The Girl in the Fireplace

I loved this episode right from the first scene, with a teaser that skips ahead in the Doctor's narrative to show us Reinette talking into her fireplace, calling for the Doctor to come help her from the monsters that are attacking. Most importantly, it's beautiful and intriguing at once and serves as a perfect thesis for the whole episode. Secondly, I can't recall the original TV series ever skipping ahead to near the ending like this before, although it has been heard many times in Big Finish audios, and is another example of great ideas from the wilderness years being folded into the new TV series.

The rest of the episode is likewise wonderful to behold and difficult to predict as it goes. This is mainly because, as in "The Empty Child," Steven Moffat has based the whole science fiction problem around a mistake by technology. If there were a logical reason for everything to be the way it is, it would also be predictable and therefore dull and boring. If, however, things are the way they are because of a very false premise on the part of the antagonist, then the root cause of it is both difficult for us to guess and yet entirely logically connected to everything else in the story that follows from that false premise, and so it all does make sense to us in the end. First he did it with nanogenes that didn't know what a human should look like, and this time it's a robot repair system that's had its chips scrambled so that it thinks the woman for whom it is named is therefore its perfect replacement central processor. (The way this was all finally revealed in the very last shots of the episode was brilliant as well.) It then of course naturally follows that it'd send its robots to try and get that spare part, and that the time windows and the fireplace and so on could be the means to that end, and as Reinette tells us, a door once opened can be walked through in both directions, and so it makes sense there'd be a horse on the spaceship and so on. These are all exquisite romantic images as well, and half the reason that they are is the same reason why anything truly beautiful in nature is, because it's all what logically follows from a single flawed premise. It's like the crystals on a snowflake. They're extremely complicated and beautiful at the same time, and they all come from moisture freezing around a single, imperfect piece of dust that was just floating in the air. Unintelligent design is often better than things intelligent designers come up with, and is certainly never predictable. Each snowflake is a masterpiece in itself for although it forms by the same rules and laws of physics as all the other snowflakes, each core piece of dust is itself an unpredictable and unique "flaw" in the air. Can you tell I love this way to build a story yet? Of course, now I'm onto it, I'm afraid it means I might be able to see what's coming in Steven Moffat's next story next year, but perhaps not, if the mistaken dust particle in that one is random enough.

The design and direction crystallized around the script utterly perfectly as well. The art direction, costume design, and cinematography in the France scenes is the equal of any award-winning period piece movie, lending the whole thing an air of class that "Doctor Who" rarely, if ever, has achieved before this. My favorite images though were, in no particular order, anything that Reinette was wearing, the ballroom itself, the nearly seamless CG done on the location shots to make them look like France of the period, the exquisite clockwork inside the robots' transparent heads, the spaceship exterior which didn't look like any other spaceship I've seen, and of course, the shot of the Doctor riding the horse through the mirror, smashing it as he goes. There's so much attention to detail everywhere you look, and I'd like to highlight the "spring/summer/autumn/winter" motif they had going on as the Doctor makes each visit to Reinette at different stages in her life. There was a similar trick used to good effect for Rivendell in the "Lord of the Rings" movies, but I don't care if I've seen that trick once before, for it really fits here just as well, perhaps better. The shot selection by Euros Lyn was just as good as that which he gave us in "Tooth and Claw," and yet of a very different style, and I'd now put him alongside Douglas Camfield or Graeme Harper on the list of the best directors "Doctor Who" has ever had.

There were a few other parts to the story that also looked familiar to this Big Finish listener. The time windows are _very_ like those used in the audio "The Time of the Daleks," and there's even carriage clock clockwork running it as there, only not quite so directly. Here it's running robots that then run the windows. The juggling of time in the narrative as well as in the events in the story is another Big Finish trademark. And the books get a great shout-out as well with the Doctor's saying that he's the thing the monsters have nightmares about, which is directly from Paul Cornell's NA book "Love and War," as admitted to by Grand Moff Steven in the podcast commentary for this episode. (and Paul had reused it himself in his BF audio "The Shadow of the Scourge") I'm all for this kind of picking off the fruits of the trees from the wilderness years, and rumor has it there's more of this to come next week...

The episode is, at its core, about what a romance between the Doctor and a human woman might be like, and at the same time about why that's not possible for him and why he avoids it. Sure, the kissing and the partying and the "dancing" is all well and good, but for the Doctor, it's all too fleeting. As he told Rose last week, humans grow old and wither and die, while he doesn't, and so his relationships with us must always be short, which is why he normally cuts them off. He finally meets a woman who could match him in every respect and could perhaps really be a true equal partner to him, and at the same time he's meeting her in a way which magnifies his central problem of the humans always living too short a time for a Time Lord. When he reads that letter she wrote to him as she lay dying, you can almost see his hearts sinking through the floor as the weariness and loneliness and sadness gets to him in a way that hasn't been seen quite so well before. I almost wonder if perhaps the TARDIS could've shown us some sympathetic reaction where her lights dim at this point or something... nah, I think not. That'd just pull focus off the best scene David Tennant has recorded as the Doctor yet, and the one where at last the Doctor's great age really shines through with what Tennant is doing. That's the one thing that's been missing from the Tenth Doctor up until now, that sense of eternity, and I didn't quite realize we hadn't seen it yet until this scene. It's there now, and it's as if the whole Doctor is back with us again, in a way I don't think I've felt since I don't know when. Well-played, David Tennant, well-played. You're my favorite now.

Another favorite I have is Sophia Myles, who turns in what I think is the best guest star role so far this season. Yes, better than Elisabeth Sladen or John Leeson or even Anthony Head. And I'm not saying this because of how she looks physically, which is tremendous of course, or at least, I'm only saying it about how she looks with her eyes. The eyes are what tell you how intelligent a character (and the actress behind the character) is, and with every look Sophia Myles has something going on behind her eyes that screams "look out, Doctor, I'm just as clever as you are." Roger Delgado used to use that "look" to hypnotize people in an evil way that made you believe he really could do hypnotize people just by looking at them. Sophia has a good and (of course) feminine eye-stare that makes you believe she really can root around inside the Doctor's mind just as he's doing it to her. And what a look she gets too... I _adore_ that line she has that goes "Doctor... Who? It's more than just a secret, isn't it?" And that's something else I hadn't quite realized was missing from the entire new series at this point and is now back as a result... restating the "Who" in "Doctor Who"... re-emphasizing that the Doctor was different from the other Time Lords even before they were all killed and he wasn't. If the series starts to earnestly bring that sort of thing back up again more often, then we'll _really_ be cooking with gas...

If the episode has any drawback at all, it's only that Rose and Mickey were sidelined a bit, and still what little time the story had for them was very good quality time, particularly when we see Rose have these jealous pangs towards Reinette but which then turn to sympathy and sadness for her and her situation, and when Mickey is the one who spots how the Doctor needs time to be alone at the end of the episode after Reinette has died. Oh, and the caption on the scene that establishes the spaceship should've said "3293 ± 50 Years Later" instead of 3000. Or something like that.

And I'll save my last comments for Mr. Murray Gold, who turned in a fantastic score again this week. He implied in DWM that perhaps not all of the music we heard in the 2005 season was what he himself wanted to write but was asked to write. Based on how much he's improved in these last four episodes, it sounds to me like the leash has been let go, because the scores have been so much improved on last season.

Here's hoping that freedom is continued to be encouraged in future.

11 out of 10 for "The Girl in the Fireplace." I did really love it that much. It's an instant "classic." Well done everyone.