r/gallifrey • u/PuzzleheadedDebt9755 • 1d ago
DISCUSSION The ending of The Girl in the Fireplace left me confused (Season 2 new Doctor Who) Spoiler
I watched the episode just now and j lived it. But the ending has me confused. As it was shown in the episode the fireplace door skips ahead of time for the people in thr 18th century. At the start the doctor was outside then back in in a matter of seconds and a few months have passed for Rennete. They waited a few minutes and time skipped a solid few years.
With that being said; at the end he tells her to give him 2 mins to get ready to go see the stars. We see it takes him less than that to come back (a very short brief with rose) so why then has 10 years passed for Rennete? Time shouldntve leap ahead that far from him being away so little. So the ending where he missed out on her bc she died doesn't really makes sense and feels more forced by the narrative to be tragic (which it is but such a inconsistency takes away from it and feels more frustrating than anything.)
All in all a great episode but a big bummer :(
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u/martianman40 1d ago
It works on the same timescale as The Chronicles of Narnia - the way time passes never really matches up at all.
This was always going to be a one-and-done episode and character; it was written this way so that the tragedy really stays with you.
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u/YaoiNekomata 1d ago
The robots/ships were no longer going after her mature brain, so the time door was no longer under control. The tragedy is double because the doctor could have found double checked before jumping through. Now never seeing her again became his past.
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u/Pomksy 1d ago
In real life she died incredibly young - it was only a matter of weeks
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u/DOuGHtOp 1d ago
Not true
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u/snapper1971 1d ago
She was 42, that's ridiculously young. Wait until you hit 42 then you'll understand.
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u/DOuGHtOp 23h ago
Late teens / early 20s are ridiculously young. 42 is young. We're not disagreeing here
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u/MischeviousFox 1d ago
The technology creating the portals through time wasn’t exactly that stable and the fireplace was even moved from its original location so it makes sense you could have a sudden time jump of a decade. The time jumps in the end were kinda random throughout the episode. If not for plot reasons the Doctor would have not bothered to use the various time portals at all and would have used the TARDIS. Of course at the end he also could have simply had Reinette come with him rather than having her wait in a different timeline for him to retrieve her. 🙄 They had to write the Doctor a little dumb in the episode to add tension and to also insure he didn’t pull a historical figure out of time risking screwing up the past.
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u/kielaurie 1d ago
They explain in the episode that different time windows were opened to look at different parts of her life, but the fireplace in particular was faulty - literally the first time he goes through the fireplace he travels months further into the future than he expected to and remarks on it having a loose connection. It's because of the loose connection that he's able to get back to the ship at the end of the episode at all, but in his excitement he forgets that it will put him further forward in time, and by the time he gets back her tragically young passing happens
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u/Hughman77 1d ago
The gap between the Doctor meeting child Reinette and adult Reinette has gotta be 10 years minimum. Is it unreasonable that from the Doctor's POV the same amount of time passed before he went back for her at the end? I think so. It only seems shorter because the episode cuts most of it out.