Having watched the episode, I’m not quite sure what to make of it. It’s difficult to pigeonhole into a category. It could be a biographical story, a period drama, a romance, a sci-fi tale or a thriller/horror narrative.

After the opening credits, we have the Doctor land in a spaceship shaped like a key with apparently nobody on board while we have the clockwork androids who are supposed to be maintaining the spaceship to make sure that it can still fly. We get a dark and dingy spaceship which are standard of sci-fi ever since Alien burst onto the scene.

We get the spaceship trying to punch a hole in the fabric of the universe creating time windows which can go back to the 18 th century from the 51 st century which is a very sci-fi concept for Doctor Who. It’s not something that has previously been explored, but the concept is put very simply.

These standard sci-fi sequences then turn into classic thriller and horror with the appearance of the clockwork droids. They’re incredibly creepy and not entirely unlike Jigsaw from the Saw films.

We get a lot of anticipation in waiting for the clockwork droids to attack when we hear the tick tock of their engines. The horror aspects come from the discovery by Rose and Mickey that they have discovered that the original crew have had their body parts used in the various repairs of the ship.

These elements themselves could make a strong story, but these are merely incidental to the multi-layered script.

Period drama is something that the BBC have always traditionally done very well. This is no exception with some beautiful costumes. I have nothing beyond a superficial interest in 18 th century France, and it looks right and beautiful. The set design looks entirely from the same period, which are helped by the beautiful lighting of Versailles.

The romance comes from the fully unsubtle treatment of the love between the Doctor and Madame De Pompadour. There’s two moments which seed the romance. The first being when the Doctor rescues a young Reinette and he says that the monsters have nightmares about him while the Doctor is just impressed by the physical attributes of Madame De Pompadour. It’s literally love at fight site on both of those moments. Indeed, the full scale of the romance showed when the Doctor is prepared to sacrifice Rose and the travelling to save Madame De Pompadour.

We also get a biographical look at the life of Madame De Pompadour. We get to see her as a child with the first attack of the monster under her bed right from the moment to the moment of her death which of course is the standard plot for most biographies.

Even after this attempt at analysis, I’m still not sure what type of story this is primarily and I would imagine that this will be classified as an oddball. However after the high octane adventures of Tooth and Claw and School Reunion, it’s a change of pace which sets us up for stories to come

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