‘Foundation’ Episode 2: “Preparing To Live”

Nicely. That was surprising!

Taking a radical departure from what was already a radical departure from Isaac Asimov’s authentic novels, the second installment of Foundation (“Getting ready to Stay”) serves up an episode-ending shock to the system that modifications, properly, just about every thing about the place you may need thought the sequence was headed. Actually so, insofar because it takes place on the ship taking a four-year-plus journey to the distant planet of Terminus, the place Dr. Hari Seldon plans to determine his civilization-preserving Basis venture. There’s only one catch now: Dr. Hari Seldon won’t make it to the promised land.

However lengthy earlier than Seldon is stabbed to loss of life by his adoptive son Raych proper earlier than the horrified eyes of his inheritor obvious Gaal Dornick, this second episode (launched concurrently with the sequence premiere) has different surprises in retailer for us. For starters, Raych and Gaal have change into an merchandise within the weeks and months they’ve spent collectively on Seldon’s spaceship, a really steamy relationship they’ve tried to maintain secret from their shared mentor.

The episode, written by sequence co-creators David S. Goyer and Josh Friedman and directed by TV journeyman Adam Bernstein, drops us into this relationship with little to no warning; instantly, Gaal and Raych are making out in a swimming pool and having intercourse on a holodeck, and we’re merely anticipated to take it in stride. You’ve bought to respect a present prepared to make such daring narrative leaps from one episode to the subsequent.

Whereas Gaal and Raych take care of their clandestine romance—which, it must be famous, features a zygote that Gaal has surgically eliminated and saved for transport, per the ship’s protocols—and Gaal and Hari take care of the workaday enterprise of the ship’s neighborhood—mingling with the assist in the laundromat, sitting in on finances committee conferences, all that jazz—the triumvirate Emperor of the galaxy has his personal enterprise to take care of. Within the weeks since suicide bombers from the warring planets of Anacreon and Thespis destroyed the planet’s vaunted starbridge and induced the loss of life of 100 million folks, some 100,000 of that are nonetheless orbiting the planet as meteors ready to occur, no additional info has been procured to find out who is really at fault for this brazen, coordinated assault. 

The three Emperors are of three completely different minds as to what to do with this failure to unearth the perpetrator. The aged Brother Nightfall urges warning to his brothers, whilst he blows up on the planets’ captive ambassadors in a pair of dinner conferences cleverly intercut to look like a single scene. He even travels to satisfy the Synnaxian seer priest (Brian Bovell) that Gaal contacted earlier than her departure, to see if both she or he may actually see the long run as their faith insists. (Let’s observe right here, for the file, that Gaal does certainly appear to have some present of prescience, insofar as she realizes one thing could be very fallacious earlier than she runs to Hari’s quarters and finds Raych within the means of murdering him.)

Brother Day, the chief of the trio, has an altogether bloodier resolution in thoughts. Whereas staging a public execution of the Anacrean and Thespan delegations—sparing solely the 2 lead ambassadors, to allow them to be despatched again house to relay their failure to their folks—he orders the imperial fleet to bombard the 2 planets, lowering them to flames that may be seen from house. Captured with the stately (if largely computerized) camerawork that’s the present’s inventory in commerce so far, it’s a lovely picture of horrific violence, seen from an elevation that aestheticizes the carnage. Watch some cable information protection of American bombings and drone strikes someday and get again to me about whether or not this even qualifies as “science fiction.”

As for Brother Daybreak, the youngest of the crew? The disaster has left him scared, and solely Demerzel (Laura Birn), the trio’s robotic advisor, appears capable of actually perceive and educate him. It’s a troublesome place for the child to be in: His entire “genetic dynasty” is based on the concept the primary man of their line, Cleon I, was so assured in his skill to rule justly that he determined to proceed his reign in perpetuity.

If the 2 storylines have a unifying thread, it’s within the youthful adults’ lack of religion of their elders. Brother Day has no time for Brother Nightfall’s melancholy, for his pacifism, for the time he spends painstakingly restoring their quarters’ grand mural now that Brother Day has blown up its earlier caretaker. Raych’s perception in Hari—previous to murdering him—appears to have been shaken by Gaal’s revelation that Seldon’s calculations have lacking items which will or might not have an effect on the end result of his predictions.

So we’re left with the episode’s ultimate moments, by which Raych races Gaal into an escape pod and blasts her off into an asteroid subject as the primary ship strikes on. Was his killing of Seldon a rogue motion, or was all of it a part of Seldon’s plan? My guess is the latter, but it surely’s only a guess. And that’s a lovely factor. A science-fiction sequence that legitimately retains the viewer guessing, as a substitute of merely confused by unclear storytelling, is one thing price preserving.

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Occasions, and anyplace that will have him, actually. He and his household reside on Lengthy Island.

Watch Foundation Episode 2 on Apple TV+