Foundation Finds Itself “In the Seldon’s Shadow” at the Start of Season 2

Season 2 of Foundation just started, so I guess I’m doing episode by episode reviews again. For my takes on season 1, go here.

But before we get to season 2 of Foundation, I also have something else Foundation related to share. Because I was a guest on the most excellent Stars End podcast again, talking about my essay in Asimov’s Foundation and Philosophy: Psychohistory and Its Discontents, edited by Joshua Heter and Josef Thomas Simpson.

Which brings me to another Foundation related thing to share. Because, as mentioned above, I have an essay in the anthology Asimov’s Foundation and Philosophy: Psychohistory and Its Discontents, edited by Joshua Heter and Josef Thomas Simpson, which just came out a few weeks ago from Carus Books.

My essay is called “Between Cynism and Faith” and discusses the very different ways in which the original Foundation stories from the 1940s and the Apple+ TV series handle the subject of religion and also notes that the extremely cynical view of religion found in Isaac Asimov’s original stories from the 1940s was not actually all that unusual for the so-called Golden Age of science fiction.

Unfortunately, there is no Hari Seldon action figure, so Roboto kindly posed with my contributor copies of Asimov’s Foundation and Philosophy.

So will season 2 of Foundation stick closer to the original stories by Isaac Asimov and also preserve the very cynical view of religion found in the original Foundation stories? Let’s find out.

Warning! Spoilers under the cut.

After the beautiful flowing pigments title sequence, season 2 opens with Hari Seldon, which would seem to be a good thing, since Hari Seldon or rather his hologram is the one connecting thread in the Foundation stories of the 1940s.

However, the Hari Seldon we meet in the opening moments of season 2 appears to be in the process of losing his mind and runs screaming through triangular black and white corridors, all of which absolutely does not match the all-knowing and yet infuriatingly vague wisdom dispensing hologram that we all know and love.

There is a childhood flashback, where Hari remembers making some kind origami object out of the pages of a book and learning the difference between two-dimensional and three-dimensional objects, all while his family is camping on a ridge on some barren planet. Hari’s mother is cooking over an open fire and encouraging his inquisitiveness, while his father is angry that tore a page out of a book – which actually seems to be some kind of origami making workbook, i.e. the pages only exist to be torn out – and slaps Hari.

There is no reason for this scene to be there at all, except to use some deep, dark childhood trauma as characterisation. Not that Hari Seldon ever needed any characterisation beyond “brilliant mathematician turned hologram who is all known, until he isn’t”. Also, why do brilliant mathematicians in the Empire inevitably grow up on primitive backwater planets where their talents are not appreciated? It makes sense for Gaal Dornick, who is also from a backwater world in the books, but not for Hari. Also, the books make it quite clear that even backwater worlds had a certain level of technology and connection to the wider Empire in Hari’s day.

The childhood flashback helps Hari to figure out that he is trapped inside the Prime Radiant – that’s the glowy puzzle box in which Hari encoded the entire Seldon plan, which only Hari and Gaal Dornick can activate. The Prime Radiant was last seen, when Salvor Hardin absconded with it, when leaving Terminus to look for her roots. As for how Hari or rather his hologram came to be trapped inside – well, when Gaal Dornick sabotaged Hari’s ship The Raven and fled in an escape pod, the Hari hologram aboard The Raven hitched a ride with her and Gaal trapped it inside the Prime Radiant, because she doesn’t trust Hari.

Hari’s mental breakdown inside the Prime Radiant is interrupted – or accelerated – when a woman in a pink dress appears. Hari recognises the woman as his deceased life partner Yanna, a fellow mathematician, and embraces her.  Now Hari Seldon does have a life partner in the Foundation prequels of the 1980s. However, her name is Dors Venabili, she is a historian and also a robot. There is absolutely no need to mention the whole robot thing in the show, since it would only confuse viewers, but why in the galaxy couldn’t Hari call the apparition of his late wife Dors? Why call her Yanna? It’s one of the many changes between books and show that make zero sense.

Hari eventually realises that the apparition is not Yanna, whereupon she transforms into a woman named Kalle, the mathematician poet who came up with the unsolvable problem that Gaal Dornick helped to solve all the way back in episode 1, setting the plot in motion. However, Hari quickly realises that the apparition is not Kalle either, but something or rather someone else. He also blames Gaal Dornick – “my tormentor”, as he calls her, for his predicament – not without justification, it turns out.

The “Hari trapped in the Prime Radiant” scenes are well acted, but then Jared Harris is one hell of an actor and perfectly cast as Hari Seldon. Nonetheless, the sole purpose of these scenes is to remind the viewer who Hari is and that he is kind of important to the plot. But while I accept that casual viewers need to be reminded who Hari is, I wonder whether this couldn’t have been handled better than by various scenes of the all-knowing Hari Seldon losing his mind, while trapped inside a cosmic puzzle box.

As for how Hari came to be trapped inside the Prime Radiant, as mentioned above, that was the doing of Gaal Dornick, who – having decided that she’s had enough of Hari and the Foundation and the Seldon Plan – jumped into an escape capsule, set course for her backwater homeworld of Synnax – you know, the very place she was so desperate to escape – and put herself into cryo sleep for the next approximately 150 years. Season 1 ended with Gaal arriving on Synnax, which is completely submerged by now with all the inhabitants gone – something that Gaal actually predicted, so why she decided to return to a planet she knew was uninhabitable is anybody’s guess.

However, submerged in the world ocean of Synnax, Gaal finds a spaceship with a single inhabitant in cryo sleep. It’s none other than Salvor Hardin who borrowed the spaceship of her trader lover Hugo, set course for Synnax and put herself in cryo sleep. And now, 138 years later, Gaal rescues and wakes up Salvor, only for Salvor to drop a bombshell on her. Because Salvor has just learned that Gaal is her biological mother.

Season 2 picks up where season 1 left off with Gaal coming to terms with the twin shocks of finding that her entire homeworld and its culture are gone and that she has a daughter she never knew about. Even more troubling is that Salvor is actually older than her biological parents Gaal Dornick and Raych Seldon.

There is actually a massive consent violation here, which is never really addressed, because unless there was a blanket “embryos belong to everybody” agreement aboard the spaceship that brought the Foundation to Terminus, neither Gaal nor Raych ever consented to having their embryo implanted into Mari Hardin. Raych was unable to consent due to being dead and Gaal was unable to consent due to having gone missing. I’m not a huge fan of how Foundation portrays Gaal Dornick as a constant font of hysterics and whining, but she is absolutely correct to be upset about Salvor’s sudden appearance and the fact that her frozen embryos were implanted in someone else. Just as Gaal has every right to be upset about that Salvor is looking for some kind of connection or relationship that Gaal just doesn’t feel.

Foundation largely glosses over the consent issue by having Gaal and Salvor wondering what the hell to do now that they find themselves stuck on a dead planet more than a hundred years into the future. Gaal would rather just mope and wait until the little raft she built for herself was consumed by the rising waters, but true to her woman of action portrayal in this series, Salvor will none of that. She borrows Gaal’s canoe, patrols the perimeter (not that there is a perimeter to patrol, since they’re in the middle of a bloody world ocean) and even manages to catch some fish for dinner.

Meanwhile, Gaal shows Salvor how the Prime Radiant works and also explains that she trapped Hari Seldon’s consciousness inside. Salvor replies that this can’t be possible since she spoke to Hari or rather his hologram on Terminus. This is when Gaal and Salvor realise that there are two Haris – one for each Foundation. Gaal also reveals that she doesn’t trust Hari, because as far as she is concerned he’s ruined her life.

When Gaal activates the Prime Radiant she also displays the Seldon plan. Only there is a problem. For while there was supposed to be smooth sailing after the first Seldon crisis, something has knocked the plan off course and there is now a pearl necklace of crisis after crisis after crisis. Gaal declares that her and Salvor’s actions might have lengthened the dar ages that follow the fall of the Empire until they will never end at all.

The Seldon plan going off course is something that also happens in the books. However, it doesn’t happen this early in the series – chronologically we should be about at the time of “The Big and the Little” – but much later in “The Mule”. And the very reason why “The Mule” has the impact that it had is that at this point we have seen Seldon or rather his hologram being right every single time through five stories. So when everybody is gathered in Seldon’s vault, while Terminus itself is under siege by the Mule and experiencing its most desperate hour, the shock is all the greater when Seldon’s hologram appears and blabbers about something completely unrelated. It’s one of the most memorable moments of the entire Foundation series, but it needs to be earned and the TV show hasn’t earned it yet.  Even worse, having the plan go off course this early actually undermines the impact, when/if the TV series ever gets to “The Mule”.

Salvor isn’t content to sit around on an empty planet with no connection to the wider galaxy or what’s happening out there – something she should have considered before embarking on this quest – so she comes up with a plan to raise her or rather Hugo’s spaceship, repair it and take off to find out what’s happening in the galaxy and if the Empire has already fallen. However, Salvor and Gaal have to hurry, because there’s a storm coming. Together they dive into the ship, Gaal shares her breath with Salvor in a weirdly sexualised kiss of life scene that’s even weirder when you consider that Gaal and Salvor are mother and daughter. With Gaal’s breath, Salvor manages to reset the ship and raise it from the ocean floor. But just as Gaal and Salvor are about to take off the who knows where, Hari Seldon or rather his hologram escapes from the Prime Radiant and he is rightfully pissed off.

The Gaal and Salvor scenes are the weakest part of the entire episode. And just to reiterate, no, I have zero problem with the fact that two characters who were portrayed as men of indeterminate race in the books are now played by two women of colour, because honestly, the gender and race of Gaal and Salvor doesn’t affect their role in the story at all. However, neither character has any reason to still be in the story at this point.

In the books, Gaal Dornick only appears in the opening story “The Psychohistorians” and basically serves as a vehicle to introduce viewers to Hari Seldon and Psychohistory and then vanishes from the story. Book Gaal is very much a cypher, so I have no issue with the show giving Gaal more personality, though I wish they wouldn’t have made her so whiny and annoying. They could even have made Gaal an ancestor of Salvor Hardin to create a connection between different generations of Foundationers. Several characters in the books are descendants of other characters, after all. However, as a character Gaal has no reason to exist beyond episode 2.

In the books, Salvor is an important figure, protagonist of two stories (the only character except for Hari Seldon himself to appear in two different Foundation stories) and one of the founding heroes of the Foundation, who shepherded it through its first two crisises. Salvor Hardin in the books is a fount of aphorisms, frequently quoted in subsequent stories (cause there are other ways of linking the present to the past than putting people in cryosleep or cloning them), and often named in one breath with Hari Seldon and Hober Mallow (who should be entering the story around now). Book Salvor is a very different character from TV Salvor – a person who prefers to think before acting and who choses non-violent solutions – which is sharply at odds with the action woman as whom Salvor has been portrayed in the series. That said, I don’t mind TV Salvor Hardin as a character, but her story ended with season 1 and she has no reason to be here at all.

I understand that the showrunners feel that the audience needs recurring characters to serve as an anchor during the time jumps. However, there already are recurring characters in the Foundation books – Hari Seldon and to a certain degree Daneel/Demerzel. The TV series also adds the Emperors Three as further connective tissue, at least for now. So why exactly do we need Gaal and Salvor as well? Why couldn’t they have stayed in their respective eras and be the hero of the day, just like they are in the books?

The Foundation books, particularly the original stories from the 1940s, have been beloved by generations of science fiction readers who had no problems accepting that a character would be the hero for one story and then the next story would take place decades later, when the previous protagonist was long dead. Yes, there are people who dislike Foundation books, sometimes violently. But many people over the decades have loves those books with all their flaws. And I don’t see why TV audiences shouldn’t accept an anthology type show – Black Mirror and American Whatever Story are popular, after all – held together by the common thread of Hari Seldon or rather his hologram and the Emperors Three.

It seems to me as if the showrunners or rather some higher up executives at Apple Plus are underestimating their audience, sadly a common problem with entertainment industry executives. Remember that Bob Iger – yes, the arsehole who is now CEO of Disney – killed Twin Peaks, one of the best and most innovative shows of its time, by forcing David Lynch and Mark Frost to reveal the killer of Laura Palmer early, destroying all tension? Remember how hard it was to get serialised TV shows made, even after several shows had proven that yes, audiences will come back week after week after week to watch? Remember how long the X-Men movie was in development hell and how superhero team movies of any kind were impossible to get made, because common wisdom claimed that audiences got confused when there was more than one superhero on screen, even though superhero team-ups had been bestselling comic events for decades? Remember how no one believed that such a thing as a cinematic universe was possible and that audiences would come back to watch film after film after film until Marvel tried it? Entertainment executives are dumb and keep underestimating their own audience.

The Verge has a very illuminating interview with Foundation showrunner David S. Goyer, in which he apologises that the first few episodes of season 1 were so slow and talky – you know, the episodes which had a massive terrorist attacks, scenes of torture and execution, two planets getting bombed to smithereens and a bloody murder – but that he had to introduce concepts like psychohistory first. Coincidentally, the first episode was the closest to the books Foundation ever got – and IMO it wasn’t talky at all. I don’t even mind injecting action scenes into the story, because the books, particularly the first one, are very talky and not very cinematic at all. But it seems to me as if Apple Plus wants to make Game of Thrones in space – and remember that Game of Thrones was initially very controversial and a huge gamble, because it was a show about dragons on a channel known for pseudo-realistic dramas about drug dealers. But if they want Game of Thrones in space, there are dozens of SF properties that would have been a better choice than Foundation.

Talking of Game of Thrones in space, let’s check in with everybody’s favourite clone emperors, the Cleons. The Empire has clearly not fallen yet and the current Brother Day is Clean the Seventeenth (the last one we saw was Cleon the Thirteenth). We first meet Cleon the Seventeenth with his pants down – literally – because he is having sex with Demerzel. We also learn that he wants to be called “Cleon” during sex and not “Empire”.

Just at the climax, they are rudely interrupted by eyeless blind ninja assassins, who slice off half of Demerzel’s head. Worse, the ninjas’ weapons can somehow penetrate the Cleons’ protective field, so he is wounded as well. Nonetheless, the combined efforts of Brother Day and Demerzel make short work of the assassins.

The assassination scene is impressively choreographed and nothing that involves a naked Lee Pace fighting off blind ninja assassins can possible be bad, though Joseph Kolacinski points out that it’s quite unlikely that a civilisation which doesn’t even remember the location Earth would still have ninjas. Nonetheless, a sex scene that turns into a fight scene is about as far away from anything Asimov ever wrote as you can get, since action scenes were not his forte at all. In fact, the mere idea of Asimov writing that scene makes me shudder to imagine how awkward it would be.

Brother Day and Demerzel are both injured in the attack. Demerzel did not suffer any lasting harm, since her consciousness is distributed across storage chips she keeps in a box. Brother Day, meanwhile, is stuck in a regeneration tank and refuses any kind of anaesthesia, because he fears – quite rightly – that he might be replaced with another Cleon clone, while under sedation.

There’s also the question of who sent the assassins. The assassins are conveniently dead and not talking. Brother Day kills his Shadowmaster for failing to anticipate or prevent the attack. He also orders to have the brains of Brothers Dusk and Dawn scanned, since he clearly does not trust them. For a rift has opened up between the Emperors Three. And the reason for that rift is that Brother Day has decided to discard the genetic dynasty and get married to Queen Sareth of Cloud Dominion, who even now is on route to Trantor to meet her betrothed. Brother Dusk and particularly Brother Dawn are not happy at the threat of being replaced with Brother Day’s bouncing babies. Particularly Brother Dawn points out that having children will not make Brother Day immortal, since “children are meant to replace us”. It’s the sort of screwed up view of human reproduction the last in a long line of clones would have.

Meanwhile, Brother Dusk also disapproves of Brother Day’s physical relationship with Demerzel, because she used to change his diapers, so sleeping with her is seriously weird. Though it also seems as if Brother Dusk is just a little jealous that he never had the idea to sleep with Demerzel when he was in his prime. Brother Day replied that Cleon the First slept with Demerzel, so why shouldn’t he? He also notes that Demerzel seduced him, something that is confirmed when Brother Day asks Demerzel, if their relationship is indecent, and Demerzel replies that something that is given freely can never be indecent. Of course, Demerzel’s position would also be threatened, if Brother Day were to marry, so she’s using all the means at her proposal to stop the wedding. Though I now also wonder whether Demerzel slept with all or at least most of the Cleons (she clearly did not sleep with the current Brother Dusk) and whether this is a rare occurrence.

The wedding party appears and we see that Trantor has replaced its space elevator – destroyed in a terrorist attack all the way back in the first episode – with rings that make the planet look like a giant astrolabe. Queen Sareth’s adviser Rue points out that Trantor is trying to seem bigger and more important than it is.

The first meeting between the prospective bride and groom is rather fraught as well, since Queen Sareth makes it very clear that Brother Day needs her, not the other way around. There is an exchange of gifts. Queen Sareth’s delegation brings various pigments that are hard to source in the Empire now and Brother Dusk, whose task is to record the glories of the genetic dynasty in a giant mural, completely forgets his Imperial composure to thoroughly geek out about the pigments. In return, Brother Day gifts Queen Sareth with a bronze model of Trantor with its rings – a symbol of what he’s offering. “But surely the Empire is bigger than Trantor”, Queen Sareth replies, “Or is this a vision of a diminished future?” The girl certainly has guts and she is easy on the eyes, too.

Meanwhile, the Emperors Three also receive an alarming report. For the body of Imperial envoy Lord Dorwin – who was killed by Phara in season 1 and left drifting in space – has finally been found and so has his final message, in which he reports that the Anacreons have taken over Terminus and located the missing warship Invictus. This is the first inkling the Empire gets that Terminus, Anacreon, Thesbis and a couple of other rim worls – a map shows Smyrno, home of Hober Mallow – were not actually destroyed in a massive solar flare, as the Foundation faked at the end of season 1 to get the Empire off everybody’s backs. What is more, “there have been rumors of an alliance at the edge of the galaxy, led by magicians who glow in the darkness, and fly unaided through the air, and whom weapons cannot touch, who speak of a galactic spirit who will return and guide his people to a promised new age,” a quote that Joseph Kolacinski points out is taken almost verbatim from “The Big and the Little”.

In the books, the Empire and the Foundation lost contact fairly early on – somewhere around the time of “Bridle and Saddle” or “The Wedge” – and the Foundation doesn’t learn that the Empire hasn’t yet fallen until Hober Mallow makes contact with them in “The Big and the Little”, while the Empire isn’t really aware of the threat the Foundation poses until “The Dead Hand”. Of course, two galactic states just drifting apart and losing contact was a stretch even in 1944 – and Asimov had a map showing troop movements on the other side of the world on his wall at the Navy Yard, while he was writing “The Big and the Little”. In 2023, however, no one will believe that two states just forget that the other exists, so the fake solar flare was used as an excuse for contact between the Empire and the Foundation to break down.

Still, the Empire no knows that the Foundation is still out there and a growing threat. Which brings us to the place which should actually be the main focus of the series, namely Terminus. Terminus has by now grown nicely and spread its influence across the outer rim. One night, an alarm sounds, raising the current Warden of Terminus and the current Director of the Foundation from their sleep. The Vault is waking up, which means another crisis is imminent. The Warden (I don’t think the character ever gets a name) fears that this will mean war with the Empire. And that’s a war the Foundation does not think it can win at the current time.

Now in the books, the first skirmish between the Foundation and the Empire is a proxy war involving the Korellian Republic (which is anything but a Republic), which is being supplied with Imperial weaponry and tech via a political marriage between the Korellian ruler and the daughter of an Imperial warlord. The Korellians take out Foundation ships and Hober Mallow is sent to investigate, as chronicled in “The Big and the Little”. The actual war between the Foundation and the Empire doesn’t happen until “The Dead Hand”. The Empire loses and falls soon thereafter to the Mule.

Normally, I’d say that we’re about to see the proxy conflict with the Korellian Republic, which would also fit the time frame. However, considering that the show ignores the books almost completely, I have no idea whether they’ll jump straight to “The Dead Hand” or whatever the show makes of “The Dead Hand”.

In his review, Paul Levinson points out that even though the story of the three Cleons and their robot has fuck all to do with the books, it is a compelling story in itself and fun to watch. However, the trials of Gaal and Salvor are a lot less compelling. And Terminus, the place where the main action should take place, barely appears at all.

Will season 2 of Foundation be as frustrating as season 1 to someone for whom the books have meant a lot? I fear it will be.