A big WELCOME to the forum, Jonathan!!
It’s great to have you here. I’m glad you’ve been enjoying reading all our posts!!
I thought it was worth advertising this forum in the ‘Making TGFT’ comments section, as I was happy to see that so many fans had watched that video and made comments, so I hoped that some of them would want to come over here and enjoy discussing the show some more.
Your comment about Katharine Cullen jogged my memory about a quote from Katharine I’d read in a magazine, from an interview at the time when TGFT first came out in Australia, where she talked about not being sure what career path she wanted to take- whether to continue with acting or pursue a different career. Annoyingly, I can’t remember exactly what she said and I couldn’t find the magazine when I searched for it this weekend, but if I later find it again, I will photograph the article and post it here.
I did however manage to find a very short snippet of information about Katharine enjoying playing tennis- this was from a 1991 issue of Lookin (a British kids/teenage magazine)…
I think you’re very lucky living in Sydney and I’m envious of your current weather!
How fantastic it would be to be able to celebrate Christmas on the beach and go swimming in the sea!!
If you don’t mind answering these questions, what was your favourite thing about TGFT that made you a fan, and who was your favourite character?
I have thought some more about the time/space plot hole, and I have come up with a theory that could possibly explain it.
I think that the Time Capsule could move through time AND space in the first series, but not in the second series, and this was why:
We already know that in the first series, the Capsule was automatically programmed to return after a month long period, and that this programming could not be overridden during the duration of the Capsule’s stay in the other time zone. And the reason it couldn’t be overridden was that for the series 1 time journeys, the Capsule’s momentum was externally generated by the temporal generators in the Time Lab in the year 3000 (supplied with energy by an orbiting power station, which was not shown being used in series 2), and, at the end of the month long stay, the Capsule was pulled back through time and space to the Time Lab by that same energy, sort of like a yo-yo effect.
Silverthorn attempted to keep the Capsule frozen in 1990 with a force field created by generators he’d built himself, but after his plan failed, the Capsule was pulled back to the year 3000 by the original generators in the Time Lab.
Why did the scientists programme the Capsule this way for Tulista’s time journey?
Well, as a historian, Tulista would certainly have known about Globecorp, Globecops and the armed gangs that roamed 2500, and she knew there was a high risk that the Capsule would be discovered and captured if it stayed in the same place for a whole month!! So it made sense for the Capsule to be able to move through space so that Tulista would be able to move and conceal the Capsule while in 2500. Then, at the end of the month, Tulista could return to the year 3000 Time Lab regardless of the Capsule’s location in 2500.
But I guess due to the naïveté of the people in the year 3000, who had thoroughly studied the violent past history but were too far removed from the mindset of people in 2500 to be able to understand the thought patterns and reasoning of people from that time or earlier eras, it never occurred to the scientists to add a feature to lock the Capsule to prevent it being hijacked.
They learned that lesson the hard way, and didn’t add that feature until series 2.
It wasn’t revealed exactly how Silverthorn captured Tulista- if he discovered the hidden Capsule and then ambushed her when she returned, or if he captured her on her way back to the Capsule and then she was forced to take Silverthorn back to 3000 with her (having no choice but to tell him about the Capsule, because otherwise it would have returned without her in it and she’d have been stranded!!). But we do know that Silverthorn captured Tulista just before the Capsule was ready to go back, because in series 2, when Silverthorn returned to 2500 not long after he originally left, Macro said that Silverthorn had only been gone from their hideout for an hour. So it looks as if Tulista managed to survive in 2500 quite well, and was very unlucky to meet Silverthorn right at the end of her stay.
(By the way, it was never revealed what happened to Tulista’s transducer! I’m assuming that it must have got broken at some point, maybe during a struggle with Silverthorn.)
Anyway, in series 2, the scientists operated the Time Capsule in a different way. There was no pre-set time journey duration, as the intention was for Lorien to quickly drop off Jenny and Silverthorn in their time periods and then return home. And this time, the Capsule’s energy was generated internally, from power cells, similar to when you power a laptop with batteries rather than plugging it in to an external power source.
This was how the Capsule was able to take Alana and Lorien to the destroyed version of the year 3000, where there was no Time Lab!! Had the Capsule been powered in the original way, Alana and Lorien would have been forever stranded in 2500, because history had changed and so the Temporal Generators that would have pulled the Capsule back through time (or rather, back to the future
) no longer existed!!
But the new method of operating the Capsule had a BIG drawback… because it meant that after too many time journeys without the power cells being re-charged, the Capsule would no longer have sufficient power to operate. And to save power, when the Capsule operated in this way, it could only move through time and not space.
As for your question about the scene where Jenny and Petey observed the Time Capsule in flight, and how it was visible in mid flight rather than suddenly exploding into view when it reached it’s destination, like it did in its other Time Journeys that we saw… well, I don’t understand how that worked and it’s much more difficult to come up with an explanation!!
The only thing I can say about that time journey is that it was different from all the others we saw in that it resulted in a crash landing. In none of the other time journeys in the Capsule did anyone else end up sprawled unconscious at their destination time zone, and I guess this was due to the fact that it was also the only time journey when Silverthorn attempted to pilot the Time Capsule.
I hate to admit this because I am Silverthorn’s biggest fan, and he had such cunning and ingenuity and many other skills… but when it came to operating vehicles, he was a bit shit at it, and greatly overestimated his abilities.
He also believed that he could drive a 20th century van simply from having observed Eddie doing it:
So I think during the journey to 1990 with Alana as his hostage, Silverthorn did not pilot the Capsule with the same competence and care that Tulista would have done, and the Capsule would also have been travelling with TREMENDOUS power, having been forced to take a 1010 year time journey just a few moments after returning from a 500 year one (from which it was still overheated). And that was the cause of the unusual phenomenon of the Capsule being visible mid flight, and the crash landing which resulted in Silverthorn having concussion.
(That lit up pier at night is lovely… 🥰 
)
If you find time to post your pictures of the filming locations here, it will be absolutely fantastic!
