20 Years Ago, The Longest-Running Sci-Fi Series Perfected A Captivating Trope
A love story across time, all building to a shocking ending.
When Doctor Who first started back in 1963, it was meant to be an educational history show, where the Doctor would travel back in time and interact with historical figures — that’s why the first companions were teachers. Of course, audiences were much more enthused about the sci-fi elements, but Doctor Who has never lost the historical bent, including episodes with Winston Churchill, Queen Victoria, William Shakespeare, and Richard Nixon.
20 years ago, one of these historical episodes unfolded a heartbreaking love story across centuries. At the time, it was a gorgeous standalone episode with unforgettable visuals. But in retrospect, it’s the start of a massive tone shift for the show as a whole.
Steampunk-y clockwork robots stalk the King’s mistress in “The Girl in the Fireplace.”
“The Girl in the Fireplace” is set in two vastly different settings: 18th-century France, where Reinette (Sophia Myles), aka Madame du Pompadour, keeps seeing the Doctor through portals in her fireplace, and 51st Century space, where the Doctor (David Tennant), Rose (Billie Piper), and Mickey (Noel Clarke) find a completely abandoned spaceship. But nothing is as it seems: in France, Reinette is being stalked by creepy porcelain-masked clockwork drones, and in space, the ship’s technology is being replaced with human body parts.
To the Doctor, this is all happening in one day, but to Reinette, the Doctor becomes a character who is a constant throughout her life, never aging a single day. He’s her imaginary friend, which makes her getting involved in this mystery all the more dramatic. In the final moments, the Doctor says he’ll be right back, not knowing that by the time he returns, it will be too late for Reinette. It all builds to an almost Twilight-Zone-esque ending where it’s revealed the clockwork droids were protecting Reinette because the spaceship they were assigned to were named after her, and they simply got confused.
This adventure was the second written by Steven Moffat, who penned the instant classic two-parter “The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances” in Season 1. It’s full of references, like the Clockwork Droids echoing the Mechanical Turk automaton hoax and, especially, the romance plot referencing the book The Time Traveler’s Wife.
“The Girl in the Fireplace” is the first of Steven Moffat’s many non-linear love stories.
This “time-crossed lovers” trope is something Moffat would revisit again and again over the course of his Doctor Who career. As a writer, he would go on to write “Silence in the Library,” the episode where the Doctor meets River Song, his non-linearly-traveling wife who would go on to become a key character. As showrunner, he wrote “The Eleventh Hour,” where Amy Pond meets the Doctor and, like Reinette, is told he’ll be right back, while instead years pass and he’s become her imaginary friend, and “The Big Bang,” where Amy’s husband, Rory, waits for 2000 years to protect his wife in the Pandorica. In a full-circle moment, he even adapted The Time Traveler’s Wife into a miniseries.
It’s something that follows Moffat everywhere he goes now. “People always used to ask me, ‘Why do you do out-of-sequence storytelling?’” Moffat told Inverse in 2022. “And I'd always say to them, is your memory in the right order? When you think about yourself, do you go from being born to being 1 year old to 2 years old? No, it's a mad jumble. You wouldn't even know what the order was.”
That entire fascination, with love torn apart by having to take “the slower way,” can all be drawn back to this episode. Sure, there are more tangible legacies, like the Clockwork Droids returning in the Season 8 premiere “Deep Breath,” but “The Girl in the Fireplace was a genuine sea change for the tone of Doctor Who, transforming the time travel element of the series from educational to sci-fi, to practically romantic.
