Taking liberties with the story was necessary to adapt Foundation. The original stories nailed one aspect of science fiction - namely coming up with a really cool hypothetical concept - but in terms of human drama, they were just decent enough to convey the former. I guess I ought to re-read the thing.
The series on Apple TV is... well, here's the thing:
Adaptation is not translation. In order to convert a story from one medium to another, you need to make changes. One thing I've been very happy to see is the diversification of the cast - turning male characters like Salvor, Gaal, and Demerzel into women has worked perfectly for the show. And pure inventions, like the "genetic dynasty" that, among other things, allows us to have Lee Pace continue playing different iterations of "Brother Day" over the course of the series, have been pretty interesting.
But at some point, the deviations start to make you question if the writers are actually all that interested in the original story.
This first season has had a couple characters emerge as "chosen one" type entities. But Asimov's thesis for the story was a rejection of the "Great Men of History" theory - he believed, as many historians do, that our methodology for analyzing history tends to place too much focus on individuals, and thus buries the underlying social forces and pressures that lead to such people gaining and exercising power.
Thus, it was sort of radical to pull the rug out from under the protagonists of each era and show that, as much as they fought hard to change the nature of the Foundation and ensure its survival, the whole process was inevitable.
Now, perhaps we're just awaiting a similar reveal. But the way that Hari Seldon has been characterized, he seems to have a much more impossibly fine control over the development of the Foundation - it's less the result of this new form of study than a massively complex Rube Goldberg device.
Let's move on to Demerzel.
Demerzel is not revealed until past the original Foundation trilogy. It was a later decision by Asimov to link his Foundation series with his Robot stories, but Demerzel is eventually revealed to be R. Daneel Olivaw, a character introduced as the very first robot with a positronic brain - essentially the first sentient robot. Olivaw is shown to have orchestrated the creation of the Empire and also subtly pushes Seldon into developing psychohistory. He's the ultimate puppet master, but a benevolent one.
One of Asimov's most enduring concepts is the Three Laws of Robotics.
Asimov had grown tired of every story involving artificial intelligence ultimately just becoming a rehash of Frankenstein - in which the act of creating an artificial mind was invariably hubristic and would be punished by the robot going homicidal. In an effort to do away with that trope, he came up with the Three Laws - rules that, in his fictional universe, were hardwired into the programming of every AI. The rules are (and I paraphrase here):
1. A robot must never harm a human being, or through inaction, allow a human to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey the instructions of humans, except when doing so would violate the first law.
3. A robot must not do itself any harm, except when doing so would violate the first or second laws.
Obviously, the biggest challenge from a modern perspective would be to create an AI smart enough to understand its own behavior well enough to ensure that it was following those laws. But the nuances of those laws actually proved to be very fertile ground for dramatic conflict. For example: suppose a robot witnesses one human holding a gun to another human's head. They cannot harm the one with the gun, as that would be a 1st law violation, but they also can't just let the hostage be shot, as that would also violate the first law.
What grows out of this, then, in discussions between R. Daneel Olivaw and another robot, is an implied corollary: the "through inaction" clause to the first law becomes extremely tricky when you consider what, ultimately, the greatest harm would be. Is a robot in violation of the law, for example, if they don't put all their efforts to finding a way to reverse aging? After all, on a long enough timeline, humans ultimately die when they get too old.
But even beyond that: if robots must protect humans as their absolute, core, fundamental reason for being, what does that mean for humanity as a whole?
And thus, the so-called "Zeroth Law" arises: a higher priority than the protection and preservation of individual humans becomes the preservation of humanity as a whole. The Greater Good, essentially, becomes the robots' top priority. And that supersedes even the first law - meaning, in theory, if a human needed to die in order to save humanity as a whole, the robot would be capable of violating that law.
So far, the characterization of Demerzel in the Foundation series has been one of subservience. There's a strong emphasis on that second law - Demerzel is the undying, ageless servant of the emperor(s).
And indeed, there are times when Demerzel's age and wisdom does seem to suggest she is the true power of the throne. The Emperor's life is so scripted and sheltered that in many ways, the show demonstrates that he barely has any power over his own life - what power, then, could he have over the galactic empire?
Demerzel functions, thus, first as a mother, and then as a kind of trusted confidante, and finally as the daughter that ushers the emperors into their twilight (and disintegration).
And yet, in the last few episodes, Demerzel has seemed to truly be subservient to the emperor. Most glaringly, after Brother Dawn treks through the Spiral to the Mother's Womb in an effort to placate the Luminist religion, he orders Demerzel to murder Halima, the high-level cleric who had been undermining his legitimacy as emperor by suggesting that clones don't have souls. Demerzel performs this deed, though it seems to cause her much stress.
But here, it's not just a conflict of emotion, but a conflict with the foundational (pun unintended) concepts behind Asimov's fictional universe. Unless we find that this is actually some long game based on the Zeroth Law, it seems like she is just unable to disobey an order from the emperor. Sure, she's fulfilling the second law, but this is a blatant violation of the first.
We have one episode to go, and I would love to discover that the show is actually respecting the Laws of Robotics - I mean, why even introduce Demerzel if you didn't want to engage with those? But the show hasn't done a lot to generate good will in those viewers who actually think there are some really interesting philosophical concepts in those books.
And look, I hate to be the nerd pushing his metaphorical glasses back onto his nose while saying "um, actually" (though the College Humor gameshow of the same name and tone is very entertaining) but for a show that clearly has experts of their craft pouring a ton of love into it, I don't want this to be using Asimov's work as just a vague inspiration for what is ultimately a different story.
The show is done no favors by the recent release of Denis Villeneuve's Dune - while that film obviously leaves some parts out (and only covers the first half of the book,) it feels very much like an attempt to adapt that story, and not just some vaguely related story, to the big screen.
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