TV
How Foundation Missed an Opportunity
Apple TV+ Reboots Isaac Asimov’s Foundation for a New Generation of Fans
Screen adaptations don’t have to mirror books precisely to be faithful to the source material, or, more importantly, to be compelling. The fidelity that matters is to the core ideas or themes, not individual scenes.
Apple TV+’s Foundation series is hiding the seeds of a good show, but it has nothing to do with the novels it’s ostensibly based on. Had the showrunners focused their story on the trio of cloned galactic emperors they invented, as it often seems they wanted to, the results would have been more interesting and coherent.
The series has a lot going for it — starting, of course, with those Isaac Asimov novels. They have their problems (infamously, almost all the major characters are men, and there’s surprisingly little action for a story about the collapse of a galactic empire), but they’ve also profoundly influenced the science fiction genre and inspired generations of fans. The show’s actors are phenomenal, and the series has a generous budget (generous enough that it repeatedly makes it into the headlines of reviews). Unfortunately, what the series doesn’t demonstrate is an appreciation of what gave the books their longevity despite those glaring problems.
The show is not really about psychohistory, the books’ major premise. Most of the characters seem to view psychohistory as a kind of mystical prophecy. By the end of the season, it’s clear the showrunners feel the same way. The show isn’t even interested in the more general idea of math’s (and science’s) problem-solving potential, since it’s eventually revealed that even the mathematician Gaal Dornick’s most important talent isn’t actually math.
Screen adaptations don’t have to mirror books precisely to be faithful to the source material, or, more importantly, to be compelling. The fidelity that matters is to the core ideas or themes, not individual scenes. In fact, getting to the heart of the story may mean taking different routes when you use different media. The Lord of the Rings films are widely acclaimed movies based on beloved books, but they tell the same story differently, each in a way suited to its medium. The books invite you to get lost in the world and its poetry; the films highlight and often streamline the action. But the action all drives toward the books’ themes, and Peter Jackson, Fran Walsh, and Philippa Boyens wove that poetry and worldbuilding into the sets, the props, and the language the characters use and pass through. The fidelity is to the idea.
Some of the most obvious changes in the Foundation show are in fact aligned with the novels’ central ideas, and enhance them by correcting some of the problems in the text. Dornick, the math prodigy enlisted to help fulfill Seldon’s vision, is now a woman played by an actor of African and European descent (Lou Llobell), and it’s a lot easier to believe that we’re watching the events of a galactic empire when they include people who happen not to be white men. There’s more action, which helps us get to the rest of the story. The problem, unfortunately, is the story itself.
This problem is evident immediately, with the first looks we get of Trantor. Much has been written about the grandiosity of the sets, and that’s accurate. I also loved the shots of Dornick’s home world, Synnax. It’s true, as well, that the empire is in a state of decline when the story opens — that’s part of the point, after all. But in the books, one of the reasons for the pushback against Hari Seldon, the creator of psychohistory, is that the empire doesn’t look like it’s in decline. This is crucial, because Seldon’s unwavering goal is to use his knowledge of psychohistory to shorten the dark ages from civilization’s impending fall from 30,000 to a mere 1,000 years. Yet the visual shots of the empire are all gloomy, and the empire itself is brazenly pseudo-fascist. In short, there’s nothing here to fear falling from. Who will mourn this empire when it dies? What could be worse? The emperors justify their rule by claiming to enforce the peace, and superficially that’s true, but they do so through acts of extraordinary violence on par with the worst actions of the Empire in Star Wars.
The books, in contrast, spend pages discussing how impressive the empire is. In fact, its capital, Trantor, is a literary precursor to Star Wars’ Coruscant, a world so fantastically wealthy that it’s been covered with a single, giant city — a connection I’m not sure would have occurred to me just from the show. This reduces the tension right off the bat, because the viewer wants the empire to fall, and we’re immediately told it will. What’s the downside? There’s a cool space elevator, but not much else worth saving.
This aesthetic decision reflects the show’s fundamental problem, which is that its creators seem more interested in space opera in general than the core theme of the book.
This core theme, of course, is psychohistory: the fictional mathematics that can predict human behavior in aggregate, turning social science into hard science. When a show is committed to its central theme, the conflicts are believable and intrinsic. But in the Foundation series, psychohistory is treated almost as a MacGuffin: a device that sets the plot in motion, but could be replaced by some other device to tell basically the same story. Because of this, the show must keep contriving various, and variously convincing, conflicts to keep the plot moving. There are many examples — really, the show itself is an example — but I’ll focus on one: in the show, the empire is run by clones of an earlier emperor.
At this point, clones are a sci-fi trope. If you’re looking for something to watch about clones, you don’t have to go far afield. The poorly received Arnold Schwarzenegger movie The 6th Day came out way back in 2000. Tatiana Maslany already blew our minds in Orphan Black. Clones aren’t some cutting-edge idea that speaks to our moment. For some reason, however, the series’ creators seemed at least as interested in the angst of being an emperor’s clone as they did in psychohistory. Ironically, because the relationships between the clones and the ideas behind them were carefully laid out in a way the other plot threads weren’t, they ended up being the most compelling part of the show.
As a storytelling device, clones might appear at first to make sense. They’re a way to keep the same antagonist even though the story covers a long period of time. Unfortunately, a cloned leader seems almost uniquely unsuited to telling the story of Foundation, which was partly inspired by Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. The books force us to consider whether any particular reformer, in a position of leadership, is capable of bucking historical trends. They raise questions of how societies shape people, and vice versa. If the leaders don’t change, these questions never get fully addressed, even if the characters occasionally make reference to them.
Almost all the other narrative choices display the same disregard for the source material. For example, it’s a nice touch that Eto Demerzel is presented as a robot, which is something Asimov only retconned in the sequels to the original trilogy — except that Demerzel blatantly violates Asimov’s First Law of Robotics (“A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm”), indicating the show’s eagerness to dispose of all Asimov’s core ideas, not just the ones from Foundation.
The irony is that the questions suggested by psychohistory are more urgent now than ever. At a time when so many political theories have collapsed in the real world, is there a scientific way to chart a new approach? Is the onslaught of history inexorable, or can the right individual, the right innovation, the right grouping of people, change it? In essence, with so much going wrong around us, can we shape our own destiny?
In the books, after the Foundation’s first “crisis,” a message from Hari Seldon reveals that psychohistory had predicted the situation far in advance, due to the historical forces already in motion. In the show, Seldon’s message at the end of the season is different. He had made some accurate predictions, but his primary role is to use his unique charisma, the type of charisma associated with politicians and prophets, to exhort the people watching him to make the right strategic choices. It’s meant to be inspiring, but for me it was the opposite. After all the characters have gone through, and all the knowledge they thought they’d gained, they still need to wait for the right man, or perhaps the right woman with the right superhuman powers, to tell them what to do.
Which brings us back to the unexpectedly best part of the show. If you’re going to stick with charismatic leaders, you might as well have some fun and make them clones.
Interstellar Flight Magazine publishes essays on what’s new in the world of speculative genres. In the words of Ursula K. Le Guin, we need “writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope.” Visit our Patreon to join our fan community on Discord. Follow us on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram.
