azdak

Since I'm terrible at deferring gratification, and always want to eat up my pudding before proceeding to the greens, I started my next round of New Who viewing with The Girl in the Fireplace. And I looked upon it and saw that it was good, albeit marred by a couple of significant flaws. Firstly, the actress playing Madame de P wasn't quite up to snuff - she was good, and certainly brought across Reinette's sexuality and strength of character, but sometimes she had trouble with the formality of the lines. And in the moments where I was likely to cringe anyway (especially the "lonely little boy" lines) she simply couldn't add enough layers to sell it to me. On the other hand, it's the series itself that has set the acting bar so high, because most of the time these secondary roles are filled with absolutely outstanding performances. Normally you don't get a chance to distinguish between "excellent" and "good enough".

My other irritations were plot-related. The Doctor has a Tardis; why can he not simply jump back a couple of years and meet Reinette again? I got that he couldn't use it during the fight with the droids because he was "part of events" (although as hand-waving goes, I prefer "ball of timey-wimey stuff" explanations to pseudo-philosophical ones), but once the fight was over and the ship was disconnected from France, why was there still a problem? Also, if the fireplace was off-line (and hence the time door could survive), why was Reinette able to call for help through it? She heard her own voice on the ship coming from a microphone attached to that very portal.

On the plus side, there was loads of absolutely brilliant dialogue ("I didn't want to say magic door", "I snogged Madame de P", "They always go wandering off", "He called her Cleo", etc etc), the scenes set in France were stunning, there was a HORSE and it jumped through a window pane (I am going to love any episode that has a horse shattering glass). The scene where he comes into the little girl's bedroom and tackles the monster under the bed is a perfect gem. And the Doctor is right, the droids were absolutely beautiful.

And, in an observation of pure shallowness, David Tennant looks much better with short hair.