TV REViEW
By B.C. Kowalski
What’s so disappointing about Foundation
▲ Jared Harris and Lou Llobell in “Foundation,” which premiered September 24, 2021 on Apple TV+.
empire follows his plan; but collapse is imminent. This is taken as an attack on the empire and Seldon and his followers are exiled to Terminus, on the outer reaches of the empire. This was always Seldon’s plan, and he forms The Foundation to start building what will become the new empire. Seldon predicts a series of what later people call “Seldon crises” that future leaders must solve. How they solve those crises is how the show varies disappointingly from the book series. One of the key phrases, also repeated in the TV show, is “violence is the last resort of the
incompetent.” The book series held to this maxim: Each crisis is solved by protagonists through brilliant maneuvering, outsmarting the violent tendencies of those on the other side of the crisis. It’s easy to see a better path here: Foundation could have been a sci-fi version of House of Cards. A less sinister version, where you’re rooting for Claire Underwood because her cunning will save humanity through her clever wits. Instead, in Apple TV’s version, the brilliant political and tactical maneuvering is replaced by shouting moralism and emotions. While reading the book allows you to marvel at the characters’ brilliance, the TV version’s characters seem lifeless and don’t grow. But even a less smart and dumbed down Foundation could have been fun if it was, well, actually fun. Unfortunately there are just too many slow and boring parts of this show, in an era where shows just don’t do that any more. Lee Pace as the middle-age emperor (the emperor is a series of clones in which three generations exist at a time) is the one exception and his character does grow some. Pace is one of my favorite actors, and brings hints of his Jobsian (as in Steve) character in Halt & Catch Fire to the role. No offense to Pace of course, but if his emperor character is the most interesting here, that doesn’t do much to recommend Foundation. Best to move on to greener pastures, such as The Expanse or the new Wheel of Time series, both of which I will tackle in future issues.
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I had my doubts when I’d learned that they were making a TV series based on Issac Asimov’s Foundation. It’s not that I doubt the power of modern day television to produce a compelling series from a property. In fact, many times these days that series ends up being more compelling than the original. My reservations had more to do with the source material itself. Asimov’s Foundation and its sequels are brilliant, but what makes them brilliant seemed like it would be difficult to translate to a TV screen. And I was right. While visually Foundation is a marvel, and just what you’d want in a sci-fi series, everything else about it is just off. It suffers from the one sin no TV show, especially in today’s time, can afford to commit: It’s boring. I was concerned that if they followed the series closely it would make for boring TV; they took liberties with it and, ironically, ended up with a boring version of the Foundation that also doesn’t come close to capturing what was so gripping about the book series. So what am I talking about? First we need to explain Foundation to newcomers. The series centers on a galactic empire that’s stood for centuries upon centuries. One of its citizens, a brilliant mathematician named Hari Seldon, creates a predictive model called psychohistory. Through psychohistory, Seldon predicts the fall of the empire and an emergence of a new empire following a period of chaos. Steps can be taken to minimize the chaos period from 30,000 years to 1,000 if the
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