‘Foundation’ Season 3 Episode 6 Recap: “The Shape of Time”

Cleon I-XXV are far from the first emperors to grace the small screen with their purple presence. The 1976 BBC costume drama I, Claudius — a direct antecedent to and influence on every show involving squabbling family dynasties you’ve ever seen since, from actual Dynasty to The Sopranos to House of the Dragon — featured the sonorous Brian Blessed in the role of Augustus Caesar, first Emperor of Rome. The show’s director, Herbert Wise, advised the actor to play Augustus as just a regular guy, arguing that everyone else’s reactions to him would show the audience just how important he really is.

The secondary effect, of course, is to convey the idea that on some fundamental level, the most powerful man on the planet has no idea how he comes across to other people. This, as we’ve learned, is a peril of unlimited power: The world and the people in it warp themselves to fit your whims. If no one checks you, no one thwarts you, no one corrects you, no one tells you you’re wrong, pretty soon you’ll be living in a world one step removed from reality. That’s all well and good as long as you’ve got the money and power to ensure no consequences ever befall you. Take that away? Put your average billionaire or GOP politician on a street corner with just enough money for an Uber and Chipotle? They’d die of starvation within two hours, somehow.

Pleasant fantasies of karmic retribution for our current tech-fascist overlords aside, Foundation’s version of Augustus, Brother Day, finds out the limits of his charm in this episode. Having successfully escaped the confines of the palace and gone undercover in the deep subterranean algae-farming undercity called Mycogen, he tracks down his mindwiped girlfriend Song in her lovely apartment. (Its giant pitcher-plant lamps look like something you’d see in a Zelda game.)

Song’s brain hasn’t been completely erased, it turns out: She still knows she’s a palace courtesan, she still recognizes Empire when she sees him, and she still knows that getting your memories of your time with the Cleons erased is part of the deal. Her only question is why she was kept on as his companion for so much longer than the one standard night, but she’s been willing to flatter herself with the explanation that she’s just that damn good.

Well, she is, Day admits, but that’s not why he’s there. It wasn’t sex that linked them, not in the end — it was love, real love. Day offers her her memories back in the form of a thumb drive that can restore them to her brain, and he keeps insisting even when she tells him there’s no way she could have ever loved him. He even drops the fact that she’s met one of the robots she and her correligionists secretly worship to sweeten the pot. Wouldn’t you want to remember that?

Nah. Song, whose full name is Songbird-17, calls for backup in the form of…her wife, Oceanglass-49 (Laura Berlin), who zaps the hell out of Day. He ought to have listened when Song told him there’s no way she could have really loved him.

Rude awakenings of this sort abound in this episode. On new Terminus, home of the First Foundation, the obnoxious Mayor Indbur allows his captives Toran Mallow, his wife Bayta, and their freed-slave friend, the psychic musician Magnifico, to put on a performance for him and the assembled leadership of the Foundation. Of course, they understand the power of Magnifico and his “visi-sonor” instrument the moment he starts playing. With his help, they stand a chance against the Mule, who Toran warns them all is on his way.

But there’s business to attend to first. The First Foundation’s Vault is opening, and with it comes their chance to commune with the holographic avatar of Hari Seldon himself. Indbur, Toran, Bayta, Magnifico, the psychohistorian Dr. Ebling, and the rebel Trader leader Randu Mallow are all part of the group that enters the vault. Captain Han Pritchard, however, is pointedly left behind, Indbur having deduced that he’s secretly working for an unknown party.

It’s probably for the best. Just as the assembled guests discover that this copy of Seldon has no idea who, or even what, the Mule is, the man himself hijacks the Foundation’s comms and radios in to show them he’s already in the process of attacking and conquering their planet. A baffled Seldon disappears and turns on the “null field” that scrambles the brain of anyone approaching the vault, forcing everyone to flee.

The news travels fast, especially if you’re an immortal robot. Far away, Demerzel picks up on the eruption of emergency transmissions after the fall of New Terminus to the Mule. Now armed with the Foundation’s whisper ships, the Mule and his forces could be at the imperial capital of Trantor any minute.

Perhaps this is part of the plan. (Whose plan? Who knows at this point?) When Demerzel picks up these transmissions, she’s in the process of saying goodbye to Gaal Dornick, the all-important telepathic psychohistorian who’s in charge of the Second Foundation. That’s a rude awakening for Demerzel, who’d detected anomalies in the Prime Radiant but hadn’t pieced together that a third organization other than Empire or Foundation was responsible, or that its agents had special mental powers.

Gaal, meanwhile, learns to her sorrow that Demerzel is a robot, a fact Hari Seldon had hidden from her all this time. Demerzel reveals that he knew it from the moment he saw her on Trantor hundreds of years ago, and that when he persuaded her that their goals of preserving Foundation and Empire were not mutually exclusive, she granted him access to her massive internal dataset to complete his calculations. 

Now that the truth is out — and once Demerzel decides not to simply snap Gaal’s neck for luring Brother Dawn and the Imperial fleet to their respective deaths — Demerzel’s robotic nature makes it impossible for Gaal to share her psychic visions of the Mule. Demerzel works around this impasse by inserting thin robotic filaments into Gaal’s head and pulling the information directly out of her, a painful technique she used to use on human prisoners during the great robot wars.

Does it help? Yes and no. Demerzel gets an eyeful of Gaal’s recurring vision of fighting the Mule hand-to-hand, trying to keep the location of the Second Foundation a secret from him. Demerzel’s able to determine that the fight takes place within the Imperial Library on Trantor itself. When she tells Gaal to push past the battle and the break in the Prime Radiant that it causes to see beyond that point in time, the two women wind up as bright blue ghost-like figures in a black void — the black hole into which we now know Gaal is destined to fall.

However, Demerzel has no way of knowing if these are real visions or merely convincing hallucinations. The uncertainty, though, is enough to persuade her to let Gaal live; we’ll see if the Mule’s victory over the First Foundation is enough to persuade her to join forces.

This is a plot-focused episode compared to its predecessors, relatively light on the sci-fi spectacle that’s Foundation’s hallmark. That’s fine — it’s good to bring things back down to earth a bit in order to advance the story.

But this is not to say it’s devoid of fascinating space-opera visuals. Demerzel pulling the Prime Radiant out of herself from between her robotic cleavage is an image that probably shouldn’t be as disconcertingly strange and sexy as it is. The coldwave psychedelia of their journey into the black hole is a bravura effect, reminiscent of Hari’s strange fractal freakouts while trapped within the Prime Radiant last season. And I love the design of Mycogen, which blends the familiar Blade Runner vibe of a decrepit futuristic city with the art nouveau beauty of a Peter Jackson Elf kingdom for its wealthier districts. I’m perpetually amazed by just how smart the design of this show is.

I keep coming back to poor oblivious Brother Day, though. His is the shock of any rich and powerful person when confronted with how normal people really think about them. Don’t you love me? I love me! I know it’s fake with all the others, but it’s real with me, right? Right? The belief of the mighty in their own irresistibility is a gap in their armor as clear and as vulnerable as the missing scale on the belly of Smaug the Golden. Great and terrible things can be done when it’s exploited.

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.