The Start Of It All
In this episode, we set the stage and show the world our brave band of scientists comes from. The series starts off with a brave band of scientists, in a world not too different from our own. Like it says in the introduction, the place is not here, and the time is not now. (Spoiler: This actually takes place in the past, even though the tech and the world is more advanced that our is even now.)
It is important to realize that this is the past, and it is a world that never had the advantages of help like we did. Their society took much longer to get to where it was than we did. They had more stops and starts, and times where progress was wiped out. Their world was also not a nice one. Yes there were very good elements, but there was slavery, violence, and a lot of things they wanted to get away from. Not having any help, made this world chaotic in certain ways.
Lastly, yes I know that religion is very central to what people value. I would never want to hurt religion, but you cannot bring religion into science class. There has to be some separation. While both things can make sense, they do not always have to make sense together at the same time. By compartmentalizing, we can learn different principles in different ways. Just set this in a box and look at this as a thought experiment in Science fiction if you wish.