Apple's TV show based on Asimov's FOUNDATION, starring Jared Harris

[Lord Patrek]

Thank God there's only one episode left!

I wish I never started watching this crap. . .

[Annara Snow]

12 minutes ago, Lord Patrek said:

Thank God there's only one episode left!

I wish I never started watching this crap. . .

You are aware no one's forcing you to watch? You could drop it now or you could have weeks ago.

[Ran]

12 hours ago, Annara Snow said:

  Reveal hidden contents

I already thought Day would not make the decision that Dusk expects him to make regarding Dawn before I saw this trailer.

I immediately thought that yesterday after watching the episode and was going to make a post about my prediction. Cleon XII/Dusk is a strict traditionalist. Day/Cleon XIII has already shown he was unhappy with Dusk(thenDay)/Cleon XII's methods and criticized him for bombing the two planets - pointing out more problems than it solved. He's done some non-traditional things recently to solidify the dynasty's position, and I thought he may now think that changes would be good for the dynasty, in order to survive and adjust to the new circumstances.

I agree that the genetic dynasty stuff has been the most interesting storyline so far., while the Terminus stuff has been... not that compelling. I'm relieved that Phara's storyline is at least over, though I wasn't thrilled at how it ended.

Same. I thought that she was a potentally compelling character when she was first introduced, but they really gave her nothing to do and she just seems like a temporary obstacle. A waste.

12 hours ago, Annara Snow said:

On the other hand, the stuff with Hari Seldon (or "Hari Seldon") is interesting, but I really don't know where it's going. I'm curious how he'll explain his return (?) to the folks on Terminus.

One bit that gets me is that Seldon was really concerned about being worshipped as some sort of prophet... and then "he" does this big showy appearance that looks a lot like resurrection. The show seems not quite to know how to deal with some of their story here, largely because they really want and need Jared Harris to stick around. 

Were I them, I'd have had Harris appear as a big projection in the sky in an obviously pre-recorded Seldon Crisis report... and then appear after, explaining immediately that he's an AI with Seldon's memory state or whatever. 

 

12 hours ago, Annara Snow said:

I still cling to the theory that he was behind the Starbridge bombing.

Hmm. Interesting. When we first start the show, we've no real sense that Seldon has a great wealth of support or resources... but then we see the Vault and the AI ship waiting for Raych and all this stuff, and yeah, in retrospect it seems like it is indeed possible that Seldon was behind it.

Personally, I side with it having been Demerzel, but that's motivated by the idea that she's still roughly doing the Olivaw thing of following the Zeroth Law.

12 hours ago, Annara Snow said:

In any case, there have been many moments during various voiceovers etc. that I have thought "is this about Cleon or Hari?"

It's a good point. I think the ambiguity is definitely being baked into the narrative.

[Lord Patrek]

11 hours ago, Annara Snow said:

You are aware no one's forcing you to watch? You could drop it now or you could have weeks ago.

I can't. It's like with books. Once I start, it's well nigh impossible for me to stop, no matter how bad it is. I won't be watching season 2, but something forces me to finish this one.

[Werthead]

I'm impressed that so much of the spacecraft work has been done with real models. Very old-skool.

[Ran]

15 minutes ago, Werthead said:

I'm impressed that so much of the spacecraft work has been done with real models. Very old-skool.

Yeah, that's genuinely impressive. How cool!

[Lord Patrek]

I think we can all agree that visually at least, Foundation knocked it out of the park. Especially if the 45M$ price tag is true. The team who handled the visual effects won't have to wait long for the phone to ring for their next gig.

If it was done this cheap and looks this damn good, future SFF productions ought to study what they did and how it was done.

[mcbigski]

19 hours ago, Ran said:

One bit that gets me is that Seldon was really concerned about being worshipped as some sort of prophet... and then "he" does this big showy appearance that looks a lot like resurrection. The show seems not quite to know how to deal with some of their story here, largely because they really want and need Jared Harris to stick around. 

Were I them, I'd have had Harris appear as a big projection in the sky in an obviously pre-recorded Seldon Crisis report... and then appear after, explaining immediately that he's an AI with Seldon's memory state or whatever. 

Don't have Apple TV so havent seen any of this, and from the responses here, I'm probably ok skipping it.  But I don't see how that idea would work well. 

Been decades since I read the source material but I do remember the general WTF moment when the Seldon hologram is talking about the widget crisis when the Mule is taking shit over.  Something to be said for keeping psychohistory mostly accurate to highlight the peril or uniqueness of a trend breaking antagonist. So yeah the 2nd Foundation bails them out, but that was the first, and possibly only time that the over arching narrative was actually threatened.  Everything else up until the universal Gaia stuff from Foundation's Edge was literally pre-ordained.

There's some interesting space to consider AI Seldons in a universe with a 3 laws backstory though.  Or maybe it all goes back to Zeroeth Law on a large enough scale.  Always had a distaste for utilitarianism myself though.  The edge cases get awfully grimy.

 

[Werthead]

12 hours ago, Lord Patrek said:

I think we can all agree that visually at least, Foundation knocked it out of the park. Especially if the 45M$ price tag is true. The team who handled the visual effects won't have to wait long for the phone to ring for their next gig.

If it was done this cheap and looks this damn good, future SFF productions ought to study what they did and how it was done.

It was $45 million spent in Ireland. With the money spent in the other 5 countries they filmed in, the overall budget was a lot higher.

[Lord Patrek]

That's what I thought. But we still don't have any overall figure.

[Spockydog]

I've always been baffled by the talk here of low budgets, when almost every single article you read about this show mentions the huge amount of money (without ever specifying a figure, mind) that has been spent.

 

[Ran]

9 minutes ago, Spockydog said:

I've always been baffled by the talk here of low budgets, when almost every single article you read about this show mentions the huge amount of money (without ever specifying a figure, mind) that has been spent.

 

The only firm number I've ever seen is the $45 million reported by the Irish Times, which appears to just be the Ireland spend. Have you seen a specific larger number somewhere?

[Spockydog]

26 minutes ago, Ran said:

The only firm number I've ever seen is the $45 million reported by the Irish Times, which appears to just be the Ireland spend. Have you seen a specific larger number somewhere?

No, and this has added to my beffudlement. Reading the press around this show, you'd think the budget was way more than £45m. All the pre-release pieces were saying this was going to be a mega-budget production.

 

Edited November 15, 2021 by Spockydog

[Ran]

1 minute ago, Spockydog said:

No, and this has added to my beffudlement. Reading the press around this show, you'd think the budget was way more than £45m. All the pre-release pieces were saying this was going to be a mega-budget production.

 

Yeah. I'm sure it's minimum $90 million, and could be more like $120 million for all I know. But they seem to have been pretty good at not revealing the number.

[Lord Patrek]

Given how good it looks and the fact that they have a few known actors, I don't think it can be less than 100M$ for the season. Likely more.

[Scott_N]

I am pleased I have now finished the season. Like LP, I find it difficult to stop watching mid-season even when I actively dislike what I am seeing.

The final episode was no better than what has preceded it. Certainly Jared Harris cannot save it and all the issues with the pacing, tone, storytelling, weak actors/characters were just as frustrating.

I will, however, concede that my earlier, somewhat flippant, observation that Lee Pace just plays Lee Pace was both premature and incorrect. The only storyline of any interest in this show has actually been the Empire-arc (how ironic) and Lee Pace is its saving grace.

[Ran]

Empire side of the story: fantastic. Lee Pace, Terrence Mann, Laura Birn, Cassian Bilton -- really great. Day's walk with Azura and what he does was really just perfect... and what Demerzel does was not something I expected but which fits very well indeed. More importantly, the reveal at the end about what's happened to the genetic dynasty's purity was a cliffhanger and I wonder what we'll see in season 2 now that it's 138 years later.

Terminus side of the story: ugh. This was basically the nightmare of what a Foundation adaptation could be, bunches of people standing around as one person declaimed then another responded, on and on. Jared Harris must have craved a stiff glass of scotch before each take. Goyer directed this episode himself, so... that probably reveals some of why the Terminus stuff was so stiff.

Then the actual end was... pretty much what I had come to expected. Though how they get back off the planet is a question, given that they don't seem to have a ship...

Edited November 19, 2021 by Ran

[Spockydog]

Sorry, Goyer, but all I could think of was this.

 

[Annara Snow]

1 hour ago, Ran said:

Empire side of the story: fantastic. Lee Pace, Terrence Mann, Laura Birn, Cassian Bilton -- really great. Day's walk with Azura and what he does was really just perfect... and what Demerzel does was not something I expected but which fits very well indeed. More importantly, the reveal at the end about what's happened to the genetic dynasty's purity was a cliffhanger and I wonder what we'll see in season 2 now that it's 138 years later.

Terminus side of the story: ugh. This was basically the nightmare of what a Foundation adaptation could be, bunches of people standing around as one person declaimed then another responded, on and on. Jared Harris must have craved a stiff glass of scotch before each take. Goyer directed this episode himself, so... that probably reveals some of why the Terminus stuff was so stiff.

 

The weirdest thing about that scene was that everyone just stood there as if they had come to a lecture , and listened to "Hari" talk and talk and even asked questions about what he was saying re: history  of Anachreon and Thespis... for some 10 minutes at least before someone (one of the kids!) finally asked "How are you here?"

It's really odd how drastically different the two parts of the show are - everything with Cleons and Demerzel has been really interesting, well written and acted, while the Terminus stuff has, by comparison, has felt generic at its best, and static and dull a lot of the time. It's like watching two completely different shows.

[karaddin]

I think it's a testament to Lee Pace's acting that I keep wanting to give him the benefit of the doubt about coming to a better mind set and then he does something like what he did to Azura (or to Demerzal in the previous episode).

I think Hari was really cemented as by far the most likely culprit for the bombing of the Star Bridge now. His in depth knowledge of the history of Anacreon and Thespis qualifies him as having the necessary knowledge to frame them for the bombing (based on the questions Empire was asking back in ep1/2) and the cut from Hari talking about the need to attack Empire to the scar on Trantor also implies a connection. On the flip side I think what we've seen from Demerzal in the last couple of episodes makes it less likely to have been her actions, although killing Dawn in that fashion does make it pretty clear she's capable of it if get calculations determine its necessary to protect the genetic dynasty. I just think they made it less likely to be the course of action she chooses.