(courtesy IMP Awards)
As we wade further into the end of Empire (Lee Pace) and empire – the one rules, the other is ruled over but they are on and the same – it’s becoming increasingly clear that the purported saviours of humanity and its shaky grasp on galactic civilisation might almost be as bad as the evil and chaos they claim to oppose and whose vacuum they are preparing to mitigate if they can.
Foundation, the group that gives their name to both Isaac Asimov’s books and the Apple TV+ series under review, was set up by arrogant genius Hari Seldon (Jared Harris) with the intention of it being the bulwark against the disintegration of the human empire whose multi-millennia long rule would end, so the maths said, in a downfall so violently catastrophic that humanity would not surface again for tens of thousands of years, if it managed that feat at all.
All knowledge would be lost, and everyone would treat back to a galaxy-wide dark ages; if that sounds terrible, and honestly no one is a fan, then Foundation was, and is to the true believers, supposed to be the cure for all those apocalyptic ills.
Only as episode two dawns, Foundation is beginning to look like some sort of hierarchical cult all its own, with the cure looking almost worse than the disease.
Over on Terminus where Foundation is based after its exile by a clearly threatened Empire, the purity of the maths and of the original mission is being increasingly lost by people who are sincere and mean well, but who, far removed from the origins of their mission, are well and truly not on the same page as Seldon was all those years ago.
But wait, there is a fix for that!
Way back when Seldon was algorithmically predicating the end of the universe and its salvation, he said there needed to be a second Foundation that would mitigate the deleterious loss of way of the first – good old humanity and its many fallibilities; it can even screw something as certain as maths … or is maths deficient for failing to account for the glaring inconsistencies of people? – but as the man, who’s now 0s and 1s in a spaceship mainframe (digital immortality is his but with dubious “benefits”) awakens 138 years after he last engaged consciousness, he rails at his onetime protégé Gail Dornick (Lee Llobell) and ———– SPOILER ALERT!!!!! ———- her daughter Salvor Hardon (Leah Harvey) that they have taken their eyes off the purity of his redundancy upon redundancy plan.
For a man with not a lot in the way of emotional intelligence, he was at least smart enough to know that all the formulas and predictive equations in the world would not allay the fact that all great beliefs decay and morph cruelly over time until their original purity of intent and effect is lost.
This is where we find ourselves in episode two with Terminus gripped by the opening of the vault, which does not quote go as well as hoped – understatement of the season with twisted belief coming head-to-head with brutal reality -and the last person alive, so the people on the planet believe (they don’t know Gail lives and breathes still) who knew Seldon, High Cleric Poly Verisof (Kulvinder Ghir), more than a little aghast at the muddying of the Foundation’s original ideals.
To be fair, the High Cleric is engaged in his lights-and-mirrors, snake oil salesmanship of his own on planets he and his acolyte, Brother Constant (Isabella Laughland) go to spread the word of Seldon, with their religious underpinnings light years from a man for whom the objectivity of maths was king.
It’s safe to say that everyone has lost their way fairly comprehensively and it’s likely going to be down to Dornick, Hardon and a digital Seldon to save the day.
A day that, despite Empire’s best efforts, is looking closer than ever.
As the empire retreats still further – in a conversation with his lover and androidal majordomo Eto Demerzel (Laura Birn), it’s revealed the empire is a quarter of the size it once was, proof that the rot has long set in and that not even cloned rulers are enough to stem the decay – Empire aka Brother Day/Cleon XVI is fashioning a marriage to the unexpected heir and ruler of the Cloud Dominion, Queen Sareth (Ella-Rae Smith), whose one thousand worlds are needed as a bulwark to the empire’s own crumbling.
She knows full well why Empire needs her, and having not been purposely groomed to rule – she stepped in to a supreme leadership role after tragedy struck her family so is far more loosey-goosey than, say, Empire himself – she is direct, honest and cheekily truthful, and she may just be the best thing going for an empire most definitely on its last legs with about a century, Seldon estimates, of life left.
Her arrival in the ossified courts of Empire is a welcome one but you suspect it could be case of too-little-too-late, the empire too far gone to save itself and its opposing number, the Foundation, clearly unable to fulfill its original brief of averting galaxy sundering catastrophe.
What is masterful about season two so far is how it is showing us the mother of all space trainwrecks in agonisingly compelling slow motion, and in doing so, is graphically and powerfully highlighting how humanity is both its own greatest enemy but also its highly-flawed saviour.
When the latter trumps the former, life is sweet but too often the dynamics roll in totally the other direction, and as Foundation is resoundingly proving, when that happens, there may no saving by anybody and the world may end not with a reassuring bounce on to a fireperson’s mat from a great height but hard on the concrete at great speed and we all know how irreversibly messy that outcome is.
Foundation is currently screening on AppleTV+