[126] The lab's forensic supercollider serves essentially the same function as a real-life mass spectrometer - determining the composition of stuff that's put in it - only it does so with Atom-Smashing Future Science! technology.

[203] Amusingly, when I wrote this scene, I hadn't seen the actual CSI episode in which the chem lab explodes.

[263] Both klaster and transpex are transparent materials used when builders need something tougher than glass. Of the two, klaster is harder - it can actually be used as armor - but transpex is more thermally efficient, so is more often used for exterior windows.

[329] This often-quoted maxim has been attributed to any number of 18th- and 19th-century political philosophers, but the sentiment behind it seems to trace back to the Irish lawyer John Philpot Curran, who said, "The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance; which condition if he break, servitude is at once the consequence of his crime and the punishment of his guilt," in a speech in 1790. The more popular simplified phrasing has been attributed to everyone from Thomas Jefferson to Wendell Phillips (who did, indeed, use it that way in a speech, but it's unclear whether he was quoting someone else at the time).

[426] Grissom so rarely exerts any of his authority as lab director that Ecklie often forgets the man is, technically, his boss - and when he does remember, his contempt for Grissom's administrative abilities is such that he generally doesn't act like he is anyway.

[579] He probably was.

[589] And she comes to us from House, MD.

[612] For the record, Sara is not, in fact, allergic to Miraculon.

[703] You can tell Dr. Cameron only recently arrived from Earth; a native Zetan (or Salusian, or anyone from almost any of the major colonies) would have said "the 64-kilocredit question".

[724] ... Not that the Chief, nor anybody he would be likely to dispatch on such an errand, would particularly need a key.

[992] Attempting to describe the sensations of moving at super-speed in text was an interesting challenge, and one that I'd end up coming back to a few times in the course of this piece. I'm not sure how successful I was, but I'm reasonably satisfied with the outcome.

[995] 186,000 miles per second. It's not just a good idea - it's the law!

[1027] This revelation - that there's another fairly major city on the Avalon pseudocontinent - arose on the spur of the moment when I was working on this scene and amused me greatly. There are quite a few small towns outside New Avalon: We've seen one, Prisoner's Base, a few times, and there have been oblique references to the existence of others. Another big city, though, that's new.

It's called "Perth", by the way, in reference to an old USENET joke. In the old days of plaintext Internet news, Australians were infamous for putting little ASCII maps of their country in their .sig blocks, and these maps nearly always contained a helpful arrow pointing out the city of Perth, standing obscure and lonely in the lower left corner of the country, thusly:

               .-_|\
              /     \
      Perth ->*.--._/
                   v <- Tasmania

[1068] Sara's ruminations here, both on the perils of the night shift and the "logical" time of day, mirror my own dark musings at many an all-hands meeting in the days when I was a night-shift network ops monkey.

[1138] In the movie, Barry could be played by Ed Harris circa The Right Stuff.

[1142] Barry and Iris have always seemed, to me, to belong to a particular era, more so than many other comic-book characters. Wherever they are, it will always be about 1961.

[1290] "Uh... well... I'd say that would be between you... and him... wouldn't it?"

[1315] The late Herbert J. "Burt" Munro was a machinist from New Zealand who set the world land speed record for motorcycles with engines displacing less than 1,000 cubic centimeters, using a heavily modified Indian motorcycle, in 1967. His quest for speed was immortalized in the 2005 movie The World's Fastest Indian, which starred Anthony Hopkins as Burt Munro.

[1347] There was a time when Sara would have disputed, or just plain not understood, the distinction between Science with a capital S and science without one... but no longer.

[1385] Where many of the districts of central New Avalon are named after comic book creators (Claremont, Waidburgh, Puckett's Landing, etc.), the western and southwestern suburbs are mainly named after British motion picture studios (Elstree, Pinewood, Shepperton).

[1428] This sequence was intended to evoke the dropped-frame, oddly-tinted flashbacks often employed on CSI when the criminalists are envisioning what might have happened at a crime scene. I'm indebted to Darwyn Cooke for the specifics of the physical transformation Sara experiences - his description of the Flash's powers working in DC: The New Frontier is by far the clearest, most evocative take I've seen on what happens to speedsters at speed.

[1508] A chain of police/fire/EMT equipment shops headquartered in New Avalon. The best place to get those cool boots the tactical guys all wear, as well as bulk discounts on rubber gloves.

[1522] Thanks to a glitch in the overtime payment policy, Sara cleared nearly a quarter-million credits for her 77-hour shift back in "Locard's Exchange".

[1587] Actually they do, but Lindsey's calling from the spaceport in Mos Eisley, where all the video screens have been stolen by Jawas. And she doesn't particularly want her mother to know she's in Mos Eisley anyway. They're supposed to be in the marginally less dubious Anchorhead. On the other hand, she's with Tom Palmer and Boba Fett, so she's reasonably safe.

[1622] Relax, Catherine, she's just messing with you. Probably.

[1638] The answer, if you're curious, has nothing to do with Brass's postulated "flashlight fetish" - it's because messing with the light switches before the initial survey would constitute tampering with the crime scene.

[1679] Gryphon is too preoccupied with other matters to make the obvious and true remark, "Catherine talks too much."

[1713] Blasters cauterize the wounds they make, but imperfectly, thanks to the shockwave. That's one way you can tell whether an energy weapon injury was inflicted by a blaster or a laser. Blaster wounds bleed; laser wounds don't.

[1714] He's not upset about what we think he's upset about, as we'll later see. We were originally planning to open the next episode with this scene, but after hacking around how to end this ep I figured it would be more fun to a) bookend this episode with explosive, surprise events, and b) leave a giant, tv-drama-esque cliffhanger. The resultant response on the Forum was quite satisfying. I didn't realize it was going to spark a giant, multistory arc concerning the same events, but then we both started heavily rewatching CSI: Miami, and they're big, big fans of this kind of thing on that show, so the influence was probably inevitable. CC