I listened to the first season and half of The Eight Doctor & Lucie Miller incredibly close together and back to back, so all of them are going to end up with the same review for the moment while I'm fixing up my forgotten rec's and clearing out my Currently Reading Folder (which shouldn't be 40 books, it should be somewhere relatively close to right under ten).

I have loved meeting Eight, and his resigned but inspirational way of being. I love Lucy's moxy, and her mouth. Her mouth may be the best thing on the planet. Even though I know the episodes are roughly the same length as tv episodes, from single one hours to double-extended two hours, somehow they end up feeling like bite-size, leaving me wanting just a little more from every single one. ( )

a rather good double feature introducing new companion Lucie and bringing her and the Doctor to a planet under threat from natural disaster but seeking help from, of all people, the Daleks. There are some neat developments of the history and ideology of the Daleks: riffs on two of the best Dalek stories (Power and Genesis), and then the question of how the Daleks would react to a secondary creation. The politics of the human colony is well thought out too.

I was not so sure about Lucie Miller. This is not a criticism of Sheridan Smith's portrayal - as a northern lass reacting to the Eighth Doctor's airs, she is rather good and builds up a memorable presence very quickly. But her back story is much less credible: snatched from (where?) by the Time Lords, and then the Doctor wilfully failing to interrogate her fully. This story came out at the same time as The Runaway Bride, which also had a companion mysteriously manifesting in the Tardis, but dealt with that rather better, I thought.

Good stuff from Anita Dobson as the civilian leader and Hayley Attwell (who was the Duchess's husband's lover in The Duchess); also Kenneth Cranham was new to me, and I thought must be Bill Oddie at first, though a glance at the credits put me right. ( )