Tony Fyler learns to
dance.
Broadcast
6th May 2006
When Steven Moffat wrote
The Empty Child and The Doctor Dances in Series 1 of 21st century
Who, it’s fair to say he gave us some breathtaking scares spun from the idea of
technology gone wrong. When he returned for a one-shot episode in Series 2, his
themes were broadly similar – again, the whole situation in The Girl in the
Fireplace unravels because technology is failing to act as it should. But if
there was ever a more perfect fit of writer and Doctor than Moffat and the
Tenth, we’d love to know who else thinks they’re in contention. The Tenth
Doctor perfectly suited Moffat’s complex storytelling and hip, flip style of
dialogue, making The Girl in the Fireplace, as an episode of Who, something as
beautiful as the masks of the clockwork robots themselves.
The story’s ‘elevator
pitch’ is delivered in a single line within the episode – ‘Robots from the 51st
century, stalking a woman from the 18th.’ The idea of secret
passageways between the time zones is perfectly in keeping with the era of
court intrigue and dangerous liaisons. And even the central plot element has a
joyful satirical edge – the forces of bureaucracy, rather than darkness, wanting
to decapitate a French aristocrat just a few decades early. While Moffat as a
writer only rarely turns in a duff script, the connection between Moffat and
Tennant makes The Girl in The Fireplace feel like its complexity slides
effortlessly from page to screen and from screen to viewer’s brain, even ten
years on.
As a celebrity historical,
it’s a slightly challenging one, most viewers’ knowledge of Madame Du Pompadour
being significantly less that their knowledge of, say, Charles Dickens, Queen
Victoria, William Shakespeare or Agatha Christie, but Moffat’s script puts
handy vignettes of backstory in the mouth of the admiring Tenth Doctor, and
writes the character of Madame Du Pompadour with enough modernity to make her
seem extraordinary given the time in which she lived. It’s a neat trick, and it
can go horribly wrong if your historical character comes across as too
knowing, too flippant about the future, but Moffat’s Madame never goes there,
Sophia Myles crafting a performance that makes Reinette always veer on the side
of likeability, despite – or possibly because of - her knowing, forthright
attitude. The Girl In The Fireplace also begins a Moffat mini-obsession with
temporal displacement – the ‘faulty wire’ in the fireplace that advances time
much more on one side of the divide than the other foreshadowing the idea of
the angels and their temporal shifting of their victims, allowing them to ‘live
to death,’ but far more blatantly giving us a taste of the life of the Eleventh
Doctor and the young Amelia Pond – five minutes in the time traveller’s life
equating to twelve years in the girl’s.
While stopping short of
bringing back Captain Jack, The Girl In The Fireplace also has callbacks to
their banana discussion from The Doctor Dances, and of course, in the arms of
Reinette, the metaphor of ‘the Doctor dancing’ is expressed far more explicitly
here – in all these ways and more, The Girl in the Fireplace is an episode
brimming over with Moffat tells and traditions, but the storytelling and the
pace allow them all to be delivered with a lightness of touch, so unless you’re
looking at it ten years down the line, they don’t feel like Moffat tells
and traditions, they feel like merely great lines, or knowing references, or
solid moments of laughter.
The storytelling itself
takes a bold stab at non-linearity, setting its pre-credits sequence at the
moment of the story’s greatest crisis, informed as the scene is with creepy
clockwork sounds. Post-credits, it picks up three thousand years later on board
the spaceship and Moffat immediately junks Rose’s sullenness at Mickey’s
travelling with them – there’s a lot of tactile action between the two, and she
grins and laughs at Mickey’s reactions to space – ‘it’s so realistic!’ – and
his embracing of the traditional companion mindset of absolutely ignoring what
the Doctor tells them – ‘Now you’re getting it!’ This makes for a story that
could be slotted anywhere in their dynamic once Mickey’s joined the Tardis, and
allows it to be rewatched a decade later without any special knowledge of their
backstory baggage, which helps the speed and pace of the story along.
The clockwork robots
themselves are an odd mixture of beauty and ‘thickness’ – when the reality of
their scheme is revealed, there’s no getting away from the scrambling of logic
it takes to make it work, but it’s worth remembering a thing that one of Who’s
greatest writers, Robert Holmes knew. Villains can be as fundamentally stupid
as the day is long, and still be terrifyingly dangerous – the Sontarans were
always written as a satire on the rigid mindsets of self-important macho
commissionaires or authority figures, and they worked on that level, but they
would still kill you stone dead if you got in the way of their plans. If for a
moment we imagine being one the crew of the SS Madame Du Pompadour, it becomes
apparent that what we’ve missed even before the story of The Girl In The
Fireplace starts is a whole Robots of Death tale, the beautifully clock-punk
service robots harvesting the lives and bodies of the crewmembers merely to
fulfil their function and repair the vessel, before turning their attention to
the barmy idea of punching time windows into the universe to collect the final
spare part they believe they need.
Visually and philosophically,
it’s to Robots of Death that The Girl in the Fireplace owes perhaps most of its
dues – the gorgeously painted, gruesomely smiling masks of the clockwork robots
giving more than a head-nod to the Vocs and SuperVocs of one of Tom Baker’s
finest hours, both sets of beautiful robots simply carrying out the orders they
understand, irrespective of the consequences on the organic creatures around
them – technology gone wrong, either by design, as in Robots of Death, or
presumably by accident, as in The Girl in the Fireplace.
But it’s really in the
synthesis of all the ideas from which he draws, and most particularly in the
modern Robert Holmes vein of his characterisation and dialogue, that Moffat
shows his own particular genius, and stamps it on the Tenth Doctor’s tenure –
the same is true of Blink, with its ‘wibbly wobbly time wimey stuff’ and it’s
‘sadness is happiness for deep people.’ The mark of a Moffat script before he
became the showrunner was a great, scary ‘monster,’ a connection to the primal
fears or playground games of children, a fantastically memorable secondary
character, and dialogue that lodged itself forever in the mind. Whatever one’s
views on his tenure in the showrunner’s seat, there can be no real disputing
the fact that with The Empty Child and The Doctor Dances, (which gave us
Captain Jack), with The Girl in The Fireplace (which gave us Reinette), Blink
(which gave us Sally Sparrow), and Silence in The Library and Forest of the
Dead (which gave us River Song), Moffat earned his place as the second writer
to steer the development of Who in the 21st century. People often
overlook The Girl in the Fireplace as part of his overall legacy, but to do so
is insane – there are scary monsters, there’s a classic Moffat quiet moment
where the chills are heightened and the inspiration for the monster becomes
clear (in this case, monsters hiding underneath a child’s bed), there are some
great Classic riffs, and there’s dialogue to set the heart of fans and casual
viewers alike thrilling, along with some classic laughs (the ‘Drunken Doctor’
scene, to this day, is a thing of pure beauty). It takes a primal childhood
fear and writes it large on the screen, while also delivering a temporally
complex chunk of science fiction storytelling and a beautiful, sensitively
written and performed characterisation in a historical celebrity story with a
time-twisting difference. Drama, laughs, tears and romance, and also a bit with
a horse – it’s practically Shakespearean in construction, and Moffat won a
well-deserved Hugo Award for it. Ten years on, The Girl in The Fireplace is
still a thoroughly enjoyable hour of Doctor Who that will feel like significantly
less because it moves so fluidly along from A to B.
Learn to dance all over
again – give The Girl in the Fireplace a rewatch today.
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