Clockwork Droids

Every so often Doctor Who produces an episode so complete, so confident, and so quietly devastating that you just sit there when it’s over. “The Girl in the Fireplace” is one of those. Written by Steven Moffat — the man who gave us the chills of The Empty Child last year — it takes a premise that sounds like nonsense on paper, a spaceship full of fireplaces that open onto the court of Louis XV, and spins it into the best hour Series 2 has managed. It’s funny, it’s frightening, and by the end it left me genuinely a bit wrecked.

Windows Into Versailles

The TARDIS drifts onto a derelict spaceship 3,000 years in the future — Rose and Mickey in tow, this being Mickey’s first proper trip in the box since he talked his way aboard in School Reunion. The ship is dead, its crew long gone, and yet its power is running full tilt and it’s riddled with “time windows”: doorways that open, impossibly, onto 18th-century France. Light an ornate fireplace on the ship and step through, and you’re in the bedroom of a little girl in Paris. Her name is Reinette — and she’ll grow up to be Madame de Pompadour, mistress of the King and one of the most remarkable women of her age.

The Doctor keeps stepping through, but time runs at different speeds on either side of the glass. He crosses in minutes; she lives whole years between his visits. So he meets her as a frightened child checking for monsters under the bed, then — a heartbeat later, for him — as a dazzling grown woman who has been waiting for her “fireplace man” her entire life. It’s a gorgeous, dreamlike structure, and Sophia Myles plays Reinette as clever, fearless, and utterly a match for the Doctor.

The monsters under her bed are real, and they’re the episode’s masterstroke: clockwork repair droids in beautiful, blank-faced 18th-century carnival masks, ticking softly as they stalk her through the palace. The reveal of why they want her is pure nightmare logic. When the ship broke down, its robots had no spare parts, so they used the crew — every scrap of them — to patch the vessel back together. There’s an eyeball in a scanner, a heart wired into the engine. And now they’ve fixated on Reinette, waiting with terrible patience for her to reach a specific age, because they’ve decided her brain is the one component the ship still needs. The ship, you see, and the woman share a name. The droids are simply trying to finish their repairs.

The Lonely Angel

What elevates all this from clever to unforgettable is the romance. When the Doctor first scans the child’s mind, Reinette scans him right back — and what she finds there is the loneliness he carries everywhere, the same open wound we’ve watched him nurse ever since the Time War took everything from him in The Parting of the Ways. “You are the loneliest of them all,” she tells him, and it lands like a diagnosis. Reinette sees the Doctor whole, the way almost no one does, and she isn’t frightened by what she finds. She calls him her lonely angel, and she chooses him anyway.

Tennant is wonderful here — giddy, flirtatious, and then suddenly, nakedly moved. There’s a scene where he emerges from reading her mind having accidentally let her into his, and the vulnerability on his face tells you everything. This isn’t a companion crush or a bit of banter. For once the Doctor has met someone who runs at his speed, and the show lets him fall, hard.

Which is what makes the climax so magnificent. The droids open a window to snatch Reinette at a grand ball, and the only way through is a sealed mirror with no return. So the Doctor does the maddest, most romantic thing imaginable: he takes a run-up on horseback and smashes straight through the mirror into 18th-century Versailles to save her — knowing, as he does it, that shattering that last window strands him there forever, cut off from the TARDIS and everything he is. He gives it all up without hesitation. “One may tolerate a world of demons,” he says, “for the sake of an angel.”

And credit where it’s due: Reinette is nobody’s swooning damsel. She walks toward the ticking monsters when she has to, stares down a clockwork man twice her size with nothing but nerve and a fireplace poker, and when the crisis comes it’s her giving the orders. Moffat writes her as the Doctor’s equal rather than his prize, which is precisely why losing her cuts so deep. The script even finds room for comedy in the middle of the heartbreak — the Doctor strolls back through a time window having somehow acquired a horse, utterly deadpan about it, and christens the thing Arthur. Little grace notes like that keep an achingly romantic hour from ever curdling into the po-faced.

Too Late

And then the episode does the cruellest, most beautiful thing. Having sacrificed his way home, the Doctor discovers the original fireplace still works, still linked to the ship — a way back after all. Overjoyed, he promises to whisk Reinette off to see the stars, tells her to pack a bag, and pops back through to fetch the TARDIS. But time runs differently, remember. For him it’s a moment. For her, it’s years. When the Doctor returns, grinning, ready to make good on his promise, he’s met with silence, and a funeral carriage passing in the rain. Madame de Pompadour has just died, aged forty-three, still waiting for the angel who said he’d come back.

The King hands him her final letter, and the Doctor reads it alone, and Tennant plays the whole thing with a stillness that’s worse than any breakdown. She kept her window, her fireplace, her whole life. She never stopped believing he’d return. He was minutes too late by his own clock and a lifetime too late by hers. It is one of the most quietly heartbreaking endings the show has ever done.

The final gut-punch is saved for the very last shot. As the TARDIS leaves, the camera drifts across the derelict ship’s hull to reveal its name: the SS Madame de Pompadour. The droids were never mad. They were repairing a ship named for a woman, and in their broken logic they simply went looking for her. The Doctor never finds out. It’s the sort of detail that reframes everything the second you catch it, and it’s the mark of a script operating on a completely different level.

What The Girl in the Fireplace Leaves Us With

A near-flawless standalone that doubles as the definitive statement of who this Doctor is. Here’s what it plants:

• The Doctor can fall in love. Not a companion’s adoration, but a real, adult, doomed romance — and the show treats it with total seriousness.
• Loneliness is the engine. Reinette reads it in an instant, and it’s the truest thing anyone’s said about the Tenth Doctor yet: for all the joy, he is the loneliest man alive.
• The slow path and the fast path. Moffat turns time itself into the tragedy — the Doctor lives fast and arrives late, and someone who loved him grows old and dies in the gap.
• Rose and Mickey, sidelined on purpose. Rose watching the Doctor lose himself in another woman quietly deepens the ache she’s been carrying since School Reunion — and that’s exactly the point.
• A monster you’ll remember. Ticking clockwork men in porcelain masks are an instant classic — elegant, patient, and horrible.

Rating: 5/5 — Funny, terrifying, romantic, and tragic in a single tight hour, with an ending that recontextualises everything that came before. The best episode of Series 2 so far, and one of the best the revived show has produced full stop.

A horse through a mirror, monsters under the bed, and a love letter read too late — “The Girl in the Fireplace” is Doctor Who at the absolute top of its game. Give me a minute. I need to go stare at a wall.