Doctor Who (2005) 2-04: The Girl in the Fireplace

Episode:

714

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Serial:

171

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Writer:

Steven Moffat

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Director:

Euros Lyn

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Air Date:

06-May-2006

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This week on Sci-Fi Adventures, I'm watching the Hugo Award-winning The Girl in the Fireplace, by Steven Moffat, the guy who wrote the Hugo Award-winning The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances last season. This 'winning Hugo Awards' thing developed into a habit for him, so that must have given Doctor Who's credibility a bit of a boost.

The episode was directed by Euros Lyn, the guy who'd just done Tooth and Claw. The poor guy didn't have much luck this season, as by the end he'd directed three of the least loved stories, but at least he got this to make up for it.

I'll be going through the episode scene by scene, so there will be lots of SPOILERS. But only for this, not any future episodes.

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The episode begins with a shot of a starfield so blue that I think Babylon 5 wanted its nebula back. But then the camera tilts down to reveal that it's actually the sky over the Palace of Versailles in France.

There's no date on screen, but the outfits worn by the screaming guests inside hints that it's the 18th century. 

The palace is under attack by unstoppable creatures, and a woman in an expensive gown goes to her fireplace to call for help from a man who has been her guardian her whole life: the Doctor!

That's a proper teaser for an episode, starting in the middle of the action and setting up a bunch of mysteries. Who is this woman and why has the Doctor been watching over her? Why does she think that the clock being broken means that 'it's time'? Why is she talking into a fireplace?

The dialogue cheats a bit to build the mystery of the broken clock, as all it means is there's a clockwork robot around and she could've just said that. The fireplace is cunning though, as on a first watch you don't necessarily realise the episode gives away that it gets moved to the palace in the first scene!

OPENING CREDITS

After the credits the episode shows a similar (but not the same) very blue starfield, then tilts upwards this time to reveal a spaceship. Also it's 3000 years later! Surprise, they made you think this was a pseudo-historical episode when really it's a future one. Well really it's both at the same time.

The TARDIS materialises and Mickey's hyped to get a spaceship on his first trip. So this comes right after School Reunion then, there hasn't been an adventure in between.

Mickey's actually done pretty well to get a spaceship on the first try, that almost never happens for a companion. I think up to this point the only two who could make that claim are Dodo and Turlough, though my memory's a bit fuzzy. Mickey didn't manage to get his name into the opening titles however.

It's the 51st century and they've travelled two and a half galaxies away. Because everything in Doctor Who has to be in a far distant galaxy if it's not on Earth.

Mickey mentions how realistic it looks, which is pretty much what I'd be thinking myself.

Rose wonders where the crew has gone as they couldn't have nipped out for 'a quick fag'. Some English slang there to throw off American viewers. The Doctor confirms that she's right, as he's checked the smoking pods.

The Doctor's eye is drawn to the repair work and he mentions that they've had some cowboys in, which is a phrase that comes back later. Also the line about how it smells like Sunday roast here. Everything in this bloody script comes back... well except for the smoking pods.

There's enough power being generated by the warp engines to punch a hole in the universe but the ship's not moving, so that's another mystery to add to the list.

They find the fireplace from the teaser, on their spaceship. In fact it's right against the edge of the ship, leaving no room for the bedroom they can see on the other side.

There's a confused little girl called Reinette in there and she's looking back at them. But the Doctor handles it well by explaining that he's doing a routine fire check. It turns out that it's 1727 France on the other side, which is apparently a decent year. Though the Doctor warns her that August is going to be rubbish... and we may never know why (I tried looking it up and found nothing).

The thing Mickey doesn't get is if she's from France, then why was she speaking English? He already knows the TARDIS translates alien languages, there was a big scene in The Christmas Invasion about it, but it doing French is pretty wild to him.

So this is where all the ship's power is going, to create a time portal. A double-sided rotating time portal in fact, which I suppose explains why the Doctor's side is an authentic 18th century fireplace, as someone already spun it around...

The Doctor goes through the rotating fireplace and finds that August has come and gone, as it's been months since Reinette last saw him. Also there's a monster under her bed.

Oh, first there's a repeat of the 'the sound is still going even though the thing making it has stopped' twist that Moffat already used in The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances, as it turns out her clock was broken by a robot so that its own ticking sound wouldn't be noticed. I could never write for Doctor Who, because things like this just never occur to me.

Though it does occur to me that the broken clock was on the side of the fireplace that the Doctor came in on, not the side that the robot came in on. Also if the robot went through first, then has it been here for months?

The Doctor suddenly demonstrates psychic powers that he hasn't used in 17 episodes and determines that the robot has been scanning her brain. To be fair, his mental powers have been a part of the show since forever, the modern series just hadn't gotten around to reintroducing them yet. 

The robot won't talk to him but it answers Reinette, revealing that they don't want her yet as she's incomplete.

The robot attacks the Doctor with a weird steampunk blade from its arm, but it gets caught on the fireplace and he spins them around back onto the ship. He assures Reinette that even monsters have nightmares... of him!

How did the robots build a rotating time portal anyway? I mean they'd need to already be in the past to build the mechanism, there's a circle of floor that's turning with it.

For a moment I wondered if they'd shot this on location in a real mansion, but no they clearly didn't. That's not a visual effect, they constructed the bedroom set next to the spaceship set, with a rotating turntable built into it. Doctor Who didn't have a huge budget but it used it well.

The Doctor disables the robot by blasting it with a fire extinguisher, then pulls its mask off to reveal a working clockwork mechanism underneath! It's a beautiful functioning prop and it doesn't even need to make sense as in-universe it was designed to look cool rather than be a practical design.

It was apparently inspired by the Mechanical Turk, which was a famous chess-playing clockwork robot first displayed in 1770 (and secretly operated by someone hidden inside). They couldn't include the actual Turk in this story though, as it takes place a few decades too early.

Anyway the Doctor really loves this thing's design, to the point where he's reluctant to use his sonic to destroy it. Which I guess explains why he never tries doing it for the whole episode. Not that he gets a chance here, as it teleports away. The Doctor tells the other two not to go look for it and goes back through the fireplace. Then the other two grab fire extinguishers and go look for it.

The Doctor returns to the girl's bedroom to discover a lot more time has passed and she's got a new actress. Adult Reinette's not freaked out at all to see her imaginary friend return, and actually kisses him! That's twice someone's randomly done that to him this season and it's only episode 4. I suppose it shows how Ten is portrayed as a more romantic remix of the Doctor. 

It's a bit weird for her to just kiss him and even weirder for him as she was a little girl a minute ago, but the episode's got enough of a fairytale tone that I can just roll with it. Plus it has a lot to get through in just 40 minutes. When he overhears her name he basically rattles off her whole Wikipedia page in 9 seconds:

"Reinette Poisson? Later Madame Etoiles? Later still mistress of Louis the Fifteenth, uncrowned Queen of France? Actress, artist, musician, dancer, courtesan, fantastic gardener!"

Basically, to sum it up: he just snogged Madame de Pompadour. That's twice we've had a famous historical figure as a guest star this season and it's only episode 4. Though his joy turns to frustration when he returns to discover the others have wandered off, even though there could be anything on this ship...

...like a horse.

I love the contrast between the palace and the ship. Neither looks too unusual on their own, but having them both together is interesting. The Star Trek series did something similar with the holodeck, though they had the benefit of standing sets. Here they had to build the bedroom, spaceship and palace, all just for this one episode.

It's a pretty nice sci-fi corridor I reckon, considering the amount of time and money they had. Though I suppose they're cheating a bit by making it so dark.

Mickey and Rose haven't found the robot, but they've found something else that's notable: a human heart wired into the machinery. There's also a security camera with a human eye. The ship's a cyborg!

I like how the episode continually introduces stuff and keeps things interesting. Sometimes they're something funny like a horse, sometimes something disturbing like a heart, but the story has a tone that works for both without it being jarring. I also liked Mickey's unnecessary commando roll and his NES t-shirt. There's a lot to like here.

Meanwhile, the Doctor finds the portal the horse came from and walks through into a garden.

There he spies on Reinette chatting with her friend about her ambitions to become the king's new mistress. There's some nice period drama dialogue here. Probably not 100% accurate to the time, especially considering they're speaking English instead of French, but it works for me.

Speaking of accuracy, I had (or will have) a bit of a problem with Doctor Who's casting after RTD's return to the show in 2023, as the series went full Bridgerton. So what do I think about Angel Coulby playing Reinette's friend in 18th century France?

Well, she's not playing Isaac Newton, so that helps. Plus maybe this is what Reinette's friend looked like, I haven't got a clue. I don't know this person's story. It only bothers me when an episode is supposed to be set in a particular place and time, but the production team have put 'creating a sense of really being in that place' low on their list of priorities. Though it's fine if people have toothpaste, I'll let them have that one.

Anyway, the majority of the extras in the episode look like someone you'd expect to see around the Palace of Versailles in the mid-18th century, and some of them don't. Seems realistic enough to me.

The Doctor catches up with Rose and Mickey in front of a two-way mirror time portal, and they haven't been cut up by robots yet! Mickey's a bit confused about the horse being on a spaceship, which gives the Doctor a chance to point out he should be more curious about pre-Revolutionary France being on a spaceship.

The French Revolution was in 1789, by the way, so it's still a long time off. The TARDIS actually dropped by to visit in the very first season, back when the series had pure historicals and an interest in teaching kids a bit of history. The Reign of Terror was a pretty decent serial I recall, and would've been even better if half the episodes hadn't been lost.

The Doctor has to do a bit of exposition here to explain how Reinette's position as the King's Mistress worked, and how she actually got on quite well with the Queen. I don't know how true this is, but it at least feels like I'm learning something!

Suddenly 23 year old Reinette is attacked by a clockwork robot and the team leaps into action.

The Doctor has Reinette order the robot to answer their questions, seeing as it listens to her, and we get some mysteries solved. These are repair droids who opened time portals in an attempt to fix their ship after it got wrecked in an ion storm. (The Doctor actually points out that they could've just opened a portal to their repair yard instead, so that is acknowledged.)

I've noticed that Moffat's episodes tend to repeat things that worked in earlier stories and here the script repeats K9's 'We are in a car' gag from the previous episode, where a robot responds with the same line until its true meaning is understood. Here 'We did not have the parts' is the repeated answer to 'What happened to the crew?' Meaning, they used the crew for spare parts. So the mystery of why the ship smells like a roast dinner has been solved.

The thing is, Moffat didn't write the episode with K9 in it! He didn't even know that Rose wasn't entirely keen about Mickey joining them on the TARDIS, so he gave the Doctor a line about how he "let her keep Mickey" when she won't let him keep the horse. It's a bit weird.

Anyway the Doctor sends the two wandering off, and then they get grabbed by robots and knocked out.

Meanwhile the Doctor uses his mind meld again on Reinette to have a look at what the robots were scanning her brain for. This gave Moffat an excuse to reuse the 'had some cowboys in here' line, because using the same line in two different contexts makes a script seem smarter. Though the mind meld ends up backfiring a bit as "A door, once opened, can be stepped through in either direction". 

She can see in his mind that he had a lonely childhood, which is a little extra information for us, to go along with how he could relate to the orphans in The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances last season. Speaking of that two parter, they talk of 'dancing' again here, as she wants to 'dance' with him first to make the King jealous. Because "there comes a time, Time Lord, when every lonely little boy must learn how to dance." Whenever another character knows to call him 'Time Lord', it's always a big deal.

We also get the very Seventh Doctor era line: "Doctor who? It's more than just a secret, isn't it?" I think this is the first hint in the modern era that his name is important.

Things aren't going great for Mickey and Rose as they've been strapped to beds for dissection. Nice of the robots to wait for them to regain consciousness first.

Rose uses the Doctor's reputation to scare them, describing him as their designated driver and talking about how the Daleks call him 'The Oncoming Storm'. Well, she tries to, but she's interrupted by him stumbling into the room drunk and talking nonsense. Which isn't really much different to how he normally is, except this time he's wearing his tie on his head. It turns out it's not a proper tie, it's held on by a strap, in this episode anyway.

You could say that this moment of comedy in a tense scene spoils the mood they've set up, but that's basically the Doctor's M.O. Plus they're clockwork robots with huge wigs and overly elaborate cutting blade attachments, so they're not the scariest villain in Doctor Who history.

Well, I suppose that mask is a bit creepy in a dark room.

The Doctor does some drunk exposition, telling Rose and Mickey a bunch of stuff he could've revealed after they were safe. Turns out they've been trying to find the right portal to reach Reinette at 37 years old, so they can take her brain to use as their ship's central processing unit. So yeah, it's basically the plot of Spock's Brain. 700 episodes of Star Trek and that's the one they went with.

Anyway, it turns out that the Doctor was faking his inebriation so he could carry a cup of anti-lubrication in plain sight, which he pours into this one's head to impede its motivation. The episode subverted its subversion by having Rose be right the first time about how dangerous he is.

He shuts the rest of the droids down and tries to turn off the time windows to get this episode finished. But the droids all just turn back on again! Plus they've found the right portal, so they all teleport away to collect their brain.

The Doctor's busy so Rose goes through to warn Reinette about an attack in five years. It seems like all these other time portals are working normally, it's only the fireplace to her bedroom that was broken and skipping ahead.

It's a bit hard for Rose to explain the situation, but Reinette tells her "Be exact and I will be attentive." I love her lines in this, both how they're written and how they're spoken. Actor Sophia Myles is such a good fit for this role that I find it hard to picture her in the modern day. I assume that she must have lived in the 1700s for a while as a child.

There are some other good lines here like "The monsters and the Doctor. It seems you cannot have one without the other," and "One may tolerate a world of demons for the sake of an angel." She's only met him four times and she is obsessed!

But then Reinette walks onto the spaceship! That is not something I expected her to do. 

The TARDIS crew have always been the only ones to use the portals, looking in on Reinette's life like she was an exhibit, but a door, once opened, can be stepped through in either direction. Now she has the same perspective they do... and she can hear the screams coming from the fireplace.

So basically she's getting the same teaser that we did at the start of the episode. All the characters now know as much as we do about the attack in her future.

She decides to return to her own time and take the slow path, even though she'll have to spend the next five years wondering when the droids are going to come, and if the Doctor will even be able to save her.

The robots have used their short-range teleporters to disappear through the portal and start their attack. But the heroes can't follow, as if they break the glass it'll destroy the portal. Plus it's made of hyperplex on this side, so it'd take a truck to get through, and they don't have one this episode.

Fortunately they have a time machine! But they can't use it, because they're "part of events". I'm sure the Doctor has a perfectly good explanation for what that means, possibly involving paradox-eating bat monsters, he just can't tell us because he's busy.

So Reinette's call for help through the fireplace goes unanswered and the robots capture her. Then they drag her here in front of all the guests, I guess because they need to be closer to the portal to use their teleporters. Not a lot of teleporting happening right now though.

This time they actually did film on location, but this room matches so well to the sets that I never thought about it before now. Plus that yellow tint really ties it together.

Reinette's being attacked by the monster under the bed that scared her as a child, but she's not just keeping her own composure, she keeps everyone else from panicking by reminding them that they are French. Plus if her nightmare can return to plague her, then their nightmare can return as well. Which is the Doctor's cue to smash through the mirror on Chekhov's horse.

That's not a bad green screen effect for a TV series in 2006, as long as you don't pause and stare at it. In fact they never brought the horse into the room, so even the shots of him riding it were faked.

I do have two problems with this scene though:

First, the Doctor said that it'd take a truck to smash through. Horses are not trucks, they don't look anything like them.

Second, I don't buy that the Doctor would strand Rose and Mickey on a spaceship in the future like this. He may not be able to use the TARDIS to influence events in the 18th century, but he could've at least dropped them off first.

There's no connection to the TARDIS any more, but that's fine because the Doctor can speak French anyway. He tells the King of France that he's the Lord of Time and he's here to fix the clock. Because we're doing smart dialogue in this one. 

Smashing the portal has stranded him here, but it's also stranded the clockwork robots. The Doctor explains their situation to them: they can't fix the time portal because they don't have the parts, and they've only got hours or days of power left. He's not winding them up.

They're robots, they don't get puns, but he's doing them anyway.

Though when the Doctor tells the robots they have no purpose now that they're isolated from their ship, he's describing his own situation as well. What he should've done is stayed on the ship, got a brick with "Tell the droids there's no way back now," written on it in French, and then thrown it through the portal.

Fortunately he doesn't topple over and shatter into cogs like they do, so there's that. It's also fortunate that they're space age clockwork instead of a disco dog robot like K9, so leaving the broken droids around shouldn't destroy the course of human development.

Meanwhile Mickey and Rose contemplate how doomed they are, with Mickey explicitly stating what Rose's 'designated driver' line hinted at earlier: Rose still doesn't know how to fly the TARDIS without the Doctor. This means that they're stuck on a broken ship, two galaxies away and hundreds of years in the future.

Like I said, this is the biggest flaw in the episode for me. It's just here to add a bit of drama and some stakes, and it makes the Doctor seem like a dick. It's already enough to have the Doctor think that he's trapped himself in the past.

Now the Doctor's drinking alcohol for real... I assume. It could be anti-oil again for all I know. The important thing is that he's trapped here, and owes the King of France a lot of money for all the mirrors and tapestries that just exploded. He doesn't mind paying for them, he's just not entirely sure where people get money from.

Fortunately Reinette already saved him years ago.

Reinette had the fireplace from her bedroom moved to the palace, just like we saw in the teaser! It seems they moved the whole rotating floor mechanism as well.

She reuses the 'door once opened' line from earlier, this time saying that it may open again. And he repeats the 'Loose connection. Need to get a man in' line from earlier, as he realises that being offline saved it from destruction. (Though it was online enough for her voice to be coming out of it earlier).

Unfortunately he apparently forgot what happened last time he used this portal. The other portals led to specific pages of Reinette's life, but this one's faulty and it skips. He spins around to the ship alone, and then talks to her through the fireplace one last time, telling her to pack a bag and pick a star.

Dude, why wouldn't you bring her with you? Why wouldn't you visit her with the TARDIS right away instead of going back to the fireplace? The tragic thing is, it's plausible that he wouldn't. That he'd make that one tiny mistake.

Before he heads back to Reinette he talks to Mickey and Rose, asking how long they waited for him, which turned out to be 5 1/2 hours. Then he says "Great. Always wait 5 1/2 hours."

Uh... you mean they had a choice not to? There was something else they could've done? What am I missing here? Did they just assume they were stuck, when the TARDIS would've just taken them home if they'd returned to it?

Unfortunately it turns out that he left Reinette waiting a lot longer than 5 1/2 hours and this was not the ideal amount of time.

The Doctor returns through the rotating fireplace to find the King of France standing at a window in some beautiful lighting. He's got a grey wig now so you can tell he's older.

The episode reveals the tragic twist slowly, as King Louis tells him he just missed her, and she'll be in Paris by 6. She's leaving Versailles for the last time. She was only 43 when she died.

The King passes the Doctor a sealed letter and asks him what it says. When he pockets it silently, he replies "Of course, quite right." This dude's only in the episode for such a small amount of screen time but he's got the weight of the whole story on his back in this scene and he carries it really well.

The previous episode, School Reunion, was about what happens to the Doctor's companions after they leave, and why he never visits them. They decay and they die, and he can't bear to see that happen. Now we've just had a demonstration of what that's like for him.

Moffat gave us a big joyful 'everyone lives!' ending in his last story, as The Empty Child subverted expectations by being one of the rare Doctor Who stories without a body count. Now he's done the opposite, as The Girl in the Fireplace is about them trying to save one person, and she dies at the end.

This is a really nice shot by the way. I don't know how it was put together, but I can buy that this is the view from inside the Palace of Versailles. The rain running down the glass helps, as it obscures any weirdness.

Rose asks the Doctor if he's alright and he says he's always alright. I feel like that line comes back a few times after this, but I don't recall him saying it before now. Mickey realises that the Doctor needs to be alone and drags Rose away to give him the tour of the TARDIS.

The Doctor unseals the envelope and takes his time reading the letter really slowly, like a human. I guess to give the actress time to provide the voice over.

It turns out that she never gave up hope that he'd come back to her, despite what reason told her, as when she was a child he quipped that she shouldn't listen to reason. But she knew she was ill and had little time left. Now her lonely angel is left lonely again. No jokes or subversion here, the scene's exactly as sad as it should be. At least she didn't blame him for not coming back, that would've been devastating.

Personally I reckon he should've kept the letter sealed and then used the TARDIS to return to her the same night he left. He always knew when Madame de Pompadour would die, she's a famous historical figure, but there was nothing to indicate that he didn't come back to her and have adventures. He looked those spoilers up himself by reading the letter.

The heroes never did learn why the robots went after Madame de Pompadour specifically, but there's a big clue when the TARDIS dematerialises revealing a painting of her. Born 1721, died 1764, just like in real life. Nothing changed.

Incidentally, this is nothing like what Madame de Pompadour looks like in her paintings. It's not even what Sophia Myles looks like really, as it's a bit gaunt.

The episode could've ended on this reveal and gone straight to credits without dragging things out any longer, but instead it gives us a chance to think and listen to the music.

And then we see that the ship is the SS Madame de Pompadour.

It's an interesting thing to end on, as it explains why the robots were after Reinette's brain specifically, but doesn't have any emotional impact on its own. It's not a huge twist that re-contextualises the whole episode.

Though it's not just a reveal, it's also a shot of an empty broken spaceship, left to drift alone in space forever. It's recognition that Madame de Pompadour continues to be remembered, years after her death. And with that music box tune playing, it's just beautiful and haunting and sad. Man, Murray Gold knocked it out of the park with this one.


CONCLUSION

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I hate The Girl in the Fireplace. Or at least, I should do. Knowing what I'm like, there isn't much about this plot that should appeal to me. For one thing it's about the Doctor falling in love, which I'm rarely keen on. Worse he immediately falls in love right after randomly getting kissed by an adult version of the little girl he met two minutes ago, and then for the rest of episode he's either spying on her or drinking with her. It's also a bit crazy that it's a romance with Madame de Pompadour, an actual person who existed.

I think what makes it work for me is that the Doctor never tries to charm Reinette, it's always her charming him. The Doctor makes strong bonds and cares deeply for people who've made an impression on him, and Reinette really makes an impression. She understands his loneliness in a way that Rose doesn't get and gives us some insight into his character... while also teasing the 'Doctor Who?' mystery from the Seventh Doctor era in the same conversion.

It helps that Sophia Myles plays the character so well that I find it easy to believe she'd fascinate him. Though I find it hard to believe the actor is a regular person from the modern day, as that witty period dialogue sounds so natural from her. It's a good match for the Doctor's own wit, which is on full display here.

It's probably fair to say that the writing is actually pretty good in general. Hugo Award-winning good. Steven Moffat and Russell T Davies gave Doctor Who the best of times and the worst of times, but bloody hell they were a great team back in the day. Composer Murray Gold is also a perfect match for RTD's Doctor Who, because when he misses it's a spectacular miss, and when he hits his music lands dead centre in the bullseye. I'm sure the episode would've hit people in the emotions even without the soundtrack... but the soundtrack is also plenty heartbreaking even without the episode, and the two combined is 2005 Doctor Who doing what it does best.

Some people praise the 2005 revival for having more depth to its stories and characters than the classic series did, and I sometimes feel that's unfair. Not this time though, there's no way the classic series could have ever done an episode like this. Even the modern series can rarely do it. Though Moffat did eventually repeat Reinette's entire arc with another character in a later story... which I will not spoil here.

In fact Reinette's story is kind of a scale model of the Doctor's relationship with anyone he grows close to, as they're only in his life for a short while and then he has to move on. It's not just the Curse of the Time Lords, it's the curse of how he lives. You can't have the Doctor without the monsters.

The episode looks pretty great as well, making good use of sets and locations (and extras in costumes) to pull off a future sci-fi story and a pseudo-historical simultaneously. Oh, plus there are the clockwork villains in creepy masks, which are an incredibly 'Doctor Who' concept. They're also a bit similar to the nanogenes in Moffat's previous story, The Empty Child, as they're not malevolent in the slightest. They're just taking logical steps to complete their programmed repair objectives based on their limited understanding. The story's not just about the dangers of AI, it's about the lack of it, as they're too stupid to realise they're doing harm, or that stealing Madame de Pompadour's brain won't work.

It's a bit worrying actually that dumb starship repair droids from the year 5000 are capable of jury-rigging time portals and messing with our history. It's actually a bit implausible that they'd get this ability so easily.

The episode's so clever and insightful and well constructed that it's kind of jarring when things don't quite make sense. I've already mentioned my biggest problem, which is the Doctor stranding Mickey and Rose to save Reinette and not even showing concern for them afterwards. Then when he gets back he's happy that they chose to wait for him. What? I think this part of the episode is just plain broken and needed a rewrite.


RATING

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If you've seen my reviews of later episodes you know I don't give this score out to every Steven Moffat story. But I don't think many people would argue I'm being too generous to this one.

  9/10

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NEXT EPISODE

Next time, it's the season's first two-parter! There's no mystery to who's going to show up though as it's called Rise of the Cybermen.

If you want to share your opinions about The Girl in the Fireplace then go right ahead. Just please don't ruin later episodes for any first-time viewer reading this who has only gotten this far.