History Recap / DoctorWhoS28E4TheGirlInTheFireplace

* OutOfCharacter: The [[SeriesContinuityError continuity errors]] lead to Rose and the Doctor acting this way at many points in the episode. For example, Reinette tells Rose that "the Doctor is worth the monsters", and Rose doesn't disagree, even though it's been established that a large part of the reason she loves traveling with the Doctor ''is'' the monsters. The Doctor abandons Rose despite promising to not leave her. Rose gets along well with Mickey even though her relationship with him is meant to be awkward, even being unhappy that he joins them at the end of the previous episodes. Moffat states in the ''Confidential'' that Reinette's class and education is associated with the Doctor's attraction to her, even though the Doctor has canonically always hated elitism. The Doctor sidelines his main companions without problem and leaves them to fend for themselves, among other moments.

* SeriesContinuityError: Only an episode earlier in "[[Recap/DoctorWhoS28E3SchoolReunion School Reunion]]" the Doctor promises Rose he won't leave her like he has other companions, only to [[OutOfCharacter uncharacteristically]] abandon her in the 51st Century in this one. Rose also was not happy about Mickey joining her and the Doctor in the TARDIS at the end of the previous episode, but the beginning of this one starts out with them laughing and getting along perfectly fine.

* {{Foil}}: Madame de Pompadour is one to Rose — Reinette's an powerful and educated aristocrat, despite being in a society where it wasn't normal for women to be so, and in control of the men in her life, loving them both. Rose is from a society that encourages equality, but is a shopworker from a council estate who never went to university, 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.

* {{Foil}}: Madame de Pompadour is one to Rose — Reinette's cultured, educated, and very powerful, despite being in a society where it wasn't normal for women to be so, and in control of the men in her life, loving them both. Rose is from a society that encourages equality, but is a shopworker from a council estate who never went to university, 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.

* {{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.

* MindRape: As the Doctor is reading her mind with her permission, Reinette starts reading his mind back without his permission.

* TimePortal: The clockwork robots created several so they could stalk Madame de Pompadour. The titular fireplace is one of them.

* SpottingTheThread: On the night she met King Louis XV, Reinette noticed someone else in the room with her who had been standing still and staying quiet for an unnaturally long time, and asked the figure to show themselves. It turned out to be another robot.

* PlotParallel: Reinette's story is very similar to Amy's in Season 5 (which makes sense since Steven Moffat wrote both).

* OutOfCharacter: The [[SeriesContinuityError continuity errors]] lead to Rose and the Doctor acting this way at many points in the episode. For example, Reinette tells Rose that "the Doctor is worth the monsters", and Rose doesn't disagree, even though it's been established that a large part of the reason she loves traveling with the Doctor ''is'' the monsters. The Doctor abandons Rose despite promising to not leave her. Rose gets along well with Mickey even though her relationship with him is meant to be awkward, even being unhappy that he joins them at the end of the previous episodes. Moffat states in the ''Confidential'' that Reinette's class and education is associated with the Doctor's attraction to her, even though the Doctor has canonically always hated elitism. The Doctor sidelines his main companions without problem and leaves them to fend for themselves, among other moments.

* IdiotBall: The Doctor's solution to clockwork droids attacking Madame de Pompadour is to ride a horse through one of the time windows, breaking the connection to the ship in the future. He then engages in TalkingTheMonsterToDeath. However he is left trapped thousands of years from his companions and the TARDIS and it is only some flimsy writing that lets him get back. It doesn't occur to him to find some other way to disrupt the time window (if smashing them can break them then it shouldn't be too difficult). This could be justified by him wanting to convince the droids to shut down but couldn't he have used the TARDIS to get there? Even if he doesn't want the droids to know about the TARDIS, he could just materialise in another room a few minutes before the connection is broken. Creator/DavidTennant actually pointed this out during recording and a line about not being able to use the TARDIS because they're part of events was hastily inserted, even though this is never a problem in any other story.

* 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.

* GenreBlind: The Doctor failing to realize that he can't leave Reinette for "two minutes" without the "Slower Path" taking effect. It overlaps into imbecilic territory, since if he wanted to take her with him, he could have just led her through the fireplace there and then.

* IdiotBall: The Doctor's solution to clockwork droids attacking Madame De Pompadour is to ride a horse through one of the time windows, breaking the connection to the ship in the future. He then engages in TalkingTheMonsterToDeath. However he is left trapped thousands of years from his companions and the TARDIS and it is only some flimsy writing that lets him get back. It doesn't occur to him to find some other way to disrupt the time window (if smashing them can break them then it shouldn't be too difficult). This could be justified by him wanting to convince the droids to shut down but couldn't he have used the TARDIS to get there? Even if he doesn't want the droids to know about the TARDIS, he could just materialise in another room a few minutes before the connection is broken. Creator/DavidTennant actually pointed this out during recording and a line about not being able to use the TARDIS because they're part of events was hastily inserted, even though this is never a problem in any other story.

--->'''Mickey:''' What's a horse doing on a spaceship?\\

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.

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 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.

* AbsurdlyDedicatedWorker: The maintenance robots had been programmed to keep the ship running at all costs. They followed these orders so well that they dismembered all of the ship's ''crew members'' and used their various body parts to supplement the ship's systems when they ran out of conventional parts. That's right, they [[TurnedAgainstTheirMasters destroyed their programmers]] in the course of following their programming.

* 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.
* AnachronisticClue: One clue that things aren't quite right on the spaceship they've landed on is there are multiple portals to 18th century France, first seen by the Doctor as a fireplace.
-->'''Doctor:''' Well, there's something you don't see in your average spaceship. Eighteenth century. French. Nice mantle. Not a hologram. It's not even a reproduction. This actually is an eighteenth century French fireplace. Double sided.
-->''[later]''
-->'''Mickey:''' What's a horse doing on a spaceship?
-->'''Doctor:''' Mickey, what's ''Pre-Revolutionary France'' doing on a spaceship? Get a little perspective!

-->'''The Doctor:''' What’s Pre-Revolutionary France doing on a spaceship? Get a little perspective!

* BadassBoast: The Doctor has a good one early on as he saves Reinette from the first Clockwork Robot and pursues it.

* CharacterTitle: Reinette is ‘The Girl in the Fireplace’

-->'''Robot:''' [[LiteralMinded We do not require your feet]].

** [[YearInsideHourOutside Time moving at a different pace in two interconnected places.]]

* DoingInTheWizard: Lampshaded: the Doctor suggests that the "windows" are "spatio-temporal hyperlinks". When Mickey asks what that means, the Doctor replies, "No idea. Didn't want to say 'magic door.'"

* {{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.
* {{Foreshadowing}}:
** When Repair Droid 8 says the robots require one more part for the ship, the reply as to why they need Reinette is "We are the same", an early clue as to TheReveal at the end.
** "[[Recap/DoctorWhoS32E13TheWeddingOfRiverSong Doctor Who?]] [[Recap/DoctorWhoS33E13TheNameOfTheDoctor It's more than just]] [[Recap/DoctorWho2013CSTheTimeOfTheDoctor a secret, isn't it?]]"

* ICantDance: With an implied UnusualEuphemism too.
* IdiotBall: The Doctor's solution to clockwork droids attacking Madame De Pompadour is to ride a horse through one of the time windows, breaking the connection to the ship in the future. He then engages in TalkingTheMonsterToDeath. However he is left trapped thousands of years from his companions and the TARDIS and it is only some flimsy writing that lets him get back. It doesn't occur to him to find some other way to disrupt the time window (if smashing them can break them then it shouldn't be too difficult). This could be justified by him wanting to convince the droids to shut down but couldn't he have used the TARDIS to get there? Even if he doesn't want the droids to know about the TARDIS he could just materialise in another room a few minutes before the connection is broken. Creator/DavidTennant actually pointed this out during recording and a line about not being able to use the TARDIS because they're part of events was hastily inserted, even though this is never a problem in any other story.

* MayflyDecemberRomance: Reinette's romance with the Doctor who never ages.

* MissedHimByThatMuch: The Doctor meets Madame de Pompadour at various points of her life. Eventually, he tells her he will come back and take her travelling with him, and she eagerly awaits. However, when he does come back, she has just died and her body is being taken from her mansion.

-->'''Rose:''' Well, look what the cat dragged in: the Oncoming Storm.
-->'''The Doctor:''' Oh, you sound just like your mother!

* StrappedToAnOperatingTable: Rose and Mickey so they can be harvested for spare parts.

* TemporalParadox:
* TheKnightsWhoSaySquee: The Doctor is overjoyed to realise the woman who just snogged him is the famous Madame de Pompadour.

* TimeTravelEscape: The Doctor tries to do this to Reinette but she dies before he can.

* TimeyWimeyBall: The spaceship doors leading to pre-Revolution France are so unusual the Doctor has to make up words for describing them, and once using them, the [=TARDIS=] can't enter the same region.

* WhatHappenedToTheMouse: 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.

* YearInsideHourOutside: Upon arriving on the abandoned spaceship, the Doctor finds an 18th century French fireplace, which is actually a 'time window'. The first time he looks through it, he speaks to the eponymous girl ("Reinette") who lives in France in 1727. He goes through the time window and Reinette informs him that it was months ago that he last spoke to her a few seconds before. Each time he goes back to the spaceship and returns through the fireplace, years have passed. At the end of the episode, the Doctor tells her to pack her bags and come with him. He runs off to find his companions in the spaceship, in his excitement forgetting about the time differential. When he returns to the fireplace, he finds that Reinette has died waiting for him.

* BigDamnHeroes[=/=]BigEntrance: The Doctor crashing through the mirror on a horse at the climax. Complete with CrowningMusicOfAwesome.

* BitterSweetEnding: The villains are thwarted, EverybodyLives, but a TimeyWimeyBall prevents Reinette from becoming the Doctor's latest companion.

* DoubleEntendre: Reinette asks the Doctor to ''dance'' with her. Notably, this episode also features the Doctor utilizing a banana. (He visits a really wild party, gets very drunk and may have invented the banana daiquiri. Except that he doesn't.)
** According to WordOfGod, Reinette is just being flirtatious in using the euphemism and that nothing sexual happened.

* 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.

* NarniaTime: The time portals between the future and 18th century France work like this. But it isn't consistent, leading to a TearJerker ending.

-->'''The Doctor:''' [[SugarWiki/FunnyMoments Oh, you sound just like your mother!]]

'''Mickey:''' [[AcceptableTargets Even French?]]

* OutOfCharacter: The [[SeriesContinuityError continuity errors]] lead to Rose and the Doctor acting this way at many points in the episode. For example, Reinette tells Rose that "the Doctor is worth the monsters", and Rose doesn't disagree, even though it's been established that a large part of the reason she loves traveling with the Doctor ''is'' the monsters. The Doctor abandons Rose despite promising to not leave her. Rose gets along well with Mickey even though her relationship with him is meant to be awkward, even being unhappy that he joins them at the end of the previous episodes. The Doctor sidelines his main companions without problem and leaves them to fend for themselves, among other moments.

* SeriesContinuityError: Only an episode earlier in "[[Recap/DoctorWhoS28E3SchoolReunion School Reunion]]" the Doctor promises Rose he won't leave her like he has other companions, only to abandon her in the 51st Century in this one. Rose also was not happy about Mickey joining her and the Doctor in the TARDIS at the end of the previous episode, but the beginning of this one starts out with them laughing and getting along perfectly fine.

* SeriesContinuityError: Only an episode earlier in "[[Recap/DoctorWhoS28E3SchoolReunion School Reunion]]" the Doctor promises Rose he won't leave her like he has other companions, only to do exactly that here. Rose also was not happy about Mickey joining her and the Doctor in the TARDIS at the end of the previous episode, but the beginning of this one starts out with them laughing and getting along perfectly fine.

* ChekhovsGun: Most didn't expect Arthur the horse to be that important.

%%Real Life example does not count; See NoRealLifeExamplesPlease. Do not read Beyond the Impossible here.%%

* {{BFG}}: Well, Big Freaking Fire Extinguisher, which is more than enough to temporarily stop the clockwork automatons. Rose and Mickey still play the trope for all its worth, clearly enjoying themselves.

** Rose's sarcastic ''"Oh look what the cat dragged in! [[Recap/DoctorWhoS27E13ThePartingOfTheWays The Oncoming Storm]]!"''

* CrapsackOnlyByComparison: Reinette briefly visit the 51st century, seeing the inside of the space ship that has the unexplained windows into her time. This, combined with whatever she saw in the Doctor's mind, has her firmly convinced that she is better off staying in 18th century France.

* TheDollEpisode: The main antagonists are life-size clockwork dolls seeking to Madame de Pompadour and use her body to fix their spaceship.

* 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.

-->'''Rose:''' Well look what the cat dragged in: the Oncoming Storm.

* Before batteries, clocks and watches were powered by winding them up, so he's saying he's not going to save the clockwork droids when they stop running.
* "Winding one up" is a British colloquialism for joking/kidding; e.g., "I'm not winding you up" means "I'm not kidding you."

* {{Pun}}:
** When the Doctor explains to the clockwork droids that their plan has failed and they're going to run out of power soon, he wraps it up with, "I'm not winding you up." This has two meanings:
** Before batteries, clocks and watches were powered by winding them up, so he's saying he's not going to save the clockwork droids when they stop running.
** "Winding one up" is a British colloquialism for joking/kidding; e.g., "I'm not winding you up" means "I'm not kidding you."