The show plays with familiar elements but has moved so far away from the source as to be “inspired by” at best.
What They Say:
The Empire recruits Bel Riose to investigate the resurgent Foundation. Hari leads Gaal and Salvor to a desert planet.
The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
Foundation hit that point for me last week where I just couldn’t not be angry at a lot of what it’s doing. I’m fully open to a lot of adaptations doing what’s needed and I’m frustrated by the way anime slavishly adapts manga when there are areas that can be tweaked and improved over the original work for the medium that it’s now being told in. But Foundation has jettisoned so much and kept characters around that should not be around that I can’t help but to throw my hands up with each episode at this point as they just extended the problems further and further and lose almost all of the voice that made up the original work. That’s not to say what’s done is done badly, but it’s just not Foundation. And that’s fine, but it’s a psychological break I needed to make myself.
The area that works well for me continues to be with Empire itself since that had so little in the books overall for a while and in this period outside of some references. Watching how Day is orchestrating things is interesting and I like the exposure to the way that things are crumbling. After a lot of time spent with a potential wife the last time around, we don’t get any of that this time but rather to see his capricious nature of control. With the Foundation pulling away worlds at the edges and the danger that sets in motion for the empire, Day has agreed with Demerzel to bring in an imprisoned military leader named Bel Riose to take command once again. Riose has been doing hard physical time on some distant world with a lot of his crew that apparently were arrested with him because he disobeyed Empire’s orders some six years prior in an encounter. That’s something that Empire can’t tolerate and there are reasons to begrudgingly go along with him to a degree.
But now Empire needs him to fight and Demerzel is able to negotiate him to come back to find out the terms, which is interesting to watch as this bedraggled man holds his own against her. It’s a familiar scene right out of the classics as he’s eventually brought before all three aspects of Empire but it’s Day that’s in control here as he wants to see just how much he can trust Riose. It’s an interesting little drama in and of itself and the way that he had been lied to about his husband being dead and his husband unable to contact him upon penalty of Riose’s death, we get a really well done transformation once they reunite and we see Riose assume command. I absolutely love the power of the visuals we get from the world of Trantor, the ships of the fleet, and just the sets and uniforms of it all as it exudes it to great detail and it’s fascinating to watch.
As for the rest of the show, I’m just at a loss. Everything involving Gaal and Salvor is ridiculous as they’re going off to start the Second Foundation knowing that The Mule is coming in 150 years and it was something that Hari had intended for before Gaal mucked it all up. They end up taking a detour that Hari didn’t tell them about and it’s a weird sequence overall with some great set design moments. It plays weird in who we meet there – Kalle, apparently – and that Hari is given human form in full physical mode. I always like the phrase that magic is science we just don’t understand but the science at work here is playing in a way that is bad magic and doesn’t help anything here at all. I get the appeal of keeping Harris around as Seldon for as long as possible but they’re doing it in such a bad way that it makes me yell and shout at the screen whenever they do things like this.
The material with the Foundation itself is able to expand on the state of this part of the galaxy at this point and the hunt is on for Hober Mallow now. There’s a lead on him and that has Poly and his assistant heading off to bring him back since the Vault wants him it seems. The problem is that Mallow, as a Master Trader that couldn’t make it as a Claric, is running a scam on another world and is finding it going very badly as he’s trying to steal something from the leader of said world. It’s an interesting bit of tech and an interesting look at this particular society that has fallen into a darker place but it Mallow himself feels absolutely nothing like the original work and other than the name seems to have no collection to the character either. It’s mostly whole-cloth made up here and while I can see them pulling parts of it over the course of the story into how they’ll change the Foundation by the end of the season, it’s just nonsense to go this direction at all.
In Summary:
Watching this series with my mother, who hasn’t read the books since before I was born, has been interesting. She has no real memory of it so she’s able to enjoy it as presented and I’m envious of that to a degree. It has a lot of interesting ideas and the presentation is fantastic, even if I disagree with some of the choices. But as an adaptation, it’s now moved from problematic to insulting in a lot of ways and that makes it a very frustrating to watch. I can appreciate a lot of pieces of it, especially with Empire and the story on Trantor, but my mind keeps going “that’s wrong” with so many things and so many actions. It’s a difficult way to watch a show.
Grade: C
Streamed By: Apple TV+
