Foundation meets “King and Commoner” and swears a lot

Season 2 of Foundation just started, so I guess I’m doing episode by episode reviews again, at least for now. For my takes on previous episodes, go here.

Warning! There will be spoilers under the cut!

Episode 2 of season 2 of Foundation starts where episode 2 left off – with Gaal still bothered by seeing Salvor dead at the hand of the Mule some one hundred and fifty years into the future.

Salvor, meanwhile, is as unbothered by this revelation as I was, though for different reasons. I don’t particularly care what happens to Salvor, because as far as I’m concerned, her story ended last season and there’s no reason for her to still be in the series at this point. Salvor herself, meanwhile, thinks that if she dies some one hundred and fifty years into the future, she’s safe in the here and now and still has a long life ahead of her. Gaal, however, won’t relent and declares that maybe they can find a way to prevent Salvor’s death. At this point, Hari Seldon or rather his hologram pops up that the path of history is not easy to alter and that any attempts to save Salvor may bring about her death, because some things are pre-ordained.

Before Gaal and Hari can argue some more, the Beggar (I’d forgotten the name of the ship) has reached its destination, a habitable but uninhabited planet that Gaal and Salvor assume is Ignis. Salvor remarks that this planet is an unusual choice to set up the Second Foundation, when Hari drops the bombshell: They’re not on Ignis at all. Instead, Hari – who partly lives in the Beggar‘s computer now redirected them somewhere else, because the Prime Radiant told him to.”Well, where the fuck are we?” an understandably frustrated Salvor demands. It’s the first of many f-bombs dropped during this episode.

Now Salvor has every right to swear at Hari taking the Beggar to an unknown planet. However, it’s really notable that there are a lot of f-bombs dropped in this episode. I don’t particularly mind and it’s mostly justified, but it seems as if they stuffed an entire season’s worth of f-bombs into a single episode. What makes this even more notable is that the original stories from the 1940s have no swearing at all, because censorship standards of the time wouldn’t have allowed that. There’s a reason that Conan keeps saying “Crom!”, because “Fuck” just wasn’t possible in those days, even in the more liberal Weird Tales. And there was no way Isaac Asimov would have gotten an f-bomb or even a less loaded term past John W. Campbell’s long-suffering eidtorial assistant Kay Tarrant, who was infamous among Astounding and Unknown writers for exorcising any hint of impropriety from the pages of the two magazines. According to Alec Nevala-Lee, Kay Tarrant once told some of Astounding‘s writers, likely including Asimov, “Personally, I don’t give a fuck what you write, but children read this magazine, too.” It seems the writers of the TV show were determined to make poor Kay Tarrant rotate in her grave.

Hari finally reveals that the Beggar has landed on Oona’s World, an Imperial palladium mining colony that was abandoned centuries ago. Oona’s World isn’t mentioned in the books, at least not as far as I recall. It is a fascinating setting, a barren world covered with rusting mining equipment and gigantic statues that have partially collapsed into the sand. It’s certainly interesting that the design aesthetic of the entire galaxy in Foundation is apparently Socialist realism. It’s also telling that even a random mining colony would be filled with gigantic statues of important people.

As for why they’ve come to Oona’s World, Hari has no idea. But the Prime Radiant told him to. Just as the Prime Radiant is now telling him to come to a certain mountain which is apparently Oona’s World’s answer to Mount Rushmore, since there are giant statues hewn into the rock. If you’re convinced by now that Hari is not quite sane, you’re not the only one.

Gaal and Salvor also have their doubts about Hari and his mysterious mission. However, since Hari is living in the Beggar‘s computer and has locked down all functions, they have no choice but to indulge Hari. Worse, since Hari has no body of his own and the Beggar‘s systems aren’t long-range enough, he demands that Gaal take Hari to Mount Rushmore of Oona’s World. Gaal is not at all happy about this and tells Hari that she is not carrying him around like “a fucking rat in a handbag”. Salvor tells Gaal to please just take Hari where he wants to go, so they can get the fuck off Oona’s World.

So Gaal and Hari Seldon or rather his holigram trek across Oona’s World. Hari gives some worldbuilding background and explains that once the planet’s palladium deposits were exhausted, the Empire turned the mining robots loose on the local population. The reason for this is not quite clear, since the human body does not contain any palladium except occasionally in tooth fillings and jewellery. Never mind that if those mining robots were beholden to the Three Laws of Robotics – which would make sense, because no one wants mining robots to ignore orders or attack humans – then how could they even be able to go after the human population of Oona’s World? So the whole thing makes no sense. However, it neatly illustrates that the Emperors are vicious pieces of shit, or – to quote Hari – “hollow men who hollow out their worlds”.

Hari is also quite cautious in moving across the barren landscape. Gaal wants to know why – after all, Oona’s World is uninhabited. “Uninhabited doesn’t mean we’re alone”, Hari says cryptically.

Otherwise, Hari and Gaal spend the rest of way bickering. Hari calls Gaal disruptive (annoying would be more fitting), whereas Gaal wants to know why Hari didn’t put a single Psychohistorian on Terminus to help the Foundation. Hari counters that he did intend to put one Psychohistorian on Terminus, namely Gaal, except that Gaal messed up that part, too.

The argument then goes into the issue of Salvor. Hari insists that Salvor’s death at the hands of the Mule may well be unavoidable and that any individual person is insignificant in the larger scheme of things anyway. Gaal counters that Salvor solved the first Seldon crisis and is therefore very important indeed, whereupon Hari says that Salvor has help because the forces of history were on her side and that if it hadn’t been her, someone else would have done the same. Which is exactly what Psychohistory teaches, namely that specific individuals don’t matter, even if they do important things. Hari calculated that someone would deal with the aggressive four kingdoms, but he had no way of knowing who this person would be nor does it really matter. So in short, Hari has read the books and knows how Psychohistory works, even if the writers sometimes don’t seem to know.

Come to think of it, Psychohistory is in many ways the antithesis to the great man (or woman, but it’s mostly a man) theory of history, because according to Psychohistory broad social and historical trends are a lot more important than any individual figure. Of course, the great man theory of history was already being challenged by the time Isaac Asimov wrote the original Foundation stories. Indeed, the entire explanation that if one “great” person doesn’t to do something, someone else will do it is borrowed almost verbatim from sociologist William Fielding Ogburn’s 1926 paper “The Great Man versus Social Forces”. Did Asimov read Ogburn’s paper? It’s certainly possible.

Hari and Gaal have finally reached the mine and venture inside. There is a door, which opens and behind that door – on a supposedly uninhabited, if not empty planet – is none other than Kalle, the dead mathematician poet whose work inspired both Hari and Gaal. Kalle welcomes Hari, who sends Gaal away and tells her to leave, if she and Salvor don’t hear from him within six hours. Then the door slams shut and Gaal is left standing outside.

Gaal returns to the Beggar and debates with Salvor what to do next. Salvor doesn’t trust Hari anymore than Gaal does and declares that if the positions were reversed Hari would leave them behind (and I couldn’t even blame him). And besides, they don’t need Hari to set up the Second Foundation. Actually, they do need him, since I doubt Gaal has all the necessary knowledge and Salvor certainly doesn’t have it. Salvor also drops another of the aphorism her counterpart in the books is famous for, though she attributes it to her father: “Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right.”

In many ways, it feels as if the writers are including these quotes from the books in the series almost as a bone thrown to the fans of the books to assure them that yes, the writers have read the books, they just chose to largely ignore them. Never mind that this particular Salvor Hardin aphorism doesn’t even fit in this situation.

Gaal and Salvor eventually decide to take off without Hari. However, just as they start the Beggar‘s engines and are about the take off, the Beggar crashes into a sinkhole and is attacked by two mining robots. I guess the Beggar contains palladium. Somehow, Salvor manages to manoeuvre the Beggar out of the sinkhole. However, before they head for orbit, the scanner detects a lifeform at the abandoned mine cum Mount Rushmore of Oona’s World where Gaal took Hari. The lifeform is lying in the palm of one of the giant statues and the mining robots are going after it, because – honestly, I have no idea. In his review, Joseph Kolacinski jokes that there appears to be a Fourth Law of Robotics that states: “A robot may not act until it is necessary to the plot?” Which makes as much sense as anything else.

Once again, the whole “escape the giant murderous mining robot” sequence feels more like something you’d see in The Mandalorian than like anything I’d expect to find in Foundation. I also find these pointless action scenes, which only seem to be there because the production seems to worry that the audience will get bored, if there aren’t enough action scenes, very frustrating. I don’t mind this sort of thing in The Mandalorian or any other Star Wars related show, but it just doesn’t belong in Foundation.

However, the powers that be have decreed that we must have an action scene, so Gaal and Salvor proceed to rescue the lifeform, which turns out to be none other than Hari Seldon and he’s got a body now.

Honestly, this development makes no sense at all. Why does Hari need a body? The whole point of Hari Seldon is that he is a ghost, a hologram of a man who died centuries ago. I applaud the show’s decision to turn Hari into an interactive hologram or rather two of them, because that makes him a lot more fun and gives Jared Harris more to do. But I still have no idea why Hari needs a body now and what the point of this whole Kalle business or the sidetrip to Oona’s World even was aside from giving us some cool visuals?

***

The second plot strand of this episode begins on the Lepsis penal colony where dissheveled convicts are harvesting sea salt – or at least that’s what it looks like. I did wonder why the Empire doesn’t use robots or machines for this, especially since machines are used to harvest sea salt even today. But then the Empire is in decline and may no longer have the machinery. Or they just really like torturing convicts. Besides, as I’ve pointed out several times before, prisoners in garishly coloured clothing being forced to do hard physical labour is a really common trope in US science fiction where practices in present day US prisons are extrapolated into the future, even if it makes little sense in the setting, as in season 1 of Star Trek Discovery. And to be fair, prisoners being forced to do hard physical labour makes more sense in Foundation or Andor for that matter than in the post-scarcity Star Trek universe. As for the bright yellow or orange outfits worn by the prisoners, something which is a comparatively new development that came in in the US only in the last thirty years or so and is not practice in most other western countries, I guess by now TV audiences, especially American ones, expect prisoners to wear garishly coloured overalls.

One prisoner collapses from exhaustion and is promptly prodded with some kind of shock stick by a guard, when another prisoner intervenes and tells the guard that his fellow prisoner has had enough and can’t work anymore. Before the guard can take out his frustrations on the prisoner who spoke up, Demerzel arrives and insists on speaking with this particular prisoner. And this is how we are introduced to Bel Riose, one of the main characters in “The Dead Hand” a.k.a. “The General”.

There are some differences to the books here. For starters, Bel Riose is not in prison at the beginning of “The Dead Hand”. There actually is a character in “The Dead Hand” who eventually dies in a prison slave mine, but that character is not Bel Riose and the slave mine where he is incarcerated is actually a Founndation prison (yes, they’re not always the good guys). What is more, Bel Riose in the books is a young man – for a general – and is only thirty-four. In the TV series he is played by 59-year-old British actor Ben Daniels. If his face seems familiar, that’s probably because it is, cause he has been in a lot of things over the years.

But apart from those differences, Bel Riose in the series is remarkably like his book counterpart, steadfast, loyal and protective of both the Empire and the people under his command. Indeed, the reason Bel Riose ended up in prison in the first place is that he countermanded an Imperial order to protect the people under his command. In short, Bel Riose is a good man, unlike the usual antagonists the Foundation deals with. He is also – and that’s not really a spoiler – doomed.

In many ways, the ultimate fate of Bel Riose is tragic. It’s also chilling when Hari Seldon’s hologram pops up at the end of “The Dead Hand” and says (paraphrasing), “Well, if the Empire sent a bad general after you – congratulations, you win. And if the Empire sent a general who’s actually good at his job after you, congratulations, you win as well, because a weak Emperor could never tolerate a strong general, but will have to eliminate him to save his hide.” Which is exactly what happens to Bel Riose in the end.

But for now Bel Riose has gotten a new lease on life, because Demerzel comes to fetch and give him his command back. Riose, however, has some conditions of his own and insists that his fellow prisoners (also Imperial military?) go free as well. Demerzel agrees to improve the conditions at the penal colony, which can hardly be worse, but won’t set the other prisoners go, whereupon Bel Riose tells her to fuck herself (which I suspect she might even be able to do).

However, Demerzel still has an ace up her voluminous sleeves, namely Glawen Curr, Bel Riose’s former second in command and husband. Yes, the Empire has marriage equality, which is something I guess. When he was imprisoned on Lepsis, Bel Riose was told that his husband had been executed for insubordination. However, Glawen Curr is still alive and Demerzel promises Bel Riose that they will be reunited, if he comes with her. Riose relents.

The scene switches to the Imperial palace on Trantor, where Demerzel shows Bel Riose to a quite luxurious apartment and tells him to clean himself up, since Riose literally looks as if he spent that past ten years on a desert island. Joseph Kolacinski says that he looks like a character from Planet of the Apes or Monty Python, which is not entirely wrong. Bel Riose, however, refuses to clean himself up and tells Demerzel that he’ll face Cleon as he is, so Cleon can see what he did to him. He also insists on seeing his husband, but Demerzel tells him that he can see Glawen Curr after he has talked with Cleon.

So we get the confrontation between Bel Riose and the Cleons which goes about as well as you can imagine. Brother Day and Dusk clearly dislike Riose as much as he dislikes them, while Brother Dawn, who has either never met Riose or only met him when he was very young, mostly seems curious. Riose insists on talking to Brother Day alone, so Dusk and Dawn as well as Demerzel are dismissed. Neither of them is happy about it.

Riose clearly triumphs in his one on one confrontation with Day, while Day comes off as weak and insecure. Which is exactly what Hari predicted. The confrontation culminates with Day trying to goad Riose into hitting him, something Bel Riose refuses to do, for while Day may be an arsehole and terrible person, he is still the Emperor and Bel Riose won’t strike his Emperor. I guess Bel Riose and Duncan a.k.a. Man-at-Arms could have a good long conversation in a bar about staying loyal to bad to terrible rulers. Though to be fair, even at his worst in Masters of the Universe Revelation, King Randor is nowhere near as terrible as Cleon XVII.

Turns out that not hitting the Emperor was exactly what Day wanted, so Bel Riose is reinstated and given his command over the 20th fleet back. He also finally gets to see his husband, who believed that Bel Riose was dead as well. The reunion between Bel Riose and Glawen Curr is genuinely touching, though the fact that Brother Day and Demerzel are spying on them through a mirror, while making out with each other is more than a little creepy. Day is once again unsure whether his relationship with Demerzel is right and proper, but Demerzel assures him that it’s perfectly all right. Dude, she says that to all the Cleons.

Glawen Curr tries to persuade Bel Riose to elope together, the Cleons and the Empire be damned. It would obviously be the right decision, but Bel Riose – being the steadfast and honourable man that he is – refuses. He’s well aware that the Brother Day and the rest of the Cleons are weak rulers, but Bel Riose will not abandon the Empire and its people to the likes of Brother Day. It’s a noble sentiment and one that will land the head of Bel Riose and probably Glawen Curr as well in a noose or on a chopping block or whatever weird and cruel forms of execution the Empire practices these days.

But first Bel Riose and Glawen Curr stand on the bridge of the Imperial flagship, where Bel Riose is greeted enthusiastically by his crew, including a female spacer. And then they take off to Siwenna to learn more about the mysterious Foundation from an Imperial agent stationed there.

I don’t recall feeling particularly sorry for Bel Riose the first time I read “The Dead Hand” a.k.a. “The General”, even though he clearly doesn’t deserve his fate. However, the books stick far closer to the Foundation than the TV series, which spends a lot of time on Trantor and with the Empire, and the Foundation were the good guys, so of course I was happy for them to win. That said, “The Dead Hand” is the moment where it becomes clear that the Foundation are not necessarily the good guys, though there are hints earlier, such as the Foundation forcing their fake religion and ideology on people who clearly don’t want it in “The Wedge”. As for Bel Riose, he is a Star Trek captain in a Star Wars world, which is the reason his story is so tragic. He also passes the “What would Commander McLane do?” test with flying colours.

In the books, the sexual orientation of Bel Riose never plays a role. He exists solely as a soldier with no personal life that we learn about. This is not unusual, since Asimov didn’t care very much about the personal lives of his characters. I also don’t recall any hints that Bel Riose is gay, but then any hints might have gone over my head, when I was younger. I really need to reread “The Dead Hand”, since it’s been a while. The TV-show turns Bel Riose into a happily married gay man to give his character more dimensions and to make his eventual fate even more tragic. However, what makes the decision to portray Bel Riose as a gay man in the show interesting is that there is a character in the show who is quite strongly implied to be gay in the books, namely Hober Mallow, the trader who enjoys engaging in nude sunbathing sessions, while smoking cigars, with a male friend. And yes, I know that sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, but trust me, that scene is very suggestive indeed.

***

This brings us to the third plot strand of this episode, namely what happens to the Foundation and Terminus. When we last saw Terminus, Hari Seldon’s Vault had just activated itself and accidentaly incinerated Jaeggar Fount, warden of Terminus. What is more, graffitti demanding “Get Hober Mallow!” appeared on the walls of the Vault, since the newly sentient Hari Seldon hologram has apparently taken up graffitti as a hobby.

The scene now opens with a cordon of armed guards surrrounding the Vault – which would seem to be smart lest someone else get incinerated. In Director’s Sermak’s conference room, Director Sermak, Poly Verisof and a bunch of other dignitaries including one Councillor Sutt, a name readers of the books may remember as Hober Mallow’s political rival in “The Big and the Little”, are discussing what to do now.

Poly Verisof insists that they fetch Hober Mallow, since that’s clearly what the Vault and Hari Seldon (who according to Poly are one and the same) wants them to do. Director Sermak counters that there is no way that Hari Seldon could predict the existence of a specific individual like Hober Mallow. There may be no psychohistorians on Terminus, but Director Sermak understands psychohistory better than some of the writers, it seems.

Poly counters that Salvor Hardin was a chosen one (though considering Poly was only a small kid when Hari Seldon last appeared, he must be misremembering things, since Hari clearly had no idea who Salvor was and even said so) and even points out a neat glass bust of Salvor in the conference room, confirming that she is one of the Foundation’s foundational heroes second only to Hari Seldon himself. So if Salvor could resolve the first crisis, maybe Hober Mallow can resolve this one, even though he is – to quote Poly – “a fucking arsehole”.

Since no one has any better ideas, Poly Verisof and Brother Constant set off to fetch Hober Mallow. Poly explains to Brother Constant that Hober Mallow was once a trainee priest in the Church of the Galactic Spirit (which matches his biography in the books), but that he became a con-man and scoundrel instead. Poly Verisof also manfully refuses a drink that Director Sermak offers him, so maybe he is cleaning himself up. As before, Kulvinder Ghir’s performance as Poly Verisof is a delight.

As for where Hober Mallow is to be found, Poly explains that he is on Korell, which is a problem, because Korell is actually off-limits to Foundationers. Again, this matches the books, where the Republic of Korell (which is very much not a republic) wants nothing to do with the Foundation and its missionaries, for fear of being taken over like the Four Kingdoms and Askone (which it seems we won’t be seeing in the show). Korell is of course also an important location in “The Big and the Little”.

In the TV show, Korell’s aesthetics seem to be operetta fascism coupled with brutalist architecture. The camera zooms in on some kind of rally. People in gray and tan uniform are lined up in a Leni Riefenstahl type arrangement. A man in a grey operetta uniform with lots of medals and tassles is sitting on a dais. He has what appears to be a golden sword with a big blue jewel in the hilt. This is Commdor Asper Argo, the well beloved leader of the Korellian Republic who is no more well beloved than Korell is a Republic. He is played by Philip Glennister, best remembered for playing DCI Gene Hunt in Life on Mars and Ashes to Ashes, two British excellent British SFF shows which for unfathomable reasons seem to be completely forgotten today.

The well beloved Commdor Asper Argo is about to have a virtual meeting with a Foundation trader named Ponyets. Readers of the books will recognise the name Limmar Ponyets as the protagonist of “The Wedge”. And indeed, the Foundation plot strand seems to be a mash-up of “The Wedge” and “The Big and the Little”, while the Trantor plot strand is already in “The Dead Hand”. It’s mystifying why the entire first season basically stuck to the first two stories in the first book with a bit of the third thrown in, which forced them to pad out the rather thin plot of the first two stories with a lot of unrelated stuff, but now suddenly the show suddenly stuffs “The Wedge”, “The Big and the Little” and “The Dead Hand” into an one season.  It probably would have been better to cover all of Foundation up through “The Big and the Little” in season 1, Foundation and Empire or just “The Dead Hand” in season 2, since “The Mule” probably deserves a season of his own, and then doing Second Foundation in the final season. The 1980s prequels are fun enough but not essential and Foundation’s Edge and particularly Foundation and Earth are very much a let-down. If I never have to see or read that Gaia nonsense again, it will still be too soon. Also screw James Lovelock for ruining Foundation.

The Commdor’s pretty blonde aide who looks as if she stepped right out of a Nazi recruitment poster, whispers to the Commdor that the man on the screen is not Trader Ponyets, but the infamous con-man Hober Mallow. Interestingly, I’ve been thinking that a good way to adapt “The Wedge” without confusing viewers with yet another protagonist (though readers of the books never minded getting a new protagonist almost every story) would be to replace Limmar Ponyets with Hober Mallow, since they’re quite similar characters and turn “The Wedge” into an earlier adventure of Mallow. It seems the writers had the same idea. In the books, Hober Mallow is described as brown-skinned – one of the few characters in the Foundation stories to get a physical description and I think the only one whose skin colour is mentioned. In the series, he is played by Dimitri Leonidas, a British actor of Greek Cypriot heritage. I certainly would not call him brown-skinned. And yes, it’s interesting that in a show which has cast several characters who are of undetermined race in the books (which in the 1940s probably meant white) with actors of colour, the one character who explicitly is a person of colour is played by a white man.

If the Commdor were smart, he would have had Hober Mallow arrested straight away. However, the Commdor is mostly greedy, but far from smart and so he agrees to listen to what Hober Mallow has to say, even though he does remind Mallow that Foundation missionaries are not welcome on Korell. Mallow replies that he has no interest in religion and doesn’t care what gods people worship. All he cares about is making a good deal. In the books, Mallow tells Commdor Argo the same thing – that he doesn’t care about religion, only about business. This moment is probably the closest that TV Hober Mallow ever comes to his book counterpart.

As for what Hober Mallow has to sell, he has a something called a “castling device”, named after the chess move, which is basically a short range teleportation device that allows two people to switch places, including wearing each other’s clothes. Mallow promptly demonstrates the device by switching places with the Commdor, who is duly impressed – until he realises that Mallow has made off with the blue jewel in the hilt of his sword. How in the universe Hober Mallow can steal the jewel, when the castling device can only switch people and not even their clothes is not explained.

Hober Mallow is about to make his getaway, but before he can get his ship off the ground, it is stormed by the Commdor’s forces and Hober is arrested. So much for the Foundation’s last, best hope.

Luckily, Poly Verisof and Brother Constant are already on the way to retrieve Hober Mallow, unaware that this retrieval has turned into a rescue mission. We first see them moving through a crowd of Korellians, their dark red priestly robes standing out in a sea of gray and beige. Interestingly, no one seems to be interested in stopping Poly and Brother Constant, even though Korell explicitly forbids Foundation missionaries from visiting the planet and there is a crucial sequence in “The Big and the Little”, where a Foundation priest is lynched by a Korellian mob, while Hober Mallow does fuck all to help him.

As for what has attracted all of those crowds, the well beloved Asper Argo is sitting on his throne again, overseeing some public executions. The execution method is something called “Death by spike of titan”, which is basically impaling the victim with a giant dart. The condemned are also made to wear garish yellow jackets with a giant target on their chest plus a kind of rubber clown’s mask. It’s all suitably bizarre, but also very un-Asimovian. As I’ve noted before, whenever someone is threatened with execution in an Asimov story – which actually does happen  in “The Wedge” – it’s inevitably by gas chamber or lethal injection. Asimov was a chemist and apparently an adherent of better dying through chemistry. But then, gas chambers and lethal injections are a lot less photogenic than impaling people on giant spikes.

We see the first victim quite gruesomely impaled. The body is taken away and Commdor Asper Argo the well beloved orders the next condemned to be brought forward. And this condemned is none other than Hober Mallow. Which means that Poly Verisof and Brother Constant have to think quickly to save the Foundation’s last, best hope from being impaled on a giant spike. Poly Verisof tries to stall the execution to give them time to come up with a rescue plan. And so Poly interrupts the proceedings and asks to be allowed to pray with Hober Mallow – after all, he is a priest. Coincidentally, this is exactly what Limmar Ponyets does in “The Wedge” to be allowed to visit the Foundation agent Eskel Gorov, who has managed to get himself arrested and sentenced to death on planet Askone. Indeed, Poly’s interjection is a nigh verbatim quote of Limmar Ponyets request to the elders of Askone.

However, Korell is not Askone. For while Askone was a religious theocracy and therefore had some respect for priests, Korell is just a corrupt shithole. And so the Commdor denies Poly’s request. I guess this brief scene is all we get of “The Wedge”, which is a pity, since it’s a good story. I also hoped we’d see the cool gold transmutation gadget, but I think Hober’s castling device fulfils that purpose in the series. But then, I was maybe the only person who geeked out about the gold transmution device from “The Wedge”, because I’d just heard about the process chemistry class shortly before I read the story.

The execution is about to go ahead. Hober Mallow still has some last words, then a clown mask is pulled over his face. Suddenly, the condemned gets very agitated and his voice and statue notably change. Turns out that Hober Mallow has used his castling gadget to switch places with the Commdor again. He also uses the confusion to escape – taking the Commdor’s golden sword with the big blue jewel in the hilt along.

Once Poly Verisof and Brother Constant realise what just happened, they also realise that there is only one way for Hober Mallow to get the hell off Korell, namely by stealing their jump ship. So they head for the spaceport and manage to jump aboard just before Hober takes off. But the unlikely trio have no time to celebrate their narrow escape, for Hober Mallow is very determined that he’s not going to Terminus. He even tries to use an escape pod to get away, but Brother Constant knocks him out with a sedative injection.

The Korell scenes are great fun and Philip Glennister really captures the self-importance and idiocy of Commdor Asper Argo, the well beloved. However, the TV series version of Hober Mallow is very different from his book counterpart to the point that he is almost unrecognisable.

For starters, Hober Mallow in the books is a trader not a con artist, though he is definitely unscrupulous. As for the TV character, Paul Levinson compares him to Han Solo in his review, while the Stars End podcast compares him to “The Outrageous Okona” from the eponymous Star Trek: The Next Generation episode. Han Solo and the Outrageous Okona are both variations of the same characters archetype, the space rogue. The space rogue is a very popular character archetype for science fiction and shows up a lot, particularly in media science fiction. In addition to Han Solo and the Outrageous Okona, other examples include Malcolm Reynolds from Firefly, Book from Star Trek Discovery, Christobal Rios from Star Trek Picard and Peter Quill a.k.a. Star Lord from Guardians of the Galaxy.

All of these are fairly recent examples, but the space rogue is venerable archetype who has been around for a long time and definitely predates the original Foundation stories. The original space rogue was C.L. Moore’s Northwest Smith, who debuted in 1933, nine years before the first Foundation story. Leigh Brackett’s Eric John Stark is probably the most famous of the early space rogues, though he does postdate Foundation. However, Leigh Brackett wrote a lot of space rogues like Roy Campbell from “The Citadel of Lost Ships” or Rick Urquart from Shadow Over Mars, which came out in 1944, the same year as “The Big and the Little”. Other stories from the same year, which feature space rogues are Edmond Hamilton’s “The Free-Lance of Space” and Manly Wade Wellman’s “Gambler’s Asteroid”.

So in short, there were a lot of space rogues in 1940s science fiction. However, Hober Mallow is not one of them. He’s a space capitalist, not a rogue. And indeed, Isaac Asimov didn’t write space rogues and Astounding, home of the original Foundation stories, almost never published space rogue stories. The space rogue was born in the pages of Weird Tales, but by the 1940s he was mostly hanging out in Planet Stories, Startling Stories and Thrilling Wonder Stories.

That said, there certainly are some parallels between the space rogue, especially the way the space rogue was portrayed in the 1940s, at the time the Foundation stories were written, and Hober Mallow. For the space rogue of the 1930s and 1940s wasn’t a charming scoundrel or comedic never-do-well – that came in much later. And indeed, even the charming scoundrels or comedic never-do-wells often hide deep trauma underneath their charming smile – see Peter Quill or Malcolm Reynolds.

The space rogue of the 1930s and 1940s was an outsider, often someone from a marginalised background who didn’t fit into society and turned to crime, often out of desperation and poverty. A lot of the fiction in magazines like Planet Stories, Startling Stories and Thrilling Wonder Stories – home of the space rogues – had a strong anti-colonial, anti-imperialistic and anti-capitalist streak. Space rogues were cynics who claimed to care for nothing and no one, yet usually had a hidden heart of gold. The space rogue shares a lot of DNA both with sword and sorcery protagonists (and the space rogue was born in the pages of Weird Tales, appearing alongside Conan and created by C.L. Moore, who was also one of the original sword and sorcery writers). A remarkable number of space rogues were also people of colour. Leigh Brackett’s Eric John Stark is the most famous example, but Leigh Brackett’s Roy Campbell and C.L. Moore’s Northwest Smith.

And now let’s take a look at Hober Mallow as he is described in “The Big and the Little”. Hober Mallow is originally from Smyrno, one of the Four Kingdoms. He initially trains as a priest, but once the Foudation recognises his intelligence, he is told the truth about scientism and the Seldon Plan and becomes a trader, part of a loose network of people like himself, most of whom are not from Terminus itself but from the Four Kingdoms, who spread the Foundation’s influence via trade and act as agents and spies, if required.

“The Big and the Little” makes it very clearly that Hober Mallow is an outsider on Terminus, a man who knows the truth about the Foundation and its purpose, but who will never be one of them. There’s a reason Hober Mallow gets more physicaly description than almost everybody else in the Foundation stories – we learn that he has brown skin and stubbornly dresses in the style of his homeworld of Smyrno and not like a Foundationer – because it shows his status as an outsider. The fact that he’s implied to be gay only further serves to add to his outsider status. And once Hober Mallow’s investigation into what the hell is going on in the Korellian Republic has the convenient side effect of making him rich, the Foudation’s establishment really starts to hate him.

So Hober Mallow shares some characteristics of the space rogue of the 1940s – he’s an outsider, a cynic and a man of colour – though unlike actual space rogues, Hober Mallow embraces capitalism. In fact, it’s quite possible that Hober Mallow as well as similar Foundation characters like Limmar Ponyets and Latham Devers were Asimov’s attempt at writing a space rogue, only that the character turned into something else than a pure space rogue.

Come to think of it, the protagonists of the first few Foudation stories do reflect Asimov’s experience as a first generation Russian Jewish immigrant. In both the books and the TV series, Salvor Hardin is a member of the first generation born and growing up on Terminus , who don’t give a damn about the Galactic Encyclopaedia but just want to live their lives – a reflection of a conflict we often see among immigrants who still retain memories and the culture of their original homeland and their children who grow up in a different society and don’t particularly care about the old country. And Hober Mallow is someone who lives on Terminus, but who will never be considered a “real” Foundationer because of his ethnic and cultural background. I’m sure the son of Jewish immigrants in early twentieth century New York City could sympathise.

So in short, Hober Mallow in the books is a very interesting, if not particularly likeable character, who shares some characteristics with the space rogues of the 1940s, though he himself isn’t one. The Hober Mallow in the show, however, is a very shallow interpretation of a space rogue, more outrageous Okona than Northwest Smith or Eric John Stark or Han Solo or Malcolm Reynolds or even Peter Quill. Of course, we haven’t seen a lot of Hober Mallow yet and he may well display some hidden depths and dimensions in future episodes (And please, give us the naked sunbathing and cigar smoking scene, because Lee Pace can’t get all naked scenes). But considering how well the show handled Bel Riose, it’s a bit disappointing that Hober Mallow, hero of the Foundation, so far seems to be mostly a comic relief character.