Well, this was a very interesting episode. Not as scary as was suggested but well worth watching. The TARDIS crew discover a space craft that has created time windows throughout the life of Madame du Pompadour. Apparently the clockwork droids running it need parts and for some reason their programming has encouraged them to track down the brain of Madame du Pompadour (Renette) when she is 37 years old. To do this they've been searching through Madame's history. And, thanks to the way the narration is written, the Doctor is able to find the same time windows that happen to be in chronological order to appear at the right time. As a result Renette believes the Doctor has been watching over her all her life.

After exploring the ship, while the Doctor is having a romantic liaison with Rennette, Mickey and Rose discover that parts of the ship are human. The droids used the original crew to try and repair the damage.

Mickey and Rose are caught by clockwork droids who say that Rose's brain is compatible, even though she's not 37 years old. (Hmm, time travel tends to age you a bit. I wonder if this will be addressed later)

The Doctor must try and prevent Madam du Pompadour's beheading by breaking through another time window.

There's a great scene when the Doctor is scanning Renette's mind and she manages to go into his.

There's also a scene where Renette is plainly upset that she has the solution for sending the Doctor back to his home but doesn't want to. She takes his hand and leads him to her bedchamber. But most Doctor Who fans would be waiting for her to say that she still has the fireplace, and be concerned that the Doctor has no way of getting back. I doubt Whovians would have seen the subtle joke of the two of them holding hands in front of a newly made bed. I certainly didn't see it and had to have it pointed out to me by a non fan who, as she watched it, gasped when she saw the scene expecting that Renette would take him to bed. (Hmm, how completely Who obsessed I am!)

While the story is original, and I'm a big fan of Steven Moffatt's writing, I was a bit disappointed by the ending. It really smacked of something from Casanova and I think there was definitely some RTD influence in it. We also had to suffer another reference to how lonely and old the Doctor is.

But the climax of this story was brilliant. How the Doctor enters the scene is one of those visual things, while cgi'd, hasn't happened before in Doctor Who, and that's what makes it and the series as a whole, so exciting.

And it was about time that there was a timelord love story and this is it. Bound to get the female viewers in!

8/10

Trivia - Apart from the Lenny Henry special available on the Curse of the Fatal Death video, is this the first time a black guy has travelled in the TARDIS? Surely a milestone in Doctor Who's history.

More Trivia - The Reign of Terror featured burning buildings, the City of Death featured cracks in time and broken clocks. Both stories were based in France.