‘Foundation’ Season 3 Episode 7 Recap: “Foundation’s End”

This episode of Foundation is called “Foundation’s End.” Is that good?

Drowning is a recurring theme on Foundation, and has been from the start. Cryosleep, the process that enables both some forms of space travel and the unnaturally long life of the show’s protagonist, Gaal Dornick, requires voluntarily “drowning” in oxygenated liquid. Gaal’s psychic visions are triggered by the sensation of drowning. Gaal’s whole world drowned, a victim of anthropogenic climate change. The reincarnated Hari Seldon was staked out to drown by his psychic enemy, Tellem Bond. There are almost certainly others I’m missing. (It’s kind of a creepy thing to keep track of.)

In this episode, this grim theme reaches its apotheosis. In one of the series’ most sadistic acts of violence to date, Mayor Indbur, the insufferable ruler of the First Foundation, is forced by the Mule not only to drown himself, but to love every second of it. The perversity of it is nearly nauseating.

And it’s not the Mule’s first time down this watery path of payback. In flashbacks that help frame the episode, we learn (or at least we’re told) that the Mule began life as a farmboy on a Foundation-controlled world. The Foundation’s massive mechanical threshers gathered the harvest, while those who grew the food were forced to subsist on meager rations which only covered one child per family. 

When the Foundation’s heartless representatives discover that the young Mule has a baby brother, they tell their parents flat out that when the Foundation returns in thirty days, they will have only one child left. Faced with this Sophie’s choice, the parents turn on the older brother, attempting to drown him even as he desperately makes his case that both children’s lives could be spared. In the end, his argument comes down to one thing: “But you love me!” he screams, to no avail.

When he’s dunked below the water, his eyes gain their familiar psychic glow and his powers kick in. He instantly incapacitates and drowns his parents, forcing them to enjoy their own watery deaths just as he would Indbur years later. 

At this point, the young Mule does something unexpected: He shows mercy. I fully expected him to leave his infant brother there on the beach to die: For one thing, it’s in keeping with the character we know, and for another the entire scene seemed set up as an homage to the similarly brutal beach scene from Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin, where things go much worse for almost everyone involved. But he’s as good as his word: He delivers the baby to his neighbors, whom he’d asserted all along would be happy to have him. 

From there, he tells the mute Vault on conquered New Terminus, he took a ride off-world with the pirates who occasionally stole from his people — after all, the Foundation always stole more. But when Hari Seldon himself appears with a flourish of Bear McCreary’s main theme, the psychohistorian and nemesis of the Mule casts doubt on the whole story. The Mule responds with what looks like genuine delight. 

I’d been wondering about the story myself. It seems a little…Foundation-centric, doesn’t it? I don’t doubt that at this stage in its development, the Foundation is guilty of any number of the crimes huge empires commit on a routine basis. But I can’t help but wonder if, like the Joker in The Dark Knight, he’s got a different origin story for every listener. When he finally confronts a Cleon, will he suddenly have grown up on a world preyed upon by Empire rather than Foundation?

Empire, of course, has its own problems. In another genuinely surprising development — not shocking-twist surprising, I mean “oh, wow, I wouldn’t have thought of that, but that makes a ton of sense” surprising — Brother Day is being treated basically decently by his erstwhile girlfriend Songbird-17 and her partner Oceanglass-49; yes, they zapped the hell out of him, but they’re letting him recover and not, like, executing him. Indeed, the first thing Day does is apologize to Song for intruding, since he had no idea she had a girlfriend on the outside world. 

The subterranean couple comes to believe him too, thanks to a hallucinogen-slash-truth-serum in the form of a spore-based tea that Day imbibes. What follows is a stunning sequence of visions and memories, including a lifelike, giant-sized Demerzel emerging from one of the show’s colorful sand-art murals that’s as cool as anything I’ve seen on TV all year. (The same must be said for the space battle that kicks off the episode, which feels like the kind of all-out war Andor would have depicted if a big X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter battle had been in the cards.)

In the end, they receive the confirmation they were after: Demerzel is a robot, alive and well and living right there on Trantor. But they react to Day with horror rather than gratitude, since his ancestor and genetic originator perverted and enslaved a being they believe to be like unto God. The high priest of their religion, Sunmaster-18 (Blake Ritson), is both a dead ringer for Mr. Boogalow from The Appleand a zealot who appears willing to inflict justice with his scepter, upon which is mounted a severed robot head. Or as Sunmaster more memorably puts it, “IT IS THE BRAZEN HEAD OF GOD, AND IT WILL SCREAM YOUR FATE ALOUD.” I mean, he does make it sound pretty badass.

With Day about to receive the judgment of a cult of robot worshippers and Dawn blown out of an airlock after getting set up by Gaal, that leaves only Dusk on Trantor to witness the fall of the Foundation from afar. Striding boldly into the Foundation’s embassy, he whisks his friend Ambassador Quent back to the palace, where he assures her of her safety as long as he has anything to say about it. 

The two old friends bond through their grief, Dusk for his brothers and Quent for her home and her cause. They ooh and ahh over Day’s pet ferret, who’s been let loose on the grounds and winds up eating from their hands. Finally, Quent seizes the moment and plants the kiss on Dusk she’s wanted to plant on him for three decades. Framed against one of the palace’s gorgeous murals, it’s a marvelously romantic moment.

Then, later that night, Dusk gets up out of their post-coital bed of bliss, comes across the ferret in the hallway, and stomps it into a red ruin. Oh, right, this is the guy who designed a black-hole gun with which he and his minions clearly have some kind of psychosexual fixation. He’s not a good person. 

But who is, at this point? Who can afford to be? Toran Mallow learns the price of heroism the hard way. As he tries to flee the friendly-fire carnage of the Mule’s attack on the Foundation, he’s overtaken by his brainwashed Uncle Randu and the Mule’s men. They seize Bayta, who’s still unconscious from her encounter with Hari Seldon’s null field last episode, and shoot Randu to death in an attempt to stop Toran from blasting off in an escape pod. He screams with grief as his rocket takes off, but at least he gets away.

The same is true of Captain Han Pritcher, the Second Foundation’s mole inside the First, now their prisoner. He uses his psychic powers to fake his own death, then nearly assassinates the Mule before fleeing from New Terminus’s governing satellite to the planet below. The move baffles the Mule, until Pritcher’s former partner tells him fleeing simply isn’t in the man’s nature when fighting is still possible.

It’s almost boring to say at this point, but Foundation’s astonishing hot streak continues. For the second season in a row, the show balances a seemingly impossible-to-reconcile number of characters, storylines, tones, and visual palettes in episode after episode. The Demerzel hallucination is an all-timer image for this show, which is saying something, and both the flashbacks and the Foundation’s horrifying massacre by the Mule’s mind-controlled forces recall the most unpleasant moments of Andor’s masterful second season. Writers Jane Espenson and Greg Goetz and director Christopher J. Byrne also prove adept chroniclers of the Mule’s sadism, with the death of Indbur’s bloodless but brutal demise ranking way up there on this series’ history of violence. Again, this is really saying something.

So at the risk of overanalyzing, I want to return to the drowning imagery that was so prevalent in the episode, as it has been from the first season forward. What is it about drowning that makes it the lethal lifeblood of the show? I think it’s that the surrender of civilization to both tyranny and entropy is, itself, like drowning. The waters rise until it feels easier to give up than continue swimming. Foundation’s moral, or at least its hope, is that it’s worth fighting the tide for as long as you can — and worth remembering that many who appear to have drowned have been dragged to dry land and made to breathe again.

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.