Doctor Who: 2x04 "The Girl in the Fireplace

DOCTOR WHO REWATCH: SERIES TWO, EPISODE FOUR: “THE GIRL IN THE FIREPLACE”

18^th Century France is on a space ship.  And a horse.  But continuity isn’t.

Doctor Who: 1x04: “The Girl in the Fireplace” Written by Steven Moffat

The Summary:

We open on a bunch of terrified 18^th century French aristocrats and a woman telling her lover that she has some kind of guardian angel who will come save them; she the calls for her protector by yelling into a fireplace and calls him “Doctor.”  Cue the Doctor, Rose, and Mickey landing on a desolate spaceship about 3000 years in the future.  All the crew is gone and the place is a wreck but Mickey is in awe as this is his first time out.  The Doctor discovers that the ship is generating enough energy to punch a hole through the universe and lo and behold – an 18^th century French fireplace on the hull of the ship with a little girl on the other side.  Her name is Reinette and she and the Doctor chats for a moment; the Doctor is puzzled as to why this spacio-temporal hyperlink (aka magic door) is in an abandoned, broken down spaceship.  He manages to get to the other side of the fireplace where he discovers Reinette has lived several months in just a few seconds for him.  A man-sized clockwork robot has been scanning Reinette’s mind and it* attacks the Doctor, who drags it back to the space ship and freezes it with a fire extinguisher that Mickey mistakes for an “ice gun.”  The Doctor tells Rose and Mickey not to wander off after the clockwork robot while he checks on Reinette to make sure she’s all right.  Rose and Mickey immediately wander off, and the Doctor discovers that not only has Reinette grown into a young woman, she’s also the future mistress of King Louis XV.  Reinette calls him her imaginary friend and snogs him thus establishing her in retrospect as the proto-Amelia Pond.  While Mickey (being very Captain Kirk-esque) and Rose are wandering around the ship they notice machinery has been replaced with human parts like eyeballs for cameras and hearts for some kind of wiring juncture.  The Doctor comes back and finds a horse while looking for Rose and Mickey, who have found a mirror that looks into Reinette’s first meeting with Louis.  Rose takes this moment to establish a sort of analogy between Reinette’s relationship with the king and the queen and her relationship with the Doctor and Rose.  A clockwork robot is there to, so the Doctor, Rose, and Mickey run in to save her.  Then, they discover the what and why(ish) of the robots’ interest in Reinette, and the Doctor realizes (sort of taking Rose’s role in their adventures) that the reasons the machinery is human organs and there are no crew members are one and the same.  He orders Rose and Mickey back onto the ship while he looks into Reinette’s mind to figure out what the robots want; she proves her intelligence by using the link to go into the Doctor’s mind.  Rose and Mickey are captured and tied up by the robots while the Doctor “dances” with Reinette, ostensibly to make the king jealous.  The Doctor shows up on the ship just as Rose is trying to talk the robot out of hurting her by threatening it with the Doctor.  He pretends to be drunk but uses this to obfuscate his plan to immobilize the robots with some sort of anti-lubricant, which works for about point-five seconds until a robot not affected sends a signal that the right magic door has been found.  While the Doctor searches for the door, he sends Rose to warn Reinette to expect the attack to happen once she’s thirty-seven.  They share a conversation about the world Rose comes from and the Doctor and the monsters, which Mickey interrupts to get Rose since the Doctor’s found the right door.  Reinette follows Rose onto the ship, and upon hearing her own screams from her future, she shows how clever she is by recognizing she must go back to Versailles in order to live in that moment.  Then cut to the Reinette in the first scene calling for the Doctor but being captured by the robots and being brought to the ballroom, since they need to be close to the magic door in order to teleport.  Despite being terrified out of her mind (presumably), Reinette calms the entire court and beautifully threatens the robots.  The Doctor can’t shut down the magic doors because the robots are there, so the only thing to do is break the door by riding a horse through it.  He saves Reinette and the court, but at the expense of being able to get back to the space ship, which he is uncharacteristically fine with.  But Reinette shows him to the fireplace she’d had moved from her Parisian home, since it wasn’t damaged, she assumes the link might still be there.  The Doctor fixes the fireplace door and goes back to the spaceship, promising Reinette that he’ll take her to see the stars.  He checks in on Rose and Mickey then runs to collect Reinette, but it’s too late, she has died at the age of 43 by the time he gets back.  The Doctor returns to Rose and Mickey and they take off in the TARDIS, the Doctor alone in the console room.  This is the third instance of foreshadowing Rose’s life without the Doctor and the prototype for the Eleventh Doctor’s first episode.

*So normally is there isn’t a gender specified, I try to use the gender neutral pronouns (xie and its associates) rather than “it,” which I consider offensive to sentient beings.  I don’t know how much I support my own use of “it” in terms of the clockwork robots, but the reasoning behind it is this: it is made very clear that the robots are computers with arms (and the other kind of arms) programed to solve problems for the ship; they don’t seem to have true (artificial) intelligence such as for example C-3PO and R2-D2 who go beyond their programming in Star Wars; this makes the clockwork robots more like objects than beings.

The Women:

Rose Tyler, Reinette/Madame de Pompadour, Katherine

The Conversations:

1. Reinette and Katherine:  Reinette and her friend Katherine (a woman of color aristocrat FTW!) discuss the failing health of the current mistress to King Louis XV and Reinette’s vying to fill the position.  The rating: 0

2. Rose and Reinette:  Rose warns Reinette that the clockwork people will come for her shortly after her thirty-seventh birthday.  Rose tries her best to explain about the spaceship and what’s happening to Reinette.  They also discuss the Doctor and how wonderful life is with him, despite the terror they have to deal with for him.  The rating: 1

The Woman to Woman Quote of the Episode:

“There is a vessel in your world where the days of my life are pressed together like the chapters of a book so that he may step from one to the other without increase of age, while I, weary traveler, must always take the slower path.”

“He was right about you.”

- Reinette Poisson/Madame de Pompadour and Rose Tyler

There’s a clear analogy drawn between Reinette as the mistress of both King Louis XV and the Doctor while both already have a queen – the Doctor’s being Rose.  But rather than creating jealous sniping, Rose and Reinette seem to respect each other and Rose tries to take care of Reinette, checking on her after she follows Rose and Mickey back onto the spaceship.

The Tally:

Episode 2x04 Total: 1

Series 2 Total: 3.5

10^th Doctor Total: 3.5

Rose as Companion Total: 20.0

Russell T Davis Era Total: 20.0

For Further Discussion: But Not Really

My main issue (in terms of women’s representation) with this episode is something I’m reserving for a later episode, either in series 5 or series 7.  But I’d still love to hear your thoughts on issues you see.

If you’re interested in my thoughts on issues not regarding how Reinette and Rose are presented, check out this post I made on Tumblr.