The 2013 series of The Tomorrow People was the second attempt to revive the British children’s television series of the same name from the 1970s. It revolves around a new breed of human who are born with psionic powers, covering a group of these individuals and those that pursue them.
There were some changes from the original series, but some general similarities too. The ‘Tomorrow People’ were known as Homo Superior and Homo Novis in the original series but only by the former term in this. Those known as Tomorrow People have powers that regular humans do not, and in this series they still have the same three psionic powers – telepathy, telekinesis and teleportation – and are still prevented from intentionally killing others – although ways are found to get around this, and this attempted reboot was rather more violent than the original, children’s, programme. Tomorrow People are born to normal parents, but can ‘break out’ and show their abilities between childhood and late adolescence. The biggest change is that the original had the Galactic Federation, an organisation of telepathic species throughout the galaxy, whilst this reboot is purely terrestrial in nature.
Many of the characters have the same name as they did in the original series, although their personalities – and, in the case of Jedikiah, his actual species (the original one was not human) – have often changed, as might be appropriate for a more mature programme. The focus of the series in Stephen Jameson, who has just come into his powers, much to his shock, and how he meets up with the Tomorrow People, discovers Ultra and finds out the truth about his family.
There is a conflict between the free Tomorrow People and an organisation called Ultra, which hunts them down, using their own, tame Tomorrow People, and neutralises or kills them. The Tomorrow People as a whole are worried about how they will be treated by mainstream humanity should it ever find out the truth about them. As a consequence of this, and Ultra’s hunting them down, they spend much of the time in the Lair, a secret base below Manhattan, although ‘base’ is a rather generous term for it when it’s compared to Ultra’s own high tech facility aboveground.
The series only lasted for one season before being cancelled. Fortunately, it didn’t quite end with a cliffhanger, as an ongoing plot thread was resolved, but it did set up new threads for the next season, which of course weren’t.