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The Marshalls are brought to the mysterious world by means of a dimensional portal, a device used frequently throughout the series and a major part of its internal mythology. This portal opens when they are swept down a gigantic 1,000 foot waterfall.
Outfitted only for a short camping trip, the resourceful family takes shelter in a natural cave and improvises the provisions and tools that they need to survive. Their most common and dangerous encounters are with dinosaurs, particularly a Tyrannosaurus Rex they nickname "Grumpy" who frequents the location of their cave. However, many of the dinosaurs are herbivores, posing no threat to the Marshalls. One is a particularly tame young Brontosaurus whom Holly nicknames "Dopey," and whom the family looks upon as a pet.
They also tangle with menacing Sleestak (lizard-men) and "cave men" called Pakuni (one of whom, Cha-Ka, they befriend), as well as a variety of dangerous creatures, mysterious technology, and strange geography.
The main goal of the three is to find a way to return home. They are occasionally aided in this by the Altrusian castaway Enik. At the start of the third season Rick Marshall is accidentally returned to Earth alone, leaving his children behind, and is replaced by his brother Jack. Spencer Milligan's absence was explained by having Rick Marshall disappear after he was trying to use one of the pylons to get home, and that Jack had stumbled upon his niece and nephew after he embarked on a search of his own to find them.
Though the term "time doorway" is used throughout the series, Land of the Lost is not meant to portray an era in Earth's history, but rather an enigmatic zone whose place and time are unknown. The original creators of these time portals were thought to be the ancestors of the Sleestak, called Altrusians, though later episodes raised some questions about this.
Many aspects of the Land of the Lost, including the time doorways and environmental processes, were controlled by the Pylons, metallic obelisk-shaped booths that were larger on the inside than the outside and housed matrix tables — stone tables studded with a grid of colored crystals. Uncontrolled time doorways result in the arrival of a variety of visitors and castaways in the Land.
Although they came close to returning to their own time in several episodes, at the time the series was canceled they had never successfully returned home. The first-season episode "Circle" features a clever twist to this plot device. Here a paradox in the time doorway is discovered; the Marshalls in fact did not fall through a portal but were in fact "killed" on the waterfall, but they are alive and thus the paradox cannot be explained. The only resolution is to open the time doorway and for the Marshalls to thus "return" home but at the same time return to the land all over again.
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