(courtesy IMP Awards)
The first two enthrallingly good seasons of Foundation, a lavish adaptation of Issac Asimov’s book series of the same overall name, were a portentous drumbeat march to the end of the world.
Or in the case of this engrossingly intense story, the end of an empire which spans and has spanned an entire galaxy full of thousands of worlds for millennia, and which like all empires has grown lax, indolent and self-involved in its declining years.
While the tripartite rulers at the head of the empire, Dawn, Day and Dusk (Cassian Bilton, Lee Pace and Terrence Mann respectively) – they are all clones of the original Emperor Cleon who gifted himself an ever staler form of immortality by cloning himself with Day the ruler with real authority while Dawn is his successor in learning and waiting and Dusk the wise head who imparts his wisdom when needed – are convinced they are inviolable, the people behind the titular Foundation, established by mathematician Hariton “Hari” Seldon (Jared Harris) believe Empire’s days, as the trio is known, are numbered.
They are proponents of psychohistory, “an algorithmic science that allows him to predict the future in terms of probabilities”, which has predicted both the downfall of the empire and the obliterative downfall of humanity for tens of thousands of years in its wake.
While everything points to a cataclysmic downfall for humanity, which will lose all its knowledge and culture and much else besides, the Foundation believes that this terrible future can be averted but only if certain very strict conditions are met.
As season three opens, we are hundreds of years beyond where the series started, and just four short, impactful months from the downfall of the empire, known as the Third Crisis, and both Empire, essentially ruled by Dawn while Day lives a hedonistically, drug-fuelled lifestyle with a concubine to the despair of his brothers and their advanced robotic majordomo, Demerzel (Lauren Dern) and the Foundation are shown signs of wear.
While the empire is still very much trying to stay off what psychohistory says is inevitable, save for Dawn who has a very interesting line of dialogue happening with psychically powerful Foundation stalwart Gaal Dornick (Lou Llobel), the Foundation has become, in effect, a min-empire, full of cats and power hungry people who seem less concerned with the end of the world than shoring up their rule of some 800 planets they have taken over from the dissolving empire.
As a study in how noble ideas can be corrupted over time, and how even the most certain of predicted futures can be thrown off by random occurrences not previously accounted for, Foundation is endlessly fascinating, full of intelligent thinking and some very frank observations about the perils and fallibilities of the human condition.
We also introduced in this season to The Mule (Pilou Asbæk), a chaotically perverse man with incredibly powerful psychic powers who Gaal has long known will be their greatest foe and most likely the instigator and architect of the Third Crisis which Gaal and her Second Foundation are going to have to tackle to stop humanity spiralling into messy, civilisation-ending oblivion.
As Big Bads go, The Mule is truly something.
Capricious and cruel, he is a mass murderer of fearfully coldly rational intent and planning who uses his ability to override the freewill of those who oppose him and impel them to commit violently awful acts against themselves and others.
A galaxy under his dominion, and that’s what he’s gunning for in these three episodes, his first step taking over the Middle Band independent pleasure planet of Kalgan, is too terrible a thing to contemplate and just how dire an outcome that is, and why Gaal is so concerned, and if she’s honest, terrified, is made is something very dark and troubling scenes.
The great drawcard of Foundation has always been that it’s able to go big and compellingly epic while staying both emotionally and narratively intimate and letting events play out with nuance and real insightful nuance.
This is a series that does have some pretty dramatic narrative punctuation points, but which doesn’t fall prey to the current TV show disease of installing cliffhanger after cliffhanger just for the sheer hell of it.
Big things do happen in these three episodes – “A Song for the End of Everything”, “Shadows in the Math” and “When a Book Finds You” – and they come with sizeable insights about the precarious nature of the human condition which can corrupt even the most noble of intent and subvert the most certain of outcomes, but Foundation never loses the meditative feel that it has made such an outstandingly good outlier in modern TV storytelling.
It is a case study in what happen swhen you don’t overstuff the narrative and when characters are allowed to define themselves and grow in surprising, interesting, and most importantly, authentically true to self ways, and critically when the story is allowed to find its own rhythm and not be harried or pushed along to meet the current predilection for little to no delayed gratification.
Foundation is happy to take its time and thank god for that, but while you may think that equates to not much happening, you’d thing.
The show, especially in these three pivotal, narrative-determining episodes, actually serves up a lot of storyline but only while it allows the characters to bloom and grow, their fulsomeness lending a significant of emotional grunt to slowly evolving but portentous scenes.
If you have ever wanted to lose yourself in the best possible way, and to not feel like you are being pushed against your will to a narrative fullstop far faster than you would like, Foundation is your show, with the first three episode of an excellent third season underscoring yet again that taking your time, letting the characters and story breathe can be far more impactful than a whole lot of sound and fury signifying nothing which afflicts many other streaming shows of the modern age.
Foundation streams on AppleTV+