Day 714: The Girl in the Fireplace

My Mum hates The Girl in the Fireplace with a deep and unbridled passion. Last night we had a wide ranging discussion of her hatred of this story, which seemed to revolve around the fact that she felt that the clockwork droids were underused, she felt that the plot was too complicated and that she has a strong dislike of Arthur, the horse. Now, I'm quite fond of this episode. It's not the best of the series (we'll get to that in about a week or so), nor is it Steven Moffat's best written work or Euros Lyn's best directed work (I have to be honest and say that his best directed work, Children of Earth, is outside the scope of this blog, but it is truly marvellous), but I do rate it highly. So I am forced to start this on the defensive, to defend this story from those that would attack it.

So I should perhaps begin with the plot. It's fairly basic, to be honest. Over the course of 45 minutes, the Doctor, Rose and Mickey land on a spaceship and discover that clockwork droids are attempting to steal the brain of an 18th century French aristocrat, Madame de Pompadour, when she turns a certain age, the age of the spaceship, and steal her brain so that they can repair their spaceship. So the Doctor and co. embark on a wild race to try and find her at that age, to stop the droids from killing her. But that's not the point of the story. The point is instead looking at the Doctor and Madame de Pompadour as they fall in love, but whilst it's over a long period of 30 years for Madame de Pompadour, it is only a couple of hours for the Doctor. It's an interesting commentary on the role that time travel has for the Doctor, where he can meet people and flash forward through their lives, while they are destined to take the slow path and settle down. It means that relationships can flash by in an instant for him, whereas they're eternally long for others. It's quite heartbreaking to realise at the end that the Doctor has missed her death, of natural causes, because of a foolish mistake he made in the heat of the moment. But that's the curse of the Doctor, as he never settles down to take the slow path.

Now, all of that said, I will admit that there are some issues with the plotting of the story. It's clearly structured as a love story, and yet it's completely done and dusted within 45 minutes. It literally feels like one second she's kissing the Doctor, the next, she's in a hearse being led away from Versailles. It means that the full flow of the story doesn't quite work, but that's a small problem in an otherwise excellent story.

Moving on to the clockwork droids, their design is excellent. It's a visually arresting thing to see their masks ripped off to reveal some clockwork beneath them, like examining an antique cuckoo clock. They're creepy as well, their masks looking not quite human, and yet the time period that they're in means that they don't look out of place. And, aside from that, there's a fantastic jump scare in this episode that caused me to give off a very manly scream. So I'm inclined to reject the notion that they're not effective as monsters, and instead I should say that I think they work rather well.

And as for the horse, it's completely worth it for the exchange

"What's a horse doing on a spaceship?"

"Mickey, what's pre-revolutionary France doing on a spaceship? Try to get some perspective!".

So, in my opinion, I think that The Girl in the Fireplace is an amazing episode of Doctor Who, and I look forward to watching it again. Unfortunately though, I know that it will never be that way for my mother, who instead has a bizzare love of The Lazarus Experiment...