A Song for the End of Everything

“Welcome to my filth!” So says a cheery Brother Day (Lee Pace), the absentee Emperor of the galaxy, to his predecessor/older brother/imperfect clone, Brother Dusk (Terrence Mann). He’s welcoming the aging avatar of Empire to his lovely villa, where he’s “playing poverty” with his beautiful lover (and drug dealer), Song (Yootha Wong-Loi-Sing). But Day — stupid, sexy, Christlike Day, with his bare chest and his oversized drug rug and his “Common People” decision to slum it — speaks for me as well. Foundation is extremely my shit. Welcome to my filth!

Very loosely adapted from Isaac Asimov’s novels by David S. Goyer, Foundation’s first season started flat but showed flickers of promise that exploded into a supernova of sci-fi entertainment in Season 2. Ably assisted by co-writer-executive producer Jane Espenson, writer-director Goyer picks up here where he left off last season. I don’t mean in terms of time or space or storyline — this is a show that leaps across the centuries between every outing, making Andor’s time jumps look like they follow the Aristotelian unities — but in terms of quality. Seemingly everything that made Season 2 one of contemporary television’s stand-out epic spectacles is in evidence here once again.

Narration from the psychic mathematician Gaal Dornick (Lou Llobell) brings us up to speed with the new status quo. It’s been 300 years since the Second Crisis, seen during Season 2. That era’s Brother Day oversaw a disastrous, genocidal attempt to wipe out the chief rival to his rule: Foundation, an organization founded by the farsighted mathematician Hari Seldon. Immortalized via various science-fictional and supernatural means, Seldon is once again played by Jared Harris, who seems like he’s having the time of his life whenever he’s on screen.

Using the science of psychohistory, which he developed himself, this almost unimaginable genius determined that humanity was headed for a new Dark Age that could span thousands of years. Foundation’s goal is not to stop civilization’s collapse, which is inevitable; it’s to soften the blow and cushion the fall, so that the ensuing Dark Age sees the light sooner rather than later.

At this point in history, both Empire and the Foundation are riven from within. With Day AWOL and the Cleonic dynasty drifting further and further from its original royal genetic blueprint thanks to saboteurs prior to the Second Crisis, the mantle of Empire is weaker than it’s ever been. Dawn, a mere ten days from ascending to the throne as the new Day himself, is forced to parlay with such lowly personages as Galactic Council President Kinn (Miltos Yerolemu, aka Game of Thrones’ Syrio Forel), Councilor Tarisk (Sule Rimi, aka Andor’s Lieutenant Gorn), and Foundation Ambassador Quent (Cherry Jones, aka Succession’s Nan Pierce), to advance the Imperium’s agenda.

Dawn is guided through all this by Demerzel (Laura Birn), his stunning and taciturn immortal robot advisor. But Demerzel is experiencing a crisis of her own, as she explains to Zephyr Voralis (Rebecca Ineson), a cleric in the Luminist faith who’s been invited to the capital planet of Trantor (more evidence that Empire needs to do business with others to survive now). Demerzel believes that the Cleonic dynasty is mere months away from total collapse. Once a robot general in the robot-human war that roiled the galaxy before the first Cleons captured and reprogrammed her, Demerzel tells the Zephyr that she must obey the four Laws of Robotics: she cannot harm a human or through inaction allow a human to come to harm; she must obey human commands that don’t conflict with the first law; she has a right to defend herself as long as doing so doesn’t conflict with the first two laws; she must prioritize the good of humanity as a whole over the good of any one human.

But Demerzel alone out of all the robots in history has a unique fifth law to obey: She must always serve Empire, i.e. the Cleon clones. If Empire falls and the Cleonic line comes to an end, she wonders, what will become of her?

The Foundation, meanwhile, is at the brink of civil war. Its ineffectual Mayor (Leo Bill) can’t stop the threat of the Traders, a powerful group of breakaway merchant princes fueled by the Foundation’s riches after centuries of expansionism. (The Foundation’s old religious trappings have been jettisoned entirely.) Suspecting, correctly, that Empire is providing Trader leader Randu Mallow (Darren Pettie) with weapons, the Mayor dispatches his dashing Captain of Information, Han Pritcher (Brandon P. Bell), and Pritcher’s partner and would-be lover (Iðunn Ösp Hlynsdóttir, whose character’s name I didn’t catch but who boy-howdy sure is good-looking), to collect evidence. 

A breakneck speeder-bike chase ensues, equal parts Phantom Menace, Return of the Jedi, and Speed Racer, as Pritcher chases Mallow while the burning glaze of the planet’s searing sun threatens to burn them alive if they slow down. 

Pritcher fails to recover the physical evidence he needs, but he’s convinced there’s a bigger threat to the Foundation and the Empire alike than the Traders. For their part, Dawn and Demerzel believe the same thing, though they haven’t yet given it a name as Pritcher has. The charming spy has a candidate in mind for the coming apocalypse, one which will render all of Hari Seldon’s predictions moot: a psychic pirate named the Mule (Pilou Asbæk, aka Game of Thrones’ Euron Greyjoy). Using mind control, the Mule takes over the influential “pleasure planet” of Kalgan by turning the military of Archduke Bellarion (Ralph Ineson, aka that guy from all kinds of things, including, you guessed it, Game of Thrones) against itself.

This creates a brand new inflection point in the Prime Radiant, Seldon’s predictive equation-algorithm-talisman thing. It an anomaly that baffles not just Demerzel and Dusk, who are in possession of a Prime Radiant given to them by Seldon after the Second Crisis, but Seldon himself, whose digital avatar is awoken from slumber by his latest acolyte, Dr. Ebling Mis (Alexander Siddiq, who had a cameo early on in the first season as this character’s ancestor). In four months time, the golden thread of the Prime Radiant cuts off entirely, leading to a blackness not even Seldon himself foresaw. 

Boy, does that feel familiar! 

Basically all sci-fi dystopias, supervillain reigns of terror, and fantasy tyrants are, for the foreseeable future, blessed or doomed to be read as allegory for the Present Unpleasntness. The idea of a Dark Age brought on not by some grand clash of socioeconomic ideologies and more by a dead-eyed idiot whose command of the masses enables him to bring the whole thing crashing to the ground? It resonates, the way Daredevil: Born Again’s criminal mayor using cops as paramilitary brownshirts resonated, the way Andor’s Empire rounding up undocumented workers and committing genocide in front of the eyes of the world resonated.

Honestly, though, any idiot can whip up an allegory for our degraded and degrading times. It takes talent and vision to make you actually want to watch the goddamn thing. Foundation has that in spades. Listen, I’ve watched and enjoyed a whole bunch of SFF shows over the past half-decade or so, as countless networks and streamers belatedly attempted to create (or recreate) Game of Thrones. Some of them, like latter-day Wheel of Time, I’ve enjoyed a great deal. 

But in terms of fully formed, lived-in worlds still capable of blowing you away with the sheer originality and inventiveness of their visual spectacle, there are exactly three current shows in the conversation: Andor, House of the Dragon, and Foundation. This feast of a series’ vistas of space travel and the strange worlds on either end of the journey are unequalled on the small screen. And that speedbike chase! 

The fun thing about Foundation is that it’s practically an undercover anthology show. With each season set hundreds of years apart, only a few characters carry over from one to the next, thanks to the scientific magic of cloning or cryosleep or the Prime Radiant. Season 2’s gangbusters guest stars — Ben Daniels, Dimitri Leonidas, Rachel House, Ella-Rae Smith, Isabella Laughland — proved you could build meaningful relationships between character and audience from scratch. So far, the work of Bell, Siddiq, Asbæk, and Ineson (Rebecca, not Ralph, who doesn’t make it through the opening scene), indicates we’ve got more of the miraculous same in store.

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.