I'm familiar with Isaac Asimov's "Foundation" novels, but don't count myself as a fan. They were too heady for me when I read them as a teenager. I only got through two volumes before giving up. Still, they made enough of an impression on me that when I learned that David Goyer and Josh Friedman were going to turn the books into a series for Apple TV+, I expected they were going to face an uphill battle. "Foundation" is a series about the fall and rebuilding of a galactic empire, where a group of "psychohistorians" are able to predict and help shape the course of history through their study of higher level mathematics. Their thousand year plan is called the "Foundation."
What Goyer and Friedman have elected to do with the first season is to take stories from multiple "Foundation" books and have them all happen simultaneously, or in very compressed timelines, to avoid having the action take place over massive time scales the way they originally did. We start with the central figure of the Foundation, Hari Seldon (Jared Harris) recruiting his protege Gaal Dornick (Lou Llobdell), and presenting the plan for the Foundation to the Galactic Emperor. The Emperor is actually a triumvirate of young, mature, and old clones of Cleon I, who refer to themselves as Brother Dusk (Terrence Mann), Brother Day (Lee Pace), and Brother Dawn (Cassian Bilton and Cooper Carter). From this meeting and subsequent events, multiple storylines unfold. One follows the unravelling of the Empire with the Cleon clones. One follows Seldon's followers on the remote planet Terminus, led by Salvor Hardin (Leah Harvey). And then there's Gaal Dornick, separated from both, travelling a very uncertain path forward.
Apple certainly spent a lot to make the first nine-episode season of "Foundation" look impressive, but too much of it ends up derivative of every other science-fiction show of the past few years. The first episode, set on the galactic capitol of Trantor, and Gaal's watery home planet Synnax, is full of beautiful visuals of otherworldly civilizations, thoughtful concepts, and interesting dilemmas. By the seventh episode, we're watching a bunch of characters dressed in grungy military outfits having shootouts in corridors with bad lighting. To be fair, this isn't the only thing going on in the episode, but I found it roundly depressing how quickly "Foundation" went from talking about these bigger, more challenging ideas to fairly rote sci-fi action squabbles. The Terminus storyline is completely revamped to turn Hardin from a politician into an action hero, and issues of statecraft into showy guerilla warfare. And it's kind of a bore.
Much more successful is the clone storyline. From what I can tell, the idea to turn the Emperor into a triumvirate of clones is an invention of the series, and allows the actors to play a succession of different characters over multiple eras. The show's exploration of the clones' relationships with one another, their absolute power, their obsessions with their legitimacy, and their ritual-bound existence all works very well. Lee Pace is the show's MVP, playing each Cleon at the prime of his life and power. A lot more finagling is deployed to keep characters like Gaal and Hari in the show. I don't mind Gaal's role being expanded to give us an additional POV character for future seasons, but she didn't have nearly enough to do. Meanwhile, Hari had a very set, very purposefully limited role from the outset, and adding all these other appearances and ongoing questions about his actions was a mistake. There's so much material that was straightforward in the books, but set up to be big mysteries in the series, and I find it very aggravating.
What else could have been done to improve the show? A shorter season, for one, that would have removed the need for so much filler. More than surface level exploration of the franchise's themes for another. I quite like that Gaal and Salvor were both gender and race swapped, which is oddly touching in a series where predestination and genetic destiny are seen as major forces. However, this is very much a show focused on spectacle over science-fiction, and full of characters who talk the way that not-smart people think smart people talk. I still have hopes that the creators can figure out ways to improve in future seasons, but it's going to take a lot of work.
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