Nyssa has returned to her biochemistry because it represents a link to Traken. And she's referring to a book because the Doctor says that books are a form of information storage which still works in a crisis. With electronic media you're in a catch-22, because when you most need the knowledge, you can't get at it (as anyone who's tried to diagnose an internet fault knows). Nyssa didn't understand what a catch-22 was, so the Doctor sent her off to the TARDIS library to find out.
When Tegan joins her, she grasses up Turlough for fiddling with the roundel.
Meanwhile the Doctor is down in a tunnel where the tanks for the inhibitor crystals are. Perhaps this works, perhaps the TARDIS's workings are always better just hinted at. The Doctor believes Tegs when she says Nyssa's experiment couldn't have caused the TARDIS to malfunction, because although she isn't a scientist, she has a good grasp of the 'uses and consequences of technology.' Nicely put sir.
Turlough finds Nyssa's abacus in the liner corridor, and uses the beads to lay a trail so that - he hopes - he and Tegan won't lose their way.
The Lydecker style is at work on Olvir and Kari, making them seem extra hard-edged and hard SF. Used in Warriors' Gate to show the banality of evil among the freighter crew this was perfect; with these two it sounds like JL is overly impressed with them. A million pages of NA and MA combatwank have their literary roots here.
When Tegan is trying to open the bulkhead that Nyssa is trapped behind, Turlough thinks about pushing her down a deep shaft. She somehow senses his thought and becomes suspicious.
When Olvir says he's never met anyone who came back from Terminus, the Doctor thinks that, if the disease and the cure are so shameful, they wouldn't talk about it.
The first Vanir to be seen is described as looking to Tegan like Death. His staff makes a tapping sound like an undertaker knocking politely on the door, or the Calvary nails. Certainly those are powerful similes but they don't seem to fit the burly, clanky Vanir somehow. When he's gone, Turlough can't stop himself reassuring the frightened Tegan.
Without his helmet Eirak just seems like a tired bureaucrat.
Nyssa does not take her skirt off when she gets infected. When Olvir realises that she's got the disease, he remembers his family burying his sister in quicklime.
'Hydromel' is just the Vanir's name for the drug, presumably it has a less romantic chemical name.
The Doctor thinks that Dante would have loved the living hell of Terminus. JL clearly not afraid of a bit of self-congratulation.
'Vanir' is both singular and plural.
The Terminus ship uses a 'self-containment reaction drive' which doesn't need fuel - not sure how this fits with the stuff about fuel being jettisoned causing the universe to be destroyed/created.
There's some extremely confusing ambiguous deixis in the scene where Sigurd and Valgard check the lazars - 'they' jumps jarringly between meaning the two Vanir and the lazars.
Eirak bets his personal supply of Hydromel - not his job - that Valgard can't catch the raiders. (And he doesn't say that 'of course' he will pay up.) But later on, when Valgard wants to collect, he quotes Eirak as having said 'Bring back the intruders and my position is yours' - which he didn't.
Having been accused for the nth time of being a Company spy, the Doctor 'was beginning to get irritated at the persistence of Valgard's misunderstanding.' That'll be a useful phrase for forums.
When Olvir meets up with Nyssa again, we're given a quick summary of how he skulked around till he acquired his disguise.
Kari looks on the dead pilot with awe, because
He was more than an alien; he was the last survivor of a universe which he'd destroyed with his error, and his dying moments had been spent looking on the new universe that he'd inadvertently brought into being in its place.
If that had been made more of on screen, the whole destroying the universe thing might not have seemed so ludicrous.
The Garm 'treats' Nyssa in the same room, and at the same time, as Olvir and Valgard fight. Indeed the radiation from the engine is the treatment.
The Garm has much more presence on the page - he emerges from the shadows 'as smoothly as a dark sunrise'. The reason the lever is so hard for him to move is that there is a time differential - Terminus is on slower time than the rest of the universe. Hmmm. I suppose any explanation is better than the usual odd way that manual controls in DW have direct feedback - if a process is particularly powerful, the way to stop it is to press the buttons extra hard.
Kari and Olvir have a fully formed plan at the end of the story - to hunt down the Chief. 'Nobody ditches us and gets away with it,' says Kari ominously.
The Doctor's thoughts on Nyssa's departure:
it seemed that the loss of every member of his ever-changing team took a little piece of him away with them. They were spread through time and through space, all of them reshaped and given new insights through their travels. Their loss wasn't too bad a price to pay... not when they gave him a kind of immortality.
Excellent characterisation - the blend of humility and arrogance that sums up the Doctor.
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