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

[karaddin]

1 minute ago, Werthead said:

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.

What was the budget for S1 GoT? It wasn't that much higher than this right? Shows how quickly the baseline can be shifted given that was one of the most expensive shows even even at that starting point.

And fair enough on your counters to my ideas, in particular you're probably spot on with the Raych ship bit. I'm mostly just theorising so I at least feel like I'm following lol.

[Clueless Northman]

1 hour ago, Werthead said:

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.

Considering the last books let us assume that the next few centuries are basically how the 2nd empire was Galaxia, Daneel's even more ambitious plan, I don't know how they're going to do it.

 

 

• 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.

Yeah, we've already seen such claims with Frank Herbert. Hopefully, it's not total horse-shit to justify money-grabbing awful retconning fan-fictions, this time. Yet have we heard about these in the last 30+ years, or has this just surfaced for the show? Because so far, the only one who's adequately dealt with his father's legacy and actually published the original texts/fragments is Christopher Tolkien.

[Ran]

I'm shocked by the idea that Foundation looks that good on a budget like that, and I don't think it's true. Vikings and its first season had a $40 million budget ... back in 2013. It's third season had a reported $75 million budget.

It's also been reported that Foundation is the largest production to date in Ireland. I can't square that with that budget.

See has a reported $15-17 million average per episode budget. Ditto The Morning Show. It seems bizarre to me that one of Apple's big swings at drawing eyeballs costs nearly a quarter to a third of those. I could see it floating around $10 million an episode, which also fits Goyer's claim that two episodes together cost as much as one of Apple's original feature films. (Presumably that's the pilot and some big bang-up finale that will actually cost more than the average, with other episodes being less. If Greyhound cost Apple $50 million... yeah, I could see two "spectacle" episodes together being $50 million, and the other 8 episodes being $40-$50 million.)

Edited October 16, 2021 by Ran

[Annara Snow]

10 hours ago, karaddin said:

My attempt to follow what's going on from this episode is that

1) Hari's plan was substantially more detailed than he let on and included his own martyrdom. That was probably an event that was going to happen regardless and earlier on his own terms results in less damage when it happens, so it's the reason Raych did it and why they apparently had this automated ship following along to pick her up. I guess Gaal is his contingency plan, someone who can update his modeling with additional data as the fall starts to happen, but needed to be off the board as events start in motion.

2) The Anacreons plan was clearly to lure an imperial ship and shoot it down, which they've now achieved. It's sufficiently obvious that there's got to be a second layer to the plan and the best I've got at the moment is that they're framing the Foundation for shooting the ship down. The Cleon's immediately assumed the comm relay going dark was done by them after all, and it seems like a fitting first step of revenge for a people who think that's what happened to them - that Hari's followers were behind the attack and set them up to take the blame.

Raych is the true martyr, really. He is kinda like Judas in The Last Temptation of Christ.

Who do we think was really behind the bombing of the Starbridge? My pet theory is that it was Hari Seldon, too.

[Werthead]

13 hours ago, karaddin said:

What was the budget for S1 GoT? It wasn't that much higher than this right? Shows how quickly the baseline can be shifted given that was one of the most expensive shows even even at that starting point.

No, $6 million per episode in 2010, which given inflation probably isn't far off the same ballpark.

Quote

It's also been reported that Foundation is the largest production to date in Ireland. I can't square that with that budget.

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.

Quote

Who do we think was really behind the bombing of the Starbridge? My pet theory is that it was Hari Seldon, too.

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).

Edited October 16, 2021 by Werthead

[Ran]

1 hour ago, Werthead said:

I'm wondering if they meant that they spent $45 million for the season in Ireland.

I think that may be likeliest, as that is the amount of money that would be eligible for tax rebates and subsidies and could be what local press would learn from government disclosuers. But for example none of the VFX companies are based in Ireland, so that wouldn't be factored, and there's like a dozen of them, giving a sense of just how much CG is being put into the show.

I don't think it's See level, because of all the location shooting that seems to entail, but yeah, definitely higher than 45 million euros.

Edited October 16, 2021 by Ran

[Ran]

14 hours ago, Clueless Northman said:

Yeah, we've already seen such claims with Frank Herbert.

Yeah, to be honest, I think this claim to be extremely unlikely to a high degree. Asimov had a good relationship with this daughter, but if she had any interest in his writing it went undocumented by him in his various memoirs and yarns.

Watched the episode, and as a review I saw elsewhere said, it takes a step back and a step forward at the same time... so kind of stays put. But at least we finally get the full story for Raych, and are returning to Gaal and what's going on there.

Think speculations here are right -- the Anacreons are setting up the Foundation to punish them for their vision of Hari Seldon's role in the decimation of their planet, and also get a bit of their own back from the Empire, and I do suspect Demerzel is the architect of the destruction of the Starbridge for 0th Law reasons; this is why her memory of Cleon I's dream of seeing the Starbridge completed was so poignant for her. 

I hated the editing of that fight scene between Salvor and the Grand Huntress, though. Holy quick cuts.

The one part of the Anacreon plan I haven't sorted was the claim that they wanted the crew manifest for the Deliverance or whatever the slowship was called, and Phara said they wanted to commandeer an imperial ship. Why keep lying? I guess maybe she was playing for time to prevent Salvor from contacting the imperial ship and waving them off. But what about the crew manifest part, what's that about?

 

 

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

5 minutes ago, Ran said:

Yeah, to be honest, I think this claim to be extremely unlikely to a high degree. Asimov had a good relationship with this daughter, but if she had any interest in his writing it went undocumented by him in his various memoirs and yarns.

Watched the episode, and as a review I saw elsewhere said, it takes a step back and a step forward at the same time... so kind of stays put. But at least we finally get the full story for Raych, and are returning to Gaal and what's going on there.

Think speculations here are right -- the Anacreons are setting up the Foundation to punish them for their vision of Hari Seldon's role in the decimation of their planet, and also get a bit of their own back from the Empire, and I do suspect Demerzel is the architect of the destruction of the Starbridge for 0th Law reasons; this is why her memory of Cleon I's dream of seeing the Starbridge completed was so poignant for her. 

I hated the editing of that fight scene between Salvor and the Grand Huntress, though. Holy quick cuts.

The one part of the Anacreon plan I haven't sorted was the claim that they wanted the crew manifest for the Deliverance or whatever the slowship was called, and Phara said they wanted to commandeer an imperial ship. Why keep lying? I guess maybe she was playing for time to prevent Salvor from contacting the imperial ship and waving them off. But what about the crew manifest part, what's that about?

 

 

All I can figure is that they wanted something they could recover from the wreckage of the imperial jumpship.

[Ran]

5 minutes ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

All I can figure is that they wanted something they could recover from the wreckage of the imperial jumpship.

Oh, that's right, they said they wanted a navigation unit. Hmm.. but then they said they wanted to commandeer one. I don't know. Is the idea that the Anacreons don't have the tech to get to Trantor, so they need the unit to be able to guide their ships? That could make sense (sort of). 

 

[Werthead]

15 hours ago, Clueless Northman said:

Yeah, we've already seen such claims with Frank Herbert. Hopefully, it's not total horse-shit to justify money-grabbing awful retconning fan-fictions, this time. Yet have we heard about these in the last 30+ years, or has this just surfaced for the show? Because so far, the only one who's adequately dealt with his father's legacy and actually published the original texts/fragments is Christopher Tolkien.

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.

[Ran]

2 hours ago, Werthead said:

not helped by Asimov's introduction of Galaxia as a replacement for the Second Empire, a near-universally-loathed concept among his readers

Yeah. Galaxia was the natural and logical conclusion of what he had been developing, but its promise of a galactic hivemind is somewhat apocalyptic to our vision of what being human is. That's why Clarke's Chldhood's End is basically the story of the end of humanity.

I'd guess the way forward has to do with recognizing that Galaxia itself is in fact a dead end, overthrowing R. Daneel Olivaw, and freeing humanity to live its destiny through a Butlerian jihad an anti-psychohistory crusade (or perhaps find some way to make it impossible for psychohistory to work -- wipe out the Second Foundation, Gaia, and mentalics?) , leaving the galaxy back in a post-Interregnum empire but not on the path to hivemind. Or something. It basically makes Seldon a misguided hero, who succeeds in reducing the 10,000 years of barbarism to 1,000... but also invented a very bad thing that will be misused by Daneel Olivaw in his benevolent tyranny.

 

Edited October 16, 2021 by Ran

[karaddin]

9 hours ago, Ran said:

Oh, that's right, they said they wanted a navigation unit. Hmm.. but then they said they wanted to commandeer one. I don't know. Is the idea that the Anacreons don't have the tech to get to Trantor, so they need the unit to be able to guide their ships? That could make sense (sort of). 

Yeah I think this is getting closer. Maybe something along the lines of having the capability to make jump ships but no way to navigate them yet, that's not an uncommon difficulty in sci fi after all. I'm ok with something relatively derivative when it's just serving the motivations of presumably lesser antagonists - they don't even have to be right. They might get the navigation module and find it does nothing, it's those genetically engineered (this is a guess, I'm not sure) spacers from ep1 that stay awake during jumps which are the key.

Hell I don't even object if they've simply been denied star charts since their planet was bombed and they don't even know where Trantor is anymore. That would make the jump unit the top priority, but the slow ship navigation unit a genuine secondary priority.

I also don't have an answer for how they plan to ensure the Empire doesn't simply talk to the Foundation and have them confirm it was Anacreons who shot down the ship, but I'm feeling pretty solid on the framing being a central part of what's going on.

Oh and Ran - to continue the discussion from last week on needing more than just more set up this week: this was enough to keep me invested for now. I guess it's not pay off per se, but it's rising action and feels like I'm now seeing the story that was only being set up in earlier eps.

[Ran]

6 hours ago, karaddin said:

Yeah I think this is getting closer. Maybe something along the lines of having the capability to make jump ships but no way to navigate them yet, that's not an uncommon difficulty in sci fi after all. I'm ok with something relatively derivative when it's just serving the motivations of presumably lesser antagonists - they don't even have to be right. They might get the navigation module and find it does nothing, it's those genetically engineered (this is a guess, I'm not sure) spacers from ep1 that stay awake during jumps which are the key.

Ah-ha, those were Spacers, not robots/androids! So that led me to a person reporting on a podcast abut Foundation with I guess Goyer, where they reveal that rather than having nuclear energy be the tech know-how that the Empire had a monopoly on (as in the books, but that's antiquated), it's the jumpships and jump technology that the Empire controls. They've done a poor job, IMO, of conveying it on the show that only the Empire has jumpships -- though I notice now, looking at the first episode, that the emissaries from Thespin and Anacreon are brought to Trantor on Imperial ships, not their own. And I'm guessing that this means Hugo and other traders don't have jumpships, they have slow (still FTL, but slow compared to jumpships) ships and need to cryo their way through travel. I think Hugo even mentioned that in episode 4?

So, yeah, Anacreon wants to be able to navigate jumpships... but maybe it also takes Spacers, and not just navigation units, to do the jumps. 

What an interesting turn they've taken on the Spacers. By the time of the novels, they are mostly gone. OTOH, I guess if they are essential to navigation the jump than they are basically a take on the Guild of Navigators from Dune....

My guess at where this is ultimately going: Anacreon ultimately teams up with the radical Luminist Proxima, jump a bunch of planet-killing nukes to Trantor, and blow it the hell up.

6 hours ago, karaddin said:

I also don't have an answer for how they plan to ensure the Empire doesn't simply talk to the Foundation and have them confirm it was Anacreons who shot down the ship, but I'm feeling pretty solid on the framing being a central part of what's going on.

It's true that they finish off with Phara saying Salvor won't talk. Maybe they plan to take hostages and force the Foundation to make up some story about what happened when the Empire comes looking for its lost ship?

6 hours ago, karaddin said:

Oh and Ran - to continue the discussion from last week on needing more than just more set up this week: this was enough to keep me invested for now. I guess it's not pay off per se, but it's rising action and feels like I'm now seeing the story that was only being set up in earlier eps.

I feel the same. Things are moving forward, some things are getting clearer, and they let us off the hook on the Raych situation after hiding their hand for so long.

[karaddin]

1 hour ago, Ran said:

My guess at where this is ultimately going: Anacreon ultimately teams up with the radical Luminist Proxima, jump a bunch of planet-killing nukes to Trantor, and blow it the hell up.

Which pays off and explains the earlier shot that I found quite weird. It establishes both that the religion is a major power and that it has planet killing nukes. Seems a pretty good guess based on what we've got so far.

And yeah, I was very much thinking of the guild from Dune as well but there are equivalents in other properties as well. I think navigation through the void is one of the big challenges of travel in 40k as well? For a tonally very different property I know nothing about.

[Werthead]

3 hours ago, karaddin said:

And yeah, I was very much thinking of the guild from Dune as well but there are equivalents in other properties as well. I think navigation through the void is one of the big challenges of travel in 40k as well? For a tonally very different property I know nothing about.

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..

Edited October 17, 2021 by Werthead

[Lord Patrek]

Finally watched episode 5 and I'm still underwhelmed.

I mean, the production value is amazing. But the pace of the storytelling makes Westworld feel like a balls-to-the-wall show and the scripts continue to kind of suck.

And yet, something compels me to watch the next episode. 

[Ran]

I was poking around a bit more about the Foundation prequels that Bear, Benford, and Brin wrote... and while they are, indeed, prequels, I was reminded of that fact that Brin's concluding volume created a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy for what happens with Galaxia. An old book, but I'll spoiler it:

Spoiler

Hari Seldon and Demerzel/Daneel Olivaw at the end discuss the future, and how Olivaw has set in motion Galaxia. But Hari says to himthat he suspects the Foundation will figure out how to incorporate Gaia into the new Galactic Empire without going all the way to Galaxia... and wagers  that in a thousand years, the Encyclopedia Galactica will continue to be updated. His point being that if that happens, Galaxia has not happened because a galactic hivemind would have no need of updating an encyclopedia or even bother writing anything down.

And the point of that wager is to point out that a lot of the action in Foundation is prefaced, at the start of chapters, with entries from the Encyclopedia Galactica dating to 1,020 or1,054 FE, showing that the Foundation kept publishing new editions hundreds of years after Daneel took on a human, mortal brain to see Galaxia come to fruition within a mortal lifetime.

The Three B's had no idea how to actually achieve that, but they too clearly seemed to think that Galaxia was not a good thing.

 

Edited October 17, 2021 by Ran

[Clueless Northman]

3 hours ago, Ran said:

 

  Hide contents

His point being that if that happens, Galaxia has not happened because a galactic hivemind would have no need of updating an encyclopedia or even bother writing anything down.

And the point of that wager is to point out that a lot of the action in Foundation is prefaced, at the start of chapters, with entries from the Encyclopedia Galactica dating to 1,020 or1,054 FE, showing that the Foundation kept publishing new editions hundreds of years after Daneel took on a human, mortal brain to see Galaxia come to fruition within a mortal lifetime.

 

I was just thinking about that yesterday, thinking this means either Galaxia takes longer to come into being, or something else happened (or Asimov just messed up). Then, considering Asimov's famous short story The Last Question, Galaxia can be a way to go in such a direction of a more hivemind/collective spreading across the universe without mankind being wholly replaced by IA. But of course it means mankind as we now know it would be fully over, so it's understandable many people don't like that Galaxia option.

I was also pondering if Galaxia wouldn't actually put mankind on a similar trajectory to that in the End of Eternity and be a dead-end? A bit like Herbert assumes in Dune, a kind of eternal empire ruling humanity and the galaxy would be a stagnating one and would directly threatens mankind's survival in the long run. Or does it allow enough leeway, evolution and progress to ensure long-term survival? But the alternative of a Second Galactic Empire would also mean most probably a second fall and new dark ages at some later point, tens of thousands of years in the future - unless mankind truly evolves into another version, a Mankind 2.0 that behaves and thinks quite differently.

[Ran]

@Clueless Northman

I guess to a certain degree he messed up, in the sense that after waiting 30 years he wrote the sequels and took things into this wild new direction when he decided to incorporate the Robot works, and specifically R. Daneel Olivaw, into the Foundation universe and tried to make everything united. What he came up with didn't mesh with what had come before.

I find it hard to put the Multivac stories into the robot and Foundation universes, personally, just because of the story "The Dead Past" which simply can't be fitted in with anything else given what happens at the end of it.  But leaving that aside, I mean, "The Last Question" sees that development as something very far away into the future, and even when humans don't have corporeal forms they still have individuality. Great story, that one.

I do think, as I outlined above, that the way to get past Foundation and Earth is to finally recognize that Olivaw/Demerzel is a misguided villain who is leading humanity into a trap of stagnation without being aware of it. I suspect that was the thing that Asimov was unable to wrap his head around, that to avert Galaxia would mean that Olivaw would have to be treated as an antagonist, and I don't think he could bring himself to do that.

[Rippounet]

5 hours ago, Lord Patrek said:

Finally watched episode 5 and I'm still underwhelmed.

I mean, the production value is amazing. But the pace of the storytelling makes Westworld feel like a balls-to-the-wall show and the scripts continue to kind of suck.

And yet, something compels me to watch the next episode. 

Yeah, same here. I really want to see how they develop the story, and the images are often stunning, but the slow pace makes it difficult to really get into.
I read these books a while ago, but I remember Asimov as a plot-driven writer, who didn't favor lengthy descriptions and characterization. It's all the more frustrating to see the adaptation have an agonisingly slow plot, and even go back in time for unnecessary character development.
I can't help but think it would have been more interesting not to focus on characters too much at least in the first season, as a reflection of the predictions of psychohistory. More information (much more) on the Empire would have been welcome, to fully grasp the magnitude of its fall ; this was not in the books IIRC, but it would have been fascinating to explore the workings of psychohistory, instead of keeping it a near-magical deus ex machina. The emergence of exceptional individuals able to invalidate the predictions would have been all the more meaningful later. I think they introduce mentalics way too early. They really should have kept this for the second season. I'm probably alone on this, but I like shows that explore the workings of fictional politics and economics, and Foundation was really the perfect excuse to do that.