This weekend I watched the first two episodes of FOUNDATION and I have *thoughts*. Spoilers follow…***
I’ll try to break this down into sections…
THE PREMISE – A+
So I really want to like this show: far future galactic empires and a cerebral plot centered around the preservation of knowledge before a coming dark age is right in my wheelhouse. The central premise of the show is that we can’t prevent the darkness, but we can minimize it through action. I love that idea.
THE SPECIAL EFFECTS – A
The special effects are Hollywood level good. I spend a lot of time on Artstation and Deviantart and the like looking at SF art, and you can see the visual artists were definitely inspired by works there. In particular, I think they were hugely inspired by the art of Paul Chadeisson, an artist of whom I am a huge fan. The show takes place some thousands of years from now, so I expected some eye-popping moments, and the show delivered. That being said, I was disappointed that in moments the show opted for the cliched cyber-dystopia vision of the future, rather than a solarpunk one, or something unique and visionary. I did like the Roman-esque architecture of parts of Trantor, the capital planet, but I think they were hitting us over the head a bit too much with the fall of Rome metaphor. Also, the gritty spaceship with lots of railinged gangways and twisting pipes is quite cliched (ahem, Dr. Who, ahem), and I would have liked to have seen a different vision of a far-future spacecraft.
THE ACTING – B-
Here’s where the show starts to falter. Lou Llobell as Gaal Dornick was just okay. Part of this, which I will get to, is the writing. She is presented as a mathematical genius who somehow got access to a rare math text on a planet where curiosity is forbidden. (Get it? A person from a planet that denies curiosity will be responsible for preserving human knowledge?) She grew up on a world that literally shuns science, and yet besides a brief moment or two of her touring the capital planet Trantus, she doesn’t seem all that out of place or wowed by the many technological wonders. In fact, by episode two she’s already in a romantic relationship with a man she just met. Random hookups are fine, but we don’t know what she’s thinking or what she wants, other than a few vague hints here and there, and when you don’t know those things about a primary character, you’re in trouble. We’re supposed to connect with Gaal, but I never did, mostly because I don’t know who she is.
Lee Pace as Brother Day does his best to pull off a cold-hearted ruler of the galaxy, but at times he just comes off as a cosplaying Loki. The young boy, Brother Dawn, does a much better job than him at conveying depth of character and feeling. Terrence Mann as Brother Dusk was mostly forgettable. It says something when the palace painter who appears in one five minute scene before he is brutally murdered is a better actor than the main characters.
Jared Harris as psychohistorian Harry Seldon does a good job of conveying a genius with a cult-like following, but again the writing does him a disservice. For me, Harry never rose above a caricature. I think my favorite actor in the show, two episodes in, is Laura Bern, as Demerzel, a robot and caretaker of Brother Dawn who hides her true self from all but the boy. There was an understated emotion and power in her character that none of the other actors brought forward. And come to think of it now, the show in general lacked that kind of nuance and subtlety in characters that I come to enjoy in shows, like for example the complex characters in FOR ALL MANKIND.
THE WRITING – D
This is where the show falters for me. I understand the difficulty of bringing Asimov’s work to the screen. The books are rather cerebral and dry, and not my favorite Asimov work. Also, the story spans millennia and there are a lot of conference-room like discussions of philosophy and reasoning. Not exactly class-A tension. So the show writers had to make choices: what would add dramatic tension? Oh, a terrorist attack! Oh, the murder of innocent diplomats! Unfortunately, it wasn’t enough, and it was grotesque. The first episode was plodding and slow. I think the writers understood this, so they added a gratuitous terrorist scene where we *literally* watch 100 million people die. Never mind that thousands of years from now a space station that is the primary means for people to visit a planet can be destroyed by two scrappy suicide bombers. For several excruciating minutes we watch people being sucked out into space, or exploding, or falling towards their death. Random human suffering and violence does not substitute for plot. Yes, we get it, the empire is collapsing. I was willing to accept that perhaps this was just a bumpy episode one. Pilots are tough, because the writers have to set up the story, characters, and major themes. But episode two falters in even more ways. Suddenly and without explanation, Gaal is in a romantic relationship with Raych. We are supposed to accept they are a couple now. I think some time has passed (two weeks?), but we never get to see this relationship develop naturally. It just happens. And this is just a cheap setup to try to make the climax more impactful, when Gaal separates from Raych. (More on this travesty in a minute.) In the end, this just muddies the characters and the plot. We can’t care about characters we don’t know.
Also, Harry and his 1200 acolytes are on a 54-odd month trip to planet Terminus at the edge of the galaxy. They are on a ship built thousands of years from now, and yet they still need to do laundry by hand? WTAF?! I think the writers were trying to show that the folks following Harry to the edge of the galaxy were “ordinary” folks, ie not all scientists and philosophers. But a *laundry* room on a spaceship? I get that this future fears robots, but there’s no technology in thousands of years that can clean dirty shirts other than wash & fold? It just came off as silly and a farce, especially when Harry tries to give them a rousing speech surrounded by washers on spin cycle.
Also, Brother Day brutally hanging innocent diplomats and devastating two innocent planets had a very HANDMAID’S TALE vibe for me, but the reason why HANDMAID’S TALE works and FOUNDATION doesn’t is because in the former we are invested in the characters, and in FOUNDATION we barely know any of them.
Finally, the episode completely lost me when Gaal stumbles upon Raych randomly murdering Harry Seldon for no reasons I could discern, then *completely* trusts him when he tells her, “You can’t be here! You have to go!” and shoves her into a liquid-filled escape pod 10,000 light years from frak all of nowhere. And she listens to him, instead of exclaiming, “What the holy frak, Raych?” and tending to a dying Harry. Why does she do this? We don’t know. We never learn who these people are and what motivates them. In the end, what we end up with is a bunch of plot points without connecting glue, and a bunch of deep holes that need filling, and so first two the episodes left me feeling disappointed in the show, and pessimistic that the story is in good hands.
OVERALL RATING (so far) – C-
I really want to like this show, and I know I’m only two episodes in, but so far the writing doesn’t show promise. The special effects are fantastic, the acting is good, but the writing is piss poor. I know Apple TV wants FOUNDATION to be their flagship show, the science fiction GAME OF THRONES, but they should have spent more money on hiring better writers and less on the special effects, because what they have presented to us so far (over two episodes) is an ugly mess badly in need of a rewrite. I will probably watch the rest of the season, but only because (a) I recently got a free Apple TV subscription for three months and (b) the CG effects were quite eye-popping and not something I’ve seen in a lot of recent science fiction tv. But I wish it were better.
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