Foundation - A Song for the End of Everything
It doesn't take long into the first episode of the new season of Foundation to remind me of my problems with the series. "A Song for the End of Everything" isn't centered around the Foundation, although we do get one scene involving a single character (Alexander Siddig) taking with the Hari Seldon AI (Jared Harris), which ultimately doesn't add anything to the story (other than get the Star Trek actor on-screen), the focus almost entirely on the decaying Empire which David Goyer has used as a throughline for the series continually returning us to the inbred clones of Trantor. While less involved, other than her narration, the show also brings back the overused crutch of Gaal Dornick (Lou Llobell) as well who awakes from cryosleep in time to interject herself into events as Goyer's deus ex machina rather than allow the next generation of the Foundation to fight their own battles.
Set 152 years after the second crisis, we're told of a Foundation on the rise and an Empire on a decline (although we aren't actually shown much on-screen to back this up). The most important aspect of the episode is the introduction of a new antagonist whose very existence threatens psychohistory and Seldon's predictive models both Foundation and Empire have available to them. The Mule (Pilou Asbæk) isn't quite the character he was on the printed page, although the episode does showcase how his mutation allows him influence and control to do whatever he pleases leading to the main conflict of this Foundation story. And what he wants is to find and destroy the Second Foundation.
Other aspects of the episode involve Demerzel (Laura Birn) struggling over the correct path for humanity, confiding in Zephyr Vorellis (Rebecca Ineson) under controlled conditions, various clone nonsense, and a kind of reckless rogue Foundation officer defying orders recognizing the threat of The Mule. The episode, like the seasons before it, is largely fine, if a bit watered down and heavily changed versions of Asimov's original stories. The Mule is, by far, the most important piece of this latest chapter but is largely an afterthought here in favor of more Trantor drama. Hopefully we'll see him, even if he isn't quite the character he was on the page, take a much larger role in the episodes to follow and, you know, see more of the actual Foundation as well.
- Title: Foundation - A Song for the End of Everything
- IMDb: link
