Foundation

 Interesting that this year marks adaptations of two of the great space epics of the mid-20th century. Later this month, Denis Villeneuve's Dune comes out (something I've been very excited for) while Apple TV has released four of the ten episodes in its adaptation of Isaac Asimov's Foundation stories.

Both of these stories are enormously epic in scale, both set in distant futures in which the fate of humanity hangs in the balance, even after we've spread to countless worlds. And both concern the fate of empires.

Asmiov's Foundation stories jump from time period to time period, following new protagonists and new eras, which is one of the reasons that an adaptation would be very difficult to pull off. The other is that the first few chapters of the stories are, well, hardly even stories. They're intellectually very interesting, and there are some space battles and a lot of thoughts about how an organization whose initial purpose is basically to build a high-stakes Wikipedia transforms into the dominant power within the galaxy.

Let's rewind:

In the distant future, the Galactic Empire, whose capitol is on the massive ecumenopolis of Trantor, is shaken by the conclusions of the mathematician Hari Seldon. Seldon has devised a radical new branch of mathematics that essentially combines sociology with statistics and probability theory (and is far more advanced than anything our modern scientists would devise, of course,) which purports to predict the course of the future on a galactic scale. And, most troublingly, he discovers that the Empire, which has kept trillions of people in relative safety and stability for over ten thousand years, is going to collapse in a matter of centuries.

Seldon claims that the aftermath of this collapse will be a horrifying 30,000-year dark age - over twice the lifespan of the empire - filled with death and barbarism. However, he believes that if steps are taken, that dark age could be reduced to a mere thousand years. To do so, he wishes to create a Foundation, which will preserve the knowledge of humanity and accelerate the rebuilding of civilization.

Rather than having him killed, the Emperor sends Seldon and his followers to a remote world known as Terminus, and it's there that the Foundation is established.

Over the course of the books, the Foundation encounters a number of crises, which often forces them to transform their mission - becoming a trading empire, and then a religious church that has control over technology. With each crisis, however, Hari Seldon's holographic records kept in a vault are unlocked and basically show that he predicted these events, and that this is all part of the plan.

Which, again, lets some of the air out of the dramatic tires, as it were, until the narrative is forced to change.

Apple's adaptation of Foundation naturally takes some creative license, which was probably necessary to make the thing work.

In its first four episodes, we begin with Gaal, a mathematician from a remote world that is dominated by an anti-intellectual religious order, who leaves home to work for Hari Seldon after winning a galaxy-wide mathematics competition. Through her, we're introduced to Trantor and the precarious situation that Seldon is in.

In the books, the Emperor is a fairly uninteresting character. The show invents a convention that I was initially skeptical about, but winds up being very interesting - every emperor is a clone of Cleon I, who ruled 400 years ago (not at the beginning of the empire, but the beginning of the current era.) At any given time, there are three clones of Cleon - one young, one middle-aged, and one old, referred to as Brothers Dawn, Day, and Dusk. This allows the show, as it jumps generations, to have the same actors portray the Emperor, but different version of him. Lee Pace, who plays Day, transitions from the Emperor who banishes Seldon to the boy who stood and watched as he did, and it's a cool acting challenge that Pace does a great job with (as does Terrence Mann, who plays Brother Dusk).

My ultimate opinion on the show is certainly still forming. The jury is out on some of the characters, especially given that the ones that the first couple episodes really focus on seem to have been phased out by around episode 3 - though that is of course the nature of the story (it does look like some shenanigans will allow us to see figures return, though.)

The show approaches this challenge in part with conventions like the Emperor's rotating clones (though I imagine that we're eventually going to see that cycle break down, unless the show is going to seriously deviate from the books even more by keeping the Emperor an element throughout.)

Actually, the Emperor is probably the most noteworthy element of the show at this point. We know that his arrogance and dismissal of Seldon's predictions marks him as a doomed villain, but there's also something a little tragic about him - each emperor is forced to walk the same path has his predecessor, his only family is reflections of himself, and frankly, his closest companion, the ageless majordomo Demerzel (whose nature is not revealed until far later in the books) seems to be the one who actually wields true power.

Naturally, the show looks very different than how I imagined the series it when I read it, though that's to its benefit. For whatever reason, Asimov's prose conjured a future that was strangely mundane, and so I mostly pictured a fairly ordinary-looking mid-century aesthetic with a bit of 70s used-future. Apple has a shit ton of money, and it sure looks like they spared no expense - the series has a big-budget movie feel to it. A catastrophic terror attack that occurs in the first episode and marks the beginning of the Empire's visible downfall is rendered in breathtaking detail (and is also deeply disturbing in its focus on the innocent people realizing their doom as the massive structure they are on collapses.)

Representation here is also significantly better. While its later entries develop some compelling characters who are also women, the first few stories in Asmiov's opus have practically no women (there's like one who is a misogynistic caricature without a real name). The series reimagines both Gaal and Salvor Hardin as women of color, and also makes Demerzel a woman, which does serve to make the story a little less cringeworthy.

Jared Harris, who plays Seldon, is appropriate casting, though as with the books, his role is to be the catalyst for the story, and not its protagonist. Harris is a versatile performer and one that I'm generally happy to see - I wish we could get more of his character on The Expanse, but I think it likely that his plot is basically done and has been for a few seasons now.

I think that purists will probably balk at all the invention the show does, though I think that a totally faithful adaptation would be unwatchable. The AV Club's reviews have pointed out that Salvor Hardin is being set up as a kind of chosen-one figure, and there are certainly elements to her character that are a bit off the themes of the original stories. I suspect that this is an attempt to keep the story easier to follow - ideally, we'd get a dynamic ensemble cast that collectively work together to fulfill their stage of Seldon's plan, but I think the producers and writers might have worried that getting to know an entire cast of characters only to move on from them in the next era might be too much to handle. By keeping things focused on the individual, we can see a baton passed from generation to generation.

I do wonder if this show would be getting more attention if it weren't on Apple TV. While Apple has been throwing a ton of money into their streaming service, I think that the momentum that brands like Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon Prime have are a bit tough to compete with. Obviously, Ted Lasso has been doing a lot for Apple's entertainment brand, but while I think Apple has been hoping for this to be their Game of Thrones (albeit one that doesn't end so catastrophically) I don't think we're seeing the same level of buzz for it. Admittedly, it wasn't until the end of the first season that Game of Thrones really took off as a cultural phenomenon, but I think the reaction to Foundation has been somewhat less enthusiastic.

Indeed, it might just be a victim of the fact that epic television is no longer the novelty it was when GoT came out. The notion of a massive genre epic coming to the small screen was fairly unthinkable at the time. Now, though, there's precedence, and everyone is trying to capture the zeitgeist the way that GoT did.

Foundation also has the age-old problem: some might view it as cliche, when in fact, it's the story that established many of the tropes now seen as cliches. The city-planet was a novel idea when Asimov wrote about Trantor. A galactic empire was novel as well. Even the notion of specialized faster-than-light ships was, if not original to Asmiov, at least a pretty recent idea (I know that the Alcubierre drive, which is more or less the warp engine from Star Trek, appeared in Ursula K. LeGuin's books, along with the Ansible).

Still, I'm compelled to watch more, and I'm eager to see how the story evolves. There are changes, of course, but I'm going to try to take the show on its own terms. Yes, the Asimov books don't get really awesome until the Mule shows up, but I think the showrunners are trying hard to make the build-up to his appearance equally compelling.