"Primeval" has a very nice sense of nostalgia to it. The story captures the feel of seasons 18 and 19 so very well. Once again Peter Davison and Sarah Sutton are excellent in their characters, but are aided this time by having a good script to work with. I've always been intrigued by the Traken society and had hoped to somehow revisit that culture. "Primeval" goes one step further in having the Doctor and Nyssa visit at a time before the era of the Keepers. The idea works well and does not seem contrived at all.

Kwundaar is an excellent villain for the story (he is actually an advanced superbeing, NOT the devil in the Biblical sense as all the Big Finish teasers imply). Narthex and Anona are interesting characters as well who have essentially rationalized their ruthless actions as moral behavior. In fact, very few characters in "Primeval" seem weak or underdeveloped save Consul Hyrca who is so squeamish it's irritating (but maybe that was the idea).

At the risk of sounding totally sexist, I wish "Primeval" had been a television story. Apart from the beautiful Traken sets which would have been lovely to see again, Nyssa spends the majority of episode two swimming in a spa, and pretty much all of episodes three and four wearing a bikini. Further, one of Nyssa's best scenes ever occurs in episode four during her showdown with Anona at the spa. Sarah Sutton delivers a great line: "It's not as if I can conceal a weapon in this.......I'm barely concealing myself." I won't give the rest away but Lance Parkin gives Nyssa a wonderful opportunity to display humor, intelligence, guile, and compassion all in one scene. Great Stuff. The cliffhanger to episode three is also quite good and would have been grand to see on television.

This is a BIG can of worms I'm getting ready to open, but I'm going to do it anyway. I'm very uncomfortable with one of Nyssa's lines from part one as she describes Traken's history: "People in the past were more superstitious, there was religion, so Traken wasn't a true paradise." First, this line seems very out of character for Nyssa and the Traken society who (as Nyssa stated in "Land of the Dead") successfully blended the scientific and the spiritual. Second, the statement implies that a true paradise can only exist when religion has been eliminated. As someone who believes in the importance of religion in society, I was not offended by the line, but I really wish the line had been written differently to say that "superstition" or even "religious fanaticism" is bad rather than religion in general.