Doctor Who/Recap/S28/E04 The Girl in the Fireplace

"Madame de Pompadour: Oh. This is my lover, the King of France.

Tenth Doctor: Yeah? Well I'm the Lord of Time."

Hold on to your hearts -- king of nightmares Steven Moffat is in the writer's seat. This episode was nominated for a Nebula and won a Hugo.

-

The Doctor, Rose, and Mickey all land on a spaceship in another galaxy and 3000 years in the future. It's abandoned, all grimy future-tech... except for an 18th-century French fireplace, complete with an actual 18th-century French fire. That's because 18th-century France is on the other side of it. Specifically, a little girl's room in Paris, 1747.

Well. You don't need to dangle a juicy plot hook like that in front of the Doctor twice. Why the little girl's room is hooked up to a spaceship 3000 years in the future and a few galaxies away, the Doctor doesn't know. He also doesn't know what the poor little Reinette has done to warrant being followed around by masked, grinning, desparate clockwork robots, but he chases them out from under her bed and back aboard the spaceship.

There, the droids confess to what Rose and Mickey have already discovered: the robots were a bit overzealous in their maintainance tasks, and the organs of the ship's missing crew have been repurposed as sources of ship repair parts.

On the other side of the fireplace, the little girl ages years each time the Doctor steps through -- even pleasantly surprising him with a very romantic makeout session once she's old enough -- and eventually becomes Madame de Pompadour, the elegant and accomplished courtesan who was mistress to King Louis XV. And the droids have decided that her brain would make a fine addition to the ship's navigational system.

But they want her brain at a particular point in her life, which means that they have to waste enough time opening and closing doors, while the Doctor tries to piece together what's going on. The Madame, meanwhile, grows to love the Doctor, and is very quick to understand just what he is and how he can be in her bedroom at all those different points in her life. When he gently scans her brain for any information he can find, she unexpectedly uses the open mental link to explore his mind in turn -- once again pleasantly surprising the Doctor, but finding nothing that could protect her from the inevitable entrance of the robots later on in her life. She does ask him something tremendously important: "Doctor Who? It's more than just a question, isn't it?"

When Mickey and Rose appear to her, years later, she decides to find out what the Doctor's world is like. So, dressed in her elaborate Versailles gown, she simply ignores them and steps through the open door and into the spaceship. From a distant open portal elsewhere on the ship, she can hear her future self screaming in despair. There's nothing she can do for now, and she resigns herself to waiting in fear in her own world.

When the droids finally appear, again years later, the Doctor makes a tremendously grand entrance -- smashing through a mirror, on a white horse, into a Versailles ballroom. (Which incidentally, after much deliberation, was deemed literally impossible by the production team. When they told Steven Moffat, he broke down and cried like a child, and so the production team decided to film it anyway.) By doing so, however, he destroys the portal and consigns himself to a life on The Slow Path together with Reinette.

Until she shows him her painstakingly-reconstructed childhood bedroom, whose fireplace is still linked to the ship... The Doctor leaves, but promises to take her along to the stars, and tells her to wait two minutes.

Two minutes later, when the Doctor comes back, years have passed in Versailles and Reinette has died of illness. King Louis hands him a letter, which the Doctor silently walks off to read.

Just before they leave in the TARDIS, Rose wonders why the robots would have wanted the Madame. The Doctor states that he doesn't know, it could've been anything, and they leave. And then comes The Tag. The camera pulls out, revealing the name of the spaceship: S.S. Madame de Pompadour.

Tropes:
"The Doctor: It's just a nightmare, Reinette, don't worry, everyone has nightmares. Even monsters under the bed have nightmares.
 * Affectionate Nickname: The Doctor apparently calls Cleopatra "Cleo".
 * Badass Boast: The Doctor has a good one early on as he saves Reinette from the first Clockwork Robot and pursues it -

Young Reinette: What do monsters have nightmares about?

The Doctor: ME!"

"Madame de Pompadour:"
 * This dialogue was repeated word for word from Steven Moffat's very first Doctor Who story, "Continuity Errors".
 * Big Damn Heroes: The Doctor crashing through the mirror on a horse at the climax.
 * Chekhov's Gun: Most didn't expect Arthur the horse to be that important.
 * Clockwork Creature
 * Clock Punk: The clockwork droids. Even the Doctor is impressed.
 * Continuity Nod: "Bananas are good!"
 * Foil: Madame de Pompadour is one to Rose - Reinette's cultured, intelligent and very powerful, despite being in a society where it wasn't normal for women to be so, and well in control of both the men (The King and the Doctor) in her life, loving them both equally. Rose is from a society that encourages equality but isn't that special, and she can't find a balance between the two men in her life, meaning one always feels left out. And they're both blonde.
 * Foreshadowing: A throwaway line in this episode becomes a major plot point in Series 6 (and quite probably Series 7). With Steven Moffat as the showrunner, it probably isn't a coincidence.

"Rose: What have you been doing? Where've you been?
 * Harmless Freezing: The freeze gun incapacitates the clockwork men in "The Girl in the Fireplace". Justified on account of the fact that they are ' robots'', so incapacitation without significant damage is far more reasonable than it would be with an organic freeze-ee.
 * Hey, It's That Guy!: Gwen is Reinette's friend Katherine.
 * Historical Domain Character: Madame de Pompadour
 * How We Got Here: "The clock on the mantle is broken! It is time! Doctor! Doctor!"
 * Imminent Danger Clue: The Doctor realizes something is amiss when he notices that the only clock in the room is broken... yet a ticking sound can still be heard.
 * Lampshade-Wearing: The Doctor does the "tie wrapped around the head" version.
 * Mayfly-December Romance
 * Necktie Headband: How the Oncoming Storm decides to present himself.
 * Oh Crap: When the Doctor points out that, if the clock is broken... what's making that ticking sound?
 * Playing Drunk: The Doctor.

The Doctor: Well, among other things, I think I just invented the banana daiquiri a couple of centuries early. Do you know they'd never seen a banana before?"

"Madame de Pompadour: There is a vessel in your world where the days of my life are pressed together like the chapters of a book so that he may step from one to the other without increase of age, while I, weary traveller, must always take the slower path."
 * Romance On the Set: Actor David Tennant dated guest star Sophia Myles for a while after they were paired in this episode.
 * The Slow Path: Trope Namer

"Rose: "What's that mean?"
 * Strapped to An Operating Table: Rose and Mickey.
 * Talking the Monster To Death: The robots simply stop functioning once the Doctor makes it totally clear that they can no longer return to their ship.
 * Techno Babble: "Spatial temporal hyperlink."

The Doctor: "No idea, just made it up. Didn't want to say 'magic door.'""


 * Timey-Wimey Ball: The doctor offers only a vague explanations as to why the Tardis is unable to affect events and how they must rely on the time corridors. The real reason, of course, is that the Tardis could easily solve the central conflict of the episode (finding the right door before the automatons do), to say nothing of negating the tragedy of the ending by jumping back in time before the Madame's death.
 * Unnecessary Combat Roll: Mickey does one for the fun of it while scoping out the spaceship, rather than in an actual fight.
 * Whole-Plot Reference: The episode was inspired by The Time Travelers Wife.
 * Zeerust: Deliberately invoked. The clockwork robots were created to look old-fashioned so as to look fancy and whimsical for people on board the starship.