Review: Foundation Episode 7

Spoilers below! Also Jurrasic Park and Karl Marx guest-star in this review.

In many ways, this is a key episode for the series as the show is now only very lightly tethered to the books. As Cora points out in her review of the episode, the departure from the plot has led one of Foundation’s most notable fans, economist Paul Krugman, to stop watching. I think he’s missing out on a fun show but without knowing the plot connections from the previous episodes, the only obvious connections with the books in this episode are the character names.

All four plots of the show get an airing and each of the characters central to those plots are each heading towards a crisis:

• Brother Day is grappling with the politics of religion
• Brother Dawn is grappling with both love and terrible case of impostor syndrome with added genetic drift
• Salvor Hardin is in space and has discovered that the Anacreon plan involves a super weapon
• Gaal Dornick is also in space trapped on a ship with the digital ghost of Hari Seldon

Seldon is very much a manipulative piece of shit and that feels 100% consistent with the books while very much not how Asimov is trying to portray him. One of the challenges for adapting Foundation are issues like this. Particularly in book 1, the characters are at best brief sketches and the stories have the air of short dramatisations to describe a historical event. That’s part of what makes the first one and a half books interesting as a style of fiction, Asimov isn’t writing a conventional story but a future history and fiction really actually genuinely doesn’t have to have personal conflict or three-dimensional characters to be interesting.

DRAMA though, well dramas really do need much more than what you’ll find in Asimov’s first Foundation stories, which the books eventually conceded by shifting style halfway through. Maybe the showrunners could have still followed the Cleon plot to keep the dramatic aspect going while burning through book 1 of Foundation but instead, they took a different tack. Having Seldon be an ongoing character means he needs to interact with somebody who can engage with him at his level and hence the elevation of Gaal from being little more than a name into a central character. And as a character to she has to be a counter-voice to Seldon, somebody who has a close relationship with but who has points of conflict with him. Further, as there’s just no way that a guy whose whole reason for being in this story is to attempt to connive a whole planet into gaslighting the galaxy can be anything other than the universe’s biggest manipulative piece of shit.

Of course, the other flaw in Asimov’s first Foundation book is the whole plan is absurd. Chaos theory would not reach mass culture as a pervasive idea until the 1970s/80s and was still novel when Jeff Goldblum’s character explains the idea to Laura Dern on the way to Jurrasic Park in the early ’90s. Yet you don’t need those ideas encapsulated in a pop-sci format to see that maybe a century-spanning deterministic plan might wander off course vary quickly. The moral from chaos theory is that it is the very determinism that is the undoing of attempts to predict the future, perversely randomness helps things avoid wandering too far off track. History should be easier to forecast if people are more like random quantum particles than Newtonian billiard balls, something that the classic gravitational Three-Body Problem had already hinted at.

Asimov’s solution to the dramatic dead-end and the unworkability of psychohistory was the Mule, the Second Foundation and psychic powers. Seldon’s plan works because it is really a very sinister conspiracy by what is essentially a cabal of space wizards and Seldon’s plan stops working because of a rogue space wizard. Which is also part of the huge amount of fun that Foundation as a trilogy is. It starts as a monument to technocratic rationalism and ends with a plot that repudiates the premise of the story.

With the TV show, we’ve already had plenty-big hints that this is a universe of mind powers (and robots but not yet robots with mind powers) but this episode starts to lay this out clearly. Gaal can anticipate the future and that pretty much makes the purely mechanical idea of psychohistory unworkable — which is where Foundation the book trilogy ends up but which is wholly at odds with Foundation the first and seminal book in the series.

Now Paul Krugman doesn’t really believe in psychohistory as portrayed initially in Asimov’s books but he has described it as part of his inspiration for his interest in economics. Using maths to model the broad sweep of human activity is a compelling idea and the idea of psychology and sociology as physics-like mathematical disciplines is one of those ideas that I personally find enticingly delicious. In fiction, Foundation is the go-to story for an attempt to grapple with that idea in fiction but it is also an idea that Asimov (sensibly) dumps in favour of space wizards. As views of history go, it’s like starting with Marx and ending with Qanon.

Imagine the reading room of the British Library sometime in the 19th century. Karl Marx is busy working out that the inherent contradiction in capitalism will inevitably lead to the working-class revolution and after an intermediary period of socialism, industrial societies will eventually evolve into state-less commune-like societies. “Nice plan,” says robot Ian Malcolm (who looks just like Jeff Goldblum in this story) but after dripping water on Marx’s hand they both conclude that Marx has not factored in the triple forces of militarism, nationalism and authoritarianism which will bot suppress and subvert from within any putative communist societies in the coming century. Despondent Marx asks robot Malcolm for a solution and luckily he already has one: “wizards!”. So along with setting up the Communist Party, Marx also sets up a secret wizard communist party that secretly manipulate the rest of 20th-century history so it all comes out a lot better…

I mean, OK, I’d have liked the twentieth century to have been a lot nicer than it was but in our Marx-as-Seldon story, the equivalent to Second Foundation really does start sounding less like a fun twist and sounding far more like how every wannabe Alex Jones imagines history really does work: secret cabals of leftists secretly manipulating people’s minds to bring about communism. I think the showrunners may be trying to dodge a bullet here. Having a psychic Second Foundation being a reveal as these-guys-were-behind-the-scenes-all-along doesn’t come over as a variation on the anti-Semitic universal conspiracy of the far-right in Asimov’s books but played out within the pop-culture framework of a modern TV show, there’s an obvious danger that the Apple+ version won’t be so lucky.

So we’ve got a very weird story thread and character choices instead. Gaal and Demerzel both have weird plot lines but canonically it is easy to see how they both connect to the second and third layers of Asimov’s future history (i.e. Second Foundation were behind everything, oops no Daneel Olivaw was behind everything). It is still heading into a conspiracy theory of history as opposed to a broad (and predictable) socioeconomic forces view of history but there’s the essence of adapting Foundation. If you want the first view of history, you can only adapt one and a half books AND the parts that really don’t work very well as drama (even though I think they work well as fiction).

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