The Girl in the Fireplace

In deep space, in the fifty-first century: the TARDIS arrives on the deck of a derelict spacecraft whose occupants have mysteriously vanished.

The Doctor and his two travelling companions, Rose Tyler and her boyfriend Mickey Smith, start to explore and very soon make a curious discovery - an antique French fireplace. But this is no ordinary fireplace, but one that is anchored to a space-time disturbance. When The Doctor looks inside Reinette, a little French girl from eighteenth century Paris, is on the other side.

Then when The Doctor trips a switch the fireplace twists around and suddenly he's back in time, in Paris, along with the little girl, but Reinette informs The Doctor that several months have passed and so he deduces that the portal is out of sync with the space ship and that time goes by much faster at this end of the portal.

Travelling Companions

The Doctor also discovers a clockwork android under the little girl’s bed. The Doctor uses the fireplace to return to the space ship followed by the android. But before he can examine the robot it teleports itself away. When The Doctor returns through the fireplace portal, to check that Reinette is okay, he finds that it's over a decade later and that she has now grown into an adult. It is then that The Doctor realises who Reinette is - she is the Madame De Pompadour, mistress of Louis XV, King of France.

Other curious discoveries are soon found on the space ship by, Rose and Mickey - a human eye in a sensor and a human heart wired into the spaceship beating in the middle of the ship's interior. The Doctor, meanwhile, discovers another portal and a white horse. The Doctor soon realizes that there are many gateways to Reinette's history aboard this craft.

Rose Prepared for Danger

Through another gateway, the three go to Paris to rescue Reinette from another clockwork android, where they learn that while the robots are stalking her, they haven't done anything to her yet because she's 'not ready'.

Back on the ship, Rose and Mickey are taken prisoner by the clockwork androids, but The Doctor attempt to rescue them fails. But he does learns that the clockwork androids are in fact repair androids who are following their instructions to repair the ship - first from the rest of the ship, and then the human crew itself, manifesting their bodies to keep the ship running. Now, for some reason, they are convinced that Reinette is the last link to repairing their damaged craft.

But what is so special about Reinette and what will happen when she becomes 'ready' and will The Doctor be able to come to her rescue and stop the androids and if he does how is he going to defeat the androids without become trapped himself?

Reinette

The Doctor does manage to foil the androids by making them realise that they no longer have a purpose since their window to the future, and their ship, is broken. It looks as if The Doctor has saved Reinette but at the cost of his own freedom. Or has he?

Will The Doctor find a way back to the ship and his TARDIS and will they discover why Reinette is so important to the androids? – maybe the fact that the spaceship is called the “SS Madame De Pompadour” holds the answer.