Foundation meets “The Sighted and the Seen” and has nothing whatsoever to do with the books

Season 2 of Foundation is currently streaming, so I’m doing episode by episode reviews again. For my takes on previous episodes, go here.

Warning! There will be spoilers under the cut!

Were you as eager as I to learn more about the mysterious mission which Hari Seldon entrusted to Hober Mallow last episode? And do you want to know how Poly Verisof and Brother Constant will fare on their peace mission to Trantor?

Well, tough luck, cause this episode doesn’t address any of that. Instead, we get a whole lot of stuff about the adventures of Hari the Second, Gaal and Salvor as well as some palace intrigue with the Cleons on Trantor. Never mind that almost none of this has anything to do with the books.

The episode opens with the now newly embodied Hari the Second remembering his “death” at the hands of Raych. It’s an emotional scene and it’s also nice to see Alfred Enoch as Raych again, even though we already knew what happened the night Hari died.

Hari wakes up, feeling the stab wound on his brand-new body, only to find himself confronted by Raych again. Raych who is dead and has been dead for approx. 150 years at this point. “Raych” accuses Hari of not giving a damn about other people and being willing to sacrifice everybody in the pursuit of his grand plan. He’s not even wrong, though it’s clear in both the books and the TV-series that Hari loved Raych like his biological son. Hari is also fated, in both the books and TV-series, to see him die and outlive his kid. It’s only now that Hari finally gets around to mourning Raych, even though – to be honest – Raych partly brought his fate upon himself, because if he had used the escape pod as planned, he would have survived.

Raych vanishes and Hari wakes up for good. He cuts himself in the palm with Raych’s knife and yup, it bleeds. Hari had a body again. Then he stumbles around the Beggar. “Well, he hasn’t had legs in 150 years”, Salvor comments dryly.

Gaal is somewhat more concerned about Hari and also asks the question that has been on everybody’s mind since the end of episode 3. How in the galaxy did Hari get a body again?

If you’d hoped this episode would give us an answer to that question, well, tough luck. Cause it turns out that Hari has no idea how he came to have a physical body again. He remembers being in a cave with Kalle, when everything went dark, and then waking up aboard the Beggar in a brand-new body. As explanations go, this is deeply unsatisfying.

Salvor has a theory that “Kalle” cloned Hari and also notes the irony that Hari has now become something much like the Cleons whom he despises. Salvor has also been scanning communications – unlike Gaal and Hari, she is the practical one – and notes that the Foundation has spread all over the Outer Rim by now (though I wonder how Salvor can easily scan Foundation communications on the Outer Rim, while the Empire physically needs to send Bel Riose to investigate) and that they have established a religion that worships Hari as a prophet. Hari replies that this isn’t his doing, but “the other one’s”, i.e. Vault Hari on Terminus, but that this development was also inevitable, because “people do love to kneel”. Hari clearly has the cynical view of organised religion that permeates the original Foundation stories and much of Golden Age science fiction.

Before our intrepid trio can delve some more into the mystery of Hari’s new body, they are interrupted by the Beggar finally arriving at Ignis. The planet is habitable – and part of the approx. thirty percent of planets in the known galaxy that look like British Columbia – but has been abandoned by humans ever since the Empire pulled out centuries, leaving behind some ruined summer palaces. Honestly, why is the Empire pulling out of so many planets and just leaving them abandoned? Abandoning Oona’s World I can understand, because it’s a barren world only of use for mining, but Ignis looks lush and pleasant and like a good place to live. However, Gaal, Hari and Salvor don’t really wonder about that, for the far more pressing question is: If Ignis is uninhabited, then what is this “signal” that Gaal and Salvor are receiving?

With some difficulties and damage to the local flora – I guess it was time for another random action scene – the Beggar lands on Ignis. Salvor is certain that someone has been watching them, so she grabs her rifle and heads out onto the unknown planet to confront whoever it is. I know that patrolling perimeters (and not in the sense I’ve been using that term in my Masters of the Universe toy photo stories) is kind of what Salvor does, but heading out into the wilderness of an unknown planet, where heaven knows what kind of hostile wildlife might be waiting, does not strike me as very smart. Gaal clearly agrees and displays some maternal worries. Hari tells her that she shouldn’t let her vision of Salvor’s death at the hands of the Mule get to her. Though to be honest, Gaal’s vision should actually make her less worried about Salvor, because if Salvor dies on Terminus at the hands of the Mule some 130 years in the future, she certainly won’t die on Ignis in the here and now.

Hari also acknowledges that Salvor is his granddaughter and that he thinks he wouldn’t have broken up Gaal and Raych, if he’d known that they were going to have a baby, whereupon Gaal replies that she and Raych hadn’t yet decided whether to have the baby. There’s also a line that there’s a difference between an embryo and a person, which is directed at contemporary US audiences more than at anybody in the show.

While Hari and Gaal are arguing, Salvor is exploring the planet. She realises that someone is following her and attacks and disarms that person. Salvor’s stalker is wearing a mask, so Salvor orders him to take it off. So he does and lo and behold, it’s Hugo Crast, the Thesbian trader who was Salvor’s lover in season 1. However, that was 134 years ago, so Hugo should be long dead by now. And indeed Salvor asks him exactly that: “How can you be alive?”

The explanation Hugo comes up with does make sense. Once he realised that Salvor had put herself in cryosleep, Hugo put himself in cryosleep as well and programmed the pod to wake him up once Salvor woke up. Then he went in search of her and only just caught up with her. Salvor is satisfied with this explanation and hugs and kisses Hugo. The viewer is more sceptical, especially since Hugo Crast was commanding the jumpship Invictus that last time we saw him and it didn’t seem as if he would abandon that post to run off after Salvor. That said, whoever “Hugo” really is, it was nice to see Daniel MacPherson again.

Salvor takes “Hugo” back to the Beggar, only to find that Hari and Gaal are none too keen on meeting their son or respectively grandson-in-law. They are also considerably less willing than Salvor to accept that “Hugo” is who he claims to be. So Hari and Gaal scan “Hugo” and compare the data to Hugo Crast’s data stored in the Beggar‘s computer and find that his weight is off by 3.5 kilograms. Which is not impossible, but suspicious. Hari then tells Gaal to hide the Prime Radiant and orders Salvor to return the genetically encoded controls of the Beggar to Hugo (it was originally his ship, after all). If “Hugo” is who he claims he is, the ship should recognise him. But of course, the Beggar doesn’t recognise “Hugo”, who promptly changes his appearance to a completely different person and attacks Salvor. Worse, he’s brought friends. They force their way aboard the Beggar, overpower Hari, Gaal and Salvor and take them all prisoner.

Hari, Gaal and Salvor come to again in one of the Imperial ruins scattered around Ignis. They assume they are prisoners and Salvor’s rifle is gone, but when they try the door, they find it unlocked. Gaal claims that she hears voices, so the three of them follow those voices and find some people in white robes assembled in a large chamber. The people seem friendly enough, even though they are clearly the same people who attacked them and took them prisoner.

The people are gathered around a little girl in a white dress, who introduces herself as Tellem Bond, a reincarnation of a goddess. However, Hari doesn’t particularly care for goddesses and he does have some experience with scam religions, so he quickly points out that the supposed “goddess” doesn’t cast a shadow. Once calls out the alleged “goddess” as a fraud, the little girl vanishes and a woman, played by New Zealand actress and director Rachel House, steps forward and introduces herself as a real Tellem Bond. She’s not a goddess either, but a telepath or rather a “Mentalic”, which is the preferred term in the Foundation series.

On Ignis, Tellem Bond has established a refuge for people with psi powers like herself, since they tend to be persecuted all over the galaxy, and sent out a psychic signal. Since both Gaal and Salvor have psionic abilities, they received the signal, which brought them to Ignis. As for the fake Hugo and fake Raych, that was the Mentalics as well. Indeed, Salvor even confronts the man who pretended to be Hugo and she’s not happy, especially since she kissed faux Hugo. Faux Hugo apologises and tells Salvor that he had no idea she’d kiss him. Yeah right, dude. We totally believe that a telepath had no idea Salvor would kiss him.

Hari doesn’t have any psychic abilities, of course, but is nonetheless pleased to meet Tellem Bond and her flock, because he has use for telepaths. Tellem Bond replies that they will discuss all that later, but first everybody must rest. Besides, Hari, Gaal and Salvor are not shielding their thoughts, which is unpleasant for the telepaths.

However, once Hari, Gaal and Salvor have wandered off to relax, the faux Hugo comes to Tellem Bond and tells her that he overheard Hari telling Gaal to hide something called the Prime Radiant. Tellem Bond nods that that’s apparently the thing Hari, Gaal and Salvor tried very hard not to think about. She then dispatches faux Hugo to find and destroy the Prime Radiant, so “there will be no Second Foundation”.

Now there definitely are people with psychic powers in the Foundation stories – the original stories were published in Astounding in the 1940s after all and Astounding editor John W. Campbell was very fond of stories about people with psychic powers. The Mule, whom we biefly saw in a flash forward in episode 2, is one notable example of a Foundation character with telepathic powers. Another example is the Second Foundation, i.e. the very organisation Hari is trying to establish. Finally, the robot Daneel R. Olivaw a.k.a. Eto Demerzel has telepathic abilities as well, which allows them to evade detection for millennia.

So are the people on Ignis the Second Foundation or rather the people who will become the Second Foundation? The fact that Tellem Bond explicitly wants to prevent the establishment of a Second Foundation would seem to be an argument against that. Never mind that the Second Foundation is not on Ignis – nor on Tarzenda nor on Helicon nor on Terminus. And yes, the TV show could change that. But honestly, the reveal where the Second Foundation really is one of the stand-out moments in the series and one you really don’t want to ruin.

Are the people on Ignis affiliated with the Mule? It’s possible, though the Mule shouldn’t even have been born at this point in time. Is Ignis perhaps Gaia? God, I hope not, because if I never have to see fucking Gaia again, it will still be too soon. Honestly, the introduction of Gaia in the 1980s sequels ruined Foundation and dragged what had been an amazing series up to that point into the mud – quite literally since the Gaians share a group consciousness with every lizard, plant and stone on their planet.

***

Meanwhile on Trantor, Queen Sareth is still trying to figure out who killed her family and if the Cleons were responsible. She also wants to know who tried to kill Brother Day.

Sareth and her adviser Rue meet under the banyan tree with the Imperial guardsman Markley who’s spying for them. Markley reports that the assassination attempt took place in Day’s bedroom and that all recordings were erased. This prompts Sareth to decide that she has to get into Day’s bedroom to take a look around for herself. And since Day wants to marry her, getting into his bedchamber shouldn’t be too difficult. Rue, who knows a thing or two about Dawn, Day and Dusk, cautions her against this, but Sareth is determined.

Meanwhile, Day informs Demerzel that – quote – “Sareth wants to copulate” (a true romantic, isn’t he?), which means that his wedding plans have taken a step forward. However, Day is uncertain, because he hasn’t had sex with anybody except Demerzel in a long time now, if ever. Indeed, it’s quite possible that this Day has never had any sexual experience other than with Demerzel. There is a reason those naked people in the Gossamer Court prefer to amuse themselves with each other, since these incarnations of Dawn, Day and Dusk don’t seem to be particularly interested in them.

Demerzel assures Day that everything will be all right and that she will be nearby. She also tells him to think of her, while he’s having sex with Sareth, which sounds a lot like “Close your eyes and think of England” to me. Then Demerzel leaves through one door, while Sareth enters through the other. Cue one extremely awkward sex scene.

There’s a bit of banter as Sareth pretend to admire Day’s gilded art deco bedroom, while surreptitiously looking for evidence of the assassination attempt such as hastily covered up blaster marks or blood splatters. Talking of which, those repairs look extremely shoddy. Yes, the Empire is in decline, but are they so much in decline that they can’t even properly repair blood splatters or blaster marks anymore? Joseph Kolacinski makes the same point in his review.

Eventually, Day gets impatient that Sareth is more interested in his bedroom than in him. Day and Sareth fall into bed and things get very awkward with bumping against the bed, bodyparts getting into the way, etc… As sex scenes go, this awkwardness is a lot more realistic than what movies and TV usually serve up.

However, this coitus is decidedly interruptus, because Day isn’t stupid and knows that Sareth has been checking out his bedroom for signs of the assassination attempt and point blank accuses her of having been involved with that attempt. Sareth replies that yes, she was checking out the damage, but because she’s afraid and worried if Day can keep her safe. Day declares that he’s been turning Trantor inside out to find out who is behind the assassination attempt and that he will find the traitors and bring them to justice. Sareth agrees to marry him, if he can keep her safe and find the perpetrators. Then she leaves.

As soon as Sareth is gone, Demerzel returns and you just know that she’s been eavesdropping on everything. Day actually thinks the encounter went well – he really has zero experience, does he? – and declares that he and Sareth are now engaged. He also points out that Sareth suspects that he was involved with the death of her family. Demerzel, who still steadfastly ignores the Three Laws of Robotics, assures Day that there is no way to trace the murder of Sareth’s family back to them. So yup, Sareth is right. Day and Demerzel did arrange for the murder of Sareth’s family.

While Day is having his most awkward sexual encounter with Sareth, Dusk is enjoying a much more satisfying sexual encounter with Sareth’s advisor Rue. When we first see them, they are enjoying a moment of postcoital bliss, while watching a recording of Dusk’s – then still Day – meeting with Rue in the Gossamer Court years before. Of course, just letting Rue view those recordings kind of defeats the purpose of erasing her memory – though we learned last episode that Dominion technicians were able to reverse the memory erasure anyway.

Yes, a large part of the Trantor storyline involves people having sex, a fact the Stars End podcast also points out. Indeed, the amount of sexposition, i.e. worldbuilding information delivered during the sex scenes, in season 2 of Foundation is quite notable. And while the Day/Sareth awkward coitus interruptus and the Dusk/Rue postcoital bliss are at least tastefully done, I still found myself groaning a little bit, because honestly do we still need to insert random sex scenes to keep the mundanes watching?

Shortly after watching the episode, I also came across this tweet. And my first thought was Foundation, though it applies to many TV shows:

What movie is this? pic.twitter.com/IW53lnELfW

— wild (tiktok) screenshots (@wildtiktokss) August 16, 2023

Dusk asks Rue if she was aware that part of her memory was missing. Rue replies that she remembers talking to Dusk in the Gossamer Court and then remembers being on a spaceship back home, but that she never noticed that anything was missing. This makes Dusk thoughtful. For if Rue isn’t aware that part of her memories are missing, then how can Dusk be certain that he still has all of his memories?

This realisation clearly eats at Dusk and so he talks Demerzel, who informs him that only Day can alter Dusk’s and Dawn’s memories. This does not exactly reassure Dusk, since he points out that all three of them are the Empire and so Day shouldn’t be making any decisions regarding Dusk and Dawn. Demerzel assures Dusk that she serves the Empire as a whole and that everything that ever happened is recorded in her memory and that she would of course inform Dusk, if Day had any of his memories erased. Yeah, I no more found that reassuring than Dusk did.

At any rate, Dusk is no more worried than ever that part of his memory has been erased. So he grabs Dawn, who seems to have very little interest in anything, and goes to talk to Cleon the First or rather his hologram. Because yes, all the subsequent Cleons have access to an interactive hologram of Cleon the First. That man truly was a control freak.

Hologram Cleon is activated by his successors putting their palms to Cleon’s glass coffin. Dawn asks what will happen if the genetic drift has progressed so far that the palm prints no longer match. Dusk tells him that if the palm prints don’t match, they will both die, but that Dawn shouldn’t be worried. Yes, that’s very reassuring.

Luckily, the palm prints match and Cleon the First or rather his hologram, appears, played by Terrence Mann, who also plays Dusk. However, hologram Cleon is clearly trying to outdo Hari Seldon’s hologram in making vague and unhelpful pronouncements. He basically tells Dusk and Dawn that it’s impossible for the Emperors Three to have conflicts and squabbles among themselves, because they are aspects of the same person. Which is not very helpful at all.

However, Dusk has a different idea, so he drags Dawn to the Memorium, where recordings of the memories of the Cleons as well as of all the staff are perpetually stored. The ever-present murals are there – by now the Cleons have clearly run out of walls and are painting on every available surface.

Dusk tells Dawn that Day was always ambitious and eager to leave his mark on history, even as a child. Day was the one who completed the rings and also insisted on making sure they were visible from the surface of Trantor (which is weird, because trantor doesn’t really have a surface, it’s all domes) as a constant reminder to the people of Trantor that they are shackled to his greatness. And Day wants to be the first Cleon to reproduce the regular way. Dusk, meanwhile, was content to enjoy himself, paint murals and let Demerzel handle the peacekeeping duties. He also tells Dawn that he should be glad that he’ll never be Emperor, if Day’s plan to found a dynasty of his own comes to fruition (which it won’t), because that means that Dawn will have the one thing Dusk always wanted and never got: A normal life. Honestly, this Dusk must be the most mellow Cleon we’ve seen so far. Dawn, on the other hand, doesn’t seem to be all that keen on a normal life.

Finally, Dusk orders the keeper of Memorium to download the complete memory files of all the Dawns, Days and Dusks all the way back to Cleon the First. Because Dusk figures that even if he cannot remember whether he’s missing part of his memories, comparing the size of his memory file to those of previous Dusks should show if something is missing. Upon first glance, the file sizes for Dawn and Dusk look just as they should. However, then they chance to see the size of the memory file of Cleon the First and it’s more than twice as big as those of any other Dusk. So it isn’t just this Dusk and Dawn who have had their memories tampered with. It’s all of them, every single Dusk, Day or Dawn that ever was.

The memory tampering, which the person itsef never notices, but which shows up in recordings is very reminiscent of the so-called “tamper plateaus”, which play an important role in “…And Now You Don’t”, the last of the original Foundation stories from the 1940s. Tamper plateaus are an unusual plateau-like patterns that shows up on an EEG graph, which indicate that someone’s mind has been tampered with by the telepaths of the Second Foundation. Mid-century science fiction was fascinated by EEGs as a means of detecting psionic abilities or activities – aside from Foundation, it also shows up in Anne McCaffrey’s 1973 story “To Ride Pegasus”.

I read both the Foundation stories and “To Ride Pegasus” around the same time, when I was given an EEG to determine if there was a neurological reason for migraine headaches (there wasn’t). So of course I quizzed the poor EEG technician whether tamper plateaus or detecting psionic abilities via EEG was possible. The guy’s response was, “No, of course not. And now can you please hold still and let me attach the electrodes?”

Electroencephalography was still a fairly new technology, when the Foundation stories were written. The first animal EEG was made in 1912, the first human EEG in 1924. EEGs were already used by World War II to monitor pilots for epileptic seizures, but further potential of the technology was still far from explored, so it makes sense for EEGs to be used to detect psionic activity (and frankly, if psionic abilities did exist, they would likely show up on an EEG) and memory tampering in science fiction. Nowadays, however, EEGs are commonplace and we know how they work and that tamper plateaus aren’t actually a thing. So it makes sense to have potential memory tampering show up in stored memory data instead.

While Dusk and Dawn are realising that all the Cleons save the original have had their memories tampered with, Sareth and Rue meet with Markley once more to find out more about what happened in Day’s bedroom during the assassination attempt. Sareth wants to see Day’s memory recordings of the assassination attempt. Markley tells her that’s impossible and that there’s no way he can get his hands on the memory recordings of any Cleon. However, Rue has an idea. If Day indeed survived an assassination attempt, someone must have treated him and tended his wounds. So they sent Markley to retrieve the memory recordings of the medical staff. This works surprisingly well, too. Markley tells the Memorium keeper that Day wants to see all the recordings from the medical staff and the Memorium keeper just hands them over. There is zero security and the possibility that there might be a spy, traitor or double agent in the palace doesn’t ever seem to have occurred to anybody, even though exactly that happened in season 1 with the gardener who seduced Dawn.

A bit later, Sareth and Rue are poring over the memory recordings of the night eyeless ninjas tried to kill Day. They see Demerzel carrying a wounded Day to the medical facility and giving orders to the staff. “She must have been with him, when it happened”, Sareth exclaims and quite possibly it’s dawning on her just what Day and Demerzel were doing, when the eyeless ninja assassins rudely interrupted them.

However, things get a lot more interesting, when Demerzel comes into view of the doctor whose memory recording they are accessing, with half her head missing and liquid that’s definitely not blood dropping down her face.

Sareth and Rue briefly discuss how what they’re seeing is even possible, until they finally realise that Demerzel isn’t a clone, like they had previously assumed, but a robot. Even though there supposedly haven’t been robots in thousands of years. “But I shook her hand”, Sareth exclaims, “It felt warm, alive.”

This moment confirms that Sareth, Rue, Markley and the bearded bodyguard who never gets a name will die horribly. For even if Day is going to let them live – and this Day is more erratic than most of them – there’s no way that Demerzel is going to let anybody not named Cleon live with the knowledge of what she is. And Demerzel is a lot more dangerous than any Cleon.

I’m definitely enjoying season 2 more than season 1 so far. That said, this episode focusses on the two least interesting storylines of the season, namely Day’s weddings plans and the adventures of Hari the Second, Gaal and Salvor. Of course, the adventures of Hari the Second, Gaal and Salvor did actually make some useful progress and introduced the Mentalics and lays the groundwork for the Second Foundation (Or the Mule? Or Gaia?). But while I like the Cleons and Demerzel, I can must a lot of interest in Day’s wedding plans with Sareth, because it’s clear that Day is never going to marry that woman and that Sareth and her retinue will all die horribly. Though the discussion of memory tampering was at least interesting and indeed, Paul Levinson is quite pleased with how the Trantor progresses. Meanwhile, Hober Mallow, Poly Verisof, Brother Constant, Bel Riose and Glawen Curr were all sorely missed, since their storylines are not only a lot more interesting, they’re also supposed to be the main plot of this season. In fact, I suspect that this episode and the previous one were shot at the same time, since only very few actors appear in both. That said, Geek Girl Authority reviewer Julia Roth is actually happy to see more of the characters carried over from season 1 rather than the new protagonists.

I definitely hope that the next episode will give us more on the continuing adventures of Hober Mallow, Poly Verisof and Brother Constant on the one hand and Bel Riose and Glawen Curr on the other.