close-up of a broken clock and a fireplace had us all asking ‘what the?’ for a week (not least because the Radio Times preview the week before had a spelling mistake of ‘clockwork ‘druids’, which is quite a different plot) before seeing the episode proper at which we all went ‘aha!’ ‘Pompadour’ is one of the shorter ‘lockdown’ extras (this week renamed ‘Clockdown’ quite brilliantly!), which is a shame because Sophia Myles gets back into character better than most. We don’t see her – the visuals are real shots of her ancestral home and snippets from the broadcast episode – but that allows Moffat to create one of his classic twists (feel free to look away now for a big spoiler!) It turns out that we’re not listening to Madame De Pompadour the person but Madame De Pompadour the spaceship, vainly waiting ‘abandoned in infinite silence’ for someone to set them free. I’d never considered the parallels between the two characters before: short as it is this is such a great use of the ‘lockdown’ extension for throwing new light on an old friend. 

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