The Girl in the Fireplace

I thought this was a gorgeous piece of televisual conjuring, some science = magic sleight of hand with a cinematic visual dexterity that has been missing from television, particularly British television, for many years.

Let us draw around the hearth and tell tales of magic, mystery and imagination, for The Girl In The Fireplace is an extraordinary piece of Doctor Who and by association it's an equally extraordinary piece of 21st Century television.

It is perhaps best approached as a symbolic allegory that illustrates one of the major themes of the previous episode, 'School Reunion'. It is a further meditation on that vexed question; can the Doctor be capable of loving a human being despite the fact that he is almost immortal? The Girl In The Fireplace seeks to answer that question, raises many more and emphatically provides the evidence as to why he is the Lonely Angel.

For me, it is a narrative that is focusing deliberately on the two leads, Madame de Pompadour and the Doctor.

Mickey and Rose are peripheral to the central conceit but they do have a function as brief commentators on the events taking place. Rose is again presented with a version of herself in Pompadour and sees how the Doctor can very easily leave one companion and then pick up the next and it's even more complicated for her when it would appear the Lonely Angel wants more than just companionship. He seems prepared to abandon them both to save Pompadour. Mickey is sensitive, perhaps more so than Rose, to the heartbreaking end of the relationship and knows that the Doctor must grieve alone.

The visuals of the episode are steeped, at a symbolic level, with cycles, circular logic, changing of the seasons, mechanisms and keys. The spaceship design is like a key and it's a key into this woman's passing life. The colour palette, as flagged up by Confidential, takes us through Spring, via Summer and Autumn, to Winter. From birth to death on the human scale but presented to us in fragments seen through the time windows and the mirror.

Euros Lyn's direction, which here is very similar to Peter Greenaway in it's composition of pictures and editing structure, is also redolent of this symbolism. The camera circles and dips around the protagonists and the editing cleverly allows this to carry from scene to scene, particularly towards the end as the cycle of the narrative winds down.

Many have felt that the clockwork creatures were a rather weak threat. In essence they are not typical Who adversaries but rather yet another example of Moffat's themes of technology gone wrong. Anyone thinking that they should have gone on an orgy of destruction is, I think, missing the point. The machines, scrambled by the ship's computer, pursue their logic via the head/shoulders portrait on the wall and name of the vessel. To the bitter end.

The references to 'winding up' and keys, clockwork mechanisms are surely symbols representing the winding up/down, the playing out of a life and the end of a particular circle of logical thinking. It is about the counterpointing of a very human life (Pompadour's) with the almost immortal Doctor. And the Doctor lives so long his greatest fear is to see human lives wind down and wither. He obviously takes a chance with Pompadour, faces his fear, believing this is a way to thwart the inevitable, but suffers the consequences of the broken mechanisms of time and is literally, the spanner in the (clock)works. When he is taken away by the fireplace in the final scenes there is an exchange of looks between Pompadour and the Doctor that sums all of this up.

There is certainly much to be read, not only in the visual splendour of Versailles contrasted with the derelict and broken spaceship but also, in the way that these interchange and inform Pompadour of the Doctor's world. The Doctor, from this point of view, exists in a dysfunctional, dark world and as soon as the he enters her world, cycles and mechanisms become disrupted, wind down and ultimately stop. Again, the proverbial spanner.

For me there is also much revealed about the nature of the Doctor. His callous actions that seemingly strand Rose and Mickey 3000 years in the future and his obvious need to try and construct an emotional life with Pompadour despite the inevitability of it's failure. The Doctor putting the fire out at the end is hugely symbolic of an emotional life extinguished and perhaps never to be rekindled? It is perhaps too painful for him to want to try again.

There are lots of iconic images: the conversations via the fireplace, the horse crashing through the mirror which again show the programme wearing its influences on its sleeve. I would particularly recommend Cocteau's 'Beauty And The Beast' to witness similar visual bravura and heartbreaking emotion. Plus a few nods to Russell T. Davies' 'Casanova' too.

Finally, apart from the magical images and the absolutely gorgeous music from Murray Gold, the leads acquit themselves very well. I still think Tennant is finding his feet and there were moments where I felt he needs to calm down a little but this is certainly his best episode to date and with time he will mature further.

A stunning episode, rich in symbolism and revealing much about the Doctor and also providing fresh mystery, that absolutely deserves a place in the continuing story of Doctor Who.