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[[quoteright:350:http://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/girlinthefireplace_5474.jpg]]
->'''Madame de Pompadour:''' Oh. This is my lover, the King of France.\\
'''Tenth Doctor:''' Yeah? Well, I'm the Lord of Time.
Hold on to your hearts -- king of nightmares Creator/StevenMoffat is in the writer's seat. This episode was nominated for a Nebula and won a Hugo.
-----
The Doctor, Rose, and Mickey all land on a spaceship in another galaxy and 3000 years in the future. It's abandoned, all grimy future-tech... except for an 18th-century French fireplace, complete with an actual 18th-century French fire. That's because 18th-century France is on the other side of it. Specifically, a little girl's room in Paris, 1727.
You don't need to dangle a juicy plot hook like ''that'' in front of the Doctor twice. ''Why'' the little girl's room is hooked up to a spaceship 3000 years in the future and a few galaxies away, the Doctor doesn't know. He also doesn't know what poor little Reinette has done to warrant being followed around by masked, grinning, desperate clockwork robots, but he chases them out from under her bed and back aboard the spaceship. [[note]]Repeating his BadassBoast from Creator/StevenMoffat's early short story Literature/ContinuityErrors: - "What do monsters have nightmares about?" - "Me!" -- which was in turn based on Creator/PaulCornell's "Love and War".[[/note]]
On the other side of the fireplace, the little girl ages years each time the Doctor steps through -- even pleasantly surprising him with a makeout session once she's old enough -- and eventually becomes Madame de Pompadour, the elegant and accomplished courtesan who was mistress to King Louis XV. After the Doctor saves her from another Droid, he finally figures out what's going on: the spaceship they came from was badly damaged during a space storm and the droids are simply the ship's repair crew, trying to fix the damage with the few spare parts they had available. During the conversation, the droid reveals a detail that Rose and Mickey have already discovered: the robots were overzealous in their maintenance tasks, and since they didn't had enough spare parts, the organs of the ship's missing crew have been repurposed as sources of ship repair parts. For some still unexplained reason the droids have decided that Madame de Pompadour's brain would make a fine addition to the ship's navigational system.
However, they want her brain at a particular point in her life, which means that they have to waste enough time opening and closing doors, while the Doctor tries to piece together what's going on. Madame de Pompadour, meanwhile, grows to love the Doctor, and is very quick to understand just what he is and how he can be in her bedroom at all those different points in her life. When he gently scans her brain for any information he can find, she unexpectedly uses the open mental link to explore his mind in turn -- once again pleasantly surprising the Doctor, but finding nothing that could protect her from the inevitable entrance of the robots later on in her life. She does ask him something tremendously important: "[[Recap/DoctorWhoS32E13TheWeddingOfRiverSong Doctor Who? It's more than just a secret, isn't it?]]"
When Mickey and Rose appear to her, years later, she decides to find out what the Doctor's world is like. So, dressed in her elaborate Versailles gown, she simply ignores them and steps through the open door and into the spaceship. From a distant open portal elsewhere on the ship, she can hear her future self screaming in despair. There's nothing she can do for now, and she resigns herself to waiting in fear in her own world.
%% Real Life example does not count; See NoRealLifeExamplesPlease. Do not read Beyond the Impossible here.%%
When the droids finally appear, again years later, the Doctor makes a tremendously grand entrance -- smashing ''through'' a mirror, on a white horse, into a Versailles ballroom. (Which incidentally, after much deliberation, was deemed literally impossible by the production team. When they told Creator/StevenMoffat, he broke down and cried like a child, and so the production team decided to ''film it anyway.'') By doing so, however, he destroys the portal and consigns himself to a life on TheSlowPath together with Reinette.
Until she shows him her painstakingly-reconstructed childhood bedroom, whose fireplace is still linked to the ship... The Doctor leaves, but promises to take her along to the stars, and tells her to wait two minutes.
Two minutes later, when the Doctor comes back, years have passed in Versailles and Reinette has died of illness. King Louis hands him a letter, which the Doctor silently walks off to read.
Just before they leave in the TARDIS, Rose wonders why the robots would have wanted Madame de Pompadour. The Doctor states that he doesn't know, it could've been anything, and they leave. Then comes TheTag. The camera pulls out, revealing the name of the spaceship: ''S.S. Madame de Pompadour.''
----
!!Tropes:
* AffectionateNickname: The Doctor calls Cleopatra (Queen of Egypt) "Cleo".
* AIIsACrapshoot: The droids were programmed to repair their ship using ''whatever they had around.'' Unfortunately, bad programming made them interpret this as ExactWords and include living people as spare parts.
* ArbitrarySkepticism: Mickey wonders what a horse is doing on a spaceship.
-->'''Doctor:''' "What’s Pre-Revolutionary France doing on a spaceship? Get a little perspective!"
* ArcWords: Someone asking what the Doctor's name is.
-->'''Madame de Pompadour:''' The Doctor. Doctor ''who?'' It's more than just a secret, isn't it?
* BadassBoast: The Doctor has a good one early on as he saves Reinette from the first Clockwork Robot and pursues it -
-->'''The Doctor''': It's just a nightmare, Reinette, don't worry, everyone has nightmares. Even monsters under the bed have nightmares.
--> '''Young Reinette''': What do monsters have nightmares about?
--> '''The Doctor''': ''ME!''
* BigDamnHeroes: The Doctor crashing through the mirror on a horse at the climax. Complete with CrowningMusicOfAwesome.
* BitterSweetEnding: The villains are twarted, EverybodyLives, but a TimeyWimeyBall prevents Reinette from becoming The Doctor's latest companion.
* CallBack: The automaton going BrokenRecord until our heroes figure out the obvious, which happened just ''one ep before''.
* ChekhovsGun: Most didn't expect Arthur the horse to be that important.
* ClockworkCreature: Under the mask, the droids have clockwork brains.
* ClockPunk: The clockwork droids. The Doctor is impressed.
* ContinuityNod: [[Recap/DoctorWhoNSS1E10TheDoctorDances "Bananas are good!"]]
** "What are monsters scared of?"
* CostumePorn: In all of her many gowns, Reinette looks ''gorgeous''.
* TheDulcineaEffect: The Doctor dooms himself to TheSlowPath without the TARDIS for a woman he's known for the period of a party.
* EuropeansAreKinky: The entanglements in Versailles prompt this exchange:
-->'''Mickey''': King's wife and the king's girlfriend?\\
'''Doctor''': France. Different planet.
* EvilPlan: The clockwork druids are looking for the key component to repair their ship. This means stalking a girl with plans to cut her head off and extract her brain.
* ExactWords: The maintenance androids were programmed to repair damage using ''whatever'' they have around to use as spare parts and that's exactly what they did.
* {{Foil}}: Madame de Pompadour is one to Rose - Reinette's cultured, intelligent and very powerful, despite being in a society where it wasn't normal for women to be so, and well in control of both the men in her life (the King and the Doctor), loving them both equally. Rose is from a society that encourages equality but isn't that special, and she can't find a balance between the two men in her life, meaning one always feels left out. Also, they're both blonde.
* GenreBlind: The Doctor failing to realize that he can't leave Reinette for "two minutes" without the "Slower Path" taking effect. It overlaps into WhatAnIdiot territory, since if he wanted to take her with him, he could have just led her through the fireplace there and then.
* GorgeousPeriodDress: They're accurate, too. Reinette sports some of the most beautiful ''robes à la française'' ever seen on television.
* HarmlessFreezing: The freeze gun that incapacitates the clockwork men. Justified on account of the fact that they are ''robots'', so incapacitation without significant damage is far more reasonable than it would be with an organic freeze-ee.
* HorsebackHeroism: How does The Doctor save the day in the end? Charging through a mirror on a white horse!
* HistoricalDomainCharacter: Madame de Pompadour did all the things The Doctor talked about in real life.
* HistoricalInJoke: "I'm the Doctor, and I just snogged Madame de Pompadour!"
* HowWeGotHere: "The clock on the mantle is broken! It is time! Doctor! Doctor!" Cue intro theme.
* ImminentDangerClue: The Doctor realizes something is amiss when he notices that the only clock in the room is broken... yet a ticking sound can still be heard.
* JustFollowingOrders: The clockwork robots were given orders to repair the spaceship. Unfortunately, no one informed them that farming the crew for spare parts was off limits, or that trying to murder the ship's namesake to replace the ship's computer was a bad idea.
* MayflyDecemberRomance: Reinette's romance with The Doctor who never ages.
* NecktieHeadband: The Doctor has his tie wrapped around the head when he pretends to be drunk.
* NotQuiteSavedEnough: The Doctor spends the whole episode protecting Reinette from the droids, but she ends up dying of illness (after another several years, but only minutes for both the Doctor and the viewers).
* ObliviouslyEvil: The androids have absolutely no idea that killing people and grafting their organs to a damaged spaceship is bad. Neither do they seem to be aware that murdering the entire crew of their spaceship made all their repairs useless, as there's nobody alive to pilot it anymore.
* OhCrap: When the Doctor points out that, if the clock is broken... ''what's making that ticking sound?''
* PlayingDrunk: The Doctor.
-->'''Rose:''' [[LikeAnOldMarriedCouple What have you been doing? Where've you been?]]\\
'''The Doctor:''' Well, among other things, I ''think'' I just invented the banana daiquiri a couple of centuries early. Do you know they'd never seen a banana before?
* RomanceOnTheSet: Creator/DavidTennant dated guest star Sophia Myles for a while after they were paired in this episode.
* RuleNumberOne: "Don't wander off!" The Doctor is exasperated how often Rose breaks this rule.
* ShoutOut: The Doctor swinging in, singing "[[Theatre/MyFairLady I Could Have Danced All Night]]".
* TheSlowPath: TropeNamer
-->'''Madame de Pompadour:''' 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.
* StrappedToAnOperatingTable: Rose and Mickey so they can be harvested for spare parts.
* TalkingTheMonsterToDeath: The robots simply stop functioning once the Doctor makes it totally clear that they can no longer return to their ship.
* TechnoBabble: "Spatial temporal hyperlink."
-->'''Rose:''' What's that mean?\\
'''The Doctor:''' [[SubvertedTrope No idea, just made it up]]. Didn't want to say "[[AWizardDidIt magic door]]".
* TimeTravelRomance: The Doctor meets Reinette when she is seven and pops back into her life at various periods up until age 37.
* TimeyWimeyBall: The Doctor offers only vague explanations as to why the TARDIS is unable to affect events and how they must rely on the time corridors. The real reason is that the TARDIS could easily solve the central conflict of the episode (finding the right door before the automatons do), to say nothing of negating the tragedy of the ending by jumping back in time before Madame de Pompadour's death.
* UnnecessaryCombatRoll: Mickey does one for the fun of it while scoping out the spaceship, rather than in an actual fight.
* WhamShot: The camera pulling out at the end of the final scene to reveal the name of the ship.
* [[WhatHappenedToTheMouse What Happened to The Horse?]]: After the BigDamnHeroes moment at the climax, the Doctor dismounts Arthur, and that's the last we see of him. It seems logical that he was left in France -- that's where he came from, after all -- except he's standing in the ballroom at Versailles.
* WholePlotReference: The episode was inspired by ''Literature/TheTimeTravelersWife''.
* ZeeRust: Deliberately invoked. The clockwork robots were created to ''look'' old-fashioned so as to look fancy and whimsical for people on board the starship.
----
->'''Madame de Pompadour:''' Oh. This is my lover, the King of France.\\
'''Tenth Doctor:''' Yeah? Well, I'm the Lord of Time.
Hold on to your hearts -- king of nightmares Creator/StevenMoffat is in the writer's seat. This episode was nominated for a Nebula and won a Hugo.
-----
The Doctor, Rose, and Mickey all land on a spaceship in another galaxy and 3000 years in the future. It's abandoned, all grimy future-tech... except for an 18th-century French fireplace, complete with an actual 18th-century French fire. That's because 18th-century France is on the other side of it. Specifically, a little girl's room in Paris, 1727.
You don't need to dangle a juicy plot hook like ''that'' in front of the Doctor twice. ''Why'' the little girl's room is hooked up to a spaceship 3000 years in the future and a few galaxies away, the Doctor doesn't know. He also doesn't know what poor little Reinette has done to warrant being followed around by masked, grinning, desperate clockwork robots, but he chases them out from under her bed and back aboard the spaceship. [[note]]Repeating his BadassBoast from Creator/StevenMoffat's early short story Literature/ContinuityErrors: - "What do monsters have nightmares about?" - "Me!" -- which was in turn based on Creator/PaulCornell's "Love and War".[[/note]]
On the other side of the fireplace, the little girl ages years each time the Doctor steps through -- even pleasantly surprising him with a makeout session once she's old enough -- and eventually becomes Madame de Pompadour, the elegant and accomplished courtesan who was mistress to King Louis XV. After the Doctor saves her from another Droid, he finally figures out what's going on: the spaceship they came from was badly damaged during a space storm and the droids are simply the ship's repair crew, trying to fix the damage with the few spare parts they had available. During the conversation, the droid reveals a detail that Rose and Mickey have already discovered: the robots were overzealous in their maintenance tasks, and since they didn't had enough spare parts, the organs of the ship's missing crew have been repurposed as sources of ship repair parts. For some still unexplained reason the droids have decided that Madame de Pompadour's brain would make a fine addition to the ship's navigational system.
However, they want her brain at a particular point in her life, which means that they have to waste enough time opening and closing doors, while the Doctor tries to piece together what's going on. Madame de Pompadour, meanwhile, grows to love the Doctor, and is very quick to understand just what he is and how he can be in her bedroom at all those different points in her life. When he gently scans her brain for any information he can find, she unexpectedly uses the open mental link to explore his mind in turn -- once again pleasantly surprising the Doctor, but finding nothing that could protect her from the inevitable entrance of the robots later on in her life. She does ask him something tremendously important: "[[Recap/DoctorWhoS32E13TheWeddingOfRiverSong Doctor Who? It's more than just a secret, isn't it?]]"
When Mickey and Rose appear to her, years later, she decides to find out what the Doctor's world is like. So, dressed in her elaborate Versailles gown, she simply ignores them and steps through the open door and into the spaceship. From a distant open portal elsewhere on the ship, she can hear her future self screaming in despair. There's nothing she can do for now, and she resigns herself to waiting in fear in her own world.
%% Real Life example does not count; See NoRealLifeExamplesPlease. Do not read Beyond the Impossible here.%%
When the droids finally appear, again years later, the Doctor makes a tremendously grand entrance -- smashing ''through'' a mirror, on a white horse, into a Versailles ballroom. (Which incidentally, after much deliberation, was deemed literally impossible by the production team. When they told Creator/StevenMoffat, he broke down and cried like a child, and so the production team decided to ''film it anyway.'') By doing so, however, he destroys the portal and consigns himself to a life on TheSlowPath together with Reinette.
Until she shows him her painstakingly-reconstructed childhood bedroom, whose fireplace is still linked to the ship... The Doctor leaves, but promises to take her along to the stars, and tells her to wait two minutes.
Two minutes later, when the Doctor comes back, years have passed in Versailles and Reinette has died of illness. King Louis hands him a letter, which the Doctor silently walks off to read.
Just before they leave in the TARDIS, Rose wonders why the robots would have wanted Madame de Pompadour. The Doctor states that he doesn't know, it could've been anything, and they leave. Then comes TheTag. The camera pulls out, revealing the name of the spaceship: ''S.S. Madame de Pompadour.''
----
!!Tropes:
* AffectionateNickname: The Doctor calls Cleopatra (Queen of Egypt) "Cleo".
* AIIsACrapshoot: The droids were programmed to repair their ship using ''whatever they had around.'' Unfortunately, bad programming made them interpret this as ExactWords and include living people as spare parts.
* ArbitrarySkepticism: Mickey wonders what a horse is doing on a spaceship.
-->'''Doctor:''' "What’s Pre-Revolutionary France doing on a spaceship? Get a little perspective!"
* ArcWords: Someone asking what the Doctor's name is.
-->'''Madame de Pompadour:''' The Doctor. Doctor ''who?'' It's more than just a secret, isn't it?
* BadassBoast: The Doctor has a good one early on as he saves Reinette from the first Clockwork Robot and pursues it -
-->'''The Doctor''': It's just a nightmare, Reinette, don't worry, everyone has nightmares. Even monsters under the bed have nightmares.
--> '''Young Reinette''': What do monsters have nightmares about?
--> '''The Doctor''': ''ME!''
* BigDamnHeroes: The Doctor crashing through the mirror on a horse at the climax. Complete with CrowningMusicOfAwesome.
* BitterSweetEnding: The villains are twarted, EverybodyLives, but a TimeyWimeyBall prevents Reinette from becoming The Doctor's latest companion.
* CallBack: The automaton going BrokenRecord until our heroes figure out the obvious, which happened just ''one ep before''.
* ChekhovsGun: Most didn't expect Arthur the horse to be that important.
* ClockworkCreature: Under the mask, the droids have clockwork brains.
* ClockPunk: The clockwork droids. The Doctor is impressed.
* ContinuityNod: [[Recap/DoctorWhoNSS1E10TheDoctorDances "Bananas are good!"]]
** "What are monsters scared of?"
* CostumePorn: In all of her many gowns, Reinette looks ''gorgeous''.
* TheDulcineaEffect: The Doctor dooms himself to TheSlowPath without the TARDIS for a woman he's known for the period of a party.
* EuropeansAreKinky: The entanglements in Versailles prompt this exchange:
-->'''Mickey''': King's wife and the king's girlfriend?\\
'''Doctor''': France. Different planet.
* EvilPlan: The clockwork druids are looking for the key component to repair their ship. This means stalking a girl with plans to cut her head off and extract her brain.
* ExactWords: The maintenance androids were programmed to repair damage using ''whatever'' they have around to use as spare parts and that's exactly what they did.
* {{Foil}}: Madame de Pompadour is one to Rose - Reinette's cultured, intelligent and very powerful, despite being in a society where it wasn't normal for women to be so, and well in control of both the men in her life (the King and the Doctor), loving them both equally. Rose is from a society that encourages equality but isn't that special, and she can't find a balance between the two men in her life, meaning one always feels left out. Also, they're both blonde.
* GenreBlind: The Doctor failing to realize that he can't leave Reinette for "two minutes" without the "Slower Path" taking effect. It overlaps into WhatAnIdiot territory, since if he wanted to take her with him, he could have just led her through the fireplace there and then.
* GorgeousPeriodDress: They're accurate, too. Reinette sports some of the most beautiful ''robes à la française'' ever seen on television.
* HarmlessFreezing: The freeze gun that incapacitates the clockwork men. Justified on account of the fact that they are ''robots'', so incapacitation without significant damage is far more reasonable than it would be with an organic freeze-ee.
* HorsebackHeroism: How does The Doctor save the day in the end? Charging through a mirror on a white horse!
* HistoricalDomainCharacter: Madame de Pompadour did all the things The Doctor talked about in real life.
* HistoricalInJoke: "I'm the Doctor, and I just snogged Madame de Pompadour!"
* HowWeGotHere: "The clock on the mantle is broken! It is time! Doctor! Doctor!" Cue intro theme.
* ImminentDangerClue: The Doctor realizes something is amiss when he notices that the only clock in the room is broken... yet a ticking sound can still be heard.
* JustFollowingOrders: The clockwork robots were given orders to repair the spaceship. Unfortunately, no one informed them that farming the crew for spare parts was off limits, or that trying to murder the ship's namesake to replace the ship's computer was a bad idea.
* MayflyDecemberRomance: Reinette's romance with The Doctor who never ages.
* NecktieHeadband: The Doctor has his tie wrapped around the head when he pretends to be drunk.
* NotQuiteSavedEnough: The Doctor spends the whole episode protecting Reinette from the droids, but she ends up dying of illness (after another several years, but only minutes for both the Doctor and the viewers).
* ObliviouslyEvil: The androids have absolutely no idea that killing people and grafting their organs to a damaged spaceship is bad. Neither do they seem to be aware that murdering the entire crew of their spaceship made all their repairs useless, as there's nobody alive to pilot it anymore.
* OhCrap: When the Doctor points out that, if the clock is broken... ''what's making that ticking sound?''
* PlayingDrunk: The Doctor.
-->'''Rose:''' [[LikeAnOldMarriedCouple What have you been doing? Where've you been?]]\\
'''The Doctor:''' Well, among other things, I ''think'' I just invented the banana daiquiri a couple of centuries early. Do you know they'd never seen a banana before?
* RomanceOnTheSet: Creator/DavidTennant dated guest star Sophia Myles for a while after they were paired in this episode.
* RuleNumberOne: "Don't wander off!" The Doctor is exasperated how often Rose breaks this rule.
* ShoutOut: The Doctor swinging in, singing "[[Theatre/MyFairLady I Could Have Danced All Night]]".
* TheSlowPath: TropeNamer
-->'''Madame de Pompadour:''' 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.
* StrappedToAnOperatingTable: Rose and Mickey so they can be harvested for spare parts.
* TalkingTheMonsterToDeath: The robots simply stop functioning once the Doctor makes it totally clear that they can no longer return to their ship.
* TechnoBabble: "Spatial temporal hyperlink."
-->'''Rose:''' What's that mean?\\
'''The Doctor:''' [[SubvertedTrope No idea, just made it up]]. Didn't want to say "[[AWizardDidIt magic door]]".
* TimeTravelRomance: The Doctor meets Reinette when she is seven and pops back into her life at various periods up until age 37.
* TimeyWimeyBall: The Doctor offers only vague explanations as to why the TARDIS is unable to affect events and how they must rely on the time corridors. The real reason is that the TARDIS could easily solve the central conflict of the episode (finding the right door before the automatons do), to say nothing of negating the tragedy of the ending by jumping back in time before Madame de Pompadour's death.
* UnnecessaryCombatRoll: Mickey does one for the fun of it while scoping out the spaceship, rather than in an actual fight.
* WhamShot: The camera pulling out at the end of the final scene to reveal the name of the ship.
* [[WhatHappenedToTheMouse What Happened to The Horse?]]: After the BigDamnHeroes moment at the climax, the Doctor dismounts Arthur, and that's the last we see of him. It seems logical that he was left in France -- that's where he came from, after all -- except he's standing in the ballroom at Versailles.
* WholePlotReference: The episode was inspired by ''Literature/TheTimeTravelersWife''.
* ZeeRust: Deliberately invoked. The clockwork robots were created to ''look'' old-fashioned so as to look fancy and whimsical for people on board the starship.
----
to:
->'''Madame de Pompadour:''' Oh. This is my lover, the King of France.\\
'''Tenth Doctor:''' Yeah? Well, I'm the Lord of Time.
Hold on to your hearts -- king of nightmares Creator/StevenMoffat is in the writer's seat. This episode was nominated for a Nebula and won a Hugo.
-----
The Doctor, Rose, and Mickey all land on a spaceship in another galaxy and 3000 years in the future. It's abandoned, all grimy future-tech... except for an 18th-century French fireplace, complete with an actual 18th-century French fire. That's because 18th-century France is on the other side of it. Specifically, a little girl's room in Paris, 1727.
You don't need to dangle a juicy plot hook like ''that'' in front of the Doctor twice. ''Why'' the little girl's room is hooked up to a spaceship 3000 years in the future and a few galaxies away, the Doctor doesn't know. He also doesn't know what poor little Reinette has done to warrant being followed around by masked, grinning, desperate clockwork robots, but he chases them out from under her bed and back aboard the spaceship. [[note]]Repeating his BadassBoast from Creator/StevenMoffat's early short story Literature/ContinuityErrors: - "What do monsters have nightmares about?" - "Me!" -- which was in turn based on Creator/PaulCornell's "Love and War".[[/note]]
On the other side of the fireplace, the little girl ages years each time the Doctor steps through -- even pleasantly surprising him with a makeout session once she's old enough -- and eventually becomes Madame de Pompadour, the elegant and accomplished courtesan who was mistress to King Louis XV. After the Doctor saves her from another Droid, he finally figures out what's going on: the spaceship they came from was badly damaged during a space storm and the droids are simply the ship's repair crew, trying to fix the damage with the few spare parts they had available. During the conversation, the droid reveals a detail that Rose and Mickey have already discovered: the robots were overzealous in their maintenance tasks, and since they didn't had enough spare parts, the organs of the ship's missing crew have been repurposed as sources of ship repair parts. For some still unexplained reason the droids have decided that Madame de Pompadour's brain would make a fine addition to the ship's navigational system.
However, they want her brain at a particular point in her life, which means that they have to waste enough time opening and closing doors, while the Doctor tries to piece together what's going on. Madame de Pompadour, meanwhile, grows to love the Doctor, and is very quick to understand just what he is and how he can be in her bedroom at all those different points in her life. When he gently scans her brain for any information he can find, she unexpectedly uses the open mental link to explore his mind in turn -- once again pleasantly surprising the Doctor, but finding nothing that could protect her from the inevitable entrance of the robots later on in her life. She does ask him something tremendously important: "[[Recap/DoctorWhoS32E13TheWeddingOfRiverSong Doctor Who? It's more than just a secret, isn't it?]]"
When Mickey and Rose appear to her, years later, she decides to find out what the Doctor's world is like. So, dressed in her elaborate Versailles gown, she simply ignores them and steps through the open door and into the spaceship. From a distant open portal elsewhere on the ship, she can hear her future self screaming in despair. There's nothing she can do for now, and she resigns herself to waiting in fear in her own world.
%% Real Life example does not count; See NoRealLifeExamplesPlease. Do not read Beyond the Impossible here.%%
When the droids finally appear, again years later, the Doctor makes a tremendously grand entrance -- smashing ''through'' a mirror, on a white horse, into a Versailles ballroom. (Which incidentally, after much deliberation, was deemed literally impossible by the production team. When they told Creator/StevenMoffat, he broke down and cried like a child, and so the production team decided to ''film it anyway.'') By doing so, however, he destroys the portal and consigns himself to a life on TheSlowPath together with Reinette.
Until she shows him her painstakingly-reconstructed childhood bedroom, whose fireplace is still linked to the ship... The Doctor leaves, but promises to take her along to the stars, and tells her to wait two minutes.
Two minutes later, when the Doctor comes back, years have passed in Versailles and Reinette has died of illness. King Louis hands him a letter, which the Doctor silently walks off to read.
Just before they leave in the TARDIS, Rose wonders why the robots would have wanted Madame de Pompadour. The Doctor states that he doesn't know, it could've been anything, and they leave. Then comes TheTag. The camera pulls out, revealing the name of the spaceship: ''S.S. Madame de Pompadour.''
----
!!Tropes:
* AffectionateNickname: The Doctor calls Cleopatra (Queen of Egypt) "Cleo".
* AIIsACrapshoot: The droids were programmed to repair their ship using ''whatever they had around.'' Unfortunately, bad programming made them interpret this as ExactWords and include living people as spare parts.
* ArbitrarySkepticism: Mickey wonders what a horse is doing on a spaceship.
-->'''Doctor:''' "What’s Pre-Revolutionary France doing on a spaceship? Get a little perspective!"
* ArcWords: Someone asking what the Doctor's name is.
-->'''Madame de Pompadour:''' The Doctor. Doctor ''who?'' It's more than just a secret, isn't it?
* BadassBoast: The Doctor has a good one early on as he saves Reinette from the first Clockwork Robot and pursues it -
-->'''The Doctor''': It's just a nightmare, Reinette, don't worry, everyone has nightmares. Even monsters under the bed have nightmares.
--> '''Young Reinette''': What do monsters have nightmares about?
--> '''The Doctor''': ''ME!''
* BigDamnHeroes: The Doctor crashing through the mirror on a horse at the climax. Complete with CrowningMusicOfAwesome.
* BitterSweetEnding: The villains are twarted, EverybodyLives, but a TimeyWimeyBall prevents Reinette from becoming The Doctor's latest companion.
* CallBack: The automaton going BrokenRecord until our heroes figure out the obvious, which happened just ''one ep before''.
* ChekhovsGun: Most didn't expect Arthur the horse to be that important.
* ClockworkCreature: Under the mask, the droids have clockwork brains.
* ClockPunk: The clockwork droids. The Doctor is impressed.
* ContinuityNod: [[Recap/DoctorWhoNSS1E10TheDoctorDances "Bananas are good!"]]
** "What are monsters scared of?"
* CostumePorn: In all of her many gowns, Reinette looks ''gorgeous''.
* TheDulcineaEffect: The Doctor dooms himself to TheSlowPath without the TARDIS for a woman he's known for the period of a party.
* EuropeansAreKinky: The entanglements in Versailles prompt this exchange:
-->'''Mickey''': King's wife and the king's girlfriend?\\
'''Doctor''': France. Different planet.
* EvilPlan: The clockwork druids are looking for the key component to repair their ship. This means stalking a girl with plans to cut her head off and extract her brain.
* ExactWords: The maintenance androids were programmed to repair damage using ''whatever'' they have around to use as spare parts and that's exactly what they did.
* {{Foil}}: Madame de Pompadour is one to Rose - Reinette's cultured, intelligent and very powerful, despite being in a society where it wasn't normal for women to be so, and well in control of both the men in her life (the King and the Doctor), loving them both equally. Rose is from a society that encourages equality but isn't that special, and she can't find a balance between the two men in her life, meaning one always feels left out. Also, they're both blonde.
* GenreBlind: The Doctor failing to realize that he can't leave Reinette for "two minutes" without the "Slower Path" taking effect. It overlaps into WhatAnIdiot territory, since if he wanted to take her with him, he could have just led her through the fireplace there and then.
* GorgeousPeriodDress: They're accurate, too. Reinette sports some of the most beautiful ''robes à la française'' ever seen on television.
* HarmlessFreezing: The freeze gun that incapacitates the clockwork men. Justified on account of the fact that they are ''robots'', so incapacitation without significant damage is far more reasonable than it would be with an organic freeze-ee.
* HorsebackHeroism: How does The Doctor save the day in the end? Charging through a mirror on a white horse!
* HistoricalDomainCharacter: Madame de Pompadour did all the things The Doctor talked about in real life.
* HistoricalInJoke: "I'm the Doctor, and I just snogged Madame de Pompadour!"
* HowWeGotHere: "The clock on the mantle is broken! It is time! Doctor! Doctor!" Cue intro theme.
* ImminentDangerClue: The Doctor realizes something is amiss when he notices that the only clock in the room is broken... yet a ticking sound can still be heard.
* JustFollowingOrders: The clockwork robots were given orders to repair the spaceship. Unfortunately, no one informed them that farming the crew for spare parts was off limits, or that trying to murder the ship's namesake to replace the ship's computer was a bad idea.
* MayflyDecemberRomance: Reinette's romance with The Doctor who never ages.
* NecktieHeadband: The Doctor has his tie wrapped around the head when he pretends to be drunk.
* NotQuiteSavedEnough: The Doctor spends the whole episode protecting Reinette from the droids, but she ends up dying of illness (after another several years, but only minutes for both the Doctor and the viewers).
* ObliviouslyEvil: The androids have absolutely no idea that killing people and grafting their organs to a damaged spaceship is bad. Neither do they seem to be aware that murdering the entire crew of their spaceship made all their repairs useless, as there's nobody alive to pilot it anymore.
* OhCrap: When the Doctor points out that, if the clock is broken... ''what's making that ticking sound?''
* PlayingDrunk: The Doctor.
-->'''Rose:''' [[LikeAnOldMarriedCouple What have you been doing? Where've you been?]]\\
'''The Doctor:''' Well, among other things, I ''think'' I just invented the banana daiquiri a couple of centuries early. Do you know they'd never seen a banana before?
* RomanceOnTheSet: Creator/DavidTennant dated guest star Sophia Myles for a while after they were paired in this episode.
* RuleNumberOne: "Don't wander off!" The Doctor is exasperated how often Rose breaks this rule.
* ShoutOut: The Doctor swinging in, singing "[[Theatre/MyFairLady I Could Have Danced All Night]]".
* TheSlowPath: TropeNamer
-->'''Madame de Pompadour:''' 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.
* StrappedToAnOperatingTable: Rose and Mickey so they can be harvested for spare parts.
* TalkingTheMonsterToDeath: The robots simply stop functioning once the Doctor makes it totally clear that they can no longer return to their ship.
* TechnoBabble: "Spatial temporal hyperlink."
-->'''Rose:''' What's that mean?\\
'''The Doctor:''' [[SubvertedTrope No idea, just made it up]]. Didn't want to say "[[AWizardDidIt magic door]]".
* TimeTravelRomance: The Doctor meets Reinette when she is seven and pops back into her life at various periods up until age 37.
* TimeyWimeyBall: The Doctor offers only vague explanations as to why the TARDIS is unable to affect events and how they must rely on the time corridors. The real reason is that the TARDIS could easily solve the central conflict of the episode (finding the right door before the automatons do), to say nothing of negating the tragedy of the ending by jumping back in time before Madame de Pompadour's death.
* UnnecessaryCombatRoll: Mickey does one for the fun of it while scoping out the spaceship, rather than in an actual fight.
* WhamShot: The camera pulling out at the end of the final scene to reveal the name of the ship.
* [[WhatHappenedToTheMouse What Happened to The Horse?]]: After the BigDamnHeroes moment at the climax, the Doctor dismounts Arthur, and that's the last we see of him. It seems logical that he was left in France -- that's where he came from, after all -- except he's standing in the ballroom at Versailles.
* WholePlotReference: The episode was inspired by ''Literature/TheTimeTravelersWife''.
* ZeeRust: Deliberately invoked. The clockwork robots were created to ''look'' old-fashioned so as to look fancy and whimsical for people on board the starship.
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This is the same principle as Melody\'s book in \"The Angels Take Manhattan\" and the broken arm.
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** Not to mention the fact that with the TARDIS working again, he could use it to go back and visit Reinette long before she died.
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** Not to mention the fact that with the TARDIS working again, he could use it to go back and visit Reinette long before she died.
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'''Tenth Doctor:''' Yeah? Well I'm the Lord of Time.
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'''Tenth Doctor:''' Yeah? Well Well, I'm the Lord of Time.
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%% Real Life example does not count; See NoRealLifeExamplesPlease. Do not add Beyond the Impossible here.%%
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* ArcWords: Someone asking what the Doctor's name is.
-->'''Madame de Pompadour:''' The Doctor. Doctor ''who?'' It's more than just a secret, isn't it?
-->'''Madame de Pompadour:''' The Doctor. Doctor ''who?'' It's more than just a secret, isn't it?
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Handling Spoilers: do not add spoilers for future episodes
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* {{Foreshadowing}}: A throwaway line in this episode becomes a major plot point in series 6 ''and'' 7. With Steven Moffat as the showrunner, it isn't a coincidence.
-->'''Madame de Pompadour:''' The Doctor. Doctor ''who?'' It's more than just a secret, isn't it?
-->'''Madame de Pompadour:''' The Doctor. Doctor ''who?'' It's more than just a secret, isn't it?
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* NotQuiteSavedEnough: The Doctor spends the whole episode protecting Reinette from the droids, but she ends up dying of illness (after another several years, but only minutes for both the Doctor and the viewers).
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* ClockworkCreature: Under the mask, the druids have clockwork brains.
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* ClockworkCreature: Under the mask, the druids droids have clockwork brains.
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'''Mickey''': King's wife and the king's girlfriend?\\
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* EuropeansAreKinky: The entanglements in Versailles prompt this exchange:
'''Mickey''': King's wife and the king's girlfriend?\\
'''Doctor''': France. Different planet.
'''Mickey''': King's wife and the king's girlfriend?\\
'''Doctor''': France. Different planet.
