Stars End S2E07 – An Exhortation from one of the Galaxy’s Major Podcasts
It’s Halloween evening as I write this and the two biggest Sci-Fi franchises have new episodes out. The premiere of Star Trek Prodigy was last Thursday and the season opener for Doctor Who was this evening.
But I have another venerable old franchise on my mind.
Namely Twilight Zone. “Hey, kids! You want to see something really scary?!?”
Well, “scary” probably isn’t the right word for “Mysteries and Martyrs” but I think some of us found it a little unsettling.
Still, there are lots of big questions! Is Psychohistory as we know it a thing of the past? What is the Anacreoneans horrific plan for the Invictus? Has the show succumbed to the Great and Glorious Az’s predilection for exposition? And in the show with the most per-capita executions might someone get put to death for erroneous thumb-clasping?
We don’t know! But we’re going to talk about it anyway! With extra special guest star Cathy Blumenfeld, who has the distinction of escaping that Asimovian indoctrination so many of us suffered as teens.
Join us! You’ll love it! It will be like losing yourself in the scar and seeing real clouds!
Stars End: A Foundation Podcast 
I think you are looking too narrowly at somethings. Raych wasn’t “in the model”…. Hari clearly setup who he was using to setup his plan. He is manipulating people to be in place to do what he feels needs to be done. Gaal on Terminus, Raych with hologram Hari setting up the 2nd foundation.
No where did he say the model predicted they couldn’t go their own ways, it was pretty clear they wouldn’t do it on their own.
If anything, its showing Hari isn’t able to predict the final actions of individuals as he didn’t predict the outcome that is currently in front of him.
Now, the model did help him predict that he needed to be martyred …. there was the scene you guys made fun of where he was upset by being called Hari, when he realized people were too friendly with him. He had to make himself into a religion passed down for generations to come so everyone would follow in their parents footsteps and believe in the cause, otherwise you get Salvor’s initial reaction referring to it as a cult and not believing. How do you make sure a 1000 year plan doesn’t die after 20 years when the children grow up and say “I didn’t sign up for this lunacy”? You could see that incident sent him back to revisit the math in the 2nd episode as he got more an more worried. And it definitely wouldn’t have helped him if he was losing his mind and they were dying on a frigid rock….
I feel like its doing plenty to prove that Hari can’t predict individual actions, but that at the civilization level he’s predicting unrest at multiple levels. The invictus is random, but its a direct result of the bombings in Ep2 that the Anacrians were even off planet looking for revenge… again, broad trends, not specifics of how. That seems to fit to me….
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Fair points. As we have said, it is possible that Hari needs to set up initial conditions to make the plan work, and that might involve having himself, Raych and Gaal all in the right places at the right times.
The situation with Anacreon is more complex, though. Finding the Invictus might not affect the overall sweep of history, just as finding the ship eventually renamed the Wienis didn’t really change anything in the book. But it’s hard to conceive of the destruction of Anacreon and Thespis not being key events in the plan – and if that was set up by Hari, along with the destruction of the Star Bridge, then he is responsible for hundreds of millions of deaths. Was there no other way? Can that kind of genocide-level murder really be justified in the name of The Plan? If those things were not part of the plan, would history really have proceeded along the same lines with or without all that destruction and death? We are left with some very important questions – maybe we’ll get some answers in upcoming episodes.
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