Foundation Season Two

During this week’s hot weather, I stayed inside and binge-watched the second season of Apple TV’s Foundation series. It was more than two years after its release in July 2023 before I succeeded in watching the entire second season. Three or four times I began watching starting with the first episode, but I found the early episodes boring, and I did not continue.

The producers of the Foundation television series do not get the points of Asimov’s novels, which include first that the behavior of the huge population of the Galactic Empire makes it possible with so much data to predict the gross behavior of a civilization. This point is understated in the TV series.

Second, Hari Seldon has arranged things so that the Foundation must pass through a series of carefully constructed crises that put it on the path to establish a new and benign galaxy-wide unification. In the books, the crises are generally not recognized until they are over. Seldon argues in the books that if the general populace knows it’s experiencing a crisis (a Seldon crisis), its behavior will change, making it less predictable.

Third, the Mule as an outlier and an individual could not be anticipated by Seldon’s Plan. This is part of what makes the original trilogy so interesting. As time goes by, small perturbations cause small divergences in the behavior of the galactic population. But the Mule, with his extraordinary powers, creates a huge perturbation as he strives to unite the galaxy under his rule. But the TV series spoils this by having Gaal forsee the Mule’s attack on the Foundation 152 years early.

The producers have no subtlety or appreciation for nuance. As they revise and amplify every story line, they always turn the knobs up to 11. The graphic violence and frequent f-bombs are gratuitous and unnecessary. To me, many action sequences feel like filler and are usually not very exciting. And some of the action scenes feel familiar, having been borrowed from Star Trek, Star Wars, or Dune.

Another complaint I have is that the TV series relies on too much magic, by which I mean violations of ordinary physics that do not appear in the books. This leads to lazy writing. Examples are the castling device that swaps two bodies; the powers of the Vault; the powers of the Prime Radiant; the multiple Hari Seldons, including the reincarnation of Hari Seldon at one point; telekinesis; and the ability to appear as another person. Other magic includes Gaal’s ability to see future events and Salvor’s ability to see past events.

I roll my eyes in frustration and disbelief at how the video industry in general cannot resist tampering with the plot of a good book. However, I understand and appreciate that filming Asimov’s books as written would make a very boring television series. The changes are often good. The clone dynasty is a brilliant idea, and the motivations and interactions of Dawn, Day, and Dusk are explored well. I like the idea that Asimov’s Spacers (who were simply the technologically advanced, robot-dependent, and long-lived inhabitants of the first fifty worlds colonized by the Earth) have evolved or been genetically engineered to fly faster-than-light spaceships.

Rating: Three of five stars (good)