Cora Buhlert's Blog, page 10

Foundation explains “Why the Gods Made Wine” and still has next to nothing to do with the books

Season 2 of Foundation is currently streaming, so I’m doing episode by episode reviews again. For my takes on previous episodes, go here.

For even more Foundation talk, I was a guest at the most excellent Seldon Crisis podcast and you can listen to us talking about Foundation, Asimov and the golden age of science fiction here.

Warning! There will be spoilers under the cut!

Unlike last episode, this episode does make some progress in the stories of Poly Verisof and Brother Constant as well as Hober Mallow. However, the majority of the episode is devoted to Hari, Gaal and Salvor and to Tellem Bond and her Mentalics.

Poly Verisof and Brother Constant arrive on Trantor aboard an Imperial jumpship with some stunning visuals of Trantor and its docking rings viewed through the hole at the center of the jumpship. Brother Constant is fascinated by the Spacers (Foundation jumpships don’t require Spacers) and the advanced genetic engineering that created them. The Spacer casually mentions that the Empire has long lost these advanced genetic engineering abilities and is instead exploiting the Spacers.

The arrival terminal on Trantor still looks a lot like it did all the way back when Gaal Dornick arrived here back in the very first episode, complete with a giant hologram of Brother Day welcoming visitors to Trantor.

At immigration desk, Poly Verisof introduces himself and Brother Constant as representatives of Terminus on the Outer Rim. The immigration officer icily replies that the Empire does not recognise these worlds. “That’s what we’re hoping to change”, Brother Constant replies cheerfully.

Even though the metal detectors or whatever they are glow ominously red, as Poly and Brother Constant pass through them, they are initially left alone and use the opportunity to take in the sights. Brother Constant, who is after all a girl from Thesbis, for whom Terminus is the hub of the universe, is mightily impressed by the size and grandeur of the city. Poly Verisof not nearly as wide-eyed and impressed, but then he is a lot older and knew people who had lived on Trantor and probably told him about it.

There is a brief conversation, where Brother Constant asks Poly if Trantor really is the heart of the galaxy and how it can still look so impressive and alive, even though the Empire is collapsing. For Constant, there is never any question that the Empire will indeed collapse – she is a true believer, after all. Poly Verisof tells her that the rot begins at the outer edges and takes a while to reach the center.

As for Brother Constant being a true believer, there is a second conversation in which Poly Verisof tells Constant that he believes in Hari Seldon and psychohistory, because he saw Hari Seldon or rather his hologram walk out of the vault with his own eyes. Brother Constant, however, never personally saw Hari Seldon, but only heard second and third hand accounts of his appearance – after all, Poly Verisof is the only surviving person who saw Seldon, everybody else is long dead  – and still believes. Poly Verisof is a believer, but Brother Constant has faith.

This dialogue is not in the books, though it sounds very much like something Asimov might have written. Though I have to quibble that in the original stories, the Foundationers don’t believe in Scientism or the Church of the Galactic Spirit, since they know it’s all a scam to pacify the Four Kingdoms. But then, Brother Constant is from Thesbis. And Poly Verisof, who in the books is one of the few members of clergy who know that it’s all a scam, explicitly says that he only believes in Seldon, because he actually saw him.

Poly Verisof also asks Constant to flush his stash of drugs, because he fears he won’t have the strength to do it. Constant replies that if Poly had the strength to ask her, he has the strength to do it, but then goes ahead and flushes the drug.

However, their discussion about belief versus faith is rudely interrupted, when Imperial guards show up to arrest Poly and Constant very much like what happened to Gaal Dornick and Hari Seldon in the very first episode. They’re even still using the same sensory deprivation hoods.

As for why Poly Verisof and Brother Constant have been arrested, we know that the Emperors Three and Demerzel want to learn more about Terminus and those rumours of flying magicians at the edge of the galaxy and even dispatched Bel Riose (who was last seen two episodes ago) to learn more. And suddenly, two travellers claiming to be amabassadors show up on Trantor itself. Of course, they’ll be arrested and questioned.

Talking of the Emperors Three, the episode briefly checks in with the Cleons. Brother Day is holding a rally in a very Brutalist looking arena. There’s a huge crowd, including Imperial patricians from far flung worlds of the Empire, as well as Dawn, Dusk, Demerzel as well as Sareth and her retinue. Thankfully, the Imperial balcony is big enough to accomodate all of them. Day orates that this arena was once used for bloodsports and gladiatorial games in the Empire’s glorious past, but has since been abandoned. They’re really laying on the Roman Empire parallels thickly, are they?

Day then proceeds to unveil a giant statue dedicated to the last Empress, the mother of Cleon the First. This coincidentally is one of the two giant female statues seen in the title sequence. What I found a bit irritating – beyond the fact that they would simply let a big chunk of real estate on Trantor lay abandoned for decades, if not centuries – is that there is blue sky visible above the arena. In the books, Trantor is a domed city.

Finally, Day declares that Cleon’s mother – who is also Day, Dusk and Dawn’s biological mother, come to think of it – will not be the last Empress after all and announces his impending nuptials to Sareth.  There’s a lot of applause, while Dawn and Sareth make gooey eyes at each other  and Dusk makes gooey eyes at Rue and actually seems to be enjoying himself, because at least the Cleons had a good run. But then, we know that this Dusk is one of the most mellow Cleons we’ve ever seen. Demerzel, meanwhile, looks as if she is quietly planning to murder everybody present. And knowing her, she probably is.

Sareth then steps forward, clad in a flimsy dress that’s clearly held in place only by double-sided tape, and gives a speech of her own, a speech that she clearly did not share with Day beforehand. Sareth declares to the assembled patricians and citizens that yes, she will be their new Empress, but that she will not just lord over them, but that she views her new role as an obligation towards the people of Trantor and the Empire, because the people are all the Empire.

In his review, Paul Levinson compares Sareth to Evita Perón, which is certainly an apt comparison. Another good comparison would be Princess Diana, who also was a lot more charismatic and popular than the rather bland royal she married. It’s also notable that neither woman lived to be forty, Evita Perón dying of cancer at 33 and Princess Diana in a car crash at 36.

Because make no mistake, even if Day actually marries Sareth, she and most likely her entire retinue as well will all die horribly. Day glaring dagger at Sareth and exchanging some very telling looks with Demerzel was foreshadowing enough. That’s also the reason why I can’t really get invested in the whole Sareth storyline. Because it’s very obvious that she will die.

While all this is going on, Hober Mallow arrives aboard the Spirit at the place where Hari Seldon or rather hologram dispatched him. However, there’s nothing there – it’s just empty space. Worse, Becky, Brother Constant’s semi-tame bishop’s claw, is hungry and Hober has no way to feed her.

Before Hober can figure out what to do about Becky, he is interrupted by the arrival of a giant spaceship of a type that we – and apparently Hober – have never seen before. The Spirit is pulled into the giant spaceship, Hober disembarks and meets people floating in zero G inside, who demand to know what he’s doing there. Turns out Hober has stumbled upon – or rather Hari Seldon led him to – the Spacer Hive, where the Spacers breed more of their kind.

The Hober Mallow scenes are brief, but extremely interesting. For starters, the Empire is completely dependent upon the Spacers for interstellar. Without Spacers, there’s no way for the far flung worlds of the Empire to remain connected. Also remember that the Spacer Brother Constant met told her that a) the Empire exploits the Spacers and b) no one in the Empire has the genetic engineering knowledge that created the Spacers.

In “The Big and the Little”, Hober Mallow travels and Korell and Siwenna and realises that a) the Empire’s technology is big and unwieldy and outdated and b) no one knows how to build these systems anymore, so if they break down for good, no one can repair and replace them. Meanwhile, the Foundation’s technology took a different path from the Empires and not only evolved and improved, because also became smaller and more nimble. Hober also realises that though the Foundation isn’t yet strong enough to beat the Empire, in another hundred years or so it will be, especially if Foundation technology keeps improving. The title refers to the contrast between the big, unwieldy legacy technology of the Empire and the small, nimble technology of the Foundation.

In the books, the technology gap involves nuclear power and nuclear powered gadgets, which seemed suitably futuristic in 1944, but is hopelessly outdated today. I think the whole Spacer plot is the TV-series’ version of the story of the tech gap between the Empire and the Foundation. Because while the Empire depends upon the Spacers, even though it treats them badly, the Foundation’s jump ships don’t require Spacers. This gives the Foundation an edge over the Empire. And if Hober Mallow were to persuade the Spacers to turn against the Empire…

The Hober Mallow and Brother Constant and Poly Verisof plotlines are the ones that interest me most, but that’s not where the episode focuses its energy. Instead, the vast majority of the runtime is spent on Ignis with Hari the Second, Gaal and Salvor and Tellem Bond and her Mentalics. It’s not all bad, but it’s not the story I really want to spend a lot of time with right now.

On Ignis, Hari is standing on the beach – a beach which doesn’t seem to fit the rest of the planet or rather this part of it, cause planets are big and have lots of different ecosystems. Salvor shows up patrolling the perimeter and tells Hari that she is feeling uneasy, because she keeps sensing the Mentalics’ dreams. Hari tries to Bond with Salvor, who is his granddaughter after all, and keeps on trying throughout the episode. At one point, we see them fishing together, which Hari enjoys and Salvor very much does not. Hari tells Salvor point blank that he knows she doesn’t trust him and that she is worried Gaal will turn into another Hari (you mean, she’ll stop being whiny and annoying? Yes, please). Hari also tells her again that he didn’t know how serious the relationship between Gaal and Raych was until that night and that maybe Raych should have displayed better judgment and shouldn’t have pursued a relationship he knew would come to nothing. Hari isn’t wrong here, since the entire Hari and Gaal subplot we have been subjected to since season 1 could have been avoided if Raych had simply stuck to the plan.

Hari also reveals that the actual Prime Radiant, the one Gaal hid aboard the Beggar, and the one on Terminus are linked via the Vault, but that neither the Prime Radiant on Terminus nor the Hari hologram on Terminus have the whole picture, lest they accidentally reveal something they shouldn’t.

I honestly wonder why Salvor is so concerned about Gaal. Yes, Gaal is her biological mother, but Salvor’s intense desire to seek her out at the cost of all her other relationships to her mother, Hugo, her friends on Terminus, etc… never really made sense. Also, Salvor doesn’t really have a reason to dislike Hari. After all, Hari Seldon’s hologram swooped in to resolve the first crisis without undue bloodshed and also confirmed that the cause of action Salvor has suggested was the right one. Plus, Salvor grew up hearing how great and important Hari Seldon was. So her feelings don’t make a whole lot of sense.

Salvor continues patrolling the perimeter and meets a little boy, who won’t or can’t talk physically, but who does talk with his mind. He shows Salvor what happened to him and how people who hated and hunted down Mentalics slit the throats of several of them and threw them into a ditch, including the little boy. However, the little boy survived and was rescued by Tellem Bond. He then takes Salvor to meet the rest of the people in the camp – cause everybody seems to live in a very makeshift camp by the seaside. The people surround Salvor, eager to share their stories. Unsurprisingly, the stories are all terrible – people being hunted, locked in cages, hanged. The stories all end the same. Tellem Bond shows up, messiah-like, to rescue them. If you wonder how Tellem can show up in so many different places and presumably on different planets to rescue the beleaguered Mentalics, you’re not alone.

It’s also notable how very low-tech all the persecution and slaughter scenes are. There are iron cages, improvised gallows with hemp nooses, people having their throats slit, etc… Those scenes might have been from any high fantasy or historical show. Which wouldn’t bother except that scenes of mass slaughter in the Foundation stories – which do exist, though they usually happen off stage and we hear about them second hand – aren’t like that at all. There are cities and planets being bombed, people threatened with gas chamber or lethal injection executions, etc… No iron cages, hangings or throat slittings.

A bit later, Hari, Gaal and Salvor talk with Tellem Bond. Tellem explains that the life of a Mentalic usually follows one of two paths. Either they are treated as gods, which isn’t particularly good or healthy for anybody, or they are hunted and persecuted, which is worse. Tellem created her sanctuary on Ignis to offer the Mentalics a third path, a fairly normal, if secluded life.

Hari says that if Tellem and her Mentalics help him and become the Second Foundation, they have the chance to do something important and help the entire galaxy. Tellem, however, doesn’t care about the entire galaxy and its fate. And she doesn’t want her people to fight somebody else’s war, thank you very much.

Gaal then tells Tellem that she has seen the future and that the Mule threatens everybody, including Tellem and her people. Tellem replies that it’s not possible for anybody to see the future. At any rate, she has never met any Mentalic who could. So Gaal isn’t just special among ordinary humans, she’s also special among Mentalics.

The whole thing also doesn’t make any sense, because in the real world precognition is actually one of the most common psychic phenomena. Many of us have had inexplicable hunches – you don’t need to be a Mentalic (and note that we have no evidence that psychic phenomena are real, in spite of years of research). So why would Tellem that while all the other psychic phenomena are possible, one of the most common that a lot of people have experienced in some form, isn’t?

A bit later, Tellem catches Gaal alone inside the Beggar and just lets herself in, which isn’t suspicious at all. She reads Gaal’s mind and sees the Mule vision, including dead Salvor, which seems to spook her. Tellem asks Gaal if she told Salvor about the vision and claims to be sympathetic to their situation. Tellem also tells Gaal that today is Salvor’s birthday, quel coincidence. Meanwhile, I continue not to care if Salvor Hardin dies at the hands of the Mule in the future, because as far as I am concerned, Salvor’s story ended last season and she should have had a long and happy life as mayor of Terminus and heroine of the Foundation.

Finally, Tellem tells Gaal that she and Salvor are welcome to stay and that Tellem would be happy to hand over her “children”, as she calls the Mentalics, to Gaal after her death, which won’t be too far in the future, since Tellem is ill. Gaal can even call the colony Second Foundation, if she wants to. However, Tellem doesn’t want non-Mentalics on Ignis, so Hari has to go. She also tells Gaal that Hari is holding her back and stopping her from developing her skills to the full.

Now there is a Second Foundation in the books, which become prominent in the second half of the original trilogy. And yes, the Second Foundation is composed of Mentalics. However, that’s where the similarities end. Because in the original trilogy, we never see the Second Foundation being established – it enters the story fully formed as a new party in the Galactic conflict. The Second Foundation deals with the Mule and then has to stop the First Foundation from getting too close to them. In the last Foundation novel Asimov wrote, Forward the Foundation, published posthumously in 1993, we do see the seeds of the Second Foundation being laid, when Hari discovers that his granddaughter Wanda, daughter of Raych, has psychic abilities and that one of his psychohistorians does as well. It is implied that Wanda and the other psychohistorian (I forgot the character’s name) will seek out others like themselves to form the Second Foundation. However, there is no Tellem Bond and no, the Second Foundation is not on Ignis (nor on Tarzenda nor on Terminus).

If anything, the whole storyline with Tellem Bond and her persecuted Mentalics reminds not of anything in Foundation, but of the X-Men comics with Hari Seldon (or Gaal) as Professor Xavier and Tellem Bond as Magneto. It’s the same conflict we’ve seen in the X-Men comics for sixty years now – should mutant fight to protect a world that fears and hates them, which is Professor Xavier’s way, or should they only live and work for themselves, preferably secluded from non-mutants, which is Magneto’s way.

Now the roots of the X-Men comics – and much of the Marvel and DC Universes – do lie in the golden age of science fiction, because the people who went on to create those comics grew up reading pulp SFF during the radium and golden age and sometimes the same people wrote for both the pulps and comics.

For the X-Men, the most notable influence is the 1948 novella “In Hiding” and its sequels as well as the 1953 fix-up novel Children of the Atom (note the title) by Wilmar H. Shiras (see reviews by Joachim Boaz and James Wallace Harris here). For some reason, Wilmar H. Shiras is largely forgotten, probably because she only wrote a handful of stories and one novel and then vanished for twenty years. “In Hiding” postdates the earliest Foundation stories, though it was published around the same time  as the later stories “Now You See It…” and “…And Now You Don’t”, which are the ones focussed on the Second Foundation. Other early example of mutants with mighty mental powers being feared and hated by those around them are the 1940 science fiction novel Slan by A.E. Van Vogt and the 1935 science fiction novel Odd John by Olaf Stapleton. I don’t know if Asimov ever read Odd John, but he certainly read Slan and the Children of the Atom stories, since they appeared in Asimov’s home mag Astounding.

In general, worries about evolution – and even more commonly devolution – and where it might go permeated the speculative fiction of the 1920s and 1930s. Among others, they are found at the heart of many a Lovecraft or Robert E. Howard story. From 1945 on, these fears about evolution were joined by fears of mutations caused by radioactivity, once an increase in birth defects was observed in the children of survivors of the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Mutations caused by radiation exposure were a staple of science fiction – in books, comics and films – well into the 1960s. The Mule and the Second Foundation didn’t come out of nowhere, but resulted from the SFF landscape of the 1940s.

So in short, it’s not completely inappropriate that Foundation turns into the X-Men for about half the episode. That said, it still doesn’t really fit, because if I want X-Men, I’ll read or watch X-Men, thank you very much.

Comparing Tellem Bond to Magneto is not all that far-fetches either, for even though I sympathise with her fears about Hari or Empire exploiting the Mentalics, I very much disapprove of her methods. Tellem Bond is a deeply unlikeable character, more unlikeable than Magneto in fact, who has been oscillating between good and evil since the 1980s (I’m not sure what he’s now) and who also has the benefit of having been portrayed by Ian McKellan in the X-Men movies. Tellem Bond has none of that. I’m not the only one who dislikes her either. Paul Levinson also notes how much he dislikes Tellem Bond in his review.

And Tellem Bond gives us plenty of reasons to dislike and distrust her. And indeed Hari says as much to Salvor and Gaal, that Tellem Bond is manipulating them all and that she is after the Prime Radiant. He’s absolutely right, too – well, he is Hari Seldon, after all. But of course Gaal and Salvor won’t listen and instead decide to celebrate Salvor’s birthday, when they see what they believe to be Hari taking off with the Beggar.

However, Hari taking off with the Beggar is as much an illusion as Raych and Hugo were last episode. Instead, one of Tellem Bond’s Mentalics has taken the ship (How can they even fly it, when it’s linked to Salvor and Gaal?). As for Hari, Tellem Bond is torturing him in a highly medieval way by chaining him up in a some kind of tidal pool… and the tide is slowly rising. Tellem wants to know where the Prime Radiant is, but of course Hari won’t tell her. Never mind that he doesn’t know, because Gaal hid it.

As Hari is about to drown, his life flashes before his eyes – and before ours, because we get a lengthy flashback of Hari’s past. It starts off with kid Hari on Helicon, scribbling calculations in his notebook, while his parents are hearding some kind of flying alien monsters called moonshrikes, which look a lot like the Salamence Pokemon, off a cliff using sheepdog drones. Kid Hari calculates the patterns in which the moonshrikes stampede towards the cliff and then goes to prove his theory by standing among the stampeding creatures unharmed. His mother is worried and his father hits him… again.

Next we see Hari as a young academic at university, still on Helicon. His early papers on psychohistory, still very much theoretical at this point, have attracted the attention of the Empire, as one Dr. Tadj (played by Irish actress Fiona O’Shaughnessy, another actress who’s actually too famous for a bit part in Foundation), university administrator cum Imperial agent and Hari’s boss points out. They are arguing when a young woman named Dr. Yanna Kine, who has just transferred from her homeworld Calda to Helicon, interrupts them. Yanna is looking for an office and Dr. Tadj puts her in Hari’s office to annoy him. Hari also is annoyed, until Yanna tells him that she is familiar with his work and believes in his theories and that they will accomplish great things together.

Hari and Yanna work together to develop a prototype of the Prime Radiant and fall in love along the way. Their romance culminates when Yanna tells Hari that she is pregnant and gives him a necklace which allows him to feel with her and her baby’s heartbeat.

However, Hari’s work continues to attract unwanted Imperial attention. Dr. Tadj shows up, bearing a job offer for Hari and Yanna to transfer to Streeling University on Trantor, where they will be much easier to monitor. Hari, however, isn’t interested in Imperial scrutiny of his work and says so. Dr. Tadj tells him that if he and Yanna don’t go to Streeling University, she will terminate all the funds for their research and confiscate the prototype of the Prime Radiant. Hari still doesn’t want to go, but Yanna tells him they should maybe consider it for their own safety and also that Dr. Tadj, since it’s pretty obvious that she is scared of the Empire.

Hari promises to consider the offer, but Dr. Tadj jumps the gun, quite literally, and shows up on Hari and Yanna’s doorstep to abduct the pregnant Yanna at gunpoint. Something goes terribly wrong and Yanna and her unborn child are killed, which Hari senses through the necklace she gave him. He decides to avenge himself upon Dr. Tadj and lures her to a meeting, hacks her car to take them to the same mesa where Hari did his first crowd dynamic calculations as a boy. He uses the sheepdog drones to call the moonshrikes, standing among the stampede unharmed, while Dr. Tadj is trampled to death.

Finally, we see Hari arriving on Trantor at Streeling University with the biggest library in the Empire. He is shown around by a man named Jerril (played by League of Gentlemen‘s Reese Shearsmith), who was revealed to be an Imperial agent way back in the very first episode.

Talking of which, it is very notable how many well known British actors like Philip Glenister, Reece Shearsmith or Fiona O’Shaughnessy shows up in Foundation in small parts, smaller parts than actors of that calibre normally play. Is this a case of actors wanting to be in Foundation, because they loved the books, which is something we see a lot with geeky properties like Star Wars, Star Trek, Marvel or Masters of the Universe: Revelation (which would never have had such a star-studded voice cast, if not for actors being fans) etc…? Or does Apple Plus just pay really well?

The Hari Seldon flashback scenes are very good, even though they don’t really push the story forward. In many ways, this is the TV series’ version of Prelude to Foundation, which has the distinction of being my introduction to Foundation and Isaac Asimov’s work in general. In both series and novel, Hari Seldon’s at this point purely theoretical work on psychohistory attracts Imperial attention and the Emperor, who is named Cleon, wants to use psychohistory for his own gain. In both cases, Hari wants nothing to do with that. I’m sure that any parallels to Isaac Asimov himself, who as a newly minted doctor of chemistry in the 1940s wanted nothing to do with research into nuclear weapons, which did not exactly improve his job prospects, are totally coincidental.

Prelude sends Hari on a mad flights across Trantor with its very different neighbourhoods, inspired by a journalist called Chetter Hummin, who tells Seldon that Cleon and his first minister Eto Demerzel are planning to have him arrested to forcibly take his research. In truth, Chetter Hummin and Eto Demerzel and yes, they’re both the robot Daneel R. Olivaw, though Daneel/Demerzel/Hummin is male in the books. Hari does end up at Streeling University for a time and teams up with a female historian who helps him to turn psychohistory into more than a mere theory. However, that female historian is called Dors Venabili not Yanna Kine. Dors is also a robot, who protects Hari Seldon and keeps an eye on him on Daneel’s order. And no, Yanna is not Dors by another name, if only because robots can’t get pregnant. After the ground gets too hot at Streeling University, Hari and Dors go on the run and have more adventures and pick up an adorable street urchin named Raych. Dors is eventually killed in Forward the Foundation, the next book in the series, though there is no Dr. Tadj involved.

So in short, I liked the Young Hari flashbacks, since this is probably the closest we’ll ever get to an adaptation of Prelude to Foundation. That said, they still feel oddly shoehorned into what is supposed to be a mash-up of “The Big and the Little” and “The General/The Dead Hand”, two stories that happen much later. Never mind that the flashbacks are almost ridiculously long, considering that this is something that Hari sees while he’s drowning. And Hari does not take twenty minutes to drown.

The episode finally ends with Hari supposedly drowning. Though I’m pretty sure he’ll be saved in the nick of time and not just because yesterday was Jarred Harris’ 62nd birthday. And even if not, there’s still Hari’s twin on Terminus.

This episode is not all bad, though it spends way too much time on Ignis with the Mentalics and not enough on any of the other storylines. And indeed the Stars End podcast and Paul Levinson both agree that there was way too much Ignis and also too much focus on Hari, even though pretty much everybody liked the Young Hari flashbacks. Only Geek Girl Authority reviewer Julia Roth actually seemed to enjoy the Ignis scenes, but then she latched onto Gaal and Salvor as characters and is invested in their relationship. If you think that Gaal and Salvor are kind of superfluous at this point in the story, the Ignis scenes are a lot less compelling.

Meanwhile, I continue to wonder who the target audience for this show is. It’s clearly not the fans of the books or fans of intelligent, idea-driven science fiction in general, because the show just isn’t catering to them at all beyond giving the occasional lip service to the originals. I still think that a more book accurate adaptation would have worked, especially considering how many politicians, scientists, tech business people, etc… have been deeply influenced by the Foundation books over the years in spite of their many flaws. And clearly the writers and showrunners wanted to make a more accurate adaptation, but the higher ups at Apple Plus nixed that idea, because they underestimate the audience as usual.

So who is the show for? The mainstream mundane audience which turned Game of Thrones into a major cultural phenomenon? IMO chasing the mainstream audience is futile, because these people are fickle. They want to watch the show everybody else is watching and they have long since moved on to Succession or Yellowstone or The White Lotus or And Just Like That or some other soap opera about rich people being awful and they only ever watched Game of Thrones for the sex scenes anyway. The mainstream audience occasionally latches onto a good show – Only Murders in the Building seems to be a current example – but chasing them is pointless, especially for a genre show. Game of Thrones was an outlier. But the mainstream folks who watched Game of Thrones won’t necessarily watch another SFF show, no matter how well made. I remember one review saying that Succession had all the backstabbing intrigue of Game of Thrones without those irritating dragons and white walkers and swordfights and weird costumes, complete failing to understand that for many of us, the dragons and white walkers and swordfights and weird costumes were the reason to tune in and that we don’t care about rich people in grey suits and grey offices being awful.

If I sound a bit cynical here, maybe that’s because I spent way too much time trying to connect with these mainstream viewers and readers, trying to discuss the movie/TV show/book of the hour with them and recommending other, lesser known books, movies or TV shows that they might enjoy, if they liked the popular thing. Only to realise that they only liked the popular thing because it was popular and because all their friends were watching or reading it. They didn’t care about other, often better works in the same vein, because their friends weren’t talking about those things, only weird people like me who don’t watch normal TV shows and movies and don’t read normal books.

These people have also been around for as long as I can remember. Back in the 1980s, Dallas and Dynasty were the shows that everybody talked about and everybody had to watch. So I tried to watch them – which wasn’t easy, because they were on after my bedtime – because I thought if everybody kept talking about those shows, if every second article in a TV mag was about them, they had to be good. Only that they weren’t. They were pretty bad, elevated only by a few good actors like Larry Hagman and Joan Collins who clearly knew how crappy those shows were and camped it up like nobody’s business. As for books, I remember when everybody read The Mists of Avalon (much as we would prefer to forget it, that book was a genuine mega-bestseller) and The Name of the Rose, even people who would otherwise never touch a fantasy novel or a historical murder mystery full of literary allusions.

So who is Foundation for? The general genre/geek audience? Apple Plus TV seems to be aiming at that audience, since they have a lot of SFF shows like Silo (you may remember the story from when it was still called Wool), See, For All Mankind, Severance, Invasion, etc… And aiming at a geek audience is not a bad idea for a streaming service, because SFF people are loyal to their shows, frequently have disposable income and are willing to spend some of it on entertainment. CBS All Access/Paramount Plus basically used Star Trek to build its subscriber base, because the only other original programming they had was the very mainstreamy The Good Fight and not a lot of people would be willing to pay solely for that.

However, there is a lot of SFF programming out there aimed at the genre audience, much of it good. There’s more Star Trek and Star Wars related TV shows out there than any one person can watch. Plus all the Marvel shows and all sorts of other SFF and horror related shows and movies. And frankly, the various Star Trek, Star Wars and Marvel shows probably have a much broader appeal than Foundation, which – though based on a beloved series of books – isn’t the most easy to series to connect with.

Right now, it seems as if the only people actually watching Foundation and talking about it are people who loved the books and are mostly frustrated by the TV-show, while both the mainstream and the geek audience are watching other shows.

Foundation meets “The Sighted and the Seen” and has nothing whatsoever to do with the books

Season 2 of Foundation is currently streaming, so I’m doing episode by episode reviews again. For my takes on previous episodes, go here.

Warning! There will be spoilers under the cut!

Were you as eager as I to learn more about the mysterious mission which Hari Seldon entrusted to Hober Mallow last episode? And do you want to know how Poly Verisof and Brother Constant will fare on their peace mission to Trantor?

Well, tough luck, cause this episode doesn’t address any of that. Instead, we get a whole lot of stuff about the adventures of Hari the Second, Gaal and Salvor as well as some palace intrigue with the Cleons on Trantor. Never mind that almost none of this has anything to do with the books.

The episode opens with the now newly embodied Hari the Second remembering his “death” at the hands of Raych. It’s an emotional scene and it’s also nice to see Alfred Enoch as Raych again, even though we already knew what happened the night Hari died.

Hari wakes up, feeling the stab wound on his brand-new body, only to find himself confronted by Raych again. Raych who is dead and has been dead for approx. 150 years at this point. “Raych” accuses Hari of not giving a damn about other people and being willing to sacrifice everybody in the pursuit of his grand plan. He’s not even wrong, though it’s clear in both the books and the TV-series that Hari loved Raych like his biological son. Hari is also fated, in both the books and TV-series, to see him die and outlive his kid. It’s only now that Hari finally gets around to mourning Raych, even though – to be honest – Raych partly brought his fate upon himself, because if he had used the escape pod as planned, he would have survived.

Raych vanishes and Hari wakes up for good. He cuts himself in the palm with Raych’s knife and yup, it bleeds. Hari had a body again. Then he stumbles around the Beggar. “Well, he hasn’t had legs in 150 years”, Salvor comments dryly.

Gaal is somewhat more concerned about Hari and also asks the question that has been on everybody’s mind since the end of episode 3. How in the galaxy did Hari get a body again?

If you’d hoped this episode would give us an answer to that question, well, tough luck. Cause it turns out that Hari has no idea how he came to have a physical body again. He remembers being in a cave with Kalle, when everything went dark, and then waking up aboard the Beggar in a brand-new body. As explanations go, this is deeply unsatisfying.

Salvor has a theory that “Kalle” cloned Hari and also notes the irony that Hari has now become something much like the Cleons whom he despises. Salvor has also been scanning communications – unlike Gaal and Hari, she is the practical one – and notes that the Foundation has spread all over the Outer Rim by now (though I wonder how Salvor can easily scan Foundation communications on the Outer Rim, while the Empire physically needs to send Bel Riose to investigate) and that they have established a religion that worships Hari as a prophet. Hari replies that this isn’t his doing, but “the other one’s”, i.e. Vault Hari on Terminus, but that this development was also inevitable, because “people do love to kneel”. Hari clearly has the cynical view of organised religion that permeates the original Foundation stories and much of Golden Age science fiction.

Before our intrepid trio can delve some more into the mystery of Hari’s new body, they are interrupted by the Beggar finally arriving at Ignis. The planet is habitable – and part of the approx. thirty percent of planets in the known galaxy that look like British Columbia – but has been abandoned by humans ever since the Empire pulled out centuries, leaving behind some ruined summer palaces. Honestly, why is the Empire pulling out of so many planets and just leaving them abandoned? Abandoning Oona’s World I can understand, because it’s a barren world only of use for mining, but Ignis looks lush and pleasant and like a good place to live. However, Gaal, Hari and Salvor don’t really wonder about that, for the far more pressing question is: If Ignis is uninhabited, then what is this “signal” that Gaal and Salvor are receiving?

With some difficulties and damage to the local flora – I guess it was time for another random action scene – the Beggar lands on Ignis. Salvor is certain that someone has been watching them, so she grabs her rifle and heads out onto the unknown planet to confront whoever it is. I know that patrolling perimeters (and not in the sense I’ve been using that term in my Masters of the Universe toy photo stories) is kind of what Salvor does, but heading out into the wilderness of an unknown planet, where heaven knows what kind of hostile wildlife might be waiting, does not strike me as very smart. Gaal clearly agrees and displays some maternal worries. Hari tells her that she shouldn’t let her vision of Salvor’s death at the hands of the Mule get to her. Though to be honest, Gaal’s vision should actually make her less worried about Salvor, because if Salvor dies on Terminus at the hands of the Mule some 130 years in the future, she certainly won’t die on Ignis in the here and now.

Hari also acknowledges that Salvor is his granddaughter and that he thinks he wouldn’t have broken up Gaal and Raych, if he’d known that they were going to have a baby, whereupon Gaal replies that she and Raych hadn’t yet decided whether to have the baby. There’s also a line that there’s a difference between an embryo and a person, which is directed at contemporary US audiences more than at anybody in the show.

While Hari and Gaal are arguing, Salvor is exploring the planet. She realises that someone is following her and attacks and disarms that person. Salvor’s stalker is wearing a mask, so Salvor orders him to take it off. So he does and lo and behold, it’s Hugo Crast, the Thesbian trader who was Salvor’s lover in season 1. However, that was 134 years ago, so Hugo should be long dead by now. And indeed Salvor asks him exactly that: “How can you be alive?”

The explanation Hugo comes up with does make sense. Once he realised that Salvor had put herself in cryosleep, Hugo put himself in cryosleep as well and programmed the pod to wake him up once Salvor woke up. Then he went in search of her and only just caught up with her. Salvor is satisfied with this explanation and hugs and kisses Hugo. The viewer is more sceptical, especially since Hugo Crast was commanding the jumpship Invictus that last time we saw him and it didn’t seem as if he would abandon that post to run off after Salvor. That said, whoever “Hugo” really is, it was nice to see Daniel MacPherson again.

Salvor takes “Hugo” back to the Beggar, only to find that Hari and Gaal are none too keen on meeting their son or respectively grandson-in-law. They are also considerably less willing than Salvor to accept that “Hugo” is who he claims to be. So Hari and Gaal scan “Hugo” and compare the data to Hugo Crast’s data stored in the Beggar‘s computer and find that his weight is off by 3.5 kilograms. Which is not impossible, but suspicious. Hari then tells Gaal to hide the Prime Radiant and orders Salvor to return the genetically encoded controls of the Beggar to Hugo (it was originally his ship, after all). If “Hugo” is who he claims he is, the ship should recognise him. But of course, the Beggar doesn’t recognise “Hugo”, who promptly changes his appearance to a completely different person and attacks Salvor. Worse, he’s brought friends. They force their way aboard the Beggar, overpower Hari, Gaal and Salvor and take them all prisoner.

Hari, Gaal and Salvor come to again in one of the Imperial ruins scattered around Ignis. They assume they are prisoners and Salvor’s rifle is gone, but when they try the door, they find it unlocked. Gaal claims that she hears voices, so the three of them follow those voices and find some people in white robes assembled in a large chamber. The people seem friendly enough, even though they are clearly the same people who attacked them and took them prisoner.

The people are gathered around a little girl in a white dress, who introduces herself as Tellem Bond, a reincarnation of a goddess. However, Hari doesn’t particularly care for goddesses and he does have some experience with scam religions, so he quickly points out that the supposed “goddess” doesn’t cast a shadow. Once calls out the alleged “goddess” as a fraud, the little girl vanishes and a woman, played by New Zealand actress and director Rachel House, steps forward and introduces herself as a real Tellem Bond. She’s not a goddess either, but a telepath or rather a “Mentalic”, which is the preferred term in the Foundation series.

On Ignis, Tellem Bond has established a refuge for people with psi powers like herself, since they tend to be persecuted all over the galaxy, and sent out a psychic signal. Since both Gaal and Salvor have psionic abilities, they received the signal, which brought them to Ignis. As for the fake Hugo and fake Raych, that was the Mentalics as well. Indeed, Salvor even confronts the man who pretended to be Hugo and she’s not happy, especially since she kissed faux Hugo. Faux Hugo apologises and tells Salvor that he had no idea she’d kiss him. Yeah right, dude. We totally believe that a telepath had no idea Salvor would kiss him.

Hari doesn’t have any psychic abilities, of course, but is nonetheless pleased to meet Tellem Bond and her flock, because he has use for telepaths. Tellem Bond replies that they will discuss all that later, but first everybody must rest. Besides, Hari, Gaal and Salvor are not shielding their thoughts, which is unpleasant for the telepaths.

However, once Hari, Gaal and Salvor have wandered off to relax, the faux Hugo comes to Tellem Bond and tells her that he overheard Hari telling Gaal to hide something called the Prime Radiant. Tellem Bond nods that that’s apparently the thing Hari, Gaal and Salvor tried very hard not to think about. She then dispatches faux Hugo to find and destroy the Prime Radiant, so “there will be no Second Foundation”.

Now there definitely are people with psychic powers in the Foundation stories – the original stories were published in Astounding in the 1940s after all and Astounding editor John W. Campbell was very fond of stories about people with psychic powers. The Mule, whom we biefly saw in a flash forward in episode 2, is one notable example of a Foundation character with telepathic powers. Another example is the Second Foundation, i.e. the very organisation Hari is trying to establish. Finally, the robot Daneel R. Olivaw a.k.a. Eto Demerzel has telepathic abilities as well, which allows them to evade detection for millennia.

So are the people on Ignis the Second Foundation or rather the people who will become the Second Foundation? The fact that Tellem Bond explicitly wants to prevent the establishment of a Second Foundation would seem to be an argument against that. Never mind that the Second Foundation is not on Ignis – nor on Tarzenda nor on Helicon nor on Terminus. And yes, the TV show could change that. But honestly, the reveal where the Second Foundation really is one of the stand-out moments in the series and one you really don’t want to ruin.

Are the people on Ignis affiliated with the Mule? It’s possible, though the Mule shouldn’t even have been born at this point in time. Is Ignis perhaps Gaia? God, I hope not, because if I never have to see fucking Gaia again, it will still be too soon. Honestly, the introduction of Gaia in the 1980s sequels ruined Foundation and dragged what had been an amazing series up to that point into the mud – quite literally since the Gaians share a group consciousness with every lizard, plant and stone on their planet.

***

Meanwhile on Trantor, Queen Sareth is still trying to figure out who killed her family and if the Cleons were responsible. She also wants to know who tried to kill Brother Day.

Sareth and her adviser Rue meet under the banyan tree with the Imperial guardsman Markley who’s spying for them. Markley reports that the assassination attempt took place in Day’s bedroom and that all recordings were erased. This prompts Sareth to decide that she has to get into Day’s bedroom to take a look around for herself. And since Day wants to marry her, getting into his bedchamber shouldn’t be too difficult. Rue, who knows a thing or two about Dawn, Day and Dusk, cautions her against this, but Sareth is determined.

Meanwhile, Day informs Demerzel that – quote – “Sareth wants to copulate” (a true romantic, isn’t he?), which means that his wedding plans have taken a step forward. However, Day is uncertain, because he hasn’t had sex with anybody except Demerzel in a long time now, if ever. Indeed, it’s quite possible that this Day has never had any sexual experience other than with Demerzel. There is a reason those naked people in the Gossamer Court prefer to amuse themselves with each other, since these incarnations of Dawn, Day and Dusk don’t seem to be particularly interested in them.

Demerzel assures Day that everything will be all right and that she will be nearby. She also tells him to think of her, while he’s having sex with Sareth, which sounds a lot like “Close your eyes and think of England” to me. Then Demerzel leaves through one door, while Sareth enters through the other. Cue one extremely awkward sex scene.

There’s a bit of banter as Sareth pretend to admire Day’s gilded art deco bedroom, while surreptitiously looking for evidence of the assassination attempt such as hastily covered up blaster marks or blood splatters. Talking of which, those repairs look extremely shoddy. Yes, the Empire is in decline, but are they so much in decline that they can’t even properly repair blood splatters or blaster marks anymore? Joseph Kolacinski makes the same point in his review.

Eventually, Day gets impatient that Sareth is more interested in his bedroom than in him. Day and Sareth fall into bed and things get very awkward with bumping against the bed, bodyparts getting into the way, etc… As sex scenes go, this awkwardness is a lot more realistic than what movies and TV usually serve up.

However, this coitus is decidedly interruptus, because Day isn’t stupid and knows that Sareth has been checking out his bedroom for signs of the assassination attempt and point blank accuses her of having been involved with that attempt. Sareth replies that yes, she was checking out the damage, but because she’s afraid and worried if Day can keep her safe. Day declares that he’s been turning Trantor inside out to find out who is behind the assassination attempt and that he will find the traitors and bring them to justice. Sareth agrees to marry him, if he can keep her safe and find the perpetrators. Then she leaves.

As soon as Sareth is gone, Demerzel returns and you just know that she’s been eavesdropping on everything. Day actually thinks the encounter went well – he really has zero experience, does he? – and declares that he and Sareth are now engaged. He also points out that Sareth suspects that he was involved with the death of her family. Demerzel, who still steadfastly ignores the Three Laws of Robotics, assures Day that there is no way to trace the murder of Sareth’s family back to them. So yup, Sareth is right. Day and Demerzel did arrange for the murder of Sareth’s family.

While Day is having his most awkward sexual encounter with Sareth, Dusk is enjoying a much more satisfying sexual encounter with Sareth’s advisor Rue. When we first see them, they are enjoying a moment of postcoital bliss, while watching a recording of Dusk’s – then still Day – meeting with Rue in the Gossamer Court years before. Of course, just letting Rue view those recordings kind of defeats the purpose of erasing her memory – though we learned last episode that Dominion technicians were able to reverse the memory erasure anyway.

Yes, a large part of the Trantor storyline involves people having sex, a fact the Stars End podcast also points out. Indeed, the amount of sexposition, i.e. worldbuilding information delivered during the sex scenes, in season 2 of Foundation is quite notable. And while the Day/Sareth awkward coitus interruptus and the Dusk/Rue postcoital bliss are at least tastefully done, I still found myself groaning a little bit, because honestly do we still need to insert random sex scenes to keep the mundanes watching?

Shortly after watching the episode, I also came across this tweet. And my first thought was Foundation, though it applies to many TV shows:

What movie is this? pic.twitter.com/IW53lnELfW

— wild (tiktok) screenshots (@wildtiktokss) August 16, 2023

Dusk asks Rue if she was aware that part of her memory was missing. Rue replies that she remembers talking to Dusk in the Gossamer Court and then remembers being on a spaceship back home, but that she never noticed that anything was missing. This makes Dusk thoughtful. For if Rue isn’t aware that part of her memories are missing, then how can Dusk be certain that he still has all of his memories?

This realisation clearly eats at Dusk and so he talks Demerzel, who informs him that only Day can alter Dusk’s and Dawn’s memories. This does not exactly reassure Dusk, since he points out that all three of them are the Empire and so Day shouldn’t be making any decisions regarding Dusk and Dawn. Demerzel assures Dusk that she serves the Empire as a whole and that everything that ever happened is recorded in her memory and that she would of course inform Dusk, if Day had any of his memories erased. Yeah, I no more found that reassuring than Dusk did.

At any rate, Dusk is no more worried than ever that part of his memory has been erased. So he grabs Dawn, who seems to have very little interest in anything, and goes to talk to Cleon the First or rather his hologram. Because yes, all the subsequent Cleons have access to an interactive hologram of Cleon the First. That man truly was a control freak.

Hologram Cleon is activated by his successors putting their palms to Cleon’s glass coffin. Dawn asks what will happen if the genetic drift has progressed so far that the palm prints no longer match. Dusk tells him that if the palm prints don’t match, they will both die, but that Dawn shouldn’t be worried. Yes, that’s very reassuring.

Luckily, the palm prints match and Cleon the First or rather his hologram, appears, played by Terrence Mann, who also plays Dusk. However, hologram Cleon is clearly trying to outdo Hari Seldon’s hologram in making vague and unhelpful pronouncements. He basically tells Dusk and Dawn that it’s impossible for the Emperors Three to have conflicts and squabbles among themselves, because they are aspects of the same person. Which is not very helpful at all.

However, Dusk has a different idea, so he drags Dawn to the Memorium, where recordings of the memories of the Cleons as well as of all the staff are perpetually stored. The ever-present murals are there – by now the Cleons have clearly run out of walls and are painting on every available surface.

Dusk tells Dawn that Day was always ambitious and eager to leave his mark on history, even as a child. Day was the one who completed the rings and also insisted on making sure they were visible from the surface of Trantor (which is weird, because trantor doesn’t really have a surface, it’s all domes) as a constant reminder to the people of Trantor that they are shackled to his greatness. And Day wants to be the first Cleon to reproduce the regular way. Dusk, meanwhile, was content to enjoy himself, paint murals and let Demerzel handle the peacekeeping duties. He also tells Dawn that he should be glad that he’ll never be Emperor, if Day’s plan to found a dynasty of his own comes to fruition (which it won’t), because that means that Dawn will have the one thing Dusk always wanted and never got: A normal life. Honestly, this Dusk must be the most mellow Cleon we’ve seen so far. Dawn, on the other hand, doesn’t seem to be all that keen on a normal life.

Finally, Dusk orders the keeper of Memorium to download the complete memory files of all the Dawns, Days and Dusks all the way back to Cleon the First. Because Dusk figures that even if he cannot remember whether he’s missing part of his memories, comparing the size of his memory file to those of previous Dusks should show if something is missing. Upon first glance, the file sizes for Dawn and Dusk look just as they should. However, then they chance to see the size of the memory file of Cleon the First and it’s more than twice as big as those of any other Dusk. So it isn’t just this Dusk and Dawn who have had their memories tampered with. It’s all of them, every single Dusk, Day or Dawn that ever was.

The memory tampering, which the person itsef never notices, but which shows up in recordings is very reminiscent of the so-called “tamper plateaus”, which play an important role in “…And Now You Don’t”, the last of the original Foundation stories from the 1940s. Tamper plateaus are an unusual plateau-like patterns that shows up on an EEG graph, which indicate that someone’s mind has been tampered with by the telepaths of the Second Foundation. Mid-century science fiction was fascinated by EEGs as a means of detecting psionic abilities or activities – aside from Foundation, it also shows up in Anne McCaffrey’s 1973 story “To Ride Pegasus”.

I read both the Foundation stories and “To Ride Pegasus” around the same time, when I was given an EEG to determine if there was a neurological reason for migraine headaches (there wasn’t). So of course I quizzed the poor EEG technician whether tamper plateaus or detecting psionic abilities via EEG was possible. The guy’s response was, “No, of course not. And now can you please hold still and let me attach the electrodes?”

Electroencephalography was still a fairly new technology, when the Foundation stories were written. The first animal EEG was made in 1912, the first human EEG in 1924. EEGs were already used by World War II to monitor pilots for epileptic seizures, but further potential of the technology was still far from explored, so it makes sense for EEGs to be used to detect psionic activity (and frankly, if psionic abilities did exist, they would likely show up on an EEG) and memory tampering in science fiction. Nowadays, however, EEGs are commonplace and we know how they work and that tamper plateaus aren’t actually a thing. So it makes sense to have potential memory tampering show up in stored memory data instead.

While Dusk and Dawn are realising that all the Cleons save the original have had their memories tampered with, Sareth and Rue meet with Markley once more to find out more about what happened in Day’s bedroom during the assassination attempt. Sareth wants to see Day’s memory recordings of the assassination attempt. Markley tells her that’s impossible and that there’s no way he can get his hands on the memory recordings of any Cleon. However, Rue has an idea. If Day indeed survived an assassination attempt, someone must have treated him and tended his wounds. So they sent Markley to retrieve the memory recordings of the medical staff. This works surprisingly well, too. Markley tells the Memorium keeper that Day wants to see all the recordings from the medical staff and the Memorium keeper just hands them over. There is zero security and the possibility that there might be a spy, traitor or double agent in the palace doesn’t ever seem to have occurred to anybody, even though exactly that happened in season 1 with the gardener who seduced Dawn.

A bit later, Sareth and Rue are poring over the memory recordings of the night eyeless ninjas tried to kill Day. They see Demerzel carrying a wounded Day to the medical facility and giving orders to the staff. “She must have been with him, when it happened”, Sareth exclaims and quite possibly it’s dawning on her just what Day and Demerzel were doing, when the eyeless ninja assassins rudely interrupted them.

However, things get a lot more interesting, when Demerzel comes into view of the doctor whose memory recording they are accessing, with half her head missing and liquid that’s definitely not blood dropping down her face.

Sareth and Rue briefly discuss how what they’re seeing is even possible, until they finally realise that Demerzel isn’t a clone, like they had previously assumed, but a robot. Even though there supposedly haven’t been robots in thousands of years. “But I shook her hand”, Sareth exclaims, “It felt warm, alive.”

This moment confirms that Sareth, Rue, Markley and the bearded bodyguard who never gets a name will die horribly. For even if Day is going to let them live – and this Day is more erratic than most of them – there’s no way that Demerzel is going to let anybody not named Cleon live with the knowledge of what she is. And Demerzel is a lot more dangerous than any Cleon.

I’m definitely enjoying season 2 more than season 1 so far. That said, this episode focusses on the two least interesting storylines of the season, namely Day’s weddings plans and the adventures of Hari the Second, Gaal and Salvor. Of course, the adventures of Hari the Second, Gaal and Salvor did actually make some useful progress and introduced the Mentalics and lays the groundwork for the Second Foundation (Or the Mule? Or Gaia?). But while I like the Cleons and Demerzel, I can must a lot of interest in Day’s wedding plans with Sareth, because it’s clear that Day is never going to marry that woman and that Sareth and her retinue will all die horribly. Though the discussion of memory tampering was at least interesting and indeed, Paul Levinson is quite pleased with how the Trantor progresses. Meanwhile, Hober Mallow, Poly Verisof, Brother Constant, Bel Riose and Glawen Curr were all sorely missed, since their storylines are not only a lot more interesting, they’re also supposed to be the main plot of this season. In fact, I suspect that this episode and the previous one were shot at the same time, since only very few actors appear in both. That said, Geek Girl Authority reviewer Julia Roth is actually happy to see more of the characters carried over from season 1 rather than the new protagonists.

I definitely hope that the next episode will give us more on the continuing adventures of Hober Mallow, Poly Verisof and Brother Constant on the one hand and Bel Riose and Glawen Curr on the other.

Foundations Goes “Where the Stars Are Scattered Thinly” and largely treads water

Season 2 of Foundation is currently streaming, so I guess I’m doing episode by episode reviews again, at least for now. For my takes on previous episodes, go here.

This review is a little delayed, because the 2023 Dragon Award finalists got in the way. I hope the next one will be back on track.

Warning! There will be spoilers under the cut!

When we last saw Imperial general Bel Riose, he and his flagship were en route to the rim world of Siwenna, which is of course the very place where we first meet Bel Riose in the 1945 novella “The General”.

One of the bridge officers informs Bel Riose that Siwenna has barely any technology and no long-range scanners, so they’re unaware of the Imperial warship in orbit around their planet. Bel Riose wants to keep it that way, so he and Glawen Curr will go down to the surface alone in a typical display of Star Trek type tactics, where the captain and the first officer will both go on an away mission, even though that would be a terrible idea in real life. Nor will they take a shuttle. Instead, they are shot out of the ship in some kind of escape pods which pop open to let Bel Riose and Glawen Curr glide down to the surface of Siwenna in some kind of wingsuit. Not that this makes any sense beyond providing some cool visuals.

The surface of Siwenna is pockmarked with craters. No real reason is given for this, though in the books, Siwenna was bombed by the Empire in retaliation for an uprising (Gee, and they wonder why rim worlds don’t want to stay with the Empire). However, the craters we see are too shallow, too evenly spaced and too close together to be bomb craters. Joseph Kolacinski calls then “giant antlion sandpits” in his review, which makes about as much sense as anything.

Bel Riose and Glawen Curr land in two different craters a bit apart from each other, but quickly meet up. However, a piece of equipment called an extraction pack (since they obviouly can’t fly back into orbit in their wing suits) was also launched along with the two of them and that extraction pack has landed quite a bit away, so Bel Riose and Glawen Curr set out to pick it up. There’s just one problem. Scavengers have found the extraction pack before Riose and Curr can get to it.

Bel Riose and Glawen Curr confront the scavengers who are in the process of carting off the extraction pack. At first, they are polite enough and even offer to pay the scavengers, though the fact that both Riose and Curr are wearing combat fatigues and toting guns somewhat marrs the effect. Nor does it help that the scavengers have (justified) beef with the Empire for effectively abandoning them. At any rate, they’re not handing over that extraction pack, though what they want with it remains a mystery. After all, it’s not as if they can use it, since all it does is take them aboard an Imperial battleship full of unfriendly soldiers.

One of the scavengers gets the brilliant idea to spit into Glawen Curr’s face, whereupon Bel Riose snaps and shoots the spitter in the face. This quickly leads to a free for all. The scavengers have Riose and Curr outnumbered, but the two Imperials are trained soldiers and so they make quick work of scavengers. Only one guy, whom we’ve seen during Brother Constant’s performance in episode 1, escapes. But Riose and Curr know that he will be back with reinforcements, so they hurry to complete their mission.

However, first Glawen Curr confronts his significant other and tells him that shooting random people willy-nilly is not how “we” (not sure if this refers to the Imperial fleet or just Riose and Curr in this context) do things and that they could have resolved the issue without excessive violence. Bel Riose responds that he’s no longer the man he was and that he picked up a few new tricks while in prison on Lepsis. The argument is shelved for now, because Riose and Curr need to fulfill their mission before the scavenger comes back with a bunch of angry friends.

Glawen Curr is right, because there was absolutely no need to kill the scavengers. Not to mention that two white men shooting a bunch of mostly people of colour is not exactly making Bel Riose and Glawen Curr more sympathetic to me. And I did like Bel Riose upon his introduction last episode.

Furthermore, I’m not sure what the purpose of the entire scavenger scene or the elaborate and overly complicated way to get Bel Riose and Glawen Curr to the surface of Siwenna in the first place is beyond filling up runtime. Because none of this is in the books – “The Dead Hand” opens with Bel Riose already on Siwenna, questioning Ducem Barr – nor does it serve any real narrative purpose.

Okay, the scene does show that Bel Riose hasn’t come unscathed out of his experience in prison on Lepsis and is no longer the man he was. But that could have been shown in other ways than adding a totally unnecessary action scene that also makes the characters look really bad. As for the oddly complicated way to get Riose and Curr down the surface of Siwenna, I honstly have no idea what the point of that was at all. They could have easily taken a shuttle – after all, it’s said in the dialogue that Siwenna has no long-range scanners and probably no tech to stop a shuttle from landing either. Or they could have just beamed down Star Trek style, because it really doesn’t matter how they get there. In his review, Joseph Kolacinski agrees with me that the whole scavenger interlude adds absolutely nothing to the story and is completely superfluous.

Foundation does have the habit to occasionally throw in an action or a sex scene, supposedly to keep the audience watching, because too many scenes of people talking are considered boring. And the original Foundation stories are very talky with most of the action taking place off-page. But while this problem occasionally popped up in season 1, it’s really, really notable in season 2, whether it’s Brother Day having sex with Demerzel, when they are attacked by eyeless ninjas or Salvor climbing out of the Beggar for some repairs in the middle of a storm or Salvor and Gaal being attacked by mining robots. None of these scenes really serve any purpose and they often feel as if they wandered in from a completely different movie or TV series. Were the writers told to add more action, lest the audience get bored?

What is more, it’s frustrating that SFF shows are peppered with random action or  – less commonly – sex scenes, because the TV executives don’t trust audiences to listen to characters talking without getting bored. Especially since this does not apply to shows set in the real world, apparently. Stuff like Succession or The Bear (which is not actually about a bear) or The White Lotus are critical darlings and apparently also popular enough with audiences, even though they focus a lot on people talking and are not interrupted by random sex or action scenes all the time, at least not as far as I know. So why don’t TV executives trust SFF audiences the way they apparently trust the audience for stuff like Succession or The Bear to follow the story without random sex or action scenes? Is SFF considered to be just entertainment for people who want kicks and explosions, whereas “real adults” (TM) watch Succession or The Bear or The White Lotus (neither of which I’ve ever seen) or whatever and don’t need the kicks and explosions?

Bel Riose and Glawen Curr eventually make it to the surprisingly comfortable desert home of Ducem Barr, the Imperial agent they’re here to see. Now Ducem Barr is a very important character in “The Dead Hand” and the story indeed opens with Bel Riose questioning him, i.e. the very scene we finally get after all that unnecessary stuff with the scavengers. Though the show’s version of Ducem Barr is actually more reminiscent of  his father Onum Barr, an Imperial patrician from Siwenna who has fallen on hard times after opposing the corrupt viceroy of Siwenna, whom Hober Mallow visits in “The Big and the Little”. In the show, Ducem Barr is still an Imperial patrician who was left behind after the Empire pulled out of Siwenna. Nonetheless, he remained loyal and has been sending reports to the Empire ever since, though no one responded in forty years – until Bel Riose and Glawen Curr showed up on his doorstep.

Ducem Barr offers his guests tea, because it is socially inacceptable not to drink tea on Siwenna, a line that’s an almost verbatim quote from “The Dead Hand”, proving once again that the producers have actually read the books, they just choose to ignore most of them. Ducem Barr also does something that a lot of characters do in the books (they were written in the 1940s, after all), but no one else does in the TV show, namely smoking. It’s quite notable, which made me suspect that there was a plot point linked to Ducem Barr’s smoking, Meanwhile, Bel Riose and Glawen Curr admire Ducem Barr’s collection of print books, which are considered rare antiques in this universe. Indeed, Glawen Curr has never seen a book.

After they have gotten the pleasantries out of the way, Ducem Barr shows his guests some recordings of Foundation missionaries. He reports that three missionaries came to Siwenna. One was murdered, as seen in episode 1. As for the other two, Ducem Barr shows his guests a recording of Brother Constant’s little presentation. Riose and Curr are stunned that Brother Constant has a personal forcefield – remember that in the Empire, only the Emperors Three have a personal forceshield. They are even more stunned when Ducem Barr shows them a personal forceshield. This actually happens in the books, where the personal forceshield was a gift from Hober Mallow to Ducem Barr’s father. In the series, I asumme that the forceshield was taken from the murdered missionary.

Bel Riose and Glawen Curr are in for even more surprises, when Ducem Barr’s recording of Brother Constant’s sermon reveals that the Foundation not only has technology that is extremely restricted in the Empire, but that they also have technology that shouldn’t exist at all such as jump ships that don’t require spacers.

Now the realisation that the Foundation has technologically outpaced the Empire in the past two centuries is an incredibly powerful moment – so powerful that it doesn’t need random fights with scavengers to add more action. In the books, we actually get that moment twice – once from the Foundation’s POV in “The Big and the Little”, when Hober Mallow travels to Siwenna and realises that Imperial tech is large, cumbersome and outdated and that no one knows anymore how to repair it, should it break down. Meanwhile, the realisation from the Empire’s POV plays out much as it does in the show – when Ducem Barr tells Bel Riose about all the technological miracles the Foundation has and also tells him that the Foundation will win in the end, because Ducem Barr in the books is a true believer in the power of Hari Seldon and his dead hand.

In the show, Bel Riose declares that they must further investigate this potential enemy they had no idea existed until a few weeks ago. However, before they can make more plans, they are interrupted by a lynch mob at Ducem Barr’s door. Turns out the lone scavenger who escaped did get reinforcements and they are justifiably angry that two Imperials killed a bunch of their number and demand that Ducem Barr hand them over. Ducem Barr, however, is not willing to do that. He shows Bel Riose and Glawen Curr a secret escape route hidden behind his bookshelf. It makes sense for Ducem Barr to have a secret escape route, considering that he is an Imperial agent living on a planet that hates the Empire.

Ducem himself, however, won’t come along, because… well, there really isn’t any good reason. However, Ducem Barr is also not eager to fall into the hands of a lynch mob baying for blood. He also explains that he has poisoned himself with his smoking – even though we saw him smoking before the lynch mob showed up. But nicotine doesn’t kill fast enough and is not a very dignified death, so he asks Bel Riose to shoot him. Bel Riose, who as we’ve seen is rather trigger happy, obliges him. He and Glawen Curr escape through the secret exit and activate the extraction pack, which turns out to be some kind of pneumatic tube system to shoot them back to their ship orbit. And no, the pneumatic tubes are not in the books, even though pneumatic tubes were still very much a thing in the 1940s.

To say that the whole Siwenna sequence was handled badly would be an understatement. Because the truth is that the Siwenna scenes are a complete mess, which make Bel Riose look like a trigger-happy jerk, prematurely kill off Ducem Barr, who is a very important character in the books (he joins forces with Foundation agent Latham Devers to outwit Bel Riose) and in general make zero sense. I mean, pneumatic space tubes? Really? Never mind that all the nonsense about scavengers, lynch mobs and pneumatic space tubes almost smothers the actual point of those scenes, namely the realisation that the Foundation has superior technology.

***

Meanwhile on Trantor, Queen Sabeth of the Dominion is conducting an investigation of her own. More precisely, she wants to know if Brother Day arranged for the murder of her whole family and how the hell he managed to survive the assassination attempt by eyeless ninjas in the first episode. As for why Sabeth thinks Day may have had her entire family murdered, Sabeth was never supposed to sit on the throne, because she was considered the weakest member of the royal family. Which makes her the perfect pawn – a weak ruler with the right pedigree – for Day’s dynastic plans.

If the plot of an entire royal family being wiped out under mysterious circumstances only for the least suitable person to end up on the throne and having to solve the mystery, while fending off assassins, sounds familiar, that’s probably because it is. It’s the plot of K.B. Wagers’ Indranan War trilogy (which would make a great TV series) and of Katherine’s Addison’s The Goblin Emperor (would make a good movie or TV show as well). However, nothing like this ever happens in any of the Foundation books.

Since Sabeth considers herself the weak link of the Dominion dynasty, she seeks out the weakest link among the Cleons, namely Brother Dawn, and invites him to a private stroll in the Imperial gardens. She also clearly tries to seduce Dawn. And Dawn, who like his predecessor Cleon VIII whom we met in season 1, thinks with his dangly end, almost falls for it.

Sabeth persuades Dawn to take her to a secluded place in the shadow of a giant banyan tree, which makes me as a long-time fan of banyan trees happy. Then she asks point blanc, if he thinks that Day ordered her family killed and if Dawn thinks he would be capable of giving such an order. Dawn replies that he doesn’t think he would be capable of mass murder, but that age changes a man. He’s not even wrong, because all of the Dawns we’ve seen so far have been shy and a little bewildered by what’s going on around them. They only become hardarses, once they turn into Day or Dusk. Dawn, in turn, asks if Sabeth was behind the assassination attempt on Day in the first episode of the season. Sabeth denies this, but then I don’t trust her any further than I can throw her.

While Sabeth is trying to seduce Dawn to get some information out of him, her assistant Rue is doing the same to Dusk. For it turns out that Rue was once one of the Imperial courtesans in the gossamer court, i.e. the Cleons’ private brothel/harem full of willing partners of either sex (this part is made very clear in this episode, suggesting that the Cleons or at least some of them are bisexual). After their night with the Emperor, those courtesans have their memories wiped. Years ago, Rue spent a night with Dusk, had her memories wiped and returned home in triumph, because apparently being chosen to be an Imperial courtesan is a big deal in the Dominion, which I assume was still part of the Empire at this point.

Dusk and Rue now walk through the gossamer court, where the various courtesans of both sexes are enjoying each other’s company. After all, it’s not as if they have anything else to do since Day is busy boning Demerzel and Dusk and Dawn are about to fall under the spell of the Dominion’s ladies. As a result, these scenes full of naked people frolicking about in the background harken back to the infamous sexposition scenes of Game of Thrones, where crucial worldbuilding information was inevitably discussed during sex scenes, lest the audience get bored. Yes, Foundation doesn’t just give us random, completely unnecessary action scenes to enliven the scenes of people talking, which are actually important to the plot, no the show now does sexposition as well. Sigh, someone at Apple Plus really thinks we’re all idiots.

Dusk and Rue reminisce about their last encounter or rather Dusk reminisces, since Rue doesn’t remember anything about it – or so we think. Dusk also shows off his murals and once again completely geeks out. Painting murals to record the genetic dynasty’s history may be part of the job description of a Brother Dusk, but this particular Dusk clearly relishes the job and even started working on his murals, when he was still Day. His enthusiasm makes remarkably likeable – for a Dusk.

Even later, Rue, Sareth and a bodyguard meet with an Imperial palace guard at the banyan tree, since Dawn helpfully pointed out that this is a secluded spot free of observation. The palace guard takes off his ostentatious helmet to reveal a scarred face and says he would pass on information to Sareth, only that he is subjected to regular brain scans like everybody who works on the palace grounds. Sareth and Rue assure him that’s no problem, because Dominion scientists figured out how to circumvent Imperial brain scans and mindwipes. Which means that Rue absolutely remembers her encounter with Dusk in every detail.

Once again, the Cleon plot strand is enjoyable enough, though it still has fuck all to do with the books. Also, Sareth and Rue are playing a very dangerous game, if they think they can outwit the Cleons. In fact, I strong suspect that Sareth will never marry Day and she and her entourage will all die horribly.

***

Meanwhile, Poly Verisof and Brother Constant are hauling Hober Mallow back to Terminus. Of course, Hober isn’t particularly willing to go, so Brother Constant knocked him out and then secured him in a cargo net, since the Spirit only has two seats. Hober isn’t too happy about that, especially since he also threw up all over himself, though that doesn’t stop him from flirting with Brother Constant, who clearly reciprocates Hober’s attentions. Poly Verisof watches both of them warily, since he knows Hober of old from his priesthood training and think s he’s a fucking arsehole.

Hober Mallow also shows Brother Constant one of his ill-gotten treasures, a rare bottle of wine from a tidally locked planet whose vineyards were on the day side, exposed to constant sunshine. Unfortunately, the Empire bombed the planet to smithereens (they are bomb happy, aren’t they?), so this bottle of wine of one the last of its kind in the universe and Hober is saving it for a special occasion, which prompts Brother Constant to ask him just what precisely Hober is waiting for.

The tidbit about the tidally locked planet made me smile, because it’s such a callback to the golden age and the pulp science fiction shared solar system, when Mercury was believed to be tidally locked (spoiler alert: It isn’t). Tidally locked planets largely vanished with the pulp era, though they still pop up on occasion in science fiction. The 2020 Hugo finalist for Best Novel and Locus Award winner The City in the Middle of the Night by Charlie Jane Anders is set on a tidally locked planet that’s very much like Mercury was described during the pulp era. Another tidally locked planet that readers of this blog may be familiar with is Eternia of Masters of the Universe fame, which is divided into a light and a dark hemisphere, though this division was created by magic, more precisely by a spell cast by Hordak going awry, rather than nature. Eternia is also a rare example of a tidally locked planet that has wine – Prince Adam is quite fond of it. Finally, Joseph Kolacinski points out that there actually is a tidally locked planet named Radole in the Foundation story “The Mule”.

Hober Mallow also asks Brother Constant what her real name is, whereupon she replies that she’s Thesbian and that their culture requires that they keep their real names. This is quite interesting, because it suggests that at this fairly early point in the Foundation’s history, the people of the Four Kingdoms – or rather only of Anacreon and Thesbis, since the TV series reduced the number of hostile neighbour kingdoms to only two – are considered as much Foundationers as the original inhabitants of Terminus. Brother Constant’s father is after all the director of the Foundation. This is quite different from the books where Hober Mallow is considered not a real Foundationer, because he’s from Smyrno rather than Terminus.

Before Hober Mallow and Brother Constant can talk some more about wine and true names, the Spirit lands and Hober, who still looks as if he’d much rather be anywhere else, is taken to see Director Sermak. On the way, he says his name graffitied all over the vault, which makes him want to bolt even more. And honestly, who could blame him? However, Brother Constant and Poly Verisof make sure that Hober does not run away.

There’s a brief reunion with Director Sermak who welcomes his daughter Brother Constant and also introduces his second-in-command, Councillor Sutt. Readers of the books will remember Councillor Jorane Sutt as Hober Mallow’s chief nemesis in “The Big and the Little”. At any rate, I would keep an eye on that guy.

However, the reunion is shortlived, because Poly Verisof, Brother Constant and Director Sermak usher Hober Mallow towards the Vault. Hober is still reluctant to go and his reluctance increases when he almost stumbles over the charred remains of Warden Jaeggar Fount. “Wait a minute, do you mean that used to be a person?” And frankly, whatever one thinks of the man, it does seem insensitive to just leave the charred remains of Jaeggar Fount lying around rather than removing and burying them – or whatever the Church of the Galactic Spirit does.

However, Hober’s protests are ignored and he’s literally sucked into the Vault. To everybody’s relief, the Vault does not incinerate Hober, but then it specifically asked for him, so incinerating him would be very rude. Poly Verisof and Brother Constant briefly argue what to do now and then decide to go after him. Cause Brother Constant really likes Hober Mallow and nothing in the galaxy could keep Poly Verisof from going into that Vault to meet Hari Seldon again. Director Sermak refuses to go, because he considers himself too important to risk incineration. “Governance depends on me continuing to govern.” No, dude, it doesn’t. You’re not important to this story at all.

In true Time Lord fashion – yes, wrong franchise, I know – the Vault is bigger, much bigger, on the inside than on the outside. Time also passes differently in and outside the Vault, because when Poly and Constant enter a few minutes after Hober, they find a very exhausted as well as hungry and thirsty Hober Mallow who claims to have been wandering the Vault for two days. Hober also admits to having peed and pooped in the Vault, which is totally on point for the character as he is portrayed in the TV series.

A few moments later, Director Sermak also appears. Apparently, the time difference inside and outside the Vault is very inconsistent. When Brother Constant asked whatever happened to the importance governing Terminus, Director Sermak replies that he left Jorane Sutt in charge. That will probably turn out to be a very bad idea.

Together, our four intrepid explorers wander through the Vault. Both Hober Mallow and Director Sermak would clearly love to be somewhere else, Brother Constant is torn between awe and unease and Poly Verisof is elated to be wandering about inside the math of Hari Seldon. He’s also inside Hari Seldon himself, which none of our four heroes really seem to be aware of.

After a fairly brief period of wandering about – apparently, the Vault wanted not just Hober Mallow but at least one Foundation priest as well – our four intrepid explorers step into a remarkably realistic replica of Hari’s study on Terminus and are greeted by none other Hari Seldon himself – or rather his hologram. The Prime Radiant is resting on his desk, even though Salvor absconded with it 134 years earlier. Hari explain that it is a quantum computer and can exist in two places at once.

Otherwise, Hari is the perfect host. He offers them food – which Hober hungrily devours – and wine. When someone asks, where Hari got the food and wine from, he replies that they are made from his body with all the subtlety of a sledge hammer.

Taking in the people in weird red robes, Hari notes with satisfaction that the Foundation appears to have entered its religious phase, just as he predicted. Brother Constant near faints with awe, whereas Hari doesn’t seem to be entirely sure what to do with people who think he’s a prophet and worship and resorts to patting her on the head like a dog.

Poly Verisof introduces himself and after some prompting, Hari does indeed remember having met Poly as a little boy. Hari also shows more interest in Poly than in Brother Constant, because he clearly recognises that Poly is smart – he realises that the Vault is a tesseract – and that he could’ve or should’ve been more than the washed up priest of a sham religion. Though in both the books and the TV series, Poly Verisof is a highly respected man as the high priest of Scientism a.k.a. the Church of the Galactic Spirit (Hari asking Brother Constant what exactly they’ve called their religion is really funny). Book Poly also knows that the whole thing is a scam and is indeed one of the few priests aware of this. TV series clearly takes the whole thing very seriously, as does Brother Constant.

As for Director Sermak, Hari knows who he is, but has zero interest in him and basically dismisses him with “Nice suit. And now could you just leave govern Terminus or compile the Encyclopaedia Galactica or whatever it is that you do.”

The question of course remains just how Hari, who is after all a sentient hologram inside a Vault, knows who Director Sermak is and knows enough about Hober Mallow to specifically ask for him. I guess while Hari’s consciousness is sleeping, the Vault automatically monitors communications and identifies people who might be useful to furthering the plan. Besides, Hari tells Hober that he has heard about him, his less legal exploits and his impressive number of bedmates – note the gender-neutral term.

Brother Constant wants to know why in the universe the Vault incinerated Warden Jaeggar Fount. Hari replies that he detected the warden trying to enter the Vault and felt the need to kill him, because he fears that otherwise the warden might have declared himself the one true prophet. Besides, a god has to show divine wrath at some point to be taken seriously. Apparently, fake religions and prophets are fine for Hari Seldon, but not for anybody else.

That said, the Vault killing the warden was just as unnecessary and out of character as Bel Riose killing the scavengers. Hari’s explanation also feels weak, almost as if one of the writers realised, “Oops, we had the Vault incinerate a guy and turn him into a charred black spot on the floor two episodes ago, so we’d better come up with a good explanation for that.”

As for why Hari woke up and called everybody into the Vault – or rather, he called for Hober Mallow, cause the others just tagged along – Hari wants to prevent a war. This actually does track with the books, because in “The Big and the Little”, Hober Mallow wins the war with Korell by not engaging and waiting for their systems to break down and the Foundation’s economic embargo doing its work. And in “The General”, all out was with the Empire is averted by Latham Devers (whom we haven’t seen yet, unless he is replaced by Hober Mallow) and and Ducem Barr undermining Bel Riose and ultimately convincing the Emperor – who is actually named Cleon – that Riose is a greater threat than the Foundation. Indeed, the fact that the Seldon Plan and its executors will always try to resolve crisises non-violently and with as little bloodshed as possible is one of the things I always loved about the books. I’m glad that the series is at least sticking to that aspect.

But in order to avert all-out war with the Empire, Hari needs everybody’s help. He dismisses Director Sermak and basically tells him, “Continue doing whatever you’re doing”. However, Hari does have a job for Poly and Brother Constant, namely travel to Trantor as peace envoys and spread the good word of Hari Seldon at the heart of the Empire. Oh yes, and maybe don’t use one of your jump ships, cause we don’t really want the Empire to know about Foundation technology.. Why do I fears that he’s been just sent Poly and Brother Constant to become martyrs for the cause?

As for Hober Mallow, Hari wants to speak with him alone. So he waits until everybody has left on their respective errands and then asks Hober a few questions about himself. We learn that Hober Mallow is still from Smyrno and that he does not come from a privileged background, had a violent father and little formal education and has basically survived by his own wits. Hari tries to bond with Hober over the shared experience of having a violent father (as revealed in the first episode of the season), but Hober isn’t having any of it.

He calls Hari out on his bullshit and tells Hari that he has no right to criticise Hober, considering Hari has a whole church of people who worship him. Hari admits that he knows that it’s all bullshit, but that religion is a phase that all successful civilisations go through and that eventually it will be replaced by something else. The latter is exactly what happens in the books, when the Foundation shifts from exerting its religious influence to exerting its economic influence during Hober Mallow’s time.

That said, I do have some quibbles with the first statement. Whether you believe that religions are a necessary phase for successful civilisations or not – and personally, I think religions can as much a force for evil than as for good and can hinder civilisational development as much as further it – Scientism a.k.a. the Church of the Galactic Spirit is a scam used by the Foundation to keep their aggressive neighbours in the Four Kingdoms under control and to expand their influence over the Outer Rim. It’s literally Karl Marx’s “opiate for the masses”. The reason the Foundation becomes a successful civilisation is because it deploys a religion it knows is a scam to keep potential enemies under control and gradually absorb them.

As for whether religion is a necessary phase for a successful civilisation, I’m not sure how Asimov would have responded to that statement. He was an atheist, but did show interest in religion, though it always seemed to be along the line of, “What is this, what purpose does it serve (one could view Foundation is one attempt to answer that question) and why do people believe in it?” Meanwhile, his contemporary L. Sprague De Camp quite clearly describes religion of any kind as a force that hinders progress and needs to be kept down in his 1939 alternate history novel Last Darkness Fall.

But while Hari and Hober both know that the Church of the Galactic Spirit is a scam, in the TV series many Foundationers actually seem to believe in it. Not just Poly Verisof, who has a drug and alcohol problem, but also Brother Constant who is the daughter of the Director and therefore belongs to the Foundation’s ruling class, even if she is Thesbian, i.e. not from Terminus. In short, in the show the Foundation has violated the rule of drug dealers to never consume your own wares and has decided to partake in some of the opiate intended for the masses elsewhere.  It’s certainly interesting that even though the TV-series shows that the “miracles” performed by the Foundation missionaries are fake, so far the show can’t quite bring himself to openly say, “Yes, it’s all fake and used to control the gullible.” Which again makes me wonder why it is apparently impossible to show a fake religion that’s explicitly used to control the population in 2023, when it was possible to write about thsi in the 1940s without any problems or pushback?

Hari also has a job for Hober Mallow. For while Poly Verisof and Brother Constant will travel to Trantor as the friendly and peaceful face of the Foundation, Hari knows that this may not be enough and that he also needs a dagger behind the back to do the job, if diplomacy fails. And that dagger is Hober Mallow.

Once Hober Mallow emerges from the Vault, he tells Poly Verisof and Brother Constant that Hari Seldon has decreed that Hober is supposed to take their ship, the Spirit. I’m pretty sure that Hari Seldon never actually said that and Brother Constant is slightly doubtful as well and tells Hober to make sure to feed the bishop’s claw she keeps as a pet and beast of burden.

Constant also tells Hober quite blatantly that she would love to become one of his bedmates. Hober manfully tries to refuse and tells her he’s not a robe chaser and not really interesting in deflowering virgins. Brother Constant tells him that no fear, she’s no virgin and absolutely knows what to do. Hober says, “Well, maybe after the mission”, whereupon Brother Constant replies that she has the premonition that if it doesn’t happen now, it will never happen. There’s something ominous about this, almsot as if either Brother Constant or Hober Mallow or both will not survive this mission. Of course, we know that Hober survives, though I have no idea what will happen to Constant, since she does not exist in the books. I wonder if Brother Constant is the show’s replacement for Jaim Twer, a former priest turned spy for the Foundation who accompanies Hober Mallow on his mission to Korell in the novels, or maybe even Ankor Jael, Hober Mallow’s occasional nude sunbathing partner cum sounding board.

I like the banter between Hober and Constant and they have a lot of chemistry. Dimitri Leonidas and Isabella Laughland are both great in their roles. However, it does annoy that the character who’s as close to canonically gay as anybody in the entire Foundation saga has sexual tension with a woman in the TV show. That said, the repeated use of the gender neutral term “bedmates” suggest that Hober is bisexual or pansexual.

In general, this episode was fun and I was thoroughly entertained while watching it. However, it’s also notable in spite of lots of things happening, the plot doesn’t progress a whole lot. The most important things in this episode were Bel Riose learning that the Foundation has technology that is far superior to the Empire’s, a revelation that was buried among unnecessary action scenes which did nothing at all to advance the plot and made Bel Riose look like a trigger-happy jerk, and Hari Seldon giving missions to Poly Verisof, Brother Constant and Hober Mallow and also admitting to Hober that the Church of the Galactic Spirit is a phase and a scam. The Empire plot strand had some progress as well, though I have no idea how relevant Sareth and her suspicions are, because none of that happens in the books.

All crucial scenes, even the Trantor scenes, were scenes of people talking, which is probably why we got those unnecessary action scenes on Siwenna and the equally unnecessary background sex scenes on Trantor. Because the showrunners seem to be terminally afraid to let Foundation be what ninety percent of the books are, namely people talking. Of course, the books as they are would not make for compelling television and there are plenty off-screen action scenes that could be put on screen. But could we maybe add action scenes that make more sense than Bel Riose gunning down random scavangers and that don’t look like they wandered in from an episode of The Mandalorian like most of the action scenes involving Gaal Dornik and Salvor Hardin.

Talking of Gaal and Salvor, they as well as Brother Day and Demerzel are absent this episode, though Gaal does provide some voice over narration about sexual attraction, how it causes indivual people to be born and how psychohistory can’t predict any of that. Now I’m sure Day and Demerzel were way too busy with each other to note Day’s bride-to-be trying to seduce his clone brothers. As for Gaal and Salvor, I find that I didn’t miss them at all, because neither is supposed to even be in the story anymore at this point. Others disagree, for example Geek Girl Authority reviewer Julia Roth explicitly notes that she misses Gaal and Salvor.

All in all, I find that so far, I enjoy this season of Foundation more than season 1, even though it still has comparatively little to do with the books. I guess part of the reason is that Hober Mallow, Brother Constant, Poly Verisof, Bel Riose and Glawen Curr, as they are portrayed in the series, are more compelling characters than perpetually whiny Gaal and Salvor Hardin, who was turned from the smooth operator of the books into a not particularly interesting action girl character. Of course, both Hober Mallow and Poly Verisof are greatly changed from their book counterparts as well (though Bel Riose is fairly constant), but they are so much fun to watch that I’m more willing to go along with the changes.

Anyway, onwards to episode 5.

The 2023 Dragon Award Finalists: Mostly Good with a Oddities

Does anybody except for me and Camestros Felapton and maybe Doris V. Sutherland still care about the Dragon Awards? I don’t know, but the 2023 Dragon Award finalists have been annunced today. The full list of finalists may be found here or – in a less eye-straining format – at File 770.

The Dragon Awards are a fan award given out by Dragon Con, a massive SFF media con in Atlanta, Georgia. This is only the eighth year of the Dragon Awards, but they have gone through quite a bit of history in those eight years, as recounted here by Camestros Felapton. You can also find my previous posts about the Dragon Awards and their tangled history here.

Camestros Felapton’s 2023 Dragon Award commentary can be found here. Meanwhile, Mike Glyer takes a look at the number of Goodreads ratings for the Dragon finalists in the various literary categories.

The 2023 Dragon Award ballot looks pretty good overall with many broadly popular works and authors, which confirms the trend that the Dragon Awards are actually doing what they were designed for. There’s only one category that’s something of an exception, but more about that later.

So let’s take a look at the individual categories:

Best Science Fiction Novel

This category is populated by popular and also very good works and doesn’t look all that different from a Hugo or Nebula ballot. The Spare Man by Mary Robinette Kowal and The Daughter of Doctor Moreau by Silvia Moreno-Garcia are both Hugo finalists for Best Novel this year as is Children of Memory by Adrian Tchaikovsky in Best Series.

Translation State (which the Dragon Awards site misspells as “Translation Slate” in a very Freudian typo) by Ann Leckie is a 2023 book, but I strongly expect to see it on the Hugo ballot next year.

Neom by Lavie Tidhar is a bit of a surprise, but then Lavie Tidhar has been a Dragon Award finalist before in the Best Alternate History category, so he may well be popular with Dragon Award nominators.

The Icarus Plot by Timothy Zahn is also something of a surprise, for though Timothy Zahn is extremely popular for his Star Wars tie-in novels,  The Icarus Plot never really appeared on my radar at all. Camestros Felapton notes that The Icarus Plot appeared on the recommendation list of the rightwing review site Upstream Reviews run by Declan Finn, disruptor of doors and unlikely story inspiration) as well as on a recommendation list posted on Twitter by someone calling themselves Aristophanes. Though I doubt these two recommendation are the only reason The Icarus Plot was nominated, because like I said, Timothy Zahn is a very popular (and good) author and previous Dragon Award winner in the now defunct media tie-in category.

Diversity count: 3 women, 4 men, 3 international authors, 1 author of colour

Best Fantasy Novel

This is another category full of popular books and authors. Martha Wells is a multiple Hugo and Nebula Award winner and I strongly expect to see Witch King (which acquired a stray article on the Dragon ballot) on several awards ballots next year.

Babel by R.F. Kuang is a Nebula and Locus Award winner and was on multiple Best of the Year lists. Its unexpected absence of from the 2023 Hugo ballot was a matter of much discussion and speculation. But if a Nebula and a Locus Award aren’t consolation enough, R.F. Kuang now also has a Dragon Award nomination.

I haven’t read The Atlas Paradox by Olivie Blake, but it was a popular and massively marketed book, so I’m not surprised to see it nominated, though I assumed it was YA for some reason.

Tress of the Emerald Sea by Brandon Sanderson did show up on the Upstream Reviews recommendation list in a different category, but considering how hugely popular Brandon Sanderson is, I’m pretty sure he would have been nominated anyway.

Tower of Silence by Larry Correia was heavily marketed by Baen (though Correia himself did not campaign for a nomination for his book) and definitely appeared on my radar, though I’m very much not the target audience. Besides, Larry Correia does have a big fanbase. Tower of Silence also is the third book in a series where both previous installments won the Dragon Award in this category, so it’s not a surprising finalist.

The second Baen finalist Into the Vortex by Charles E. Gannon is more of a surprise, because I had no idea this book even existed (though again I’m probably not the target audience) and know Charles E. Gannon mainly as a science fiction author. That said, Charles E. Gannon has been a Nebula finalist several times and clearly has a fanbase. Larry Correia also apparently campaigned for Into the Vortex as well as Wraithbound by Tim Akers, which shows up in another category, and The Dabare Snake Launcher by Joelle Presby, which did not make the ballot. Plus, Baen always has a big presence at Dragon Con.

Diversity count: 3 women, 3 men, 3 authors of colour

Best Young Adult / Middle Grade Novel

Again, we have a lot of very popular authors and one surprise in this category.

Bloodmarked by Tracy Deonn and The Golden Enclaves by Naomi Novik (which awards voters seem to have decided is YA, even if some folks disagree) are also Lodestar finalists this year and not surprising choices at all.

The Scratch Daughters by H. A. Clarke got quite a bit of buzz, plus the previous book in the series was a Dragon Award finalist in the category in 2021.  Justina Ireland has been a Lodestar finalist and World Fantasy Award winner in the past and Rust in the Root sounds fascinating. Chloe Gong is a very popular author of YA fantasy, though I’m not familiar with Foul Lady Fortune.

The one surprise for me in this category is Academy Arcanist by Shami Stovall, because I’ve never about either the author or the book before. A bit of googling reveals that Shami Stovall and her husband run an e-book small press. The book doesn’t show up on any of the recommendation lists from the broader puppy sphere, so it seems Shami Stovall has an eager fanbase who nominated her.

Diversity count: 5 women, 1 non-binary, 3 authors of colour, 1 international author, 1 indie author

Best Alternate History Novel

The biggest surprise is that this category survived the purge of the most of the smaller subgenre specific Dragon Award categories, especially since alternate history was always a small subgenre – military SFF and media tie-in are much bigger. Plus, alternate history already has a dedicated award with the Sidewise Award, whereas military SFF has none.

But whatever the reason, the category is still here and it’s still the category with the most “I’ve never heard of these books or authors” finalists. It’s also the category that most resembles the early years of the Dragon Award with a mix of indie authors, Amazon imprints (no Baen, oddly enough) and even the token literary writer.

A.G. Riddle started out as a hugely popular indie writer, though his nominated novel Lost in Time – which judging by the blurb seems to be a time travel rather than alternate history novel – was published by Head of Zeus.

Christopher G. Nuttall is another very popular indie writer. I mostly know him as a writer of military science fiction, but apparently he moved into alternate history, because his nominated novel The Revolutionary War is already book five in an ongoing series.

Dan Willis has written for the popular Dragonlance series, which probably put him on the radar of Dragon Con attendees. His nominated novel Hidden Voices appears to be self-published and is definitely alternate history.

Halcyon by Elliot Ackerman is this year’s “literary novel you’d never expect to see on the Dragon Award ballot in a million years” finalist (let’s not forget that Ian McEwan and Margaret Atwood have both been Dragon Award finalists). He is a (US) National Book Award finalist, decorated US military veteran and a staff writer for The Atlantic. His book is also very definitely alternate history.

The Mother by B.L. Blanchard was published by Amazon‘s 47 North imprint and is definitely alternate history.

Diversity count: 5 men, 1 woman, 1 writer of colour, 1 international writer, 2 indie authors plus 2 more who started out as indie authors

Best Horror Novel

The horror category has usually been the most mainstream category at the Dragon Awards with the exception of the first year, where the winner was an obscure religious space opera rather than an actual horror novel.

This year’s finalists continue the trend. The Devil Takes You Home by Gabino Iglesias was this year’s Stoker Award for Best Novel, while Reluctant Immortals by Gwendolyn Kiste was a finalist. The Pallbearers Club by Paul Tremblay and No Gods For Drowning by Hailey Piper were both Locus Award finalists in this category (as was The Devil Takes You Home). Paul Tremblay and Hailey Piper are also previous Stoker Award winners. Ursula Vernon a.k.a. T. Kingfisher is perennially popular and I strongly expect to see A House With Good Bones on many awards ballots come next year. I have heard of The Only One Left by Riley Sager, though mainly as a thiller rather than a horror novel.

Diversity count: 3 men, 3 women, 1 author of colour

Best Illustrative Cover

This category is new this year and also the weirdest category, because I’ve never heard of most of the finalists and the artists are not names that show up on other awards which have art categories.

Ashes of Man is a novel by Christopher Ruocchio, the cover by Kieran Yanner can be seen here. River of Ashes is a novel by Alexandra Weis and Lucas Astor, the cover by Sam Shearon may be seen here. Both covers are nice enough, though I wouldn’t call them the best of the year.

But Not Broken is an anthology edited by Cedar Sanderson who also created the cover. People may remember her as a member of the Mad Genius Club and puppy Hugo finalist for Best Fan Writer back in 2015, though Camestros Felapton notes that this book and its cover do not show up on any puppy adjacent recommendation lists. The cover itself doesn’t do much for me.

Titan Mage: Apocalypse by Edie Skye is a self-published novel billed as a harem fantasy adventure. The cover by Jackson Tjota may be seen here. It’s very cheese cake. This cover was on the Upstream Reviews recommendation list. Personally,. I find it very amusing that a review site founded by a conservative Catholic recommends the cheese cake cover of a harem fantasy book featuring a sexy witch, which was created by an artist from Indonesia, a muslim majority country.

Tower of Silence by Larry Correia is nominated in the Best Fantasy Novel and the cover by Kurt Miller may be seen her (sans typography). It doesn’t do much for me and I suspect it was nominated more on the base of Correia’s popularity than on its merits as a piece of art.

Wraithbound is a fantasy novel by Tim Akers, which was quite heavily promoted by Baen. The cover by Jeff Brown may be seen here. It’s pretty good and Baen’s typography – often a weakness with their covers – isn’t too intrusive either. This cover was also on the recommendation by Twitter user Aristophanes.

Now taste in art is subjective. Some of the nominated covers are quite good and none are eye-searingly terrible. That said, I still find most of these choices baffling. Neither the books nor the artists are huge names and while the covers are perfectly competent and the artwork is mostly good, I wouldn’t call any of them outstanding. I suspect that the nominations in this category were spread over a large number of covers, because tastes are very individual, and so recommendation lists had more impact than elsewhere.

Diversity count: 5 men, 1 woman, at least 1 artist of colour, 1 international artist, 2 indie books

Best Comic Book or Graphic Novel

X-Men, Wolverine and Dawn of DC: Green Arrow are all mainstream superhero comics and not exactly surprising finalists, though apparently the Green Arrow mini-series only had three issues out by the nomination deadline. Also, have the X-Men comics improved? Cause last I heard they had moved away from everything that once made the X-Men interesting.

Night Fever by Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips is a noir/horror comic published by Image and a most worthy finalist. Kaya by Wes Craig, another Image offering, wasn’t on my radar at all, though it certainly look promising.

Finally, we have Dune: House Harkonnen by Brian Herbert, Kevin J Anderson and Michael Shelfer, which fills this year’s “something or other involving Dune” slot. Now it’s quite possible that the Dune graphic novels are actually good – there is one on the 2023 Hugo ballot as well – but I’m very much over Dune.

No diversity count, too many people are needed to make comics.

Best Science Fiction or Fantasy TV Series

Camestros Felapton calls this “basically a list of big name SFF shows” and that’s exactly what it is. Nothing here is remotely surprising.

The Star Wars universe is represented by Andor and The Mandalorian, the Star Trek universe by Strange New Worlds and Picard. The Last of Us, The Sandman and House of the Dragon round out the ballot. House of the Dragon was actually on the Upstream Reviews recommendation list, but I’m pretty that the show would have made the ballot anyway.

It’s notable that no Marvel show made the ballot, but then both Ms. Marvel and Secret Invasion fall into two different eligibility and besides, no one seems to have liked Secret Invasion very much. The only Marvel TV show that’s fully eligible for the 2023 Dragon Awards is She-Hulk: Attorney at Law, which the usual suspects hated, even though I personally found it delightful.

No diversity count, too many people are needed to make TV shows.

Best Science Fiction or Fantasy Movie

This is another category that’s full of popular, big name Hollywood movies with almost no surprises.

Everything Everywhere All At Once has already won every award in the whole multiverse and can now add a Dragon nomination to its accolades. Honestly, is this the most awarded movie in history? I also really want to see the Daniels’ awards cabinet, because it must be incredibly impressive.

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 and Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse were the two most popular and critically acclaimed superhero movies in what was otherwise a lackluster year for superhero movies. I expect to see both movies on the Hugo ballot next year. Though I’m a bit surprised that Wakanda Forever didn’t make the ballot.

I’m really happy to see Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves on the ballot, because it’s such a fun fantasy adventure and finally a good Dungeons & Dragons movie. I also strongly expect to see this film on the Hugo ballot next year. It’s also a movie almost everybody seems to have liked, though it’s apparently considered a box office failure, largely because it was flattened by the Super Bros Movie which debuted a week later and inexplicably became one of the highest grossing movies of the year. And yes, a lot of families went to see Super Mario Bros, plus it drew in the nostalgia crowd, but I find its massive success still baffling, especially considering that other animated films aimed at the family audience like Strange Days or Elemental, both of which were almost certainly better than Super Mario Bros, underperformed.

I had sort of forgotten that Puss in Boots: The Last Wish existed, probably because it was released during the holiday period and I’m also not the target audience, but it’s apparently a good film. Apparently, both this film and Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves were recommended by Upstream Reviews and Aristophanes, but again both movies would probably have been nominated anyway.

The ballot is rounded out by Avatar: The Way of Water. As I’ve already said in my Hugo commentary, I disliked the first Avatar and didn’t even bother to watch the sequel and think that James Cameron made exactly three and a half good movies, all of them more than thirty years ago. Besides, the critical and popular reception of Avatar: The Way of Water was lukewarm at best and no one seemed to like the movie very much and the various tie-in toys are currently hanging out on the clearance table at Smyths Toys. Therefore, I’m surprised to see Avatar: The Way of Water on the Hugo and Dragon ballot. Maybe people did like the film more than they said. Or maybe the nomination is due to the small devoted fanbase that original Avatar still has.

No diversity count, too many people are needed to make movies.

Best Digital Game

The formerly four gaming categories have been consolidated into only two, best digital and best physical game, which makes sense IMO.

This category is full of popular and big name games that even I as a non-gamer have heard about. And yes, some of these games were on the Upstream Reviews and Aristophanes recommendation lists, but if there’s one game that didn’t need any help it’s Legends of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom.

The only slight surprise is Hogwarts Legacy, which attracted a lot of controversy due to being based on the work of noted transphobe J.K. Rowling and because apparently there were technical issues with the actual game as well. However, a lot of people still cling to Harry Potter and his world.

No diversity count, too many people are needed to make games.

Best Tabletop Game

Magic the Gathering has been nominated and I think won in the former collectible cardgame category of Dragon Awards since their inception and so it’s no surprise to see the Lord of the Rings expansion set nominated.

Dorfromantik: Das Brettspiel (Romantic Village: The Boardgame) has just won the coveted Spiel des Jahres award for 2023, which continues the trend of Spiel des Jahres winners subsequently making the Dragon ballot. Of course, Spiel des Jahres is the world’s biggest boardgame award, so it’s not surprising that Dragon nominators will look to Spiel des Jahres for recommendations – after all, everybody else does. The Spiel des Jahres winners usually pops up under German Christmas trees that year – I have several of the winners from the early 1980s.

However a) Dorfromantik doesn’t even have an English language release as far as I know, so I’m not sure how many Dragon nominators were familiar with the game, and b) the Spiel des Jahres winner was announced only one or two days before the Dragon nominations closed, so it’s a very tight time frame. Finally, Dorfromantik isn’t even remotely SFF – it’s a game about building a village and planting crops. Another finalist, Earth, is not SFF either. Here is an interview with Dorfromantik co-creator Lukas Zach, who’s a local boy done good.

No diversity count, too many people are needed to make games.

***

So all in all, this is a very good ballot and shows that the Dragon Awards continue to move towards what they were intended to be, a people’s choice type award that honours broadly popular works.

So far, reactions to the 2023 Dragon Award finalists are quite muted. There were some neutral “These are the finalists” posts of genre news sites. On Twitter, I saw a lot of happy finalists celebrating their nominations and little in the way of grumpiness. The official Baen Books Twitter account congratulated their finalists, but didn’t weigh in one the ballot otherwise.

Oddly enough, neither Upstream Reviews nor Aristophanes felt the need to comment on the relative success or lack thereof of their recommendation lists. The Upstream Reviewers appear to be on holiday and Aristophanes’ Twitter feed was full of US rightwing stuff, some of it outright offensive, but nothing whatsoever about the Dragon Awards. I guess he forgot all about them and moved on to being outraged that trans people exist, that Mexican immigrants exist, that Hunter Biden exists and is not on trial, that Donald Trump on trial, etc…

Only Larry Correia apparently cannot manage to get through a Dragon Awards season without having a freak-out, as Camestros Felapton reports here. Basically, Correia claims that someone – most likely Cam and File 770, since my post wasn’t up yet – accused him and Baen Books of issuing nomination slates and that Correia promoted himself. Except that no one said anything like this. Cam explicitly noted that Correia did not ask for a nomination for Tower of Silence and a publisher mentioning which of their titles are eligible for an award is standard business practice. The only thing that might be considered an actual slate was the Aristophanes list, since the Upstream Reviews list usually recommended more than one work per category. And the Dragon Awards explicitly encourage authors and publishers to ask their fans to vote for them.

Plus, none of the Baen finalists in the literary categories are huge surprises, since these are all popular authors with big fanbases. Even the two Baen finalists in the Best Cover category are not that much of a surprise, since both books are popular and actually the least obscure finalists in that category. Plus, Wraithbound has a very good cover.

If more reactions show up, I’ll add them to this post.

Comments are open for now, but I reserve the right to close them, if commenters behave badly.

Foundation meets “King and Commoner” and swears a lot

Season 2 of Foundation just started, so I guess I’m doing episode by episode reviews again, at least for now. For my takes on previous episodes, go here.

Warning! There will be spoilers under the cut!

Episode 2 of season 2 of Foundation starts where episode 2 left off – with Gaal still bothered by seeing Salvor dead at the hand of the Mule some one hundred and fifty years into the future.

Salvor, meanwhile, is as unbothered by this revelation as I was, though for different reasons. I don’t particularly care what happens to Salvor, because as far as I’m concerned, her story ended last season and there’s no reason for her to still be in the series at this point. Salvor herself, meanwhile, thinks that if she dies some one hundred and fifty years into the future, she’s safe in the here and now and still has a long life ahead of her. Gaal, however, won’t relent and declares that maybe they can find a way to prevent Salvor’s death. At this point, Hari Seldon or rather his hologram pops up that the path of history is not easy to alter and that any attempts to save Salvor may bring about her death, because some things are pre-ordained.

Before Gaal and Hari can argue some more, the Beggar (I’d forgotten the name of the ship) has reached its destination, a habitable but uninhabited planet that Gaal and Salvor assume is Ignis. Salvor remarks that this planet is an unusual choice to set up the Second Foundation, when Hari drops the bombshell: They’re not on Ignis at all. Instead, Hari – who partly lives in the Beggar‘s computer now redirected them somewhere else, because the Prime Radiant told him to.”Well, where the fuck are we?” an understandably frustrated Salvor demands. It’s the first of many f-bombs dropped during this episode.

Now Salvor has every right to swear at Hari taking the Beggar to an unknown planet. However, it’s really notable that there are a lot of f-bombs dropped in this episode. I don’t particularly mind and it’s mostly justified, but it seems as if they stuffed an entire season’s worth of f-bombs into a single episode. What makes this even more notable is that the original stories from the 1940s have no swearing at all, because censorship standards of the time wouldn’t have allowed that. There’s a reason that Conan keeps saying “Crom!”, because “Fuck” just wasn’t possible in those days, even in the more liberal Weird Tales. And there was no way Isaac Asimov would have gotten an f-bomb or even a less loaded term past John W. Campbell’s long-suffering eidtorial assistant Kay Tarrant, who was infamous among Astounding and Unknown writers for exorcising any hint of impropriety from the pages of the two magazines. According to Alec Nevala-Lee, Kay Tarrant once told some of Astounding‘s writers, likely including Asimov, “Personally, I don’t give a fuck what you write, but children read this magazine, too.” It seems the writers of the TV show were determined to make poor Kay Tarrant rotate in her grave.

Hari finally reveals that the Beggar has landed on Oona’s World, an Imperial palladium mining colony that was abandoned centuries ago. Oona’s World isn’t mentioned in the books, at least not as far as I recall. It is a fascinating setting, a barren world covered with rusting mining equipment and gigantic statues that have partially collapsed into the sand. It’s certainly interesting that the design aesthetic of the entire galaxy in Foundation is apparently Socialist realism. It’s also telling that even a random mining colony would be filled with gigantic statues of important people.

As for why they’ve come to Oona’s World, Hari has no idea. But the Prime Radiant told him to. Just as the Prime Radiant is now telling him to come to a certain mountain which is apparently Oona’s World’s answer to Mount Rushmore, since there are giant statues hewn into the rock. If you’re convinced by now that Hari is not quite sane, you’re not the only one.

Gaal and Salvor also have their doubts about Hari and his mysterious mission. However, since Hari is living in the Beggar‘s computer and has locked down all functions, they have no choice but to indulge Hari. Worse, since Hari has no body of his own and the Beggar‘s systems aren’t long-range enough, he demands that Gaal take Hari to Mount Rushmore of Oona’s World. Gaal is not at all happy about this and tells Hari that she is not carrying him around like “a fucking rat in a handbag”. Salvor tells Gaal to please just take Hari where he wants to go, so they can get the fuck off Oona’s World.

So Gaal and Hari Seldon or rather his holigram trek across Oona’s World. Hari gives some worldbuilding background and explains that once the planet’s palladium deposits were exhausted, the Empire turned the mining robots loose on the local population. The reason for this is not quite clear, since the human body does not contain any palladium except occasionally in tooth fillings and jewellery. Never mind that if those mining robots were beholden to the Three Laws of Robotics – which would make sense, because no one wants mining robots to ignore orders or attack humans – then how could they even be able to go after the human population of Oona’s World? So the whole thing makes no sense. However, it neatly illustrates that the Emperors are vicious pieces of shit, or – to quote Hari – “hollow men who hollow out their worlds”.

Hari is also quite cautious in moving across the barren landscape. Gaal wants to know why – after all, Oona’s World is uninhabited. “Uninhabited doesn’t mean we’re alone”, Hari says cryptically.

Otherwise, Hari and Gaal spend the rest of way bickering. Hari calls Gaal disruptive (annoying would be more fitting), whereas Gaal wants to know why Hari didn’t put a single Psychohistorian on Terminus to help the Foundation. Hari counters that he did intend to put one Psychohistorian on Terminus, namely Gaal, except that Gaal messed up that part, too.

The argument then goes into the issue of Salvor. Hari insists that Salvor’s death at the hands of the Mule may well be unavoidable and that any individual person is insignificant in the larger scheme of things anyway. Gaal counters that Salvor solved the first Seldon crisis and is therefore very important indeed, whereupon Hari says that Salvor has help because the forces of history were on her side and that if it hadn’t been her, someone else would have done the same. Which is exactly what Psychohistory teaches, namely that specific individuals don’t matter, even if they do important things. Hari calculated that someone would deal with the aggressive four kingdoms, but he had no way of knowing who this person would be nor does it really matter. So in short, Hari has read the books and knows how Psychohistory works, even if the writers sometimes don’t seem to know.

Come to think of it, Psychohistory is in many ways the antithesis to the great man (or woman, but it’s mostly a man) theory of history, because according to Psychohistory broad social and historical trends are a lot more important than any individual figure. Of course, the great man theory of history was already being challenged by the time Isaac Asimov wrote the original Foundation stories. Indeed, the entire explanation that if one “great” person doesn’t to do something, someone else will do it is borrowed almost verbatim from sociologist William Fielding Ogburn’s 1926 paper “The Great Man versus Social Forces”. Did Asimov read Ogburn’s paper? It’s certainly possible.

Hari and Gaal have finally reached the mine and venture inside. There is a door, which opens and behind that door – on a supposedly uninhabited, if not empty planet – is none other than Kalle, the dead mathematician poet whose work inspired both Hari and Gaal. Kalle welcomes Hari, who sends Gaal away and tells her to leave, if she and Salvor don’t hear from him within six hours. Then the door slams shut and Gaal is left standing outside.

Gaal returns to the Beggar and debates with Salvor what to do next. Salvor doesn’t trust Hari anymore than Gaal does and declares that if the positions were reversed Hari would leave them behind (and I couldn’t even blame him). And besides, they don’t need Hari to set up the Second Foundation. Actually, they do need him, since I doubt Gaal has all the necessary knowledge and Salvor certainly doesn’t have it. Salvor also drops another of the aphorism her counterpart in the books is famous for, though she attributes it to her father: “Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right.”

In many ways, it feels as if the writers are including these quotes from the books in the series almost as a bone thrown to the fans of the books to assure them that yes, the writers have read the books, they just chose to largely ignore them. Never mind that this particular Salvor Hardin aphorism doesn’t even fit in this situation.

Gaal and Salvor eventually decide to take off without Hari. However, just as they start the Beggar‘s engines and are about the take off, the Beggar crashes into a sinkhole and is attacked by two mining robots. I guess the Beggar contains palladium. Somehow, Salvor manages to manoeuvre the Beggar out of the sinkhole. However, before they head for orbit, the scanner detects a lifeform at the abandoned mine cum Mount Rushmore of Oona’s World where Gaal took Hari. The lifeform is lying in the palm of one of the giant statues and the mining robots are going after it, because – honestly, I have no idea. In his review, Joseph Kolacinski jokes that there appears to be a Fourth Law of Robotics that states: “A robot may not act until it is necessary to the plot?” Which makes as much sense as anything else.

Once again, the whole “escape the giant murderous mining robot” sequence feels more like something you’d see in The Mandalorian than like anything I’d expect to find in Foundation. I also find these pointless action scenes, which only seem to be there because the production seems to worry that the audience will get bored, if there aren’t enough action scenes, very frustrating. I don’t mind this sort of thing in The Mandalorian or any other Star Wars related show, but it just doesn’t belong in Foundation.

However, the powers that be have decreed that we must have an action scene, so Gaal and Salvor proceed to rescue the lifeform, which turns out to be none other than Hari Seldon and he’s got a body now.

Honestly, this development makes no sense at all. Why does Hari need a body? The whole point of Hari Seldon is that he is a ghost, a hologram of a man who died centuries ago. I applaud the show’s decision to turn Hari into an interactive hologram or rather two of them, because that makes him a lot more fun and gives Jared Harris more to do. But I still have no idea why Hari needs a body now and what the point of this whole Kalle business or the sidetrip to Oona’s World even was aside from giving us some cool visuals?

***

The second plot strand of this episode begins on the Lepsis penal colony where dissheveled convicts are harvesting sea salt – or at least that’s what it looks like. I did wonder why the Empire doesn’t use robots or machines for this, especially since machines are used to harvest sea salt even today. But then the Empire is in decline and may no longer have the machinery. Or they just really like torturing convicts. Besides, as I’ve pointed out several times before, prisoners in garishly coloured clothing being forced to do hard physical labour is a really common trope in US science fiction where practices in present day US prisons are extrapolated into the future, even if it makes little sense in the setting, as in season 1 of Star Trek Discovery. And to be fair, prisoners being forced to do hard physical labour makes more sense in Foundation or Andor for that matter than in the post-scarcity Star Trek universe. As for the bright yellow or orange outfits worn by the prisoners, something which is a comparatively new development that came in in the US only in the last thirty years or so and is not practice in most other western countries, I guess by now TV audiences, especially American ones, expect prisoners to wear garishly coloured overalls.

One prisoner collapses from exhaustion and is promptly prodded with some kind of shock stick by a guard, when another prisoner intervenes and tells the guard that his fellow prisoner has had enough and can’t work anymore. Before the guard can take out his frustrations on the prisoner who spoke up, Demerzel arrives and insists on speaking with this particular prisoner. And this is how we are introduced to Bel Riose, one of the main characters in “The Dead Hand” a.k.a. “The General”.

There are some differences to the books here. For starters, Bel Riose is not in prison at the beginning of “The Dead Hand”. There actually is a character in “The Dead Hand” who eventually dies in a prison slave mine, but that character is not Bel Riose and the slave mine where he is incarcerated is actually a Founndation prison (yes, they’re not always the good guys). What is more, Bel Riose in the books is a young man – for a general – and is only thirty-four. In the TV series he is played by 59-year-old British actor Ben Daniels. If his face seems familiar, that’s probably because it is, cause he has been in a lot of things over the years.

But apart from those differences, Bel Riose in the series is remarkably like his book counterpart, steadfast, loyal and protective of both the Empire and the people under his command. Indeed, the reason Bel Riose ended up in prison in the first place is that he countermanded an Imperial order to protect the people under his command. In short, Bel Riose is a good man, unlike the usual antagonists the Foundation deals with. He is also – and that’s not really a spoiler – doomed.

In many ways, the ultimate fate of Bel Riose is tragic. It’s also chilling when Hari Seldon’s hologram pops up at the end of “The Dead Hand” and says (paraphrasing), “Well, if the Empire sent a bad general after you – congratulations, you win. And if the Empire sent a general who’s actually good at his job after you, congratulations, you win as well, because a weak Emperor could never tolerate a strong general, but will have to eliminate him to save his hide.” Which is exactly what happens to Bel Riose in the end.

But for now Bel Riose has gotten a new lease on life, because Demerzel comes to fetch and give him his command back. Riose, however, has some conditions of his own and insists that his fellow prisoners (also Imperial military?) go free as well. Demerzel agrees to improve the conditions at the penal colony, which can hardly be worse, but won’t set the other prisoners go, whereupon Bel Riose tells her to fuck herself (which I suspect she might even be able to do).

However, Demerzel still has an ace up her voluminous sleeves, namely Glawen Curr, Bel Riose’s former second in command and husband. Yes, the Empire has marriage equality, which is something I guess. When he was imprisoned on Lepsis, Bel Riose was told that his husband had been executed for insubordination. However, Glawen Curr is still alive and Demerzel promises Bel Riose that they will be reunited, if he comes with her. Riose relents.

The scene switches to the Imperial palace on Trantor, where Demerzel shows Bel Riose to a quite luxurious apartment and tells him to clean himself up, since Riose literally looks as if he spent that past ten years on a desert island. Joseph Kolacinski says that he looks like a character from Planet of the Apes or Monty Python, which is not entirely wrong. Bel Riose, however, refuses to clean himself up and tells Demerzel that he’ll face Cleon as he is, so Cleon can see what he did to him. He also insists on seeing his husband, but Demerzel tells him that he can see Glawen Curr after he has talked with Cleon.

So we get the confrontation between Bel Riose and the Cleons which goes about as well as you can imagine. Brother Day and Dusk clearly dislike Riose as much as he dislikes them, while Brother Dawn, who has either never met Riose or only met him when he was very young, mostly seems curious. Riose insists on talking to Brother Day alone, so Dusk and Dawn as well as Demerzel are dismissed. Neither of them is happy about it.

Riose clearly triumphs in his one on one confrontation with Day, while Day comes off as weak and insecure. Which is exactly what Hari predicted. The confrontation culminates with Day trying to goad Riose into hitting him, something Bel Riose refuses to do, for while Day may be an arsehole and terrible person, he is still the Emperor and Bel Riose won’t strike his Emperor. I guess Bel Riose and Duncan a.k.a. Man-at-Arms could have a good long conversation in a bar about staying loyal to bad to terrible rulers. Though to be fair, even at his worst in Masters of the Universe Revelation, King Randor is nowhere near as terrible as Cleon XVII.

Turns out that not hitting the Emperor was exactly what Day wanted, so Bel Riose is reinstated and given his command over the 20th fleet back. He also finally gets to see his husband, who believed that Bel Riose was dead as well. The reunion between Bel Riose and Glawen Curr is genuinely touching, though the fact that Brother Day and Demerzel are spying on them through a mirror, while making out with each other is more than a little creepy. Day is once again unsure whether his relationship with Demerzel is right and proper, but Demerzel assures him that it’s perfectly all right. Dude, she says that to all the Cleons.

Glawen Curr tries to persuade Bel Riose to elope together, the Cleons and the Empire be damned. It would obviously be the right decision, but Bel Riose – being the steadfast and honourable man that he is – refuses. He’s well aware that the Brother Day and the rest of the Cleons are weak rulers, but Bel Riose will not abandon the Empire and its people to the likes of Brother Day. It’s a noble sentiment and one that will land the head of Bel Riose and probably Glawen Curr as well in a noose or on a chopping block or whatever weird and cruel forms of execution the Empire practices these days.

But first Bel Riose and Glawen Curr stand on the bridge of the Imperial flagship, where Bel Riose is greeted enthusiastically by his crew, including a female spacer. And then they take off to Siwenna to learn more about the mysterious Foundation from an Imperial agent stationed there.

I don’t recall feeling particularly sorry for Bel Riose the first time I read “The Dead Hand” a.k.a. “The General”, even though he clearly doesn’t deserve his fate. However, the books stick far closer to the Foundation than the TV series, which spends a lot of time on Trantor and with the Empire, and the Foundation were the good guys, so of course I was happy for them to win. That said, “The Dead Hand” is the moment where it becomes clear that the Foundation are not necessarily the good guys, though there are hints earlier, such as the Foundation forcing their fake religion and ideology on people who clearly don’t want it in “The Wedge”. As for Bel Riose, he is a Star Trek captain in a Star Wars world, which is the reason his story is so tragic. He also passes the “What would Commander McLane do?” test with flying colours.

In the books, the sexual orientation of Bel Riose never plays a role. He exists solely as a soldier with no personal life that we learn about. This is not unusual, since Asimov didn’t care very much about the personal lives of his characters. I also don’t recall any hints that Bel Riose is gay, but then any hints might have gone over my head, when I was younger. I really need to reread “The Dead Hand”, since it’s been a while. The TV-show turns Bel Riose into a happily married gay man to give his character more dimensions and to make his eventual fate even more tragic. However, what makes the decision to portray Bel Riose as a gay man in the show interesting is that there is a character in the show who is quite strongly implied to be gay in the books, namely Hober Mallow, the trader who enjoys engaging in nude sunbathing sessions, while smoking cigars, with a male friend. And yes, I know that sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, but trust me, that scene is very suggestive indeed.

***

This brings us to the third plot strand of this episode, namely what happens to the Foundation and Terminus. When we last saw Terminus, Hari Seldon’s Vault had just activated itself and accidentaly incinerated Jaeggar Fount, warden of Terminus. What is more, graffitti demanding “Get Hober Mallow!” appeared on the walls of the Vault, since the newly sentient Hari Seldon hologram has apparently taken up graffitti as a hobby.

The scene now opens with a cordon of armed guards surrrounding the Vault – which would seem to be smart lest someone else get incinerated. In Director’s Sermak’s conference room, Director Sermak, Poly Verisof and a bunch of other dignitaries including one Councillor Sutt, a name readers of the books may remember as Hober Mallow’s political rival in “The Big and the Little”, are discussing what to do now.

Poly Verisof insists that they fetch Hober Mallow, since that’s clearly what the Vault and Hari Seldon (who according to Poly are one and the same) wants them to do. Director Sermak counters that there is no way that Hari Seldon could predict the existence of a specific individual like Hober Mallow. There may be no psychohistorians on Terminus, but Director Sermak understands psychohistory better than some of the writers, it seems.

Poly counters that Salvor Hardin was a chosen one (though considering Poly was only a small kid when Hari Seldon last appeared, he must be misremembering things, since Hari clearly had no idea who Salvor was and even said so) and even points out a neat glass bust of Salvor in the conference room, confirming that she is one of the Foundation’s foundational heroes second only to Hari Seldon himself. So if Salvor could resolve the first crisis, maybe Hober Mallow can resolve this one, even though he is – to quote Poly – “a fucking arsehole”.

Since no one has any better ideas, Poly Verisof and Brother Constant set off to fetch Hober Mallow. Poly explains to Brother Constant that Hober Mallow was once a trainee priest in the Church of the Galactic Spirit (which matches his biography in the books), but that he became a con-man and scoundrel instead. Poly Verisof also manfully refuses a drink that Director Sermak offers him, so maybe he is cleaning himself up. As before, Kulvinder Ghir’s performance as Poly Verisof is a delight.

As for where Hober Mallow is to be found, Poly explains that he is on Korell, which is a problem, because Korell is actually off-limits to Foundationers. Again, this matches the books, where the Republic of Korell (which is very much not a republic) wants nothing to do with the Foundation and its missionaries, for fear of being taken over like the Four Kingdoms and Askone (which it seems we won’t be seeing in the show). Korell is of course also an important location in “The Big and the Little”.

In the TV show, Korell’s aesthetics seem to be operetta fascism coupled with brutalist architecture. The camera zooms in on some kind of rally. People in gray and tan uniform are lined up in a Leni Riefenstahl type arrangement. A man in a grey operetta uniform with lots of medals and tassles is sitting on a dais. He has what appears to be a golden sword with a big blue jewel in the hilt. This is Commdor Asper Argo, the well beloved leader of the Korellian Republic who is no more well beloved than Korell is a Republic. He is played by Philip Glennister, best remembered for playing DCI Gene Hunt in Life on Mars and Ashes to Ashes, two British excellent British SFF shows which for unfathomable reasons seem to be completely forgotten today.

The well beloved Commdor Asper Argo is about to have a virtual meeting with a Foundation trader named Ponyets. Readers of the books will recognise the name Limmar Ponyets as the protagonist of “The Wedge”. And indeed, the Foundation plot strand seems to be a mash-up of “The Wedge” and “The Big and the Little”, while the Trantor plot strand is already in “The Dead Hand”. It’s mystifying why the entire first season basically stuck to the first two stories in the first book with a bit of the third thrown in, which forced them to pad out the rather thin plot of the first two stories with a lot of unrelated stuff, but now suddenly the show suddenly stuffs “The Wedge”, “The Big and the Little” and “The Dead Hand” into an one season.  It probably would have been better to cover all of Foundation up through “The Big and the Little” in season 1, Foundation and Empire or just “The Dead Hand” in season 2, since “The Mule” probably deserves a season of his own, and then doing Second Foundation in the final season. The 1980s prequels are fun enough but not essential and Foundation’s Edge and particularly Foundation and Earth are very much a let-down. If I never have to see or read that Gaia nonsense again, it will still be too soon. Also screw James Lovelock for ruining Foundation.

The Commdor’s pretty blonde aide who looks as if she stepped right out of a Nazi recruitment poster, whispers to the Commdor that the man on the screen is not Trader Ponyets, but the infamous con-man Hober Mallow. Interestingly, I’ve been thinking that a good way to adapt “The Wedge” without confusing viewers with yet another protagonist (though readers of the books never minded getting a new protagonist almost every story) would be to replace Limmar Ponyets with Hober Mallow, since they’re quite similar characters and turn “The Wedge” into an earlier adventure of Mallow. It seems the writers had the same idea. In the books, Hober Mallow is described as brown-skinned – one of the few characters in the Foundation stories to get a physical description and I think the only one whose skin colour is mentioned. In the series, he is played by Dimitri Leonidas, a British actor of Greek Cypriot heritage. I certainly would not call him brown-skinned. And yes, it’s interesting that in a show which has cast several characters who are of undetermined race in the books (which in the 1940s probably meant white) with actors of colour, the one character who explicitly is a person of colour is played by a white man.

If the Commdor were smart, he would have had Hober Mallow arrested straight away. However, the Commdor is mostly greedy, but far from smart and so he agrees to listen to what Hober Mallow has to say, even though he does remind Mallow that Foundation missionaries are not welcome on Korell. Mallow replies that he has no interest in religion and doesn’t care what gods people worship. All he cares about is making a good deal. In the books, Mallow tells Commdor Argo the same thing – that he doesn’t care about religion, only about business. This moment is probably the closest that TV Hober Mallow ever comes to his book counterpart.

As for what Hober Mallow has to sell, he has a something called a “castling device”, named after the chess move, which is basically a short range teleportation device that allows two people to switch places, including wearing each other’s clothes. Mallow promptly demonstrates the device by switching places with the Commdor, who is duly impressed – until he realises that Mallow has made off with the blue jewel in the hilt of his sword. How in the universe Hober Mallow can steal the jewel, when the castling device can only switch people and not even their clothes is not explained.

Hober Mallow is about to make his getaway, but before he can get his ship off the ground, it is stormed by the Commdor’s forces and Hober is arrested. So much for the Foundation’s last, best hope.

Luckily, Poly Verisof and Brother Constant are already on the way to retrieve Hober Mallow, unaware that this retrieval has turned into a rescue mission. We first see them moving through a crowd of Korellians, their dark red priestly robes standing out in a sea of gray and beige. Interestingly, no one seems to be interested in stopping Poly and Brother Constant, even though Korell explicitly forbids Foundation missionaries from visiting the planet and there is a crucial sequence in “The Big and the Little”, where a Foundation priest is lynched by a Korellian mob, while Hober Mallow does fuck all to help him.

As for what has attracted all of those crowds, the well beloved Asper Argo is sitting on his throne again, overseeing some public executions. The execution method is something called “Death by spike of titan”, which is basically impaling the victim with a giant dart. The condemned are also made to wear garish yellow jackets with a giant target on their chest plus a kind of rubber clown’s mask. It’s all suitably bizarre, but also very un-Asimovian. As I’ve noted before, whenever someone is threatened with execution in an Asimov story – which actually does happen  in “The Wedge” – it’s inevitably by gas chamber or lethal injection. Asimov was a chemist and apparently an adherent of better dying through chemistry. But then, gas chambers and lethal injections are a lot less photogenic than impaling people on giant spikes.

We see the first victim quite gruesomely impaled. The body is taken away and Commdor Asper Argo the well beloved orders the next condemned to be brought forward. And this condemned is none other than Hober Mallow. Which means that Poly Verisof and Brother Constant have to think quickly to save the Foundation’s last, best hope from being impaled on a giant spike. Poly Verisof tries to stall the execution to give them time to come up with a rescue plan. And so Poly interrupts the proceedings and asks to be allowed to pray with Hober Mallow – after all, he is a priest. Coincidentally, this is exactly what Limmar Ponyets does in “The Wedge” to be allowed to visit the Foundation agent Eskel Gorov, who has managed to get himself arrested and sentenced to death on planet Askone. Indeed, Poly’s interjection is a nigh verbatim quote of Limmar Ponyets request to the elders of Askone.

However, Korell is not Askone. For while Askone was a religious theocracy and therefore had some respect for priests, Korell is just a corrupt shithole. And so the Commdor denies Poly’s request. I guess this brief scene is all we get of “The Wedge”, which is a pity, since it’s a good story. I also hoped we’d see the cool gold transmutation gadget, but I think Hober’s castling device fulfils that purpose in the series. But then, I was maybe the only person who geeked out about the gold transmution device from “The Wedge”, because I’d just heard about the process chemistry class shortly before I read the story.

The execution is about to go ahead. Hober Mallow still has some last words, then a clown mask is pulled over his face. Suddenly, the condemned gets very agitated and his voice and statue notably change. Turns out that Hober Mallow has used his castling gadget to switch places with the Commdor again. He also uses the confusion to escape – taking the Commdor’s golden sword with the big blue jewel in the hilt along.

Once Poly Verisof and Brother Constant realise what just happened, they also realise that there is only one way for Hober Mallow to get the hell off Korell, namely by stealing their jump ship. So they head for the spaceport and manage to jump aboard just before Hober takes off. But the unlikely trio have no time to celebrate their narrow escape, for Hober Mallow is very determined that he’s not going to Terminus. He even tries to use an escape pod to get away, but Brother Constant knocks him out with a sedative injection.

The Korell scenes are great fun and Philip Glennister really captures the self-importance and idiocy of Commdor Asper Argo, the well beloved. However, the TV series version of Hober Mallow is very different from his book counterpart to the point that he is almost unrecognisable.

For starters, Hober Mallow in the books is a trader not a con artist, though he is definitely unscrupulous. As for the TV character, Paul Levinson compares him to Han Solo in his review, while the Stars End podcast compares him to “The Outrageous Okona” from the eponymous Star Trek: The Next Generation episode. Han Solo and the Outrageous Okona are both variations of the same characters archetype, the space rogue. The space rogue is a very popular character archetype for science fiction and shows up a lot, particularly in media science fiction. In addition to Han Solo and the Outrageous Okona, other examples include Malcolm Reynolds from Firefly, Book from Star Trek Discovery, Christobal Rios from Star Trek Picard and Peter Quill a.k.a. Star Lord from Guardians of the Galaxy.

All of these are fairly recent examples, but the space rogue is venerable archetype who has been around for a long time and definitely predates the original Foundation stories. The original space rogue was C.L. Moore’s Northwest Smith, who debuted in 1933, nine years before the first Foundation story. Leigh Brackett’s Eric John Stark is probably the most famous of the early space rogues, though he does postdate Foundation. However, Leigh Brackett wrote a lot of space rogues like Roy Campbell from “The Citadel of Lost Ships” or Rick Urquart from Shadow Over Mars, which came out in 1944, the same year as “The Big and the Little”. Other stories from the same year, which feature space rogues are Edmond Hamilton’s “The Free-Lance of Space” and Manly Wade Wellman’s “Gambler’s Asteroid”.

So in short, there were a lot of space rogues in 1940s science fiction. However, Hober Mallow is not one of them. He’s a space capitalist, not a rogue. And indeed, Isaac Asimov didn’t write space rogues and Astounding, home of the original Foundation stories, almost never published space rogue stories. The space rogue was born in the pages of Weird Tales, but by the 1940s he was mostly hanging out in Planet Stories, Startling Stories and Thrilling Wonder Stories.

That said, there certainly are some parallels between the space rogue, especially the way the space rogue was portrayed in the 1940s, at the time the Foundation stories were written, and Hober Mallow. For the space rogue of the 1930s and 1940s wasn’t a charming scoundrel or comedic never-do-well – that came in much later. And indeed, even the charming scoundrels or comedic never-do-wells often hide deep trauma underneath their charming smile – see Peter Quill or Malcolm Reynolds.

The space rogue of the 1930s and 1940s was an outsider, often someone from a marginalised background who didn’t fit into society and turned to crime, often out of desperation and poverty. A lot of the fiction in magazines like Planet Stories, Startling Stories and Thrilling Wonder Stories – home of the space rogues – had a strong anti-colonial, anti-imperialistic and anti-capitalist streak. Space rogues were cynics who claimed to care for nothing and no one, yet usually had a hidden heart of gold. The space rogue shares a lot of DNA both with sword and sorcery protagonists (and the space rogue was born in the pages of Weird Tales, appearing alongside Conan and created by C.L. Moore, who was also one of the original sword and sorcery writers). A remarkable number of space rogues were also people of colour. Leigh Brackett’s Eric John Stark is the most famous example, but Leigh Brackett’s Roy Campbell and C.L. Moore’s Northwest Smith.

And now let’s take a look at Hober Mallow as he is described in “The Big and the Little”. Hober Mallow is originally from Smyrno, one of the Four Kingdoms. He initially trains as a priest, but once the Foudation recognises his intelligence, he is told the truth about scientism and the Seldon Plan and becomes a trader, part of a loose network of people like himself, most of whom are not from Terminus itself but from the Four Kingdoms, who spread the Foundation’s influence via trade and act as agents and spies, if required.

“The Big and the Little” makes it very clearly that Hober Mallow is an outsider on Terminus, a man who knows the truth about the Foundation and its purpose, but who will never be one of them. There’s a reason Hober Mallow gets more physicaly description than almost everybody else in the Foundation stories – we learn that he has brown skin and stubbornly dresses in the style of his homeworld of Smyrno and not like a Foundationer – because it shows his status as an outsider. The fact that he’s implied to be gay only further serves to add to his outsider status. And once Hober Mallow’s investigation into what the hell is going on in the Korellian Republic has the convenient side effect of making him rich, the Foudation’s establishment really starts to hate him.

So Hober Mallow shares some characteristics of the space rogue of the 1940s – he’s an outsider, a cynic and a man of colour – though only actual space rogues, Hober Mallow embraces capitalism. In fact, it’s quite possible that Hober Mallow as well as similar Foundation characters like Limmar Ponyets and Latham Devers were Asimov’s attempt at writing a space rogue, only that the character turned into something else than a pure space rogue.

Come to think of it, the protagonists of the first few Foudation stories do reflect Asimov’s experience as a first generation Russian Jewish immigrant. In both the books and the TV series, Salvor Hardin is a member of the first generation born and growing up on Terminus , who don’t give a damn about the Galactic Encyclopaedia but just want to live their lives – a reflection of a conflict we often see among immigrants who still retain memories and the culture of their original homeland and their children who grow up in a different society and don’t particularly care about the old country. And Hober Mallow is someone who lives on Terminus, but who will never be considered a “real” Foundationer because of his ethnic and cultural background. I’m sure the son of Jewish immigrants in early twentieth century New York City could sympathise.

So in short, Hober Mallow in the books is a very interesting, if not particularly likeable character, who shares some characteristics with the space rogues of the 1940s, though he himself isn’t one. The Hober Mallow in the show, however, is a very shallow interpretation of a space rogue, more outrageous Okona than Northwest Smith or Eric John Stark or Han Solo or Malcolm Reynolds or even Peter Quill. Of course, we haven’t seen a lot of Hober Mallow yet and he may well display some hidden depths and dimensions in future episodes (And please, give us the naked sunbathing and cigar smoking scene, because Lee Pace can’t get all naked scenes). But considering how well the show handled Bel Riose, it’s a bit disappointing that Hober Mallow, hero of the Foundation, so far seems to be mostly a comic relief character.

Masters-of-the-Universe-Piece Theatre: “The Uninvited Guest”

It’s time for another Masters-of-the-Universe-Piece Theatre photo story. The name “Masters-of-the-Universe-Piece Theatre” was coined by Kevin Beckett at the Whetstone Discord server.

I got a new Masters of the Universe figure recently, namely Zodac, the Cosmic Enforcer:

Even big bad Cosmic Enforcers need their morning coffee.

Zodac has always been one of the strangest Masters of the Universe characters. He was there from the very beginning, one of the first eight figures to come out in 1982. Zodac bears a lot of similarities to Metron from Jack Kirby’s New Gods, but then the early Masters of the Universe designs were partly inspired by Jack Kirby’s Fourth World, because Mattel was apparently working on a Fourth World toyline in the late 1970s that never went into production, so a lot of ideas were reused for Masters of the Universe.

Though the Battle Ram Blog points out that the Jack Kirby influence on Masters of the Universe was not as great as the video linked claims, since no one who worked on the line in the 1980s ever mentioned Jack Kirby as an influence. The one part of Masters of the Universe that was influenced by Jack Kirby’s Fourth World is the 1987 movie. Director Gary Goddard was very open about the Kirby influence and even wanted to bring in Jack Kirby as a concept artist.

Zodac was also the only one of the main characters not aligned with any faction. Instead, he was billed as a neutral observer, a cosmic enforcer who’s task it is to maintain balance in the universe. Zodac is also frequently described as being a connected to or even being a former member of the all-powerful Council of Elders (a concept that goes back to the early 1980s, though it wasn’t really explored very much until the 2002 cartoon). Quite often, Zodac is the sole member of the Council of Elders to remain in human form.

Zodac’s position of a neutral force preserving the balance of the cosmos is a heady concept for a kids’ toyline. As a result, neither the kids playing with the toys nor the people working on Masters of the Universe often had no real idea what to do with Zodac. He only put in a handful of appearances in the original mini-comics and the Filmation cartoon of the 1980s, though a related character named Zodak with a K (the two Zodacs are different enough that they are generally considered two separate characters) played a bigger role in the 2002 cartoon. Zodac did appear in the West German audio dramas, voiced by Jürgen Thormann, and also put in several appearances in the various Masters of the Universe comics over the years.

Whenever Zodac did appear, he was often portrayed as something of a jerk. This goes back all the way to the original 1982 cardback illustration by Errol McCarthy, which shows Zodac firing his blaster at He-Man (reproduced here along with a lot of background information on the character and his development), which outright billed him as an evil character. Because Zodac is comitted to maintaining the balance between good and evil, he often doesn’t approve of He-Man, since He-Man is just too powerful and tilts the balance too much towards good. Zodac obviously doesn’t approve of Skeletor either, yet while he will occasionally aid the heroic warriors against the Evil Forces of Skeletor, we mostly see him harassing He-Man. Zodac is also one of the very few people (in the wider sense of the word) who knows that Prince Adam is He-Man.

In the Filmation episode “The Search”, Zodac shows up on Eternia to warn He-Man that Skeletor is trying to steal the Star Seed, an all powerful glowing orb (Eternia has a lot of all powerful glowing orbs) buried deep underneath the surface of the planet. However, once He-Man has stopped Skeletor, Zodac reveals that the whole thing was just a test to see if He-Man would be able to resist the temptation of using the all powerful Star Seed for himself and was thus worthy of wielding the Power of Grayskull. As for how Skeletor learned about the Star Seed – well, Zodac told him. This wouldn’t be the only time that Zodac would aid the villains for his own ends either. His counterpart with a K in the 2002 cartoon deliberately unleashes the terrifying Snake People upon Eternia, because he wants to avenge himself on the Snake People’s leader King Hiss for murdering and eating his brother.

Zodac’s obsession with whether Prince Adam was worthy of the Power of Grayskull would become something of a pattern in later appearance of the character, particularly in the comics. Hereby, the Sorceress of Grayskull was usually the one who had to serve as an advocate for He-Man – well, he is her champion, after all – and who had to persuade Zodac that yes, Adam is indeed worthy.

Indeed, this is very much the plot of Dark Horse‘s recent Masters of the Universe: Masterverse comic mini-series by Tim Seeley, Eddie Nunez and various other artists. Zodac pays a visit to the Sorceress and once again expresses his disapproval of Prince Adam – as well as his intention to torture Adam to test him – whereupon the Sorceress proceeds to show Zodac a selection of He-Men throughout the Multiverse and how He-Man is always a force for good, regardless of the universe. This serves as a framing device for different Masters of the Universe stories set in alternate realities.

In the Masterverse mini-series, Zodac at least only confines himself to threatening to torture Adam and holding the Sorceress at blaster point – something that doesn’t impress her very much. But in issue 19 of the 2012 DC Comics He-Man and the Masters of the Universe series, written by Rob David (there’s a great interview with him here at the Dad-at-Arms podcast) and illustrated by Tom Derenick (yes, I looked that up), Zodac goes even further and actually wants to kill Prince Adam until the Sorceress stops him. What makes this even worse is that Adam is only about twelve years old at this point and unwittingly taps into the Power of Grayskull and stops time in order to pull his father from a crashed Wind Raider.

It’s very much a standalone flashback issue of Adam recalling a pivotal day in his life – a day which starts with young Adam kissing Teela (because she dared him to) and then getting rebuffed by his father and manipulated by his evil Uncle Keldor into running away in order to lure both Adam and Randor into an ambush. Adam has his Sky Sled shot out from under him, but is otherwise unharmed, but Randor is badly injured and trapped inside the wrecked Wind Raider. Adam is struggling to save him and accidentally taps into the Power of Grayskull to stop time. This is when Zodac and the Sorceress show up to discuss what to do about the twelve-year-old boy who has accidentally stopped time. Zodac wants to kill young Adam, because he’s too powerful and might pose a danger to the balance of the cosmos, but the Sorceress argues that Adam is acting purely out of love for his father and that they should help him instead. Obviously, the Sorceress wins this argument or else there wouldn’t be a story.

I imagine that the Sorceress would get quite annoyed to constantly have to defend her champion against Zodac. As for what would happen, if Duncan were to find out that Zodac wanted to murder Adam… well, let’s see…

Castle Grayskull, in the Sorceress’ private quarters:

Everybody on Eternia likes Delftware.

“It’s so nice of Duncan to drop by and help me with my home improvement project. And maybe afterwards, there’ll be time for other things…”

Knock, knock.

“And here he comes. Time to lower the jawbridge.”

“Duncan! How wonderful of you to come! And…. Malcolm?!”

“Don’t worry, Sorceress, whatever repair work you need done, Eternia’s strongest and most handsome brothers will get it done for you in a jiffy.”

“Sigh.”

“So what can we do for you today, my… ahem, Sorceress?”

“Ahem, Duncan, could I have a word? In private?”

“Well, if you two want to make out or whatever, I’ll be over here unpacking the tools.”

“Sigh.”

“What is it, my love?”

“When I said I needed a hand, did you have to bring your brother?”

“Malcolm comes in handy, if you need a wall knocked down.”

“I don’t need a wall knocked down, all I want is for you to put up a picture.”

“Malcolm is handy for that, too. If you have Malcolm, you don’t need a hammer. And anyway, I would have brought Adam, but he’s busy with some royal duties.”

“And it never occurred to you to just come alone?”

“Why? What’s wrong, my love?”

“What’s wrong?! Your brother is the most indiscreet person on all of Eternia, that’s what’s wrong. And I don’t want him to blab about our relationship all over the royal barracks.”

“Uhm, if you want to retreat somewhere more private, that’s fine by me.”

“See what I mean?”

“Shut up, Malcolm.”

“So where do you want us to hang this picture?”

“Right above that dresser will be fine, thank you.”

BOOM!

“Teela-Na, I need a word. Now.”

“Zodac?! Don’t you knock? No, of course you don’t. You never do. So why don’t you just come in and treat my private quarters like a public transit station? After all, everybody else does.”

“Uhm, Teela-Na, do you need help? I didn’t know you were expecting a visitor.”

“I wasn’t.”

“Enough! Remove your mortal associates, Teela-Na, for we must talk about the problem of He-Man. Your champion is upsetting the balance of the cosmos.”

“Who is that jerk?”

“I think I know. And I don’t like it.”

“You! The Sorceress has told me all about you, Zodac. She told me how you wanted to kill Prince Adam, when he was only twelve and pulled his father from a wrecked Wind Raider.”

“He did what?!! He tried to kill Adam?!! Get the bastard and give him hell, brother!”

“I’m warning you, Zodac, lay one hand on Adam or on Teela-Na and you’ll answer to me.”

“Duncan, no!”

ZAP!

“Unhand me, mortal. Matters of cosmic importance do not concern you, Man-at-Arms.”

“Duncan!”

“Okay, that does it. No one zaps my brother without answering to the strongest right first in Eternia.”

“Eat steel knuckles, cosmic shithead!”

“Duncan, are you all right? You shouldn’t have intervened. Zodac is powerful beyond imagination.”

“I’m… uff… sworn to protect Adam… and you. Can’t let him hurt you.”

ZAP!

“Shut up, imbecile! These matters do not concern mere mortals like you.”

“That’s it. No one tells me brother to shut up except for me.”

“No, Duncan, he’s too powerful.”

“Listen, Zodac, I don’t care how powerful you are or how important your mission is. If you as much as touch Adam or Teela or Teela-Na or even Malcolm, I will kill you. Is that understood?”

ZAP! BOOM!

“Now you listen, Man-at-Arms. I have no quarrel with you nor with your imbecile of a brother. But interfere with my sacred mission and I shall kill you both without a second thought.”

“Hey, hands off my brother, cosmic arsehole!”

“ENOUGH! You will not harm my champion or my daughter or my man or even Fisto or you will find that I am more than a match for you. And now leave, Zodac. You are not welcome here.”

“Yeah right, you tell him, Sorceress.”

“All right, Teela-Na. I shall take my leave and enforce the balance of the cosmos over in Galaxy SW-77, cause those Jedi are getting way to complacent. But be warned. If your champion gets out of line again, I’ll be back.”

“Don’t let the door hit you on your way out, arsehole!”

“Are you all right, my love? Did he hurt you?”

“Have no fear, Duncan. Within these walls, I’m more than a match for Zodac and he knows it. But you should have kept out of this. Zodac is too powerful for you.”

“I don’t care how powerful he is. If he threatens Adam or Teela or you, he picks a fight with me.”

“And that cosmic jerk really tried to kill Adam, when he was just twelve and saved his Dad from that Wind Raider crash? You know, the one event that convinced all of the Masters that there was more to Adam than just a kid who kept getting underfoot. What a fucking arsehole!”

***

That’s it for today, folks. I hope you enjoyed this Masters-of-the-Universe-Piece Theatre Photo Story, because there will be more.

Disclaimer: I don’t own any of these characters, I just bought some toys, took photos of them and wrote little scenes to go with those photos. All characters are copyright and trademark their respective owners.

Indie Speculative Fiction of the Month for July 2023

It’s that time of the month again, time for “Indie Speculative Fiction of the Month”.

So what is “Indie Speculative Fiction of the Month”? It’s a round-up of speculative fiction by indie and small press authors newly published this month, though some June books I missed the last time around snuck in as well. The books are arranged in alphabetical order by author. So far, most links only go to Amazon.com, though I may add other retailers for future editions.

Once again, we have new releases covering the whole broad spectrum of speculative fiction. This month, we have urban fantasy, historical fantasy, sword and sorcery, paranormal mystery, space opera, military science fiction, Steampunk, horror, vampires, dwarves, elves, dragons, superheroes, time travel, aliens, airships, fly gods, lesbian space pirates, crime-busting witches, crime-busting ghosts and much more.

Don’t forget that Indie Speculative Fiction of the Month is also crossposted to the Speculative Fiction Showcase, a group blog run by Jessica Rydill and myself, which features new release spotlights, guest posts, interviews and link round-ups regarding all things speculative fiction several times per week.

As always, I know the authors at least vaguely, but I haven’t read all of the books, so Caveat emptor.

And now on to the books without further ado:

The Morass: Servant of the Fly God by Zachary Ashford

What if you had been kidnapped by a serial killer and your only hope of escape was cut off by rising floodwater?

“A terrifying descent into a nightmarish scenario, rendered with skill, imagination and a merciless desire to immerse the reader in undiluted horror. This is a terrific work of horror fiction by one of Australia’s best genre writers. I couldn’t put it down.”—Jamie Blanks, director of Urban Legend and Valentine

The Australian Outback is a place mired in myth, folklore, and rumour that’s inspired some of the best horror fiction and creature horror books. Some say it’s full of deadly creatures. Others claim it’s rife with serial killers hunting for backpackers and stranded tourists. Whatever the cause, young people in central Queensland are disappearing and the locals are frightened.

Katy is fresh from college and ready to research and write her magnum opus, a book investigating the many disappearances of outback youths in Australia. When she meets Kip, a guitarist on his way to the city, she knows she’s onto something good and that she can prove her hypothesis: there’s nothing there for the youth of today and they’re running away, searching for employment and prospects in the city.

Unfortunately, she’s wrong. In this terrifying cosmic horror book, there is a killer in the outback. One that thinks God is the ancient creature that lurks in the swamps near his property. With floodwaters rising, he’s certain Katy and Kip are the sacrifices that will allow the entity to emerge from the morass and cleanse the world of sinners. One terrifying abduction later, he has them both imprisoned.

As they struggle to escape the terror and the torture, their desperate fight for survival will lead only to more horror. Because their kidnapper is not crazy. His god is real. His god is hungry, and it is screaming to be reborn.

Aurealis-nominated Australian author Zachary Ashford turns his attention to the isolation of the outback with this fast-paced horror. The tension thrums. The brutality screams. The desperation of his protagonists’ plight bleeds from the page. For fans of extreme horror, splatterpunk, gore, violent films like Wolf Creek, or international movies like the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and the grotesque creatures of movies like Aliens, The Thing, or The Fly, The Morass: Servant of the Fly God is not to be missed.

Will Katy and Kip survive? Will their killer succeed? Will the God in the swamp take over the world. Buy this supernatural thriller book now, and discover their fate.

Brave New Dawn by Jonathan P. Brazee and J.N. Chaney:

Live for today. Prepare for tomorrow.

The unknown reaches of the galaxy still offer danger for Sergeant Major Reverent Pelletier and his small group of Marines and karnans. They must be ready to protect their own.

But back in human space, war has reared its ugly head once again. Pax Naxli is done, and the central government pays little attention to the Exiled Fleet. On their own now, they can’t count on help when the inevitable comes a’knocking.

Without any outside support and unable to return home, Rev, Tomiko, and the rest must figure out how to survive.

Rev is a Marine, born and bred to fight and survive, to defend those who cannot defend themselves, but one way or another, his journey is coming to an end.

The only question is: will he and his friends live long enough to see it?

Cursed by Lindsay Buroker:

The final installment in the Legacy of Magic series!

Matti Puletasi has defeated her enemies, rescued her parents, fallen in love with the elf of her dreams, and even started thinking of having children. Will her life finally return to normal (as normal as possible when one is mated to an elf and has a goblin for a roommate and a dragon for a neighbor)?

All Matti has left to do is to fulfill her obligation to Mikki the Wrench. That task, however, takes an unexpected turn when she encounters a powerful dark-elven artifact.

Before she knows it, the foul relic has marked her, leaving her cursed as it steals her magic—and threatens to steal her life.

If she can’t figure out how to remove the curse, she may lose everything she’s fought so hard to achieve.

Uninvited House Ghosts by Rachel Ford:

Ghosts are real, and they’re watching over their families. Sometimes, that’s a good thing. But not for the Evanses.

Tennessee Evans comes from a long, undistinguished line of crooks, grifters, layabouts, and rascals. She’s made her share of mistakes, sure, but she’s trying to break the mold. Even after a contentious breakup that hits her emotionally and financially, she works hard, keeps her head up, and carries on.

Then her ex winds up murdered in her backyard. And her prints are all over the murder weapon. She didn’t do it, but no one believes her.

Especially not the pigheaded, infuriatingly hot lead detective investigating the case. On the contrary, she seems to have it out for Tennessee.

Tennessee knows she needs help, and she needs it fast. What she doesn’t know is that the ancestral spirit council is on the job. Which is probably for the best, since their last few missions have ended in disaster – and the odd, accidental death. (Sorry about that, Jane!)

The council dispatches a 20th century American tax expert and an 18th century British criminal to tackle the case. Whether the pair can put aside centuries of personal and cultural differences to save Tennessee is anyone’s guess.

But one thing’s for sure – Marshmeadow will never be the same after this ill-advised haunting!

A supernatural cozy mystery with outrageous shenanigans, cute dogs, found family, a slow burn lesbian romance, and an old, definitely haunted house full of secrets.

Sisters of Fangs by Carlo Hart:

When Emily and Luna, two sisters from Los Angeles, hear about all the paranormal activity on Frazier Mountain, they decide to move there and see if the stories are true. Armed with a camera and a tripod, they are ready to capture footage that will go viral and jump start their fledgling social media careers.

They make friends and enjoy the sweet mountain life before one of them is kidnapped and they find themselves trying to solve a dangerous mystery.

Now they find themselves surrounded by dark woods and horrible creatures. They face vampires, hellhounds, demons, aliens, a talking polar bear and a secret lab. Will they fight the growing evil before it takes over the mountain and then the world.

Sisters of Fangs is the follow up urban fantasy series to the Mountain of Fangs series that has scared so many readers deep into the night.

Rent a cabin on Frazier Mountain. Come for the quiet, stay for the monsters.

Witches of the Deep by Lily Harper Hart:

Hali Waverly thought she’d seen the worst the world had to offer. Then her boyfriend Gray Hunter’s parents arrived on her beach. Now the horror truly begins.

Hali has a big problem…and that’s not including the skeletons that are taking over the beach thanks to an errant spell.

Nobody knows who cast the spell, or more importantly why, but Hali is determined to find out. When she’s not dodging visits from the people Gray wants to see least in his life that is.

Hali is a fixer, which means she can’t stay out of the situation. Will she make matters better or worse, though?

Gray knows exactly how he sees his future going. His parents aren’t part of it. Despite that, part of him doesn’t want to shut the door forever. If he lets them in, though, will he lose everything he’s been working toward?

Gray and Hali are a team. Dark forces are moving in on them from every direction, however. It’s going to take both of them working together to come out on the other side.

Even then, it might not be enough.

Death is coming for St. Pete Beach, and it’s not taking any prisoners.

Little Nothing by Dee Holloway

Two young women race to turn the tide in a Florida on the brink of civil war…

Everyone knows that Jonnie trains and races the limerunners, the deadly water horses that live in the swamps and streams around the town of Sawgrass and that she’s got a way with them that none of the local men can match. And everyone suspects that while Bess works at her family’s inn, The Nag’s Head, she sews her little nothings, magic in every stitch, to protect her beloved Jonnie and their family. What they don’t know is that Jonnie runs messages, stitched in code by Bess, for the Union Army. But now the Confederate forces have taken the nearby fort and they want to use Jonnie’s limerunners and Jonnie herself as weapons against the Union. And all of Bess’s magic won’t be enough to save them when they’re caught in a web of betrayal in a Florida being torn apart by burgeoning civil war. Only Ada Nuit, the Maroon’s ghost queen, knows what lies in store for them and she’s not telling…

Black Sails to Sunward by Sheila Jenné:

In a world of frock coats, solar sails, and rigid class boundaries, Lucy joins the Martian Imperial Navy as a midshipman.

Mars and Earth are at war, and Lucy hopes for quick promotion. But when she arrives aboard ship, she finds harsh officers and a crew on the verge of mutiny. And worse: her former friend, Moira—a commoner and a radical—is a member of the crew.

It’s clear where Lucy’s duty lies. As an officer and a gentlewoman, she has to quell the crew’s rebellion and preserve her ship for the fight against Earth. But soon, she’ll have to make a decision between all she’s been taught to believe and the injustice she can see with her own eyes.

A Book of Blades, Volume II, edited by Matthew John and L.D. Whitney:

Within this tome are buried the blades of warriors, thieves, and wizards. Tales of their deeds, glories, and triumphs shall ring throughout the ages.

Rogues in the House Podcast has gathered the best tales of Sword & Sorcery from across the community.

Here, brave adventurers will discover tales of daring and adventure, of dark sorcery and bloody combat, all penned by members of the burgeoning Sword & Sorcery Community. Returning authors John R. Fultz, Jason Ray Carney, and Charles Clark are joined by new addtions like J. Thomas Howard, Bryn Hammond, and legendary Kirk A. Johnson. Journey across distant, unremembered lands with these and many more!

Bewitched and Bothered by Amanda M. Lee:

Hadley Hunter is taking some downtime with her fiancé Galen Blackwood. All she wants to do is bask in their happiness and pretend nothing bad could possibly happen.

This is Moonstone Bay, however. That’s simply not reality.

When Galen gets a call that an old-timer on the island is holding a gun on the guests at a local bar, Hadley accompanies him to the scene…and watches as the unthinkable happens. The man’s death is strange enough, but when news starts to spread that their victim had been carrying on with a woman who was young enough to be his granddaughter, things take an even odder turn.

It seems there’s an unknown power on the island, and this individual is casting the sort of love spells that force unusual couples to start burning—literally—for one another.

Not only are Hadley and Galen hot on the trail of an outside player, but they’re also targets.

Hadley has learned a lot since finding out she’s a witch. This lesson, however, might be too hot to handle.

The union of earth, air, fire, and water has become symbolic on Moonstone Bay. This time the union will lead to a whole new adventure.

Nothing will ever be the same again.

Of Wings and Shadows by Kyoko M.

In a modern-day world teeming with marauding dragons, there is only one solution: The Wild Hunt.

The United States government has decided to hold a tournament called The Wild Hunt to determine who will be responsible for the capture of wild dragons by the Knight Division. The four challengers Noah Wilson, Charlie Howard, Su Jin Han, and Beowulf have to catch five deadly dragons alive if they want to win the tournament and become the new Knight Division dragon hunters. Their journey will take them through the mountains of South Carolina, the seas of Key West, the caverns of Ruby Falls, the Redwood forest, and finally, the murky bayous of Louisiana. Will they succeed against their competition, or will the dragons of the Wild Hunt be too wild to tame?

Of Wings and Shadows is the sixth book in the Of Cinder and Bone series. It takes place in medias res of Book Five, Of Claws and Inferno. It follows Of Cinder and Bone, Of Blood and Ashes, Of Dawn and Embers, and Of Fury and Fang

Vaulting Through Time by Nancy McCabe:

Can she perform the vault of her life to save her loved ones—and herself?

Sixteen-year-old gymnast Elizabeth Arlington doesn’t care that her mother is older than the other girls’ moms or that she doesn’t look anything like her parents. She has too much to worry about like her body changing and how all of a sudden the balance beam is not as easy as it used to be. But when she makes a discovery that throws her entire identity into question, she turns to her ex-best friend Zach, who suggests a way for her to find the answers her mother won’t give her: a time machine they found in an abandoned house.

As Elizabeth catapults through time, she encounters a mysterious abandoned child, an elite gymnast preparing for Olympic Trials, and an enigmatic woman who seems to know more than she’s revealing. Then when a thief makes off with an identical time machine, Elizabeth finds herself on a race to stop the thief before the world as she knows it—and her future—are destroyed.

Space Ships and Other Trips by Raven Oak:

Part II of this debut collection by multi-award-winning author and artist Raven Oak brings together speculative fiction stories from the past ten years of her career, ranging from space adventures with a dash of mystery and other near-future tales to post-apocalyptic stories and deep dives into the mind.

You’ll find closed-ship mysteries, foul-acting apps, talking cats, retail hell, and hacked programs in these ELEVEN speculative fiction pieces. Space Ships & Other Trips contains FIVE never-before seen stories for your enjoyment, including a tie-in story from Jeff Sturgeon’s The Last Cities of Earth universe.

STORIES INCLUDED: The Loss of Luna, Hungry, Mouth, Only a Bird, Q-Be, Hands, Ol’ St. Nick, Drip, Level Up, Scout’s Honor, and D.E.A.T.H.

Blue Lancer by Glynn Stewart:

It was just supposed to be a run to the bank…

A superpowered criminal named Cashout just took over the bank Joshua Hammond went to for cash—demanding that the unlicensed super-vigilante called Blue Lancer come out and fight him.
Unfortunately for everyone, Joshua Hammond is the Blue Lancer—and trapped with the rest of the hostages, he can’t do anything.

But if Cashout’s “nemesis” doesn’t come out and fight, people are going to die…

Faraway and Forever: More Stories by Nancy Joie Wilkie:

This collection of novelettes takes the reader from the not-to-distant future to a time when travel between worlds is a common occurrence. Each stop along mankind’s journey outward to the stars is accompanied by a deeper look inward–from examining how extraterrestrial beings might use our own biology against us, to whether a human consciousness can survive in a virtual environment, to how wishes are really granted. Original and thought provoking, these stories–which include an interstellar religious thriller involving a second coming of Christ–will stimulate the intellect and engage the imagination.

Indie Crime Fiction of the Month for July 2023

Welcome to the latest edition of “Indie Crime Fiction of the Month”.

So what is “Indie Crime Fiction of the Month”? It’s a round-up of crime fiction by indie authors newly published this month, though some June books I missed the last time around snuck in as well. The books are arranged in alphabetical order by author. So far, most links only go to Amazon.com, though I may add other retailers for future editions.

Our new releases cover the broad spectrum of crime fiction. We have cozy mysteries, small town mysteries, historical mysteries, Jazz Age mysteries, paranormal mysteries, crime thrillers, adventure thrillers, horror thrillers, police officers, FBI agents, private investigators, amateur sleuths, serial killers, kidnappings, missing persons, deadly weddings, plane crashes, redneck detectives, murdered space tourists, fly gods, crime-busting witches, crime-busting socialites, crime-busting butlers, crime-busting ghosts, murder and mayhem in London, Louisiana, New Mexico, Florida, the Australian Outback, a deserted island in the Pacific and much more.

Don’t forget that Indie Crime Fiction of the Month is also crossposted to the Indie Crime Scene, a group blog which features new release spotlights, guest posts, interviews and link round-ups regarding all things crime fiction several times per week.

As always, I know the authors at least vaguely, but I haven’t read all of the books, so Caveat emptor.

And now on to the books without further ado:

The Morass: Servant of the Fly God by Zachary Ashford

What if you had been kidnapped by a serial killer and your only hope of escape was cut off by rising floodwater?

“A terrifying descent into a nightmarish scenario, rendered with skill, imagination and a merciless desire to immerse the reader in undiluted horror. This is a terrific work of horror fiction by one of Australia’s best genre writers. I couldn’t put it down.”—Jamie Blanks, director of Urban Legend and Valentine

The Australian Outback is a place mired in myth, folklore, and rumour that’s inspired some of the best horror fiction and creature horror books. Some say it’s full of deadly creatures. Others claim it’s rife with serial killers hunting for backpackers and stranded tourists. Whatever the cause, young people in central Queensland are disappearing and the locals are frightened.

Katy is fresh from college and ready to research and write her magnum opus, a book investigating the many disappearances of outback youths in Australia. When she meets Kip, a guitarist on his way to the city, she knows she’s onto something good and that she can prove her hypothesis: there’s nothing there for the youth of today and they’re running away, searching for employment and prospects in the city.

Unfortunately, she’s wrong. In this terrifying cosmic horror book, there is a killer in the outback. One that thinks God is the ancient creature that lurks in the swamps near his property. With floodwaters rising, he’s certain Katy and Kip are the sacrifices that will allow the entity to emerge from the morass and cleanse the world of sinners. One terrifying abduction later, he has them both imprisoned.

As they struggle to escape the terror and the torture, their desperate fight for survival will lead only to more horror. Because their kidnapper is not crazy. His god is real. His god is hungry, and it is screaming to be reborn.

Aurealis-nominated Australian author Zachary Ashford turns his attention to the isolation of the outback with this fast-paced horror. The tension thrums. The brutality screams. The desperation of his protagonists’ plight bleeds from the page. For fans of extreme horror, splatterpunk, gore, violent films like Wolf Creek, or international movies like the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and the grotesque creatures of movies like Aliens, The Thing, or The Fly, The Morass: Servant of the Fly God is not to be missed.

Will Katy and Kip survive? Will their killer succeed? Will the God in the swamp take over the world. Buy this supernatural thriller book now, and discover their fate.

Dead Among Stars by Kat Bellemore:

Space tourism isn’t dangerous. It’s the passengers.

Psychologist Maddie Swallows had always thought of space tourism as science fiction. That was before the phone call that turned her world upside down and she was hired to work with celebrity passengers as they prepared for their once-in-a-lifetime flight.

It was her dream job. Until six passengers went up into space, and two hours later, only five returned.

If you don’t count the dead body.

Investigating a murder hadn’t been in the job description, but Maddie now needs to use her psychological training to discover who of the remaining five passengers is a murderer.

Before they strike again.

Dead Among Stars is the fourth book of the Maddie Swallows mystery series. If you like confined suspects, humor, and impossible whodunits, you’ll love this cozy mystery.

Pitch Our Evils by Beth Byers:

Once again, adventure arises for Smith and Bea. Only this time, it’s Bea who drags them into trouble. Bea who faces the dark side of her soul. And, it is Bea who has to decide just how deep into the darkness that she is willing to go.

The only question remaining is can Smith pull her back out?

 

 

 

Never Letting Go by Stacy Claflin:

A destination wedding is the idyllic escape. Except when there’s a murderer on the loose.

Ariana and Damon are thrilled for a getaway weekend to celebrate their friends’ new life together. Everything is smooth sailing until strange things start happening… Unexplained noises. People feeling watchful eyes when alone. Mysterious threats.

Then a member of the wedding party goes missing.

Everybody must work together to find their friend. But who can they trust? Any of them could be behind the disappearance… or it could be someone who came without an invitation. Either way, they’re dealing with a desperate person who will stop at nothing to end the marriage before it even begins.

Ariana is determined to find answers before anyone else vanishes…

Uninvited House Ghosts by Rachel Ford:

Ghosts are real, and they’re watching over their families. Sometimes, that’s a good thing. But not for the Evanses.

Tennessee Evans comes from a long, undistinguished line of crooks, grifters, layabouts, and rascals. She’s made her share of mistakes, sure, but she’s trying to break the mold. Even after a contentious breakup that hits her emotionally and financially, she works hard, keeps her head up, and carries on.

Then her ex winds up murdered in her backyard. And her prints are all over the murder weapon. She didn’t do it, but no one believes her.

Especially not the pigheaded, infuriatingly hot lead detective investigating the case. On the contrary, she seems to have it out for Tennessee.

Tennessee knows she needs help, and she needs it fast. What she doesn’t know is that the ancestral spirit council is on the job. Which is probably for the best, since their last few missions have ended in disaster – and the odd, accidental death. (Sorry about that, Jane!)

The council dispatches a 20th century American tax expert and an 18th century British criminal to tackle the case. Whether the pair can put aside centuries of personal and cultural differences to save Tennessee is anyone’s guess.

But one thing’s for sure – Marshmeadow will never be the same after this ill-advised haunting!

A supernatural cozy mystery with outrageous shenanigans, cute dogs, found family, a slow burn lesbian romance, and an old, definitely haunted house full of secrets.

Fatal Game by Olivia and K.S. Gray:

Jumping off a plane is one thing, but being forced to do so amid a plane crash is something no one puts on their bucket list.

After surviving a plane crash in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, FBI agent Olivia Knight and a group of survivors are washed ashore onto a desolate island.

An island harboring more danger than any of them could have ever imagined.

As they set foot on the sandy shores, Olivia and Brock discover a chilling truth.
A masked figure known as the Game Master has brought all the survivors there for the purpose of his twisted games.
Games where the unwitting contestants must fight for their lives.
Forced to play the fatal games with possible enemies hiding at every turn,
Olivia and Brock must rely on one another more than ever before.

What is the true identity of the Game Master and what is the purpose of these games?
With mysteries at every turn and answers fleeting, there is only one thing certain.
On this forsaken island everyone is a pawn, and there’s only one way off it…

Witches of the Deep by Lily Harper Hart:

Hali Waverly thought she’d seen the worst the world had to offer. Then her boyfriend Gray Hunter’s parents arrived on her beach. Now the horror truly begins.

Hali has a big problem…and that’s not including the skeletons that are taking over the beach thanks to an errant spell.

Nobody knows who cast the spell, or more importantly why, but Hali is determined to find out. When she’s not dodging visits from the people Gray wants to see least in his life that is.

Hali is a fixer, which means she can’t stay out of the situation. Will she make matters better or worse, though?

Gray knows exactly how he sees his future going. His parents aren’t part of it. Despite that, part of him doesn’t want to shut the door forever. If he lets them in, though, will he lose everything he’s been working toward?

Gray and Hali are a team. Dark forces are moving in on them from every direction, however. It’s going to take both of them working together to come out on the other side.

Even then, it might not be enough.

Death is coming for St. Pete Beach, and it’s not taking any prisoners.

Bewitched and Bothered by Amanda M. Lee:

Hadley Hunter is taking some downtime with her fiancé Galen Blackwood. All she wants to do is bask in their happiness and pretend nothing bad could possibly happen.

This is Moonstone Bay, however. That’s simply not reality.

When Galen gets a call that an old-timer on the island is holding a gun on the guests at a local bar, Hadley accompanies him to the scene…and watches as the unthinkable happens. The man’s death is strange enough, but when news starts to spread that their victim had been carrying on with a woman who was young enough to be his granddaughter, things take an even odder turn.

It seems there’s an unknown power on the island, and this individual is casting the sort of love spells that force unusual couples to start burning—literally—for one another.

Not only are Hadley and Galen hot on the trail of an outside player, but they’re also targets.

Hadley has learned a lot since finding out she’s a witch. This lesson, however, might be too hot to handle.

The union of earth, air, fire, and water has become symbolic on Moonstone Bay. This time the union will lead to a whole new adventure.

Nothing will ever be the same again.

The Redneck Detective Agency by Phillip Quinn Morris:

The title seems to say it all. But not quite. Fifty-five year old Rusty Clay does not claim to be a detective, though his office door says otherwise. He says he is no redneck, though his longtime friend Gloria Davenport asserts otherwise.

Not being a detective changes when a big man walks into Rusty’s office and insists he find his two hundred fourteen pound catfish. Five thousand dollars cash asserts this is no joke. And he wants it found so he can win first place in the annual grabbling (catching a catfish with one’s bare hands) rodeo.

Second Chance by Jim Riley:

FBI agent Sheila Richardson finds herself in a twisted game of cat and mouse when the daughter of a powerful Louisiana congressman is kidnapped. As she leads the search, Sheila discovers that the kidnapper possesses intimate knowledge of her dark past, turning the investigation into a treacherous dance of deception.

To save the young girl, Sheila joins forces with Niki Dupre, an independent investigator whose sharp instincts rival her own. But as tensions rise and the kidnapper demands ransoms from both women, they must unravel a web of secrets and betrayal, knowing that defying the captor’s demands could cost the girl her life.

With each passing moment, the kidnapper’s grip tightens, forcing Sheila and Niki to question everyone around them. In a heart-stopping race against time, they uncover a shocking truth that extends beyond the abduction, leading to a revelation that challenges their notions of loyalty and justice.

The Girl on the Road by A.J. Rivers:

“You’re going on a date with someone you’ve just met online?
There are a bunch of crazies out there. You need to be careful!”

After multiple assassination attempts, FBI agent Emma Griffin is on the road to recovery.
At times though, her dreams and reality seem to blur together. Leaving her to question aspects of her life.

When the bodies of young women are found on the side of the road at multiple rest stops.
Emma and her team are assigned to the case.
No one could make sense of the brutal and sadistic murders, and it seems as though the bloodthirsty killer might be sending a message.

With more questions than anyone could answer. Nothing is certain.
On the pathway of justice, the pit stops to find the highway killer will exact a costly toll…

Foundation Gets “A Glimpse of Darkness” and Introduces Some Major Players

Season 2 of Foundation just started, so I guess I’m doing episode by episode reviews again, at least for now. For my takes on previous episodes, go here.

Warning! There will be some pretty big spoilers under the cut!

Okay, that’s more like it. Of course, this episode of Foundation is still something of an unholy mess and Gaal Dornick continues to wear out her welcome even further, but there’s actual stuff from the books here and some of it is even fun.

The part that’s the least fun of the episode is once again the continuing adventures of Salvor Hardin, Gaal Dornick and Hologram Hari. After managing the raise Hugo’s, now Salvor’s ship at the end of the last episode, Gaal and Salvor are just about to take off before a storm hits their corner of the world ocean of Synnax, when a royally pissed off Hari Seldon emerges from the Prime Radiant.

And why is Hari so royally pissed off? Well, turns out he was conscious the entire 188 years or so that Gaal spent in cryo-sleep. Gaal blabbers something along the lines of that she’s sorry, but that she was so depressed upon learning that Raych was dead. Harry insists that Gaal and Raych were never meant to be together and continues to rant that they upset his precious plans, whereupon Gaal confesses that she checked the Prime Radiant and that the plan has gone off track – badly.

“And whose fault is that?” Hari rants, “It’s yours, Gaal, because you prevented me from setting up the Second Foundation to keep the plan on track.”

This statement is very significant, because this is the first time we explicitly hear about the Second Foundation which will play a very important role in stories to come. But before Hari can expound upon why the Second Foundation is important, Salvor interrupts to point out that a storm is coming in and that the ship won’t survive it, unless they get it airborn now. So if Hari wants to set up his Second Foundation, he should project his consciousness into the computer and help to start the ship.

“And who are you?” Hari asks, whereupon Salvor replies that they met on Terminus. Hari points out that the Hari Salvor met on Terminus wasn’t him, but the other one. Salvor also unwisely mentions that she is Gaal’s daughter, which sets Hari off on another rant about how Gaal came to have a daughter. I suppose Hari hasn’t quite realised that Salvor is also his granddaughter.

In many ways, Hari’s rants reminded me of the frustrated fans of the Foundation books ranting at the TV series for getting everything wrong and messing it up. Even the fact that he focusses his ire on Gaal fits, because Gaal remaining in the series long after she should have exited the story is major symptom of things going wrong.

However, before they can fix anything, Gaal, Salvor and Hari first have to get the ship in the air. So Hari does vanish into the computer to boot up the system. The ship is ready to fly, but barnacles in an exhaust port (the ship spent a long time under water) prevent it from taking off, so Salvor hands the controls to Gaal (who has no idea what to do, not being a pilot), while Salvor goes outside in the storm to remove the barnacles. This leads to a completely superfluous action scene, which would have been far more at home in The Mandalorian and which is only in this episode, because apparently we cannot expect the audience to focus on people – gasp – talking and explaining important plot points.

This is yet another example of not trusting the audience to actually listen to the characters explaining something, if there isn’t an action scene involved. It’s the same impulse that gave us the so-called “sexposition” scenes in Game of Thrones, where the characters would discuss worldbuilding details while having sex. And frankly, I find it insulting to assume that audiences can’t focus on some worldbuilding and exposition without an action or a sex scene. After all, plenty of people watch courtroom dramas, where the various lawyer characters explain what happened and what’s going on, while talking. Sometimes, there are flashbacks, but there are no sex scenes, at least not in the courtroom, and almost no action scenes either. Medical dramas are similar, a lot of talking about what could have caused these symptoms. So if audiences are perfectly happy to listen to people talking about how and why X killed Y and why patient Z is sick in real world set shows, why don’t production teams trust audiences to listen to characters talking about dragons, the history of Westeros, psychohistory or the Seldon Plan in an SFF show?

Though once again, I suspect that the issue lies not with the actual showrunners, writers and producers, because people like David S. Goyer, Josh Friedman, Jane Espenson or Eric Carrasco (with whom I actually had a very nice Twitter exchange about his work on Masters of the Universe: Revelation without knowing that he was also involved in Foundation) are all genre people and good writers. No, I suspect that the problem lies with the higher echolons of Apple Plus executives who don’t think audiences are smart enough to get SFF and push many of those inexplicable changes on the showrunners and writers.

Once the combined efforts of Hari, Salvor and Gaal (well, mainly Hari and Salvor, since Gaal doesn’t know squat about spaceships) have gotten the ship into orbit, the three of them get back to the actual meat of the story. Hari explains why a Second Foundation is necessary to keep the plan on track and that the Second Foundation must know the plan, while it has to remain hidden from the First, because too much information would knock the Foundation and the plan itself off course. This is all pretty much straight from the books and hearing it all laid out made me happy.

Hari also points out that a war between the Foundation and Empire is imminent. Salvor of course wants to go off and help them, but Hari tells her that they can’t help the Foundation, but that they must resolve the crisis on their own. Which again is exactly what happens in the “The Dead Hand” a.k.a. “The General” segment of Foundation and Empire. Honestly, it’s such a relief to actually get to references to things which happen in the books.

Gaal displays the deviation from the plan and suggests using her precognitive abilities to go to the point in time where the plan diverges from the path. There’s also a line about how Gaal’s precognitive abilities and Salvor’s occasional flashbacks to a past that’s not hers are two sides of the same coin. Anyway, Gaal does manage to briefly project her mind to the future and finds herself in a Terminus on fire and experiences a feeling of overwhelming despair. And we know who tends to project exactly such feelings…

Because Gaal’s initial glimpse of the future didn’t reveal very much, it’s decided to try again. However, this time Gaal insists that she must open her mind the way the religious fanatics back on Synnax, hence gone extinct with the rest of the planet, used to do – by drowning. Of course, there is no water basin or pool aboard the spaceship, so Gaal decides to use the fire suppression system, which removes oxygen from the atmosphere inside the ship instead. If you think that Gaal Dornick is a bloody idiot, you’re not alone. Though she does remember to give Salvor a breathing mask first. Hari, being a hologram, doesn’t need to breathe, of course. He is also remarkably unconcerned about the fact that Gaal needs to “drown” to get a vision, but then Hari has plenty of reasons to dislike Gaal, plus he knows that she’s nuts.

Gaal’s plan works, too, and she gets her vision. And so we get a flash forward of Gaal running through the burning streets of Terminus. There are bodies all around and Gaal is running from something or rather somone. We get to see a man in a leather coat with goggles and some kind of electrical weapon glove. He finally captures Gaal and says something about how he has beaten her Mentalics – apparently some kind of warriors corps with psi powers. This is not as ridiculous and out of place in Foundation as it sounds, because yes, people with psi powers play an important role in the series. Foundation is, after all, a science fiction series of the 1940s published in Astounding, whose editor John W. Campbell really liked stories about psi powers and absolutely considered them hard SF.

The man with the goggles and the electrical shock glove eventually realises that he has the wrong Gaal, a Gaal from the time of the Empire, before Hober Mallow pierced its hide. And then he asks the all-important question: “Where is the Second Foundation?” Gaal obviously has no idea where it is, which does not stop the man with the goggles from using his own telepathic powers to try and pull the answer from her mind. However, before he can get anywhere, Gaal is revived by Salvor and Hari.

She briefly related what she saw and heard, the the person who pursued and captured her is called “The Mule” and that he is telepathic. She also relates that while she did not divulge the location of the Second Foundation, she realised where it was when the Mule tried to pry it from her mind. It’s on a planet called Ignis, which is quite close to Synnax, close enough to get there for a ship without a jump drive without requiring cryosleep. So that’s where Gaal, Salvor and Hari will go next.

Now Gaal’s flash forward is an incredibly important scene, probably one of the most important ones in the series so far. Because we get to see the Mule, a character I hadn’t expected to see this early in the narrative. The time frame, approximately 150 years into the future, fits as well, because the Mule shows up around the year 300 in the Foundation era to take down what’s left of the Empire and completely shatter the Seldon Plan. As for how and why the Mule is able to do all this – he is a telepathic mutant, the random result of a roll of the genetic die that Hari Seldon could neither foresee nor plan for. Worse, the Mule’s telepathic powers give him the ability to instantly take over everybody he encounters and make them his slave. In the short novel “The Mule”, we see this ability in terrifying action, when he takes over and converts Captain Han Pritcher, a member of the Foundation’s military determined to stop him.

In short, the Mule is one of the most terrifying characters you’ll ever encounter, spiritual ancestor of the equally terrifying Jason Wyngarde and Aldo Ferro from the X-Men comics, Jim Jaspers from the Captain Britain comics (Marvel, please make a Jaspers Warp movie and do it right) and TAO from WildC.A.T.S. What makes the Mule so terrifying is that you have no chance to beat him, no defence against him. If you try to kill him, he’ll do to you what he did to Han Pritcher and make you his slave. Not even the all-knowing Hari Seldon can help you to defeat him, because the Mule is the one thing Hari could no foresee.

So in short, “The Mule” is a huge deal and a large part of what made the Foundation series as memorable and beloved as it is. So seeing the Mule in the flesh was both exhilarating and infuriating. Exhilarating, because I’ve been waiting for this moment for more than thirty years. And infuriating, because we’re not actually supposed to see the Mule or know what he looks like. For in the books, the identity of the Mule is a big secret, because no one who has seen him is able to tell the tale later. There is one character who claims to know what the Mule looks like – basically scary and impressive, like the dude with the leather coat, goggles and electrical glove, who looks as if he stepped right out of a 1980s/90s SF B-Movie – but he’s not telling the truth.

The reveal of the true identity of the Mule is one of the most jawdropping and heart-stopping moments of the entire series along with the reveal of where the Second Foundation is located (it’s not Ignis. Or Helicon. Or Tarzenda). And to waste that moment and give us a B-movie villain, which is very much not what the real Mule looks like, too, is an infuriating storytelling choice. In his review, Joseph Kolacinski notes that the B-Movie villain dude may not be the show’s version of The Mule, but the Warlord of Kalgan, a character who serves as a front for the real Mule. He sincerely hope he’s right, because you don’t waste one of the best moments in the entire series like that.

Another thing that bothered me is the implication that Gaal falling in love with Raych and going on a weird escape pod odyssey across the galaxy is the reason for the rise of the Mule and for knocking the Seldon plan off course. Because it’s another symptom is the show’s intention to turn Gaal Dornick into the most important person in the universe rather than a minor character who appears only in a single story. The very point of the Mule is that he is a freak accident, a product of random genetic chance that Hari Seldon and the Second Foundation could not foresee.

But while every Foundation reader is salivating over the Mule, Gaal has a different concern. For she confesses to Salvor that there was a part of the vision that she didn’t reveal. For just before she was captured by the man pretending to be the Mule, she saw Salvor lying on the ground, quite dead. This reveal is actually the end of the episode and apparently supposed to be a kind of cliffhanger, but in truth it’s just massively underwhelming. Because the show just gave us the fucking Mule and expects us to care that Salvor Hardin is dead? Salvor Hardin who’s not even supposed to be in the story anymore at this point, let alone at the time of the Mule? I like Salvor, but her story has been told and she’s just superfluous at this point.

However, the rise of the Mule and the final fall of the Empire is still some 150 years in the future at this point. For now, the Empire is still chugging along, which means it’s time to check in on our favourite clone Emperors and their robot. We first see Brother Day as he is contemplating the giant murals in the palace, particularly one showing a pre-genetic dynasty group of Empresses. Brother Day is still absolutely convinced that he wants to marry Sabeth of the Dominion and have children.

Demerzel finds him and reports that she has found the perfect person to send against the Foundation, namely a general named Bel Riose. This is another name that will excite readers of the books, because Bel Riose is the titular general from the story “The General” a.k.a. “The Dead Hand”, which coincidentally is also the only story other than the very first story “The Psychohistorians” and the 1980s prequels to be partly set in the Empire and actually feature an Emperor, Cleon II.

Brother Day, however, wants absolutely nothing to do with Bel Riose, because the man has the tendency to ignore orders, is not properly subservient and much too popular for Day’s liking. Brother Dusk agree with him. Demerzel, however, insists that Bel Riose is exactly the right man for the job. We don’t Bel Riose yet, but so far his introduction as the brilliant but unconventional general who is the only person who could possibly stop the rise of the Foundation is remarkably close to the books, as is the fact that the Emperor neither likes nor trusts Riose. In the end, it’s this distrust that doooms Riose and in turn the Empire, while the Foundation once again doesn’t really have to do anything except trust in the Dead Hand of Hari Seldon and let history run its course to win. Coincidentally, Demerzel’s insistence on pushing Bel Riose on Brother Day once again made me wonder whether she isn’t a lot more invested in making Hari Seldon’s predictions come true. After all, in the books Demerzel and Hari are on the same side and want the same thing.

However, before the Cleons have to deal with Bel Riose, there is still a wedding to plan and an engagement dinner of sorts to get through. We see that the Cleons no longer move in synch due to the genetic drift and now need a movement coach to make sure that they give the appearance of moving in synch and being three versions of the same person.

The dinner does not go well. Sabeth does manage to charm all three Cleons, but she is also very cocky and forward to the point that I strongly suspect that she will not survive her wedding to Brother Day for long, if the wedding ever takes place at all. At any rate, Sabeth is as doomed as Bel Riose and the Empire itself.

Sabeth asks to see the chambers where the clones are grown and Day obliges and takes her there. He explains how the process works and what would happen if he or any other of the Cleons got killed and replaced by a new clone. Sabeth wants to know what happens if they have children. Day assures her that euthanizing the clones won’t be much of a problem. As for how Day and Sabeth will have children, Day reveals that he is sterile like all Cleons, which makes sense to prevent Cleonic by-blows from running around the Empire and upsetting the genetic dynasty. However, the process can be reversed and then Day and Sabeth can have children conceived in test tubes. The most promising embryos are selected and implanted, for why leave anything to biological chance. Artificially conceiving their future children to prevent genetic disorders does make sense for the future rules of the Galactic Empire (and that they have long to rule), but personally, I raised an eyebrow at the implantation bit. For why subject Sabeth and the future heir to the Empire to the potential risks of pregnancy, when you’ve got a chamber full of artificial wombs right there? Honestly, I think someone needs to read the Vorkosigan Saga by Lois McMaster Bujold.

The third plot strand in this episode takes us to the planet Siwenna, a location that will be familiar to readers of the books. Siwenna is a world on the furthest edge of the Empire, beset by civil war and ruled with an iron first by a cruel Imperial vice roy with very little oversight. In “The Big and the Little”, Hober Mallow travels to Siwenna to see for himself what has become of the Empire. He meets an impoverished patrician named Onum Barr who tells him the story of how Siwenna became a hellhole and goes to visit a power station only to realise that Imperial technology is large, clumsy and aging and that the technicians tasked with maintaining it have no idea how anything works. This convinces Mallow that the Empire is doomed, because they have stopped innovating.

Siwenna shows up again in “The Dead Hand” a.k.a. “The General”, where Bel Riose travels to Siwenna to interrogate Ducem Barr, the sole surviving son of Onum Barr, about his father’s contact with Hober Mallow decades before, which makes Ducem Barr the one person with the most knowledge about the Foundation. There is a Ducem Barr listed in the end credits, so I suspect we’ll get to see him eventually.

But for now the Siwenna in the show is an Old West inspired planet on the outer rim which has been cut loose and ignored by the Empire. The inhabitants have been eeking out a meagre living ever since then.

However, the first person we meet in Siwenna is not a local but a Foundation missionary named Brother Constant who uses a Bishop’s Claw monster as a mule. Brother Constant, who is a young woman BTW, has just stumbled upon something, a fellow Foundation missionary who was lynched by binding him to a tree and waiting for him to be killed by lightning, for Siwenna’s inhabitants worship a lightning bolt hurling deity. There actually is a priest lynched in “The Big and the Little”, though this happens on Korell rather than on Siwenna and the circumstances are quite different, because the priest is a trap for Hober Mallow.

Brother Constant promptly runs off to fetch her superior, only to find him in his bunk in their spaceship in a drunken stupour. Brother Constant rudely rouses the priest with an injection that instantly turns him sobre and takes him to their murdered comrade. Both Brother Constant and her boss know that the murdered priest is a warning and fear that they will be next.

“But why?” Brother Constant wonders, “They can keep their gods. We are just shining a light on the great force that underlies everything.” And what would that great truth be? Well, of course the teachings of the great prophet Hari Seldon.

The two missionaries have a presentation planned for that night and decide to go ahead with it anyway, even though their personal forceshields are not very good against lightning.

We next are treated to Brother Constant giving her presentation/sermon in the market place of a town on Siwenna, surrounded by hostile locals who are brandishing ropes. She has a little projector that shows 3D images of the vault on Terminus and Hari Seldon and a personal forceshield that may not work against lightning, but works really well against hostile locals trying to grab her.

Just when things are about to get hairy for Brother Constant, her boss arrives, floating to the ground via an anti-gravity cloak. The locals are more and more impressed by the show put on by those foreign missionaries who appear to be magicians and end their performance by flying off into the air via a tractor beam.

The whole event is very reminiscent of a US-style medicine show or tent revival, which is exactly what it is. Because the Church of the Galactic Spirit (just called Scientism in the books) is a fraud, its miracles are technology dressed up as magic. The personal forceshields are straight out of the books, though the anti-gravity cloaks of the missionaries are borrowed from another “science as a fake religion” story published in Astounding around the same time as the Foundation stories, namely Gather, Darkness! by Fritz Leiber, which was serialised in Astounding in 1943.

Now the fake religion of scientism was always one of my favourite things about the Foundation stories and something I really, really wanted to see in the show, because my sixteen-year-old self, who’d recently decides that religious people were all hypcrites, loved the idea of the Foundation using a fake religion to spread its influence and dupe the idiots. So I was absolutely thrilled to actually see Foundation missionaries do their thing and duping locals in the show.

Even better, Brother Constant’s boss is Poly Verisof, last seen at the end of season one as a young boy. As in the TV series, Poly Verisof in the books is the high priest of scientism and one of the fairly few people who know that the religion is a scam, because most of the priests and missionaries don’t actually know that their religion is fake. In the books, the priests are also not Foundationers, but recruited from the Four Kingdoms and given just enough education to be able to operate the Foundation’s technological miracles. Particularly smart acolytes like Limmar Ponyets from “The Wedge” and Hober Mallow are removed from the seminaries and told the truth about the Foundation. However, both Poly Verisof and Brother Constant are Foundationers and apparently true believers in their own faux religion. Poly Verisof is also the last survivor of those who saw Hari Seldon emerge from the Vault during the first crisis, which would make him some 144 years old. He is portrayed by 58-year-old British-Indian-Kenyan actor Kulvinder Ghir, who is way too young to play a 144-year-old, but still manages to be utterly delightful in the role of the drunkard high priest of the Church of the Galactic Spirit. The Siwenna scenes are a genuine delight and I would gladly watch a whole show of Poly Verisof and Brother Constant missionating the outer rim and spreading the good news about Hari Seldon and the Church of the Galactic Spirit.

However, Poly and Brother Constant’s mission trip is cut short, when they are recalled to Terminus, because the Vault has come alive and a new crisis is imminent. Poly Verisof is excited to meet Hari Seldon again. We also see that the spaceship of the two missionaries is a jump ship developed from the technology used aboard the Invictus. Again, this is true to the books, where the Empire’s technology stagnated or declined, while the Foundation, which is after all a colony of geeks, continued to develop and refine its own technology.

On Terminus, Poly and Brother Constant are welcomed by warden Jaeggar Fount and Director Sermak, who also happens to be Brother Constant’s father. There is an argument about who gets to talk to Hari Seldon, when he emerges from the Vault. Poly Verisof thinks that he should be the one to talk to Seldon, but Director Sermak and Jaeggar Fount only want him to hold back the crowds – after all, he is the High Priest and people will listen to him. Apparently, the Church of the Galactic Spirit is also a thing on Terminus rather than just an opiate for the masses of the Four Kingdoms.

Shortly thereafter, everybody is gathered outside the Vault. Jaeggar Fount attempts to enter, but only get s single message conveyed, before the Vault quite rudely incinerates him. And just to make its point, the Vault also graffitis the message on it walls. “Get Hober Mallow!” I guess the Vault has read the books and knows who is supposed to be up next.

I have to admit I was not exactly looking forward to watching this episode, because watching Foundation often feels more like a chore than a joy, since it’s very much not the story I want to see and have wanted to see for more than thirty years now. However, I thoroughly enjoyed this episode. The saga of the Emperors Three is always fun, the adventures of Poly Verisof and Brother Constant are a pure delight and even Gaal Dornick is not quite as annoying as usual and besides, she gave us a glimpse of the Second Foundation and the Mule.

As Paul Levinson points out in his review, the show introduces a lot of major players that will become important later on in this episode. Not only does the show tease Hober Mallow and Bel Riose, though neither has appeared on screen yet, but we also get Poly Verisof, the Church of the Galactic Spirit and of course the Mule and the Second Foundation, well before either of them should enter the story.

Personally, I suspect that showrunners might not be sure if they will get another season, so they’re teasing the meaty parts of Foundation and Empire and Second Foundation will before they should appear. Even Bel Riose shouldn’t yet appear in the story at this point, since this should be the story of Hober Mallow and his proxy war with the Empire via the Republic of Korell. Though it appears that the showrunners are skipping over the proxy war with Korell and may have combined Hober Mallow with Latham Devers, a similar character who appears in “The Dead Hand”.

Once again, this episode illustrates two major problems with the TV series. The first is that once again, the TV show cannot resist making the various Foundationers dealing with the crisises facing them special. The Vault asks for Hober Mallow specifically, whereas the books always made it clear that while general trends dictate what will happen, they can’t predict who the protagonists will be. If Salvor Hardin hadn’t kept the Four Kingdoms in check, someone else would have done it. If Hober Mallow hadn’t dealt with the Republic of Korell, somone else would have done it. The protagonists themselves don’t matter nor are they special. They’re just the right person who happens to be in the right place at the right time. In many ways, the Foundation stories are the counterpoint to the “great man” theory of history, because the stories very clearly say that anybody could have been that great man and that larger trends matter more than individuals. In many ways, this is a remarkably modern view. Which makes it so annoying that the TV show has to make all of the protagonists of the hour special in some way.

The other problem is one that’s inherent with the structure of the book series, namely the fact that the first five stories, collected in Foundation, are somewhat dull and talky and that everything that made the series the classic that it is happens in the second and third book. However, you can’t just skip ahead to Foundation and Empire and skip the first book – which new readers sometimes try to do – because that will ruin the impact of the later stories. Cause you first need to see the Foundation use their wits to triumph against steadily stronger enemies again and again and you need to see Hari Seldon be right again and again to feel the absolute shock when the Foundation faces its strongest enemy yet – the Mule – and Seldon is wrong.

Personally, I think it would have been best to cover the events in Foundation in season one rather than spending ten episodes on only three stories with lots of filler and massive departures. Because if you actually reread Foundation, “The Psychohistorians” is just set-up (and the show did handle that story really well) and “The Encyclopaedists”, which was only known as “Foundation” upon first publication in 1942, is the only story that really is fairly dull and mostly features people talking. “Bridle and Saddle” a.k.a. “The Mayors” has plenty of action, “The Wedge” would make a neat single episode story and “The Big and the Little” is a mystery which culminates in a courtroom drama. It would be possible to turn these stories into good TV by actually showing much of the action that happens off stage without changing the stories too much.

However, you have to trust your audience and that’s something Apple Plus just isn’t willing to do.

Foundation Finds Itself “In the Seldon’s Shadow” at the Start of Season 2

Season 2 of Foundation just started, so I guess I’m doing episode by episode reviews again. For my takes on season 1, go here.

But before we get to season 2 of Foundation, I also have something else Foundation related to share. Because I was a guest on the most excellent Stars End podcast again, talking about my essay in Asimov’s Foundation and Philosophy: Psychohistory and Its Discontents, edited by Joshua Heter and Josef Thomas Simpson.

Which brings me to another Foundation related thing to share. Because, as mentioned above, I have an essay in the anthology Asimov’s Foundation and Philosophy: Psychohistory and Its Discontents, edited by Joshua Heter and Josef Thomas Simpson, which just came out a few weeks ago from Carus Books.

My essay is called “Between Cynism and Faith” and discusses the very different ways in which the original Foundation stories from the 1940s and the Apple+ TV series handle the subject of religion and also notes that the extremely cynical view of religion found in Isaac Asimov’s original stories from the 1940s was not actually all that unusual for the so-called Golden Age of science fiction.

Unfortunately, there is no Hari Seldon action figure, so Roboto kindly posed with my contributor copies of Asimov’s Foundation and Philosophy.

So will season 2 of Foundation stick closer to the original stories by Isaac Asimov and also preserve the very cynical view of religion found in the original Foundation stories? Let’s find out.

Warning! Spoilers under the cut.

After the beautiful flowing pigments title sequence, season 2 opens with Hari Seldon, which would seem to be a good thing, since Hari Seldon or rather his hologram is the one connecting thread in the Foundation stories of the 1940s.

However, the Hari Seldon we meet in the opening moments of season 2 appears to be in the process of losing his mind and runs screaming through triangular black and white corridors, all of which absolutely does not match the all-knowing and yet infuriatingly vague wisdom dispensing hologram that we all know and love.

There is a childhood flashback, where Hari remembers making some kind origami object out of the pages of a book and learning the difference between two-dimensional and three-dimensional objects, all while his family is camping on a ridge on some barren planet. Hari’s mother is cooking over an open fire and encouraging his inquisitiveness, while his father is angry that tore a page out of a book – which actually seems to be some kind of origami making workbook, i.e. the pages only exist to be torn out – and slaps Hari.

There is no reason for this scene to be there at all, except to use some deep, dark childhood trauma as characterisation. Not that Hari Seldon ever needed any characterisation beyond “brilliant mathematician turned hologram who is all known, until he isn’t”. Also, why do brilliant mathematicians in the Empire inevitably grow up on primitive backwater planets where their talents are not appreciated? It makes sense for Gaal Dornick, who is also from a backwater world in the books, but not for Hari. Also, the books make it quite clear that even backwater worlds had a certain level of technology and connection to the wider Empire in Hari’s day.

The childhood flashback helps Hari to figure out that he is trapped inside the Prime Radiant – that’s the glowy puzzle box in which Hari encoded the entire Seldon plan, which only Hari and Gaal Dornick can activate. The Prime Radiant was last seen, when Salvor Hardin absconded with it, when leaving Terminus to look for her roots. As for how Hari or rather his hologram came to be trapped inside – well, when Gaal Dornick sabotaged Hari’s ship The Raven and fled in an escape pod, the Hari hologram aboard The Raven hitched a ride with her and Gaal trapped it inside the Prime Radiant, because she doesn’t trust Hari.

Hari’s mental breakdown inside the Prime Radiant is interrupted – or accelerated – when a woman in a pink dress appears. Hari recognises the woman as his deceased life partner Yanna, a fellow mathematician, and embraces her.  Now Hari Seldon does have a life partner in the Foundation prequels of the 1980s. However, her name is Dors Venabili, she is a historian and also a robot. There is absolutely no need to mention the whole robot thing in the show, since it would only confuse viewers, but why in the galaxy couldn’t Hari call the apparition of his late wife Dors? Why call her Yanna? It’s one of the many changes between books and show that make zero sense.

Hari eventually realises that the apparition is not Yanna, whereupon she transforms into a woman named Kalle, the mathematician poet who came up with the unsolvable problem that Gaal Dornick helped to solve all the way back in episode 1, setting the plot in motion. However, Hari quickly realises that the apparition is not Kalle either, but something or rather someone else. He also blames Gaal Dornick – “my tormentor”, as he calls her, for his predicament – not without justification, it turns out.

The “Hari trapped in the Prime Radiant” scenes are well acted, but then Jared Harris is one hell of an actor and perfectly cast as Hari Seldon. Nonetheless, the sole purpose of these scenes is to remind the viewer who Hari is and that he is kind of important to the plot. But while I accept that casual viewers need to be reminded who Hari is, I wonder whether this couldn’t have been handled better than by various scenes of the all-knowing Hari Seldon losing his mind, while trapped inside a cosmic puzzle box.

As for how Hari came to be trapped inside the Prime Radiant, as mentioned above, that was the doing of Gaal Dornick, who – having decided that she’s had enough of Hari and the Foundation and the Seldon Plan – jumped into an escape capsule, set course for her backwater homeworld of Synnax – you know, the very place she was so desperate to escape – and put herself into cryo sleep for the next approximately 150 years. Season 1 ended with Gaal arriving on Synnax, which is completely submerged by now with all the inhabitants gone – something that Gaal actually predicted, so why she decided to return to a planet she knew was uninhabitable is anybody’s guess.

However, submerged in the world ocean of Synnax, Gaal finds a spaceship with a single inhabitant in cryo sleep. It’s none other than Salvor Hardin who borrowed the spaceship of her trader lover Hugo, set course for Synnax and put herself in cryo sleep. And now, 138 years later, Gaal rescues and wakes up Salvor, only for Salvor to drop a bombshell on her. Because Salvor has just learned that Gaal is her biological mother.

Season 2 picks up where season 1 left off with Gaal coming to terms with the twin shocks of finding that her entire homeworld and its culture are gone and that she has a daughter she never knew about. Even more troubling is that Salvor is actually older than her biological parents Gaal Dornick and Raych Seldon.

There is actually a massive consent violation here, which is never really addressed, because unless there was a blanket “embryos belong to everybody” agreement aboard the spaceship that brought the Foundation to Terminus, neither Gaal nor Raych ever consented to having their embryo implanted into Mari Hardin. Raych was unable to consent due to being dead and Gaal was unable to consent due to having gone missing. I’m not a huge fan of how Foundation portrays Gaal Dornick as a constant font of hysterics and whining, but she is absolutely correct to be upset about Salvor’s sudden appearance and the fact that her frozen embryos were implanted in someone else. Just as Gaal has every right to be upset about that Salvor is looking for some kind of connection or relationship that Gaal just doesn’t feel.

Foundation largely glosses over the consent issue by having Gaal and Salvor wondering what the hell to do now that they find themselves stuck on a dead planet more than a hundred years into the future. Gaal would rather just mope and wait until the little raft she built for herself was consumed by the rising waters, but true to her woman of action portrayal in this series, Salvor will none of that. She borrows Gaal’s canoe, patrols the perimeter (not that there is a perimeter to patrol, since they’re in the middle of a bloody world ocean) and even manages to catch some fish for dinner.

Meanwhile, Gaal shows Salvor how the Prime Radiant works and also explains that she trapped Hari Seldon’s consciousness inside. Salvor replies that this can’t be possible since she spoke to Hari or rather his hologram on Terminus. This is when Gaal and Salvor realise that there are two Haris – one for each Foundation. Gaal also reveals that she doesn’t trust Hari, because as far as she is concerned he’s ruined her life.

When Gaal activates the Prime Radiant she also displays the Seldon plan. Only there is a problem. For while there was supposed to be smooth sailing after the first Seldon crisis, something has knocked the plan off course and there is now a pearl necklace of crisis after crisis after crisis. Gaal declares that her and Salvor’s actions might have lengthened the dar ages that follow the fall of the Empire until they will never end at all.

The Seldon plan going off course is something that also happens in the books. However, it doesn’t happen this early in the series – chronologically we should be about at the time of “The Big and the Little” – but much later in “The Mule”. And the very reason why “The Mule” has the impact that it had is that at this point we have seen Seldon or rather his hologram being right every single time through five stories. So when everybody is gathered in Seldon’s vault, while Terminus itself is under siege by the Mule and experiencing its most desperate hour, the shock is all the greater when Seldon’s hologram appears and blabbers about something completely unrelated. It’s one of the most memorable moments of the entire Foundation series, but it needs to be earned and the TV show hasn’t earned it yet.  Even worse, having the plan go off course this early actually undermines the impact, when/if the TV series ever gets to “The Mule”.

Salvor isn’t content to sit around on an empty planet with no connection to the wider galaxy or what’s happening out there – something she should have considered before embarking on this quest – so she comes up with a plan to raise her or rather Hugo’s spaceship, repair it and take off to find out what’s happening in the galaxy and if the Empire has already fallen. However, Salvor and Gaal have to hurry, because there’s a storm coming. Together they dive into the ship, Gaal shares her breath with Salvor in a weirdly sexualised kiss of life scene that’s even weirder when you consider that Gaal and Salvor are mother and daughter. With Gaal’s breath, Salvor manages to reset the ship and raise it from the ocean floor. But just as Gaal and Salvor are about to take off the who knows where, Hari Seldon or rather his hologram escapes from the Prime Radiant and he is rightfully pissed off.

The Gaal and Salvor scenes are the weakest part of the entire episode. And just to reiterate, no, I have zero problem with the fact that two characters who were portrayed as men of indeterminate race in the books are now played by two women of colour, because honestly, the gender and race of Gaal and Salvor doesn’t affect their role in the story at all. However, neither character has any reason to still be in the story at this point.

In the books, Gaal Dornick only appears in the opening story “The Psychohistorians” and basically serves as a vehicle to introduce viewers to Hari Seldon and Psychohistory and then vanishes from the story. Book Gaal is very much a cypher, so I have no issue with the show giving Gaal more personality, though I wish they wouldn’t have made her so whiny and annoying. They could even have made Gaal an ancestor of Salvor Hardin to create a connection between different generations of Foundationers. Several characters in the books are descendants of other characters, after all. However, as a character Gaal has no reason to exist beyond episode 2.

In the books, Salvor is an important figure, protagonist of two stories (the only character except for Hari Seldon himself to appear in two different Foundation stories) and one of the founding heroes of the Foundation, who shepherded it through its first two crisises. Salvor Hardin in the books is a fount of aphorisms, frequently quoted in subsequent stories (cause there are other ways of linking the present to the past than putting people in cryosleep or cloning them), and often named in one breath with Hari Seldon and Hober Mallow (who should be entering the story around now). Book Salvor is a very different character from TV Salvor – a person who prefers to think before acting and who choses non-violent solutions – which is sharply at odds with the action woman as whom Salvor has been portrayed in the series. That said, I don’t mind TV Salvor Hardin as a character, but her story ended with season 1 and she has no reason to be here at all.

I understand that the showrunners feel that the audience needs recurring characters to serve as an anchor during the time jumps. However, there already are recurring characters in the Foundation books – Hari Seldon and to a certain degree Daneel/Demerzel. The TV series also adds the Emperors Three as further connective tissue, at least for now. So why exactly do we need Gaal and Salvor as well? Why couldn’t they have stayed in their respective eras and be the hero of the day, just like they are in the books?

The Foundation books, particularly the original stories from the 1940s, have been beloved by generations of science fiction readers who had no problems accepting that a character would be the hero for one story and then the next story would take place decades later, when the previous protagonist was long dead. Yes, there are people who dislike Foundation books, sometimes violently. But many people over the decades have loves those books with all their flaws. And I don’t see why TV audiences shouldn’t accept an anthology type show – Black Mirror and American Whatever Story are popular, after all – held together by the common thread of Hari Seldon or rather his hologram and the Emperors Three.

It seems to me as if the showrunners or rather some higher up executives at Apple Plus are underestimating their audience, sadly a common problem with entertainment industry executives. Remember that Bob Iger – yes, the arsehole who is now CEO of Disney – killed Twin Peaks, one of the best and most innovative shows of its time, by forcing David Lynch and Mark Frost to reveal the killer of Laura Palmer early, destroying all tension? Remember how hard it was to get serialised TV shows made, even after several shows had proven that yes, audiences will come back week after week after week to watch? Remember how long the X-Men movie was in development hell and how superhero team movies of any kind were impossible to get made, because common wisdom claimed that audiences got confused when there was more than one superhero on screen, even though superhero team-ups had been bestselling comic events for decades? Remember how no one believed that such a thing as a cinematic universe was possible and that audiences would come back to watch film after film after film until Marvel tried it? Entertainment executives are dumb and keep underestimating their own audience.

The Verge has a very illuminating interview with Foundation showrunner David S. Goyer, in which he apologises that the first few episodes of season 1 were so slow and talky – you know, the episodes which had a massive terrorist attacks, scenes of torture and execution, two planets getting bombed to smithereens and a bloody murder – but that he had to introduce concepts like psychohistory first. Coincidentally, the first episode was the closest to the books Foundation ever got – and IMO it wasn’t talky at all. I don’t even mind injecting action scenes into the story, because the books, particularly the first one, are very talky and not very cinematic at all. But it seems to me as if Apple Plus wants to make Game of Thrones in space – and remember that Game of Thrones was initially very controversial and a huge gamble, because it was a show about dragons on a channel known for pseudo-realistic dramas about drug dealers. But if they want Game of Thrones in space, there are dozens of SF properties that would have been a better choice than Foundation.

Talking of Game of Thrones in space, let’s check in with everybody’s favourite clone emperors, the Cleons. The Empire has clearly not fallen yet and the current Brother Day is Clean the Seventeenth (the last one we saw was Cleon the Thirteenth). We first meet Cleon the Seventeenth with his pants down – literally – because he is having sex with Demerzel. We also learn that he wants to be called “Cleon” during sex and not “Empire”.

Just at the climax, they are rudely interrupted by eyeless blind ninja assassins, who slice off half of Demerzel’s head. Worse, the ninjas’ weapons can somehow penetrate the Cleons’ protective field, so he is wounded as well. Nonetheless, the combined efforts of Brother Day and Demerzel make short work of the assassins.

The assassination scene is impressively choreographed and nothing that involves a naked Lee Pace fighting off blind ninja assassins can possible be bad, though Joseph Kolacinski points out that it’s quite unlikely that a civilisation which doesn’t even remember the location Earth would still have ninjas. Nonetheless, a sex scene that turns into a fight scene is about as far away from anything Asimov ever wrote as you can get, since action scenes were not his forte at all. In fact, the mere idea of Asimov writing that scene makes me shudder to imagine how awkward it would be.

Brother Day and Demerzel are both injured in the attack. Demerzel did not suffer any lasting harm, since her consciousness is distributed across storage chips she keeps in a box. Brother Day, meanwhile, is stuck in a regeneration tank and refuses any kind of anaesthesia, because he fears – quite rightly – that he might be replaced with another Cleon clone, while under sedation.

There’s also the question of who sent the assassins. The assassins are conveniently dead and not talking. Brother Day kills his Shadowmaster for failing to anticipate or prevent the attack. He also orders to have the brains of Brothers Dusk and Dawn scanned, since he clearly does not trust them. For a rift has opened up between the Emperors Three. And the reason for that rift is that Brother Day has decided to discard the genetic dynasty and get married to Queen Sareth of Cloud Dominion, who even now is on route to Trantor to meet her betrothed. Brother Dusk and particularly Brother Dawn are not happy at the threat of being replaced with Brother Day’s bouncing babies. Particularly Brother Dawn points out that having children will not make Brother Day immortal, since “children are meant to replace us”. It’s the sort of screwed up view of human reproduction the last in a long line of clones would have.

Meanwhile, Brother Dusk also disapproves of Brother Day’s physical relationship with Demerzel, because she used to change his diapers, so sleeping with her is seriously weird. Though it also seems as if Brother Dusk is just a little jealous that he never had the idea to sleep with Demerzel when he was in his prime. Brother Day replied that Cleon the First slept with Demerzel, so why shouldn’t he? He also notes that Demerzel seduced him, something that is confirmed when Brother Day asks Demerzel, if their relationship is indecent, and Demerzel replies that something that is given freely can never be indecent. Of course, Demerzel’s position would also be threatened, if Brother Day were to marry, so she’s using all the means at her proposal to stop the wedding. Though I now also wonder whether Demerzel slept with all or at least most of the Cleons (she clearly did not sleep with the current Brother Dusk) and whether this is a rare occurrence.

The wedding party appears and we see that Trantor has replaced its space elevator – destroyed in a terrorist attack all the way back in the first episode – with rings that make the planet look like a giant astrolabe. Queen Sareth’s adviser Rue points out that Trantor is trying to seem bigger and more important than it is.

The first meeting between the prospective bride and groom is rather fraught as well, since Queen Sareth makes it very clear that Brother Day needs her, not the other way around. There is an exchange of gifts. Queen Sareth’s delegation brings various pigments that are hard to source in the Empire now and Brother Dusk, whose task is to record the glories of the genetic dynasty in a giant mural, completely forgets his Imperial composure to thoroughly geek out about the pigments. In return, Brother Day gifts Queen Sareth with a bronze model of Trantor with its rings – a symbol of what he’s offering. “But surely the Empire is bigger than Trantor”, Queen Sareth replies, “Or is this a vision of a diminished future?” The girl certainly has guts and she is easy on the eyes, too.

Meanwhile, the Emperors Three also receive an alarming report. For the body of Imperial envoy Lord Dorwin – who was killed by Phara in season 1 and left drifting in space – has finally been found and so has his final message, in which he reports that the Anacreons have taken over Terminus and located the missing warship Invictus. This is the first inkling the Empire gets that Terminus, Anacreon, Thesbis and a couple of other rim worls – a map shows Smyrno, home of Hober Mallow – were not actually destroyed in a massive solar flare, as the Foundation faked at the end of season 1 to get the Empire off everybody’s backs. What is more, “there have been rumors of an alliance at the edge of the galaxy, led by magicians who glow in the darkness, and fly unaided through the air, and whom weapons cannot touch, who speak of a galactic spirit who will return and guide his people to a promised new age,” a quote that Joseph Kolacinski points out is taken almost verbatim from “The Big and the Little”.

In the books, the Empire and the Foundation lost contact fairly early on – somewhere around the time of “Bridle and Saddle” or “The Wedge” – and the Foundation doesn’t learn that the Empire hasn’t yet fallen until Hober Mallow makes contact with them in “The Big and the Little”, while the Empire isn’t really aware of the threat the Foundation poses until “The Dead Hand”. Of course, two galactic states just drifting apart and losing contact was a stretch even in 1944 – and Asimov had a map showing troop movements on the other side of the world on his wall at the Navy Yard, while he was writing “The Big and the Little”. In 2023, however, no one will believe that two states just forget that the other exists, so the fake solar flare was used as an excuse for contact between the Empire and the Foundation to break down.

Still, the Empire no knows that the Foundation is still out there and a growing threat. Which brings us to the place which should actually be the main focus of the series, namely Terminus. Terminus has by now grown nicely and spread its influence across the outer rim. One night, an alarm sounds, raising the current Warden of Terminus and the current Director of the Foundation from their sleep. The Vault is waking up, which means another crisis is imminent. The Warden (I don’t think the character ever gets a name) fears that this will mean war with the Empire. And that’s a war the Foundation does not think it can win at the current time.

Now in the books, the first skirmish between the Foundation and the Empire is a proxy war involving the Korellian Republic (which is anything but a Republic), which is being supplied with Imperial weaponry and tech via a political marriage between the Korellian ruler and the daughter of an Imperial warlord. The Korellians take out Foundation ships and Hober Mallow is sent to investigate, as chronicled in “The Big and the Little”. The actual war between the Foundation and the Empire doesn’t happen until “The Dead Hand”. The Empire loses and falls soon thereafter to the Mule.

Normally, I’d say that we’re about to see the proxy conflict with the Korellian Republic, which would also fit the time frame. However, considering that the show ignores the books almost completely, I have no idea whether they’ll jump straight to “The Dead Hand” or whatever the show makes of “The Dead Hand”.

In his review, Paul Levinson points out that even though the story of the three Cleons and their robot has fuck all to do with the books, it is a compelling story in itself and fun to watch. However, the trials of Gaal and Salvor are a lot less compelling. And Terminus, the place where the main action should take place, barely appears at all.

Will season 2 of Foundation be as frustrating as season 1 to someone for whom the books have meant a lot? I fear it will be.