I understand why the Girl in the Fireplace is a well-liked episode. It's one chockful of entertaining Moffatisms, some nice and entertaining dialogue, an interesting time-bending concept, some body horror (that is much too underexplored), and a neat, tragic end. But I'd be lying to myself if I was to say that an interesting concept makes for a good episode. I'd rather characterise it as the worst Moffat-penned story of the entire show, and a horrid indictment of the failure of the show to fully come to grips with the reality of the hierarchies it depicts.

Central to my disdain towards Girl in the Fireplace is what it chooses to avoid discussion on. The setting of the majority of the episode, the place where the fireplace is located. It's .. never mentioned, it's never critiqued, nothing about the horrendous, crushing hierarchy of the ancien régime, the abject poverty that the tens of millions lived under so that these walls can be glossed and painted gold. It's just completely absent from the story. Madame de Pompadour is not shown in any moral terms. Her actions are not shown. We only see her with a few glimpses, none of which tell us anything about her character or her behaviour at all. She's just accepted by the story as self-evidently important, someone who we must fall for because the Doctor does too. We never see her take an action, we never see her prove herself to the audience. Her status as a person from history, and as a direct enabler of the brutal absolute monarchy of pre-revolutionary France, is wiped clean. What we get is akin to looking at a portrait of her. Adding insult to injury, the Doctor makes the decision to lock himself into pre-revolutionary France, so he can save Pompadour. He didn't know that he would get back, and didn't bother to give Rose and Mickey a way back to their time, potentially locking them on a lonely spaceship in the far future. It's stupid, it's callous, and it shows a vile disregard for the importance of their characters in favour of the glamour, spectacle, and prestige of the aristocracy. Even the suggestion that they have been waiting for five and a half hours for him (!) is played off as a joke. Rose and Mickey get very, very little to do in the story. Because the story thinks it self-evident that they are less important than Pompadour. Because the palace is fun, because the fantasy is nice to imagine.

And that's what it is. The palace is a set, a fantasy world in which the Doctor can snog important people and charge through to save them from the evil robots. The blood splattered on its walls is just out of frame.