The Girl in the Fireplace

Chapter The 194th, which features tragic star-crossed, and time-portal-crossed, lovers

Plot:

The Doctor, Rose and Mickey arrive on a spaceship in the 51st century; there's no sign of the crew, and the engines are running full pelt even though the ship is not moving. This is because they are powering various portals opened across the ship that lead to other times and places, space-time events along one specific individual's life; the person being Madame De Pompadour. The Doctor first enters her life when she is a young girl nicknamed Reinette via a revolving fireplace into her bedroom. A creepy clockwork robot is hiding under her bed, but the Doctor sees it off. After checking in with his travelling companions on the ship, the Doctor returns via the fireplace but finds that many years have passed for Reinette; she leaves for a pressing engagement but not until she's given the Doctor a big snog, and he works out that she is the famous historical personage, one day to become mistress of French King Louis XV. Underneath their masks, the clockwork figures that are stalking Reinette, and making life difficult for the TARDIS team too, are the ship's complement of wind-up droids. Their circuits a bit scrambled, they have repaired the ship using the only components to hand: the body parts of the crew who the droids have slaughtered previously.

The droids are wanting only one more part: the command circuit, i.e. the brain of Madame De Pompadour. Why her? The Doctor can't work it out, but he does know the droids are trying to find her when she's 37 years old as that's the same age as the ship. The droids disable all the portals to prevent the Doctor following, and attack the palace at Versailles when Reinette has reached the right age. The Doctor breaks in by crashing through the portal - a mirror - on a horse that had previously wandered onto the ship, and saves everyone. He's now stranded in the 18th century with no way back. Reinette shows him the original fireplace through which he first came into her life; she has had it transported to the palace years before, breaking its link with the ship meaning it was not disabled when the others were. The Doctor reactivates it. Through all their interactions, the Doctor and Reinette have developed some kind of mutual attraction, and the Doctor invites her to travel with him. Telling her to pack a bag, he - like an idiot - pops back to the ship. When he returns though, the obvious has happened: time has passed again and Reinette has died. He reads a letter she left him and is heartbroken. Leaving with his two 21st century friends, he misses that the name of the spaceship was the SS. Madame De Pompadour, explaining why the droids were focussed on her.

Context:

I watched this from the DVD on a Sunday afternoon with all the kids (boys aged 14 and 11, girl aged 9), with the Better Half coming in for brief stretches too. It's rare that everyone is present for a Doctor Who story any more, but this one has David Tennant who is usually a draw. It was generally a crowd-pleasing episode, with mostly hushed watching without comment throughout (always a good sign). The  scare near the beginning with the clockwork droid's arm snatching at the Doctor from under the bed made everyone - even the cynical teenager - jump. Everyone saw the sad ending coming; the youngest said "I think he waited too long - she's died" in advance of the scene that confirms this indeed to be the case. I believe the telegraphing is intended by the script, though: Reinette's death is presented as an inevitability to the audience, if not the Doctor.

First Time Round:

I first saw this the day after it was initially shown on BBC1 in May 2006. It was the first time since the series had returned the previous year that I had elected to miss the live broadcast of a new Doctor Who episode. I'd missed The End of the World, second episode of Christopher Eccleston's 2005 series, go out, but that was due to a holiday that was booked before the schedule had been published, and which I couldn't get out of (trust me, I tried). When The Girl in The Fireplace went out, I was having a nice meal in a London Pizza Express with the Better Half and another friend. The VCR (remember them?) was set to record, and dutifully did so. Back at home in our old place in Hove, the Better Half and I caught up with the taped episode the following morning. Maybe this was an early sign of the novelty of the newly returned series wearing off just a little bit, but I certainly watched live for the rest of the 2006 episodes; time-shifting only became more usual once we started to have young children to deal with (our first was "in the oven" and fairly well-done by the time of this Tennant episode; he was born between Fear Her and Army of Ghosts).

Reaction:

The Girl in the Fireplace brings together a lot of writer Steven Moffat's Doctor Who script preoccupations, many of them appearing for the first time: the Doctor meeting someone during their childhood then zipping forward in time to meet them when grown up and seeing his inadvertent impact, antagonists that appear to be evil but are just malfunctioning technology, visualisations of childhood nightmares including hands shooting out from under a child's bed, a temporally-twisted romance... They are still fresh here, and work so well that Moffat would revisit each of them a good few times in his subsequent years writing for and then running the show. The biggest selling point of the story is the fusion of all these points into an original and intriguing structure. Showrunner of the time Russell T Davies had given Moffat Madame Du Pompadour as a subject after learning a lot about her when researching Casanova; instead of doing the usual "celebrity historical" approach, Moffat instead creates an intricate construction linking together all these ideas and bridging the two contrasting locales of grimy futuristic spaceship and 18th century splendour; all that, plus memorable monsters and some great comic lines and moments.

With all that going on in 45 minutes, there isn't much room to go into anything about Pompadour's life or accomplishments (patron of the arts, patron of the philosophers of the enlightenment, etc. etc.) so Moffat resorts to giving David Tennant a big speech info-dumping some of that background in a few seconds flat, and the actor seems to find it difficult to make it sound real, which isn't surprising. It is one of a couple of small moments where Tennant overplays slightly, which are the only minor blemishes on an otherwise excellent production. Another big one is Tennant's drunk acting when he berates the clockwork droids for being "thickity thick thick". It's just the set up for a gag where, having revealed that the drunk act was a bit of misdirection so he could nobble the droids, they un-nobble themselves and he says "Ooh, that was a bit clever". Alas, the punchline is a bit too thrown away, so the set-up looks like what it is - someone play-acting as drunk unconvincingly and doing sub-Blackadder dialogue (Tennant could of course counter that it's the Doctor that's acting drunk unconvincingly not him). Elsewhere, though, he shines, particularly with the grandstanding moments that Moffat favours: crashing through the mirror on horseback and then winking; answering the question "What do monsters have nightmares about?" with a cocky "Me".

Tennant also excels at the romance scenes', but he's helped by a magnificent performance opposite him by Sophia Myles as the adult Reinette. The script would succeed or fail as a story based on the casting of Madame De Pompadour, and it was luckily perfect. The lack of detail of her famous life is more than made up for by the scenes later on of Myles turning the tables on the Doctor during the mind meld he does on her (not something he'd been known to do before this story), and when she breaks through from her world into the spaceship, ceasing to be a passive observed part of history and literally stepping into a new world putting her on equal time-spanning footing with the Doctor. Performance-wise, this story boils down to a succession of two-hander scenes between the Doctor and Reinette, and nobody else gets much of a look in. King Louis and Rose get one scene each to do a little more than feed lines and exposition, that's about it. Angel Coulby is wasted in a cameo. As a whole, it works, though.

Surrounding these scenes are particularly fine production values and beautiful touches: great music, great dialogue ("Must be a spatio-temporal hyperlink." / "What's that?" / "No idea; just made it up - didn't want to say magic door."). The challenge Moffat set of depicting the Doctor on horseback breaking through the mirror is a tough one (and he's on record as having fought for it when it was threatened with being cut), but the production crew rises to the challenge and creates a great moment for the story. The design is great too: the clockwork droids are a particularly fine creation, the look of them, both with the scary masks and without, is excellent, the ticking noise they make, how they move. Obviously, they have a couple of design flaws. Presumably, when they were programmed, they were instructed to continually wind each other up before they powered down, but nobody thought to tell them not to kill humans to use for parts. One would think it would be fundamental: don't slaughter humans and harvest their organs.

Connectivity: 

Both The Girl in the Fireplace and Dragonfire include characters searching for someone to decapitate as they need to retrieve something from inside their head; both stories end with a character having their plans thwarted by time, followed by an emotional goodbye.

Deeper Thoughts:

Wibbly-wobbly twisty-wisty. One of my favourite authors Raymond Carver wrote in Fires, a book of his essays and short pieces "I hate tricks. At the first sign of a trick or gimmick in a piece of fiction, a cheap trick or even an elaborate trick, I tend to look for cover", and added "Writers don't need tricks or gimmicks or even necessarily need to be the smartest fellows on the block. At the risk of appearing foolish, a writer sometimes needs to be able to just stand and gape at this or that thing - a sunset or an old shoe - in absolute and simple amazement." It probably doesn't need to be said that Carver and Steven Moffat come from opposing sensibilities. I have, though, had just as much pleasure from Moffat's works as I have from Carver's. Moffat does give the impression of striving to be the smartest fellow on the block, and he loves his tricks: non-chronological narratives, puzzle-box story structures, twists. The Girl in the Fireplace withholds until the very last shot a key piece of information - look away now if you want to remain unspoilered - the name of the spaceship on which the Doctor and friends have landed. Interestingly, this information is only revealed to the viewers, and the TARDIS team never find it out. This is very rare; in a show where the central character is supposed to be super-intelligent, he or she usually is a few steps ahead of us mere mortals in the audience.

Another person with possibly contentious views on story is Robert McKee. I attended this famous / infamous screenwriting guru's seminar in London in early 2000, and he outlined in a Q&A his feelings on good versus bad twists. He compared two films that had come out relatively recently at that time, Fight Club and The Sixth Sense. He felt the former's twist was better than the latter. I'm not going to reveal what either of said twists are, just in case anyone reading this hasn't seen them yet; I'm still smarting from reading DVD reviews of each of these films in a single issue of Empire magazine which blew both films' surprises for this unsuspecting reader before he got a chance to see either of them. The Sixth Sense's twist, according to McKee, doesn't change anything about the narrative in terms of characters' values or emotions. It's just a piece of information that's been withheld until a late moment, and - in his opinion - was more about the filmmakers showing the audience how clever they had been in concealing it. In contrast, the twist in Fight Club - which arguably a different set of filmmakers have teased in just as clever-clever a way - does make a significant change to the emotions and values of the characters. On thinking about this, it seemed to me that storytelling is ultimately all about choosing the right moment for the reveal. Fight Club's key scene happens with about half an hour of running time left, i.e. the point in which the narrative is propelled into the final act. The Sixth's Sense's shock revelation comes right at the very end - it's too late for it to have much impact on the story beyond a resolution scene.

The same is true of the final shot reveal from The Girl in the Fireplace. It would make no difference to the emotion or values that change for the characters in the course of the story if the name of the ship was shown in the very first scene rather than the last. Maybe there's a case for saying it has thematic resonance: there are things we'll never be certain about in this universe, just like the Doctor will never be certain about what would have happened had he managed to get back to Reinette in time. It's a bit of a reach, and I don't buy it: I just think Moffat wanted an extra little sting to keep people guessing right to the end. This isn't necessarily that negative a thing; McKee described The Sixth Sense style ending as a "Mindfuck", but then added that it was still a fuck and so had to be somewhat enjoyable. But if the revealed information is not going to lead anywhere, but is instead only going to send audience minds racing backwards analysing everything they've watched up to that point, it's not as effective ultimately. McKee is probably being a little unfair to The Sixth Sense, as its final scene does bring some closure for one character, unlike The Girl in The Fireplace. Besides being somewhat unlikely (the Doctor manages to find out the ship's age, would he really have found no reference to its name too?), the narrative thread is left dangling at the end never to be picked up, even though the story had a loose sequel in Deep Breath many years later.

In long-running episodic television, unlike film, a twist at the very end of a story can be taken forwards in future episodes. The big 'game changer' endings throughout Who's history usually just tee up the very next story or get paid off very soon after that. So, the reveals at the ends of stories like The Tenth Planet, The War Games, The Keeper of Traken, Turn Left, and The Ganger two-parter amongst others lead in to the next broadcast shows, and the arc plots of The Key to Time and Trial of a Timelord seasons, as well as all the more recent new series linking themes, like Bad Wolf and Vote Saxon all the way up to the Timeless Child, pay off in a season's finale. These sort of tricks would no doubt have sent Raymond Carver running for cover. Writing short stories and poems is perhaps not the same as television, and some more leeway should be allowed. I anyway think that Carver's point about writers just gaping at things in amazement is not the best advice. Carver's best work is focussed, incisive and lean, and when he starts looking at the world in wonder he's not at his optimum. I'd say the same is true of Doctor Who; it doesn't often stop too long to dwell on the times and places and strange vistas the TARDIS team visits before the plot kicks in, and whenever it does it gets quite dull quite quickly. With starts as well as ends, and with twists and pay offs wherever they come between those two points, it's best not to keep people waiting more than the absolute minimum.  

In Summary:

A plot that fits together like clockwork.