I’ll get back to S1E09 when time permits; but in the meantime, S2E01 has dropped a bit early! What are ya doin’ here? You can come back to this!

Watching Foundation: S1E10

There’s Hari’s coffin floating through space as Gaal muses about sleep. It’s transmogrifying into the Vault.

Back on Terminus.

This is very Asimovian. Everybody is standing around while Hari exposition-dumps.

Hari: “History is written by the victor, and neither of you seems to be winning.”

The enmity? Thespin King murders Anacreon Huntress. But really it’s Cleon II with a plan that could span centuries.

Hari on the Invictus. He gave the problem of the Invictus to his model. That’s thin. It’s probably running a pseudo-random number generator. But how could you back-engineer the seed without ever encountering the ship?

“Well, I might have lied about that.” Funny.

Trantor:

12 and 13 ponder 14’s fate. 13 and 14 discuss 14’s situation.

14: “…living out a script written centuries ago.” There’s determinism. “We’re not people. We’re echos.”

Terminus. Hari: “ The Foundation was never about curating knowledge, it was about curating people.“

3 parts of a tripod.

“The human race is an ever-evolving story told over thousands of years by countless number of voices. But for a long time now that chorus has been suffocated and quietly erased. Because under the Genetic Dynasty, There is only room for one story. One voice.”

He implies that Cleons will lead to extinction. “We cannot become who we must become if the Empire is allowed to persist. That path leads to the annihilation of the human race.”

The three civilizations in a single-star system? I’m still dubious.

12:53 When Kier touched Hari, that looks more like an imperial shield than a hologram.

“It wouldn’t have been wise for me to have been sentient all this time.” Foreshadowing Azura’s fate.

16:04 and we’re basically done with the first crisis.

Trantor.

13 takes Azura for a walk.

“I know people hate me, consider me evil. But it is my detachment, My Indifference to suffering that allows me to rule effectively. The galaxy is so vast, the problems so large, that I must turn a blind eye to the individual.”

Interesting to see 13 musing about his ambitions as a child, which we saw in episode 1, and then discussing how they’ve evolved.

Legacy. Azura’s punishment. So dark! The last shot of her is tiny and shrinking as 13 walks away.

Terminus.

Mari is pissed at Hari. Salvor believed she was special but her lack of connection to the Vault belies that.

Salvor and Rowan discuss Phara and plant a tallyn oak in her honor.

We get a time-lapse of the tree growing. “In the months that followed, the children of the outer reach took Hari’s words to heart, setting aside hatred in favor of strength. It takes more power to build than to burn and Hari wanted them to build.”

Hugo and Salvor don’t have a lot of chemistry. But Salvor has more visions. And she sees a young Gaal. She goes up to the vault and disappoints us with nothing but a rhetorical question.

Chekov’s embryo rears its now-self-evident head. Salvor and Mari talk and we learn about Salvor’s genetic background. Salvor won’t be Mayor, she’s going on a Gaal hunt. This bit’s kind of slow and draggy.

A lot of this could have been at the start of season 2. Joanne says that this entire episode feels like the closing scenes of a movie. That gives me flashbacks to Return of the King which was painfully tedious at the end.

Back to Trantor. Before the episode, I was thinking about the plot in episode 9 and how dumb it was. What would have made it make sense? As we pointed out on the podcast maybe it was meant to fail. Why do that? If the frozen replacement Dawn has also been genetically altered but in a way less obvious and more sinister than the changes made to 14.

I wondered if Dawn was going to leap to his death here.

“All love is programming.”

Demerzel has her hand on 14s back here exactly like she did with 11 right before he was vaporized.

13 looks like he’s on the verge of letting 14 live. 12 remains a huge asshole.

And then goddamn it! Total shock! But in retrospect, I should have seen it coming.

“I am loyal, Empire to the Cleonic dynasty above all else,” says Demerzel

I wonder if the newly decanted Dawn will remember having his neck snapped.

I’m assuming that the shifting paints are figurative.

13 carrying 14 to the disintegration chamber is reminiscent of Demerzel bringing 11 back to bed the night before he was vaporized.

12 really seems torn up by this.

Olbrecht tells us that the plans undermining the Dynasty were more extensive than thought. The source material has been altered. That silly plan was the insurgents signing their work. I like that!

Still, the Dynasty isn’t any worse off than any inherited dynasty. Are they?

Disturbing scene with Demerzel. I wondered if she was going to shut herself down with these tools we see. Nope. Instead, well, you should see that for yourself. This is clearly what a positronic crisis looks like. There’s some sort of conflict there. Maybe it’s a conflict with the programming to be loyal to the Cleons. Even if there was no order given, Demerzel must have known she was going against 12’s wishes. Maybe the three laws were overwritten by the dynastic programming but remnants are still there.

Synnax.

Gaal’s back.

That seatbelt isn’t going to be enough to survive reentry.

Just a rowboat in the middle of an ocean seems stupid. Looks like Synnax has been abandoned. But there’s a red light underwater. Now it’s like Gaal is chasing a laser pointer. My cat does that.

Not sure if this bit is annoyingly slow or if it wouldn’t work if they didn’t show us everything.

But we end with Salvor meeting Gaal 138 years in the future. Salvor’s been in stasis for “more than 100 years.” I wonder if there’s more to her story in the “present day.”

Lots of nice stuff in this episode, but the pacing is off. The bookkeeping and laying the groundwork for Season 2 is slow going.

All Images from Foundation on Apple TV+.