Girls in scripts are often pretty but brainless, or geeky and no one likes them, so it's great to find richer roles. Chalk and cheese aspects of people are very interesting to play.
Religiously the Empire was pluralistic and marked by a search for a faith which would be satisfying intellectually and ethically and would give assurance of immortality.
We should remember that there was once a discipline called natural philosophy. Unfortunately, this discipline seems not to exist today. It has been renamed science, but science of today is in danger of losing much of the natural philosophy aspect.