The crew

Meet everyone

Five friends, one wolf, and something in the dark that none of them have met yet. Character design is early — what you are looking at is the first pass.

The Heart

Ham Balonius

“I have a plan. It is not a good plan. But it is a plan.”Ham Balonius, most episodes

Ham is a Roman kid, which in this world means sandals, a tunic, a wooden sword and a laurel crown he has to keep pushing back off his eyes. He is not the smartest one in the group and he knows it. What he has is the thing that actually gets a group of children through a Cretaceous swamp: he goes first.

The comedy of Ham is that his courage arrives about four seconds before his judgement. The heart of him is that when it counts — when Bim is scared, when Hallie is being talked over, when TukTuk cannot move — he stops being loud and becomes the steadiest person in the room.

He is voiced by Isabel, who is six, and who came up with him.

Brave first, thinks secondFiercely loyalPerpetually hungryVoiced by Isabel, age 6

Best Friend

Bim

“Uh-oh.”Bim, expressing roughly nine different emotions

Bim is an oversized potato bug — a roly-poly somewhere between a teapot and a small terrier. He is Ham's pet and, much more importantly, Ham's best friend. He does not speak in sentences. He speaks in squeaks, in enormous eyes, and in one extremely well-timed “uh-oh” that has become the show's laugh line.

Bim's superpower is the least heroic one imaginable: he curls into an armoured ball. It has solved a startling number of problems — rolling down a pyramid ramp, plugging a leak in a pirate hull, being mistaken for a very expensive Egyptian melon.

He is voiced by Henry, Isabel's brother, whose nickname — Ham Bone — is where this whole thing began.

Roughly the size of a teapotRolls into a ball under pressureEats first, asks neverVoiced by Henry

The Scientist

Hallie

“I wrote it down. I wrote all of it down.”Hallie, holding the notebook that saves them

Hallie is a hedgehog, an inventor, and a girl living in a century that has no idea what to do with her. She is building levers, lenses and pressure vessels in a world where nobody has agreed those are things a girl does. She does them anyway, quietly, in a workshop full of scrolls and half-finished apparatus.

She is the one who works out how the time machine functions — not because she is told to, but because she cannot leave a mechanism alone. Her notebook is the group's most valuable object, and it is the reason they survive Pompeii.

The thing Hallie does not tell anyone is how frightened she is. She is the crew's confidant, the one everybody brings their worries to, and the one who has nowhere to put her own. Ham is the only one who notices.

Keeps a notebook alwaysReads the machine firstAhead of her centuryDesign in progress

The Ride

TukTuk

“I would like it noted that I did not want to do that.”TukTuk, after doing it

TukTuk is the crew's horse, their getaway vehicle, and their resident worrier. He can list every way a plan will go wrong before Ham has finished describing it, and he is usually correct. Then he does it anyway.

The joke is that TukTuk narrates his own terror the entire time. The truth underneath is that he is the bravest character in the show, because bravery that costs nothing is not really bravery. He is the last one to believe this about himself.

TukTuk is a working name and may yet change. Everything about him except the name is settled.

Fast when it mattersAnxious the rest of the timeBottomless appetite for grapesWorking name — may change

The Antagonist

Vincent

“I am, and I cannot stress this enough, a respected member of the Senate.”Vincent, holding a sack of somebody else's gold

Vincent is a wolf, a Roman senator, and a thief — a reverse Batman, respectable in public and prowling by night. He is pompous, cowardly, self-pitying and utterly convinced he is the hero of his own story. He is the Doctor Smith of this show: the villain the audience is delighted to see, because the moment he appears something is about to go ridiculously wrong for him.

Crucially, Vincent is never actually frightening. He is a bumbler in an expensive cloak. The peril in an episode comes from the century they have landed in, not from him — he is the complication, the running gag, and occasionally, when he is cornered, an unwilling ally.

He is also being played. Vincent takes his orders from Brain, and believes he is the one in charge.

Senator by daylightThief by lamplightEnormously theatricalCompletely out of his depth

The Overlord

Brain

“Everything Vincent thinks was his idea.”

Brain is the shadow behind the senator. Brain built the time machine — not as a way to travel, but as a trap: a device designed specifically to scatter Ham and his friends across history and keep them from ever reassembling at home.

Nobody has seen Brain. Not the audience, not the crew, and not really Vincent, who takes instruction from a voice and a lamplit silhouette and has convinced himself he is the senior partner.

The long arc of the series is the answer to two questions a five-year-old will ask out loud at the television: who is that, and why does he want Ham gone?

Built the time machineNever shows a faceWants them lost, not caughtDesign in progress

Now see where
the machine takes them

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