Doctor Who: Steven Moffat's Timey-Wimiest Episodes

The Girl in the Fireplace is Steven Moffat’s first real exploration of time travel in revival-era Doctor Who, and is also one of his most celebrated. The story involves a romance between David Tennant's Tenth Doctor and the real-life Madame de Pompadour (aka Reinette, played by Sophia Myles), mistress to King Louis XV of France. For the Doctor, this relationship lasts just a few hours, but thanks to time travel, it covers all of Reinette’s life.

Moffat uses the idea a spaceship filled with portals to different days in Reinette’s life as the mechanism to tell a compressed yet comprehensive romance between the two. The Doctor first meets her as a child, making such an impression that she is primed to fall in love with him as an adult--an encounter which takes place for the Doctor only minutes later.

But the chemistry between them is strong, and the experience has a profound effect on our hero. When the same time travel conceit results in the Doctor accidentally skipping over the last portion of Reinette's life, we have no doubt he has been deeply impacted. His emotional vulnerability--something David Tennant is particularly adept at playing--accounts for a good part of the episode's strong reputation.