[4] One of the main features of the series is the portrayal of alternate versions of many figures from popular culture, such as Godzilla, Tarzan, Sherlock Holmes,[5] and Doc Savage.

In 1999, Elijah Snow, a reclusive centenarian and former adventurer with cryokinesis powers, reluctantly accepts recruitment by the field team of Planetary, an organization that investigates the "secret history" of the twentieth century.

On their missions, the field team encounter concepts from speculative fiction in the flesh, such as pulp magazine heroes, superheroes, kaiju, wuxia and gun fu, a superspy, B movie monsters, Jules Verne's imaginary technology, and interstellar starships.

He is also briefed on Planetary's conflict against the Four—Randall Dowling, Kim Süskind, William Leather, and Jacob Greene—a superpowered rival group who have hunted and hoarded hidden wonders as trophies through decades of covert black operations.

Learning the extent of the Four's wanton atrocities, Snow becomes invested in missions to liberate life-saving technology from the Four and to recover and assist victims of Science City Zero, a concentration camp used by the Four for human experimentation.

Snow also remembers former team member Ambrose Chase, able to alter the laws of physics inside a limited field, who was seemingly fatally shot by a Dowling operative but inexplicably vanished, leaving no body.

Re-assuming leadership, Snow actively opposes the Four, thwarting their plans and turning their allies before targeting their members outright: he captures and tortures Leather, and sacrifices the observation of a unique extraterrestrial object to permanently strand Greene off-planet.

However, Snow personally turns on the time machine, and his intent to keep the world strange, exerted by the observer effect, manifests many timelines instead of one: while Chase is retrieved and successfully triaged, numerous versions of the field team all arrive from different futures, promising yet more adventures to come.