Review - The Girl in the Fireplace

The Doctor learns how to "dance" with the first in a long line of female historical figures in The Girl in the Fireplace.

Season 2, Episode 4 - The Girl in the Fireplace

Yo Dawg! I heard you like time travel, so I put some more time travel into your time travel show. This episode makes extra special use of time travel. The idea of one participant in the story taking the long road whilst the other skips ahead is very interesting. Of course the episode is apparently loosely based on The Time Traveller's Wife, so we cant award too many points for that. We do get more touches of the culture shock theme, with Reinette having that same "left behind" experience. She handles it much better than Rose or Sarah Jane though.

We skip between a space ship in the far future that's been repaired using bits of its crew, and pre-revolutionary France. I liked the way the characters were split between the timelines. It gave Rose and Mickey a chance to prove themselves without The Doctor. This opportunity could have been exploited a lot more than it was though, as the episode was squarely focussed on The Doctor, almost the complete opposite of The Companion Show featuring The Doctor. Strangely this is almost as bad as focusing on the Companion more than The Doctor. There really does need to be a good balance.

You stay here. I've got to sort someone out.

THING!

Sort something out.

Our main monster is the Clockwork Robots, who again fit the mould of advance slowly and be creepy. They work in this story though, despite no explanation of why they are made of clockwork. I mean a teleport, no matter how short-range, must require a power source beyond mere clockwork.

As if the French aristocracy wasn't creepy enough.

The whole episode is pure Hunka hunka burning Doc though. Reinette jumps The Doctor's bones with little more than two brief meetings when she was a little girl and a five minute conversation under her belt. Moffat keeps the dance metaphor going strongly in this story, dropping a very strong implication that The Doctor and Reinette had sex.

The relationship is solidly written though, and for whatever reason I can accept this sexualisation of The Doctor more than any other instance in the show. Perhaps this is a testament to Moffat's writing. I can believe that this girl successfully got through the layers and seduced The Doctor through a combination of her natural charm and his innate need to protect. 

Not to mention being face-meltingly hot.

The pacing of this episode is spot on. The short-range teleports combined with the nature of the time windows and the Clockwork Men's mission means they can be easily fended off with little fear of them returning until much later. This gives us little bursts of action amongst the talking and flirting. It was nice to see Rose get her comeuppance though. At least she had Mickey as a fall-back.

The climax of the episode was great, with The Doctor not only risking all and stranding himself in the past (albeit with a smoking hot lover) but doing so by riding in on a white charger. Not the only fairy tale parallel in this episode, but definitely the coolest.

Of course there couldn't be a happily ever after in this situation. What we did get was perfect though.

I've just got something in my eye... Again.

Despite the whole episode being pretty much all about The Doctor falling in love and someone falling in love with him, I enjoyed it. Removing this episode from the context of ongoing instances of Hunka hunka burning Doc, it works as that one time a girl managed to turn his head. It is significantly diminished by all the other times it happens (or is implied to happen) though.

Still, a very watchable episode, with much more of an historical feel about it despite its quite solid sci-fi core.

8/10

Can we fix it?

I'm sure many would be expecting me to demand less Doctor love here, but in all honesty in the context of this episode, I'm fine with it. All of the bits with The Doctor and Reinette are great. But when you look past that the rest seems a tad light on. 

I feel if we had a bit more meat on the bones of the Rose and Mickey side of this story, we could have found out more about how the ship and its attendant robots got into the state they did.

The way I see it, the ship originally only had a small group of maintenance droids. These robots cannibalised themselves for parts first, replacing higher tech systems used in repairs to the ship with hastily manufactured clockwork facsimiles. Having used up their own parts, they turned on the crew, replacing their bits with clockwork too. A nice Tin Man parallel to go with some of the other fairy tale stuff in this episode. The clockwork is clearly a unique design, with The Doctor fawning all over it. That could be the reason why. 

This information could be revealed to Mickey and Rose through Mickey using his awesome computer hacking skills to unearth fragments of video logs from the Captain. This makes the Rose and Mickey section a bit more than wandering the halls waiting for The Doctor to get back so that they can tell him things they've seen and let him figure it out.

These recordings could also hint that the reason the crew couldn't fight the Clockwork Men off or order them to not use them as spares was because they only respond directly to the mission computer. This would be there as an early clue for the audience who realise they only respond to Reinette. When The Doctor finds out he of course puts two and two together without having to interrogate the Clockworks to get it.

We could even go so far as to hint that the original problem with the ship was limited just to the mission computer, and that the repairs made by the droids were purely to create the time windows. They cannibalised the ship to create the time windows, and cannibalised the crew to keep the ship running.

We can still leave the name of the ship as a mystery, but I think this fleshes the ship side of the story out a bit and gives Rose and Mickey something more to do.

The (Insert Noun) of The Doctor

The BBC have released the full poster for the 2013 Christmas Special, The Time of The Doctor.

More like The Time to Get Some New Title Ideas, am I right?

Quite why we had to have an almost identical name to the 50th Anniversary Special and the Season 7 finale, I'll never know. Besides that bit of old news, it looks like they're slapping a bunch of big enemies together again in a Too Many Monsters extravaganza.

Why Angels? I'm so sick of them. They are totally played out as a monster. I had hoped after The Angels Take Manhattan we'd seen the last of them. That was pretty stupid, I suppose. And trotting The Silence out again? What's the point of that? They should have been done and dusted after The Wedding of River Song. Teasers have shown references to Trenzalor as well, another plot point that should have been left alone after it was resolved in The Name of the Doctor.

I'm trying not to draw too many conclusions from this poster and the few teasers, but I fear we're going to get a bit of a cluster-you-know-what here, and my expectations are currently rather low. The best scenario I can imagine sees most of these monsters appearing in some kind of nightmare dream sequence of The Doctor's.

In the end, I'm just hoping the few seconds of Peter Capaldi as The Doctor make it all worthwhile.

Review - School Reunion

A couple of old favourites of mine returns to crank up the nostalgia in School Reunion.

Season 2, Episode 3 - School Reunion

We get thrown straight into this story with The Doctor appearing to be well into his investigation. It had me fearing a Go, go, go, Geronimo! situation, but in the end the pacing ended up quite good. It's obvious from the start that the Headmaster Mr Finch (deliciously played by Anthony Head) is up to something. Hell, we all but see him eat a poor orphan.

Apart from the obvious child chomping, we see the students are being used to do... something. Something with computers and crazy spinning cube graphics. It seems to involve a lot of randomly tapping at the keyboard.

We're trying to get the complete works of Shakespeare.

The Doctor and Rose manage to draw out clues about what's going on in a timely and natural way. Mickey reappears to show us all how he's not just a buffoon, at least not a total one, with his hacking skills getting stronger. And of course we get the wonderful Sarah Jane Smith return. Sarah Jane is an all time favourite companion of mine, so it would be tough for this episode to go too far wrong for me.

The monster reveal stumbled a bit though. It was a reasonable idea to give a glimpse of the undisguised Krillatine under the desk, but it ended up being entirely too much of a glimpse. The transition as he stands up was really smooth though. 

A network cable is unplugged.

We saw a little bit of Deus Ex Screwdriver with a good old Deadlock Seal sitting there like a lump of kryptonite. That didn't end up hampering them much though. The Doctor spent more time investigating what the Krillitines were up to than he did working out a way to stop them. Hell they all spent more time gabbing than even investigating. Despite all that, it worked quite well. 

A big part of this episode deals with that culture shock of a returned companion. This was touched on in The Parting of the Ways with Rose's big emotional speech in the chip shop. Sarah Jane shows us that the displacement felt by Rose at that point never really goes away. Elizabeth Sladen really conveyed the conflicting emotions of joy and resentment a dumped companion would feel. 

Despite their common ground, Rose and Sarah Jane get to be delightfully bitchy with each other at first. Mickey seems to take particular delight in this situation. I think I would too. 

The girlfriend and the ex. Welcome to every bloke's nightmare.

Mickey also delights in rubbing it in to Rose that The Doctor seems to have a thing for traveling with young girls and then upgrading.

I'd go easy on the chips.

This is all a reasonable indication that Mickey is at least a little over Rose at this point. Rose, on the other hand still seems to be trying to keep Mickey on the bench, asking if the situation at the school was the only reason he called, and giving him the flirty eyes. Even at the end of the episode when Mickey decides to join The TARDIS crew, Rose looks really pissed off.

Hey Rose! The boyfriend and the ex. Welcome to every girl's nightmare.

This episode hit me square in the nostalgia, with a bunch of references to old episodes. It moved forward at a decent pace, and despite a lot of interplay between characters it never got bogged down or felt too "talky". Even the Bond Villain explanation of his plan by Mr Finch seemed sort of natural and The Doctor's temptation in the face of his offer seemed genuine. This one is very much a favourite.

9/10

Can we fix it?

Just a couple of tweaks to this one, I think. First up, that initial monster reveal was too much. It needed to just be a quick flash of something inhuman under the desk before the teacher stood up. Looking right at the kid and screeching was over the top and ruined the full reveal later. Just his eyes would have been enough.

Putting a Deadlock Seal in there was a bit lazy. There's several other ways they could have kept The Doctor out of the gubbins. Perhaps there was a booby trap, or breaking in would cause a feedback loop into the kids' minds. The enhanced state the kids are in could leave them open to psychic distress or something. Not hugely important, but an easy fix.

More K-9 would have been nice too, but the episode is already crammed full, so I couldn't begin to suggest where he could fit.