When “Foundation” Gets the Blockbuster Treatment, Isaac Asimov’s Vision Gets Lost

An innocent viewer of the new Apple TV+ series “Foundation”—a lavish production complete with clone emperors, a haunted starship, and a killer android who tears off her own face—might be surprised to learn that the novels it’s based on inspired Paul Krugman to become an economist. Isaac Asimov’s classic saga revolves around the dismal science of “psychohistory,” a hybrid of math and psychology that can predict the future. Its inventor, Hari Seldon, lives in a twelve-thousand-year-old galactic empire, which, his equations reveal, is about to collapse. “Interstellar wars will be endless,” he warns. “The storm-blast whistles through the branches of the Empire even now.”

His followers establish a Foundation on the frontier world of Terminus—a colony tasked with conserving all human knowledge—where they spend the next millennium fulfilling “Seldon’s plan” to reunite the galaxy. Left ignorant of its details (such knowledge would play havoc with prediction), each generation must solve its own crises. The Foundation confronts barbarian kingdoms, imperial revanchists, and shadowy telepaths who elude psychohistory’s grasp.

The novels conspicuously lack aliens, mysticism, and other space-opera standbys, not least battle scenes. (“I was so sorry afterward I had not counted the number of spaceships that had exploded,” Asimov wrote in a withering review of the 1978 movie “Battlestar Galactica.”) Their appeal is subtler, relying on the tension between Seldon’s plan and the individuals caught in its weave. They are ordinary scholars, traders, politicians, and scientists: the tale spans light-years and millennia, but never forgets its human proportions.

This is no invitation to cinematic extravagance. Asimov’s saga has been enormously popular since the publication of its first trilogy—“Foundation” (1951), “Foundation and Empire” (1952), and “Second Foundation” (1953)—which sold millions of copies. (Asimov kept writing prequels and sequels until his death, in 1992.) Yet the series’ onscreen presence has been restricted to its influence on other science-fiction sagas, especially “Star Wars.” Zealously noting these homages, Asimov fans have waited decades for their own epic.

Now David S. Goyer—who’s best known for co-writing “The Dark Knight” with Christopher Nolan—has not only adapted Asimov’s saga but overhauled it. Planned for eight seasons, and just renewed for a second, “Foundation” gathers the original’s far-flung strands into an action-packed morality play about agency and legacy, freedom and fate. The series attempts to rescue the novels from their atomic-age limitations but largely squanders its material on a clone of every other blockbuster fantasy quest. Though sprinkled with timely allusions, its hero-centered narrative obscures Asimov’s most pressing question for an era of political and ecological precarity: What does it mean to engage in a survival struggle that lasts far longer than any individual life?

The TV series has three arcs, each dramatizing an orientation toward the future. The first centers on Salvor Hardin (Leah Harvey), the Warden of Terminus, who defends its fledgling settlement from invasion. She’s agnostic about the plan (“Seldon’s gone. When are you all going to start thinking for yourselves?”). But her uncanny visions—linked to a portentous diamond-shaped “vault”—unwittingly advance its trajectory. A few decades earlier: Hari Seldon (Jared Harris) enlists Gaal Dornick (Lou Llobell), a math prodigy from a backwater world, to work on psychohistory, and then, by a cunning stratagem, arranges for their exile to Terminus. The gambit opens Asimov’s novel, but in the series it sparks a season-long argument. Gaal lambastes Seldon’s deterministic saviorism, shouting, “You didn’t care what we wanted, as long as your plan was safe!”

A third narrative unfolds at the imperial palace on the city-world of Trantor, a galactic capital where a “genetic dynasty” of clones has reigned for nearly four centuries. If Gaal, Hari, and Salvor enact an uneasy dance between progress and freedom, the emperors, all named Cleon, stand for unyielding continuity. They are a royal family of three, each at a different stage of life: Brother Dawn, a boy, who learns; Brother Day, an adult, who rules; and Brother Dusk, a retiree, who, naturally, paints, documenting the dynasty’s exploits by adding them to a vast mural. (Its grainy, ever-shifting surface exemplifies the show’s distinctively particulate aesthetic—an Ozymandias of nanobots.) Even at the dinner table, the clones mirror one another, synchronizing their every gesture with neurotic precision.

Lee Pace, with a dulcet voice and a conspicuous chest, gives a mesmerizing performance as Brother Day, whose faltering serenity suggests a man beginning to lose his erection as he bestrides worlds. Day spends his time berating Dusk, molding Dawn in his image, and tyrannizing Eto Demerzel, his robot adviser-mother-wife-slave. Played with cunning and world-weariness by Laura Birn, Demerzel has tended Cleon egos for centuries. But her ministrations aren’t quite enough to salve the imperial insecurities, as unrest threatens to unravel man and state.

Trantor suffers its 9/11 moment when terrorists attack the Star Bridge, a colossal spire that serves as its umbilical connection to the larger galaxy; its fall destroys a swath of the densely populated planet. Brother Day retaliates by publicly executing dignitaries from the suspects’ home worlds; in a mashup of Caesar’s thumbs-down in “Gladiator” and the Death Star’s annihilation of Alderaan in “Star Wars,” a crowd jeers at the blubbering emissaries as he nukes their planets with a two-finger flick of the wrist.

Asimov’s saga has no such clone-emperor theatrics. The empire’s death agonies are dispersed among more oblique episodes—a loss of contact with the inner worlds; a superstitious “tech-man” guarding an ancient nuclear plant—which gather momentum over chapters and centuries. Still, the Brothers Cleon are among Goyer’s more effective innovations, giving the original theme of imperial inertia three all too human avatars. In what may be the season’s most compelling episode, Brother Day endures a trial by ordeal to refute a charismatic priestess, Zephyr Halima (T’Nia Miller), who preaches that the emperors have no soul.

“Foundation” is much clumsier, alas, when it comes to the Foundation; Goyer dilutes psychohistory from a detective story about the future to a cottony utopian ideal. Jared Harris’s Seldon is a bland thought leader who delivers speeches that wouldn’t feel out of place at a political convention. In one scene, he shows up to praise starstruck laundry workers on the colony ship. “Your names will be memorialized,” he says, as “believers who threw their lot in with an eccentric, that pinned the fate of the galaxy on the back of a theorem so abstract, well, it might as well have been a prayer.” You can almost see the yard signs on Terminus: “In this house, we believe that psychohistory is real.”

Gaal and Salvor, who are men in the Asimov saga, are both portrayed by Black women actors—a welcome revision of the original’s first installment, in which exclusively male principals smoke long cigars of “Vegan tobacco.” Yet Gaal, portrayed by Lou Llobell with precocious gravity, is burdened with a strangely racialized origin story: Synnax, her home world, seems to be populated by dark-skinned people who reject the empire and science with neo-primitivist ardor. (The planet’s Atlantean vistas combine a reference to our climate crisis with an opportunistic seasoning of off-brand Afrofuturism.) She defies tradition for psychohistory and Seldon, as if she were born to claim the mantle and correct the blind spots of a problematic white male genius. It’s a winking allusion to the show’s own self-consciously diverse update of Asimov—and exactly the kind of earthbound pigeonholing that limits Black actors in imaginary realms.

A more martial update is foisted on Salvor, played by Harvey with a striking flattop, a black jumpsuit, and an unremitting attitude of frowning concentration. She’s an anxious loner who emerges as a sort of gunslinging sheriff. In Asimov’s novel, by contrast, Salvor is a savvy mayor, who overthrows the Foundation’s pedantic director and forestalls an invasion through shrewd demagoguery. The original Salvor’s motto is that “violence is the last refuge of the incompetent”; the TV show gives the line to her father, and has Salvor march into the Terminus armory to “see what violence we can muster.” It’s a characteristic revision for the series, which strategically bundles amped-up diversity with amped-up action. But why not cast a Black woman in the original role of a crafty pol, instead of as another wide-eyed underdog who grows into an action figure?

The larger problem is that Goyer’s “Foundation” seems bored with its source material. The plot is carefully tailored to Joseph Campbell’s “The Hero’s Journey,” with many of its fantasy embellishments cribbed from better-known sagas. There are transhuman starship pilots à la “Dune.” Math plays a feeble cousin of the Force; Jared Harris’s Seldon looks like Alec Guinness’s Obi-Wan Kenobi, and Gaal, the young outworlder evading her destiny, is an updated Luke Skywalker. Everyone seems to have a special ability, and, where Asimov’s protagonists drew urgency from the brevity of their lives, Goyer’s cheat their way across the centuries with clones, cryogenic capsules, and “uploaded consciousness.” They are supersized heroes gallivanting through a diminished galaxy.

What’s lost is Asimov’s talent for conveying our fragility in the cosmos. His first novel, “Pebble in the Sky,” takes place on a colonized, irradiated Earth, where imperial soldiers mock the local belief that the planet is humanity’s world of origin. “Nightfall,” his most celebrated story, is set on a world with multiple suns, where an eclipse makes the stars visible for the first time in millennia, and creates a planet-wide existential crisis. The “Foundation” saga achieves a yet larger sense of scale through its episodic structure: Trantor, a sprawling city-planet that dazzles Gaal in the opening volume, returns in the next as a world of farmers who sell scrap metal from the endless ruins.

The Apple TV+ series could have tried to craft a new template to encompass these constellations. Instead, it falls back on a sturdily familiar one: a ragtag band facing down a mighty empire, with the fate of the universe pivoting on the actions of a gifted few. It’s an approach that would have appealed to Asimov’s Lord Dorwin, a dilettantish dignitary obsessed with identifying humanity’s original solar system. Rather than search for it himself, though, Dorwin relies on the findings of long-dead archeologists. When Salvor suggests that he do his own field work, Dorwin is incredulous: Why blunder about in far-flung solar systems when the old masters have covered the ground so much better than we could ever hope to? ♦

What’s in the base on your face? Modern day foundations have a rich history that paved their journey toward the remarkable skin-improving ingredients and formulas used today.

The First Foundation

Ancient Greeks and Romans wore versions of foundation containing high levels of white lead and mercury -- a formula that caused lethal poisoning. Nevertheless, extremely white skin remained popular into the 1800s. It represented class and privilege.

Stage Presence: Greasepaint

Modern foundation has its beginnings in the theater. Carl Baudin, a German actor, mixed a paste of zinc, ochre, and lard to hide the joint between his wig and forehead. Other actors liked his concoction so much that Baudin called it greasepaint and sold it commercially.

Not for Breakfast: Pan-Cake Makeup

In 1914, Max Factor introduced his Pan-Cake makeup to make movie actors appear more realistic in close-ups. His version of greasepaint looked more like skin and was the first makeup created for film. Factor's Pan-Cake eventually spawned other foundations and makeup for women who weren't actors.