Doctor Who Week: "The Girl in the Fireplace" (2006)

When The TARDIS lands on a derelict vessel deep in space, The Doctor (David Tennant), Rose Tyler (Billie Tyler) and Mickey (Noel Clarke) investigate the situation, and discover a time door aboard the craft leading to eighteenth century Paris, on Earth.

There, the Doctor spies a young girl, Reinette in her bedroom, and realizes she is in danger from a strange Clockwork Man automaton.  He saves her from it, but the young girl imagines it all a bad dream, and fantasizes the Doctor as a protector and imaginary friend.

Since time on each side of the fireplace flows differently, when the Doctor next attempts to save Reinette (Sophia Myles) from a clockwork android, she is an adult, and remembers him from her childhood dreams. The Doctor also soon realizes that she is soon to become the infamous mistress of King Louis XV, Madame de Pompadour.

While the Doctor interfaces with 1700s France, Rose and Mickey discover that the clockwork androids are using surgically-removed body parts from the (dead) starship crew to repair the vessel’s massive damage.  The Doctor fears that the androids have set their sights on the one human brain they believe can power the ship’s computer: Reinette’s.

The Doctor attempts to save Reinette from a fate worse than death, but recognizes a kindred spirit in her, and begins to grow close to her…

In general, I’m not a big fan of stories in which The Doctor falls in love with a human being. 

For one thing, such a love affair doesn’t seem likely given the vast differences between species.  In “Rose,” for instance, the Doctor refers to humans, in a fit of rage, as “apes.”   This descriptor suggests how the character views the distance between his race, the Time Lords, and the human race.

Humans don’t fall in apes, and if the metaphor holds, Time Lords shouldn’t fall in love with humans, either. 

After all, how many apes -- even the most intelligent apes -- have you felt the desire to be involved in a physical romance with?

I’ve always considered it a bridge too far in terms of fan service to suggest that the Doctor might fall in love with and engage in a sexual relationship with a human, given the apparent -- and acknowledged -- gulf between species. 

I’m absolutely okay with Amy Pond and Martha Jone being hot for the Doctor, since he appears human (and also attractive), and since their desires for physical love go unrequited.  The Doctor rejects their attempts to become intimate with him. 

But otherwise, frankly, it starts to get icky. 

Already in the new series, we’ve seen the beloved Sarah Jane Smith ret-conned so as suggest she was always in love with the Doctor (“School Reunion”), an idea that feels cheap given the great and sturdy friendship the two characters actually shared during the eras of the Third and Fourth Doctor. 

I enjoy tremendously the sentimentality and nostalgia of “School Reunion,” but the idea that Sarah is a spurned “ex” who must come to terms with her displacement in the Doctor’s romantic life for a younger model (Rose) is an absolute disservice to Elisabeth Sladen’s strong character, who -- for many fans -- remains a 1970s feminist icon.  Does anyone else remember her discussion of female power in “Monster of Peladon?”

Of course, Rose obviously falls in love with the Doctor during her time with him in the TARDIS too, and has those feelings reciprocated even though a physical relationship never resulted until a human clone of the Doctor came into the picture.   

In the long run, I feel that this kind of material doesn't serve the characters, or the series itself.

Yet sometimes -- as is abundantly the case with “The Girl in the Fireplace" -- a romance in the Doctor’s life is necessary, dramatically-speaking, because it reflects or suggests something crucial about the Doctor’s non-human nature (and not merely that he would romance an ape, given half the chance.)

“The Girl in the Fireplace” is a beautiful tale not because it is about a tragic, and unfulfilled love affair, but because it exemplifies the very nature of the Doctor’s existence in a way that his relationship with the companions simply cannot, given the limitations of our human viewpoint.  

The Doctor views time differently than we do, and lives an extended life-span by our standards.  So his time with Rose, or Donna, or Martha, is but a blip.  They age and die, and he is still young.   The Doctor tells us this many times.  We know it intellectually, but on a week-to-week basis, we don't really see it.  We see them together, not separated by time.

However, that very idea -- of being separated by fast-moving time and a long life-span  -- is expressed beautifully with the concept of the Time Door in this episode.  The Doctor appears in Reinette’s life when she is young.  But literally every time he sees her again, she is older…and different.  When he returns for her the final time, she is dead.  

She is gone, in other words, in the blink of an eye, a least by the Doctor’s (and audience's...) perspective

We see the companions in every adventure and so, in essence, we are on “their” time, and don’t experience their travels by the Doctor’s  perspective.  The magic of “The Girl in the Fireplace” (and also “The Eleventh Hour” and “The Girl Who Waited”) is that the writer has found a way for us to viscerally experience the Doctor’s life; as a man alone who out-lives all those around him.  He barely has time to make a move before it is too late.  Time robs him of his friends and companions.

Thus, the romance angle in "The Girl in the Fireplace" is actually a symbol for something other than physical love. It is a representation of the fleeting connection between the Doctor and any soul who isn’t a Time Lord.  

The Doctor wants to connect, but just when that connection gets interesting, the other person in the relationship grows old and dies.  

People complain a great deal about Moffat’s stories, and his stewardship of Doctor Who, but I admire his work because he writes emotional stories that help us experience what it might be like to be an ageless time traveler.  

Instead of focusing just on the fact that one can travel anywhere and anywhere, his work permits audiences to see that there are drawbacks too.  We learn that the Doctor visits other worlds, meets many people, and helps lots more.  But in the end, every day, he is alone, a solitary figure.  

This is a perspective we might have intuited in the classic series and even felt on occasion (like the Third Doctor's sad goodbye to Jo, in "The Green Death"), but in Tennant's era (under Davies stewardship),  it is the dominant theme, the story behind all the stories.  And no story captures that theme better than this one, penned by Moffat.

David Tennant, the tenth iteration of the Doctor, is especially strong in dealing with this sort of material.  He plays the most sensitive of all Doctors, and can express mourning, loneliness, and regret beautifully.  This makes sense in terms of the character’s overall “arc.”  He is a little further away from the guilt of the Time War than Eccleston’s incarnation, but growing ever more aware of how “alone” he is as the last time lord.   

Tennant is not my favorite Doctor -- I would vote for Patrick Troughton, Tom Baker, or to my complete and utter surprise, Matt Smith – but I like and admire Tennant's incarnation tremendously, and feel he is a great Doctor.  It is difficult to imagine a different actor pulling off a story like “The Girl in the Fireplace” or “Human Nature,” but Tennant is the right Doctor at the right time.  You can see in every performance his longing to connect, and his reluctance to connect. 

In the final analysis, “The Girl in the Fireplace” is a great Doctor Who story because it makes us feel the Doctor’s agony at being alone, and even share his viewpoint of human life going by at warp speed.  

Also, the Clockwork robots are magnificent and diabolical villains in terms of their appearance.  In some way, they are perfect monsters for Doctor Who: they drive the story from point to point, but don’t get in the way of character development.  And they’re scary as hell.

But I really picked us this story because it reveals best the Tennant Doctor.  

He is a man who wants to connect, but sees connection shut down at every juncture ("The Girl in the Fireplace," "Doomsday," "Human Nature.")  He is so shattered by this fact that by the end of his era, he is loudly embracing his alone-ness, and calling himself "Time Lord Victorious."  

Because of Tennant's remarkable performances -- and humanity -- you can see how that destroys him inside.