The parachute was covering the top of the balloon. It remained in position once the balloon deflated, and allowed to fall gently. There were several demonstrations, I think; people were crazy about ballons back then and experimented a lot of things.
Here is one one of the accounts in French, published in Le Républicain's edition from Aug 12, 1894 :
unless the show is specifically about time travel.
Even then... I mean, what has good chances to be OK is when the show is a pure serial with a defined story with a start and an end (so basically a looong movie cut in 40 minutes pieces), in a universe where the conditions of the time travel are clearly defined and limited.
When it is a series-serial mix (like >90% of TV shows theses days), with extra seasons which may or may not be ordered, you can be sure the writers will trip up, as they have to invent new things, and some of those things will break the conditions and the limits defined earlier and then it won't make sense anymore.
I wish they did like in the 1940s... Instead, current directors cannot shoot proper B&W and just rely on hackneyed gimmicks (I mean stuff like using the overly contrasted shade of a Venetian blind, smoke going through a ray of light, ...). There is always too much white and too much black, which kills the range in between, unlike old movies and TV shows which are made of shades of grey where everything can be seen clearly; settings are not adapted either; anyway they have no idea of what they are shooting, they simply shoot in colour and then remove colours in post-processing like they do usually when they apply their stupid colour filter (blue-brown = Scandinavian police drama, lovat green = Germany, yellow = Mediterranean, blue = techno-thriller, etc.). Any low-rated chain-produced family entertainment TV series from the 50s and 60s, filmed by a random director from back then, exhibits a better B&W picture than those modern arty attempts.
Yes, they are. The case of the last one is exemplar: there was a similar community elsewhere, which had grown organically from people recreating the same name Reddit sub in the manner it was over 10 years ago (memes, people talking about their real life, news); it was by far the most followed of several similar communities. Then mods/admins of a more recent instance infiltrated the successful community and convinced existing mods to shut the main community down and move to the one on that new instance. Now all that is left is selected news and orientated propaganda. The modus operandi is to bring or recreate all communities in this language to their own instance, so that they can apply their own rules on them, whereas they had zero power over the other ones. If an outside community is in zombie state, they have no interest into reviving it (it would just requires posting to generate a regular trafic, and after a while waking up a sleeping mod or request its replacement), but they are going to create the equivalent on their instance, it will probably go zombie too after un short moment since they have no interest in the subject, they just want to exert control.
There is a reason why on Usenet, parallel hierarchies (typically alt.*) came up to life beside the more successful big 8 and national hierarchies. Even in BBS time, BBSs often subscribed to 2 or 3 networks offering conferences on duplicate subjects, one was more popular than the other, but so what? There is a need for several communities on the same subject, even if one is more popular than the others; it allows people who are banned (or simply harassed or shunned) from community A to go to B and those who are banned or feeling unwelcome on B to go to A. It is the same with regular Web forums: when you get pissed at people or the mod/admin has it in for you on server A, you make an account on server B. With web forums, I have witnessed a special case and its consequences: a clique of the same 2 or 3 persons managed to infiltrate moderation on both existing large forums on the subject, and therefore could silence any other opinion than theirs. That's the same issue as with concentration/centralisation, whether you call it consolidation or another name. It is better to keep several communities alive: even if their trafic is very scarce, there are always lurkers already present, and it is easier to revive/vivify them that way than starting from scratch as a 1-man effort, often with no way to advertise it, while the main community still lives.