Review: Foundation Episode 3

A shorter episode this week but one that takes its time and fits in two stories: one on Trantor and one on Terminus, both set about 20 years after the last episode. The events at the end of Episode 2 are not touched on, even at a point in the dialogue where Hari Seldon’s death is relevant. For those keeping track, I note that IMDB credits actor Lou Llobell (who plays Gaal Dornick) as having a voice role in this episode, which I believe confirms that she is the narrator?

The first 15-20 minutes is set on Trantor and follows the Clone Emperor Brother Dusk in the closing days of his life. Because everybody has aged, actor Terrence Mann has to play Brother Dusk and play Brother Day (last episode played by Lee Pace), whereas Brother Dawn is now an adult. I really like this idea, which has shades of Ann Leckie’s Radch trilogy but also touches on elements from Arkady Martine’s A Memory Called Empire.

I really enjoyed this initial segment. Aside from being thoughtful and visually rich, it conveys well the idea of the serial-Cleons as distinct characters as well as phases of the same character. Look what science fiction can do! There’s no protracted discussion about the nature or ethics of cloning (…or galactic Empires but I’ll get to that) but we get an interesting and character-led engagement with ideas of self, ageing and legacy.

I think it is also an excellent defence of this project as a whole. None of this is in Asimov’s books but it is a set of rich science-fictional ideas applied to create an engaging story. It even emulates to a degree the ancestry of Foundation as short fiction. The quarter-hour story of Brother Dusk’s last days isn’t quite a short story structurally as it relies too much on prior events and as a set-up for later events, but it is also self-contained in other ways.

Nice, but I’m mindful of how badly a series with promising elements can run off the rails. I wonder if I should have waited until a whole season had dropped before reviewing? We will see.

I do need to talk about Demerzel though, so avoid spoilers from here.

The Trantor thread of this episode is also a Demerzel heavy episode. Now you know me, I love robots. I utterly missed the obvious clues about Demerzel in episode 1 but episode 2 let us all know she is a robot and this episode confirms that she is not just a robot but a robot who worked with the original non-cloned Emperor Cleon, to kick off the whole imperial scheme that fast-forwarding hundreds of years later is now unravelling.

In short, Demerzel is Daneel Olivaw, Asimov’s Robot character originally in the future detective novel The Caves of Steel and then used by Asimov in much later stories to tie together his original near-future robot stories to his far-future Foundation stories.

Folding Daneel into an adaptation of Foundation certainly will allow for a more complex plot to the Foundation series but it will present an interesting challenge for the writers. Hari Seldon alone, just in the first book of Foundation, raises questions about manipulation and predestination. I think episode 2 and Jared Harris’s performance began to highlight that aspect of Seldon as a character with dubious elements i.e. somebody who styles himself as just an honest scientist describing inevitable events, whereas the actual plot shows he is somebody trying to control those events in a way that lacks any real form of accountability.

Seldon is framed as a sort-of rebel in Episode 1 (and in the original story) but he is absolutely somebody endorsing empires both overtly (he claims to be finding a way of restoring the empire after it collapses) but also in terms of his personality. He’s a philosopher-king but one who lacks even the minimal level of accountability of the Brothers Cleon because they at least let everybody know that they are in charge.

Daneel ends up being the manipulator behind the manipulators behind the manipulator. Demerzel in Episode 3 appears that way also. She is part of the constant thread of the serial-Cleons and the chief engineer of the Galactic Empire as we first encounter it.

This takes Foundation into an interesting space.

Asimov in later books does touch on the ethical aspects of Daneel trying to steer humanity but also sets up the situation that Daneel is effectively compelled to. Once he is capable of generalising the moral imperatives built into him (the classic three laws) into considering humanity as a whole, Daneel is stuck on a path of social engineering. I’m OK with that aspect, to be honest — it makes sense, once you recognise that our collective choices shape society and that we can understand how they shape society, there’s no way out of being somebody engaged in social engineering of one form or another.

Economist Paul Krugman has cited the original Foundation novels as one of those deeply formative books of his personal teenage reading. The idea of psychohistory is obviously something that a liberal-minded economist would find intriguing. Krugman also calls the books “a very bourgeois version of prophecy” and says:

“Foundation isn’t about the triumph of the middle class, either. We never get to see the promised Second Empire, which may be just as well, because it probably wouldn’t be very likeable. Clearly, it’s not going to be a democracy – it’s going to be a mathematicized version of Plato’s Republic, in which the Guardians derive their virtue from the axioms of psychohistory. What this means for the books is that while a relatively bourgeois society may be the winner in each of the duels, Asimov is neither endorsing that society nor giving it a special long-run destiny. What this means for the storytelling is that the struggles don’t have to be and aren’t structured as a conventional tale of good guys versus villains, and the novels have that unexpected cynicism. The Foundation may start out a lot nicer than its barbarous neighbours, but it evolves over time into a corrupt oligarchy – and that’s all part of the plan.”

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/dec/04/paul-krugman-asimov-economics

This aspect of Foundation is there in the original books which carry the implication that humanity is best ruled, even if it is with a subtle and often hidden hand. Yet, in its first iteration, that element can be seen as arising out of Seldon’s own flaws and biases. It’s not surprising that a man inculcated in Empire aims to recreate Empire but with people like him in charge.

Asimov’s Daneel retcon changes matters. Daneel persues empire as a moral and logical necessity. It’s like Spock endorsing the economic effectiveness of Nazis but a thousand times worse because Spock at least maybe just read a really bad history book.

I wonder where the writers will go with this? You don’t need a sophisticated critique of the politics of empire to see that “history is run by a secret cabal, which is run by a single figure who has manipulated human history for centuries” points to Daneel as being the literal big-bad of the series. I wonder if just current standard plot conventions will lead the writers to just directly punching into the character that Asimov clearly loved the most. That won’t be a bad thing, there are a host of ideas in Foundation and part of what makes it compelling fiction is that Asimov’s stories are thought-provoking.

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Well, that’s 15 minutes of the episode covered.

Meanwhile, on Terminus.

We have at last got to the Salvor Hardin plot that was teased in Episode 1. We get to see the frontier town colony where the Encyclopedists are spending their days both serving a harsh environment and having an argument about what kind of clock would work best for a low-tech society that might survive the impending Dark Ages.

The shift to a grittier setting carries with it a few issues. Grittier suggests realism but this is still a fantastical space-opera setting where the technology and questions about how-exactly-far-away-everything-is do not and cannot make sense. Still, the weird telescope thing bugged me in a way that it wouldn’t if I’d be watching an episode of the Mandalorian with a set that looked exactly the same. Maybe because this show is pitching itself as big serious drama? I don’t know. I don’t think the show can win here, the Galactic Empire isn’t a setting that can carry a hard sci-fi examination and it is an error to watch it expecting the technology or space travel to make any sense.

Australian actor Daniel MacPherson swaggers into the story as frontier space pilot/trader and also drops another interesting hint about how the show will move through decades while retaining characters. He is much older on paper than he appears because he has spent much of his life in suspended animation on space flights.

It’s a slow set-up for the initial crisis for Foundation but we’ll need to wait until next week to see how that plays out.