Werthead

Today's episode was solid, despite some glaring Anacreonish stupidity (why kill the Empire captain literally after he opened the front door; might have there been more security systems he'd have been useful to negate?). T'Nia Miller is excellent as Halima, and her scene with Lee Pace was outstanding. The look on his face when he realised that she was for real and not just a political opportunist was priceless. Interesting possibility that Gaal's psychic powers means that she will be a key founding member of the Second Foundation (and interestingly, Hari calls the Terminus faction "The First Foundation" for the first time), or maybe her and Raych's child (or great-great-grandson or whatever) will be the Mule? What's the betting that Hugo faked his thruster malfunction and will be back next week?

Not in their millions, probably not, but Lee Pace has a very avid and passionate fan following. The guy is like a walking meme factory by himself. Jared Harris is also hugely popular now post-Chernobyl, so probably hooked a large number of people into watching, even if he's barely been in it so far.

Lee Pace, Terrence Mann and Clarke Peters are all outstanding actors who've done pretty well in this. Of the two main leads, Lou Llobell is pretty solid as Gaal but she's not been in it as much as you'd expect either. Leah Harvey as Salvor is fine given her inexperience, but her weak point seems to be her accent. Not sure why they let Llobell use her English accent (she was born in Spain but is based in the UK) but made Harvey use an American accent which she really seems uncomfortable with. Surprised they haven't brought back Reece Shearsmith as the Imperial Agent from the first episode. He was enjoyably creepy (which is kind of his career thing).

Yeah, that was solid, even if there's a bit of "running around, getting captured, escaping, blowing something up, getting captured" to Salvor's story, like a 1970s episode of Doctor Who. The stuff with the Emperor was great though. Interesting nod to Prelude to Foundation (how Raych met Seldon). And I have to say that "starring Jared Harris" is pushing it a bit. So far he could have filmed all his scenes for the show on the same afternoon.

He also names the author who turned down being in the book, or didn't respond, which might be a breach of etiquette.

Interestingly, no mention at all of the so far, despite it coming up pretty early in the books IIRC.

I don't think that's the problem (well, it's a problem when it comes to adaptation in general). Martin wrote ASoIaF (especially AGoT) immediately after years spent working in Hollywood, and the books have plot beats, cadences and a structure that makes adapting them into TV very straightforward, including semi-regular cliffhangers. Foundation doesn't have that, especially when the studio shot down the idea of an anthology format following the fragmented structure of the first three books more faithfully. The second you have to turn nine short stories and novellas with only limited recurring characters or plot beats, spanning 300 years, into a serialised top-tier TV show, you're going to have issues. And to be frank, Asimov's prose and characterisation isn't remotely on the same plane as GRRM's to start with, so the TV writers were always going to have a much bigger challenge ahead of them. And that's not even touching the 30-year gap in writing the series, after which he came back with a completely left-field idea for continuing the story that doesn't mesh well with what came before (and relies on a completely separate series of books which they don't have the rights to). I'm more astonished that for a writer who's first professional credit was in 1990, Goyer is still such a clunky writer of dialogue.

Yeah, in 40K they have a safe FTL drive which is basically the Alcubierre drive, but that's only effect for star systems that relatively close together. It would still take centuries to traverse the galaxy. For long-range jumps you need the Warp, which requires both the beacon of the Astronomicon (located on Earth, allowing for safe-ish warp transit within a radius of 50,000 light-years) and highly-trained navigation psykers, without which the ship would be lost/destroyed/Event Horizon-ed to hell and back. Even with those things, weird stuff can happen, like a ship comes out of jump ten years after it went into it, but only moments have passed inside. Dune alludes to that as well: there was/still is (and is used in the post-God Emperor stuff) a standard FTL drive which is still too slow to traverse long distances, so they developed the spice-driven fold system later on, after the discovery of Arrakis and the effects of melange..

The interesting thing is that Asimov admitted he completely blanked on how to follow up Foundation and Earth, which is why he wrote prequel novels instead. I have no doubt that he did discuss ideas with people, but they may have been little more than notions he threw around, like Herbert's "notes" for "Dune 7" which ended up being maybe two sides of A4 saying, "BRING BACK PAUL & CHANI AS GHOLAS: COOL OR NO?" Interestingly, the combined firepower of David Brin, Greg Bear and Gregory Benford, who are no slouches, couldn't come up with a way of resolving the story satisfyingly either (not helped by Asimov's introduction of Galaxia as a replacement for the Second Empire, a near-universally-loathed concept among his readers), which is why they also wrote more prequels in their authorised additional trilogy.

No, $6 million per episode in 2010, which given inflation probably isn't far off the same ballpark. Reading the articles, I'm wondering if they meant that they spent $45 million for the season in Ireland. They filmed in several other countries as well and the CG was done in other countries and the music back in the states, so if the real spend was twice that, that would be fairly credible. OTOH, virtually all of the location filming thusfar has been on the same patch of land, and they're reusing the same few sets a lot, as well as using real locations (Trinity College Library is being used for so many different shows at the moment that I think film crews are in there more often than tourists and academics). The costumes and CG are top-notch, and the set detailing is really unbelievably good for television, which does make me think the budget has to be more. I don't think Hari is that psychotic. My guess would be Demerzel: assuming Demerzel is convinced by the psychohistorical argument (as she/he was in the books), the Zeroth Law would allow her to create a situation where a relatively small number of humans was killed if it permitted the survival of the human race later on. Apparently they are allowed to use the Laws of Robotics due to a shared licence agreement, which is weird (as R. Daneel is way more important to Foundation than the Laws of Robotics, so I'd assume he'd be under a similar kind of shared licence).

Apple is still in a building phase and has picked up a lot of new subs from Ted Lasso, but it was starting from a very low base, so it's still not huge. The viewership needed for renewal is thus far lower than it would be for a show on Netflix or Amazon. As for the budget, I've seen several reports that it's only $4.5 million per episode ($45 million for the season), which is at the upper end of a normal network show budget (it seems to be around what Superman & Lois on the CW has for a budget) and way below The Witcher ($7 million per episode in the first season) or Wheel of Time (~$12 million per episode). That's pretty much chicken feed these days.

I think the ship was meant to pick up Raych but he decided to switch his place with Gaal; likely an independent act that Seldon could not foresee. The ship kept saying it was programmed to follow Raych's commands, which was why Gaal couldn't make anything work. For the second point, maybe, but the Anacreons seem to have immediately laid waste to the compound and taken out a bunch of the Foundation. Plus any witnesses to the crime will simply give their version of events, and I'm assuming the Empire has superior truth-detection abilities. I'm not sure what the Anacreon game is here. Other key points from Goyer's Q&A: Asimov had several ideas for how the saga ends and told his daughter about them, which they are using to craft the endgame of the series. The show has been a big hit so far and Apple are very happy with things. The action scenes in this episode were a bit shit because they'd booked to film it after COVID began, so the big action sequences meant to be shot across many days with a huge number of extras were instead shot in a day and a half with 60 extras. TV Seldon is not above instigating events himself and then claiming psychohistory gave him the foreknowledge; he knew bringing Gaal to Trantor would trigger his arrest, so psychohistory had nothing to do with knowing that would happen but he knew he could enhance his mystique by suggesting it did. Foundation was proposed as an anthology series when it first did the rounds and all the studios said no, but they would consider it if it was more heavily serialised. That stopped them from following the books 1:1 almost immediately. Season 2 will primarily adapt the first half of Foundation and Empire from the sound of it, and the trader prince stories from the first book. Bel Riose will be a major character. Material from the prequels will appear later this season, and maybe in later seasons. Jared Harris dressed up as Jason from Halloween to entertain the kids of cast and crew during filming last October.

Ah, that's interesting. They do not have the rights to R. Daneel Olivaw, as a character who originated in the Robots series which is under option elsewhere, which meant they had to change Demerzel's character (and make her a separate entity). He also notes that the relationship between the show and the books is more akin to the relationship between the MCU and the comics than a direct adaptation. Plus, the plan seems to be to show the full span of the Foundation and the full 1,000-year history of the interregnum, which Asimov only got halfway through in the books.

The latter. Part 1 is called Into the Narrowdark, Part 2 is called The Navigator's Children (and I'm hearing the gap between them might not be as long as first thought). Brothers of the Wind, the stand-alone prequel about Ineluki and his brother, is out in three weeks.

Hmm. That felt a bit oddly paced. The flashbacks to Gaal's past felt a little redundant (didn't we cover this previously) and slowed down the on-Terminus action too much. I'm a bit worried that they're dedicating the entire season to this storyline (mixed in with Gaal presumably making her way to Terminus and clearing her name and more of the clone emperors doing clone emperor stuff), which is way too much for another five hours.

Yup, the 1978 BSG got a HD restoration off the back of the reboot so that would certainly be possible.

The big success is the colour correction and the purely live-action footage, which now looks excellent. The upscaled CG is pretty meh, but it's nice to see the full frame CG images again, which hasn't been possible since the original TV and VHS release of the series. There are some hopes that they did all that work for the full-frame images as well, so that if they redo the CGI in the future they can integrate the two pretty easily (JMS was tracking down some of the surviving original CG team a while ago).

I don't think they would set up and show Laconia unless they have a plan in mind in how to deal with it, so it'll be interesting to see how that happens: The Expanse ends in Season 6, but at the end of Episode 6 they announce a spin-off/sequel series, The Expanse: Crusade or whatever, which will adapt Books 7-9 and maybe flesh out those elements to fill up a 2-4 season-long show of maybe shorter episodes. The Expanse ends and they segue into three big(ish) budget Amazon movies, each one telling the story of the last three books. Each movie gets a lot of marketing to try and boost the appeal of the whole series. There is absolutely no plan in mind, they're just ending The Expanse with Season 6 having just adapted the six books semi-faithfully and are basically hoping that something turns up, allowing them to cover the rest at a later date. One thing I do believe is that the plan for 3 more seasons on Amazon was set when Amazon renewed the show, and they made the decision then to build to that across the entire series, regardless if the series got fifty million viewers.

Reportedly the show was one of the ten biggest streaming drama series in the world for Season 4. How Season 5 did is unclear, but I don't think it was a massive disaster. However, it is possible that The Expanse might be getting great viewing figures but not driving fresh subscribers, as compared to something like Stranger Things, Bridgerton and The Witcher, which all drive people to sub to Netflix and then re-sub later on when the next season drops, so they can show how those shows make them money. It appears that when SyFy cancelled the show and they talked to Amazon about it, they decided on a fixed idea of three seasons to cover Books 4-6, with the possibility of a different approach to doing Books 7-9 later on. What that is and how realistic that is, is unclear. We'll find out more after the Season 6 finale. I am wondering if they're thinking of doing a trilogy of bigger-budget movies on Amazon to tell that story, but they didn't want to commit to that up front. People are also forgetting they adapted Abaddon's Gate in 7 episodes, IIRC, and that was absolutely fine. If anything, I felt they had too many episodes for Cibola Burn and probably a couple too many for Nemesis Games, so adapting Babylon's Ashes in 6 is fine by me.

That's a reference to the only time anything like this has happened before: the anime Fullmetal Alchemist, which was produced in 2003 based on an incomplete manga. Because the anime outpaced the manga and the original writer was unwilling to provide a detailed breakdown of how it ended (because she didn't know at the time), the studio made up their own (distinctly weirder) ending. Then, seven years later, they decided to remake the original series with the complete manga to use as source material and more or less the exact same creative team to hand, and they created a new version of the exact same series with a very similar art style. After considering leaving the title the same, they got enough feedback suggesting they needed to differentiate them, so they called the new series Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood. I do think the new series needs a better title. BSG was more or less acceptable because the original show had become fairly obscure by 2003 and was very short, but B5 is better-known now, and will probably have far more episodes than the new version even if it runs multiple seasons and has a great ending. I'd call it The Babylon Project personally.

Once he'd killed hundreds of millions of people, it was the only thing they could do to make him more despicable as a villain.

Missed a trick by not calling it Babylon 5: Brotherhood.

It's been renewed for Season 2 and they confirmed they're going to get into the Trader Princes and then Bel Riose next season, saving the Mule for Season 3, I assume. This was another solid-ish episode, again let down by the Trantor stuff being more interesting than the Terminus storyline, but the Terminus storyline is better than it was. It looks like the Ancreon stuff (just the second and third - of five - stories in the original Foundation) is going to be the focus of the first season, which is remarkable given how little space it takes up in the book.

There's some hard "from a certain point of view" justification going on there. Total lifetime sales of the four Stormlight books seem to be under 4 million (The Way of Kings passed 1 million last year by itself, and Rhythm of War is at 800,000 after a year, so we can assume averaging out sales of 1 million per each of the other books), which is very impressive by modern epic fantasy metrics but microscopic compared to A Song of Ice and Fire, which is well north of 90 million and potentially closing in on 100 million (and still neck and neck with Wheel of Time). Also, given that Tor sell Stormlight but not ASoIaF, Kingkiller or Dresden, I find their assurance they know how much those series are selling comparatively to be somewhat dubious, especially given that Dresden dropped two new books last year and is among the biggest-selling urban fantasy series of all time. Otherwise what the sales blurb tell us is that Stormlight sold more copies of the latest volume in the series published under a year ago than series which have not had a new volume in a decade (although I note they exclude WoT from the comparison, perhaps a sign that WoT sales are surging ahead of the TV show), to which the answer is, "Duh." If The Winds of Winter came out tomorrow, it would (probably) bury the latest Sanderson comparatively. Stormlight's performance is extremely impressive in hardcover, but it's overall sales performance seems slightly disappointing compared to Mistborn, which seems to comfortably remain Brandon's biggest-selling series.

The three clone brothers thing is confusing, which may overcome the interesting idea behind it. The Lee Pace we saw in Episodes 1/2 is the young Terrance Mann in Episode 3, whilst the old Terrance Man in Episode 3 is the young Terrance Mann we saw from Episode 1/2, and the little kid in Episode 1/2 is Lee in Episode 3. They've now introduced Cassian Bilton as a fourth intermediate stage which is adding to the confusion (especially since the jump from the little kid who seemed to be about 10 in Episode 1/2 to the 42-year-old Lee Pace in Episode 3 feels a bit of a stretch, though I think they did try to age down Pace a bit).