‘Foundation’ Season 2 Episode 1 Recap: Strange Nude Worlds

“Rip-roarin’” isn’t an adjective I’d use to describe Foundation, science-fiction godhead Isaac Asimov’s heady tome (is there any other kind of tome?) about a rogue mathematician’s plan to save humanity from itself. I do not mentally associate the novel with the phrase “psychedelic freak-out.” Nowhere in its pages do I recall a chapter entitled “The Emperor Fucks a Robot, Then Has a Fight Scene in the Nude.”

And yet, my friends. And yet!

Bombastic, lascivious, arch, gorgeous — “In Seldon’s Shadow,” the long-awaited return of David S. Goyer’s epic-scale adaptation of Asimov’s magnum opus, is all of the above. Written by Goyer and his fellow genre luminary Jane Espenson and directed with verve and grace by Alex Graves, it indicates that this show learned every possible lesson from its inconsistent but entertaining first season. It leans hard into its strengths, shores up its weaknesses, and provides enough beauty — both science-fictional and human-physical — to leave me as optimistic about this show as I’ve ever been. 

And I’m not gonna bury the lede here: Lee Pace has a naked fight scene in it.

We might as well start there, actually. As is Foundation’s custom, this episode divides its action into three main storylines, and as is also its custom, the most interesting one centers on the Emperors Cleon, the never-ending series of clones played at different life stages by Cassian Bilton, Terrence Mann, and Pace himself in the lead. It’s been 173 years since their predecessors exiled “psychohistorian” Hari Seldon and his Foundation to the edge of the Empire over his heretical calculation that their civilization was on the verge of collapse, and time is clearly on his side of the argument. 

In ways both subtle and profound, things at the capital have gotten noticeably…fuzzier around the edges. The main Cleon, Brother Day, has begun having sex with his immortal robot advisor Demerzel (a fantastic Laura Birn; sample quote: “Harder, Empire, please!”). He has simultaneously offered a marriage proposal to the powerful Queen Sareth (Ella-Rae Smith); this would be a first for the dynasty, which after all reproduces with clones rather than kids, and he’s doing it against his brothers’ wishes. He’s also got an earring, his speech is markedly less formal (“Someone get me a damn-blasted robe so my manhood isn’t floppin’ around!” he hollers after repelling assassins mid-coitus), and he’s openly paranoid about being killed and replaced with another Day clone by his bros. The wounds he incurs from the assassins due to the failure of his personal protective aura indicates sabotage from within.

All of this — the personal conduct, the infiltration of the palace by assassins, the need to marry in order to prop up the Empire with some other figure’s power, the possibility that someone close to him wants him dead — was basically unimaginable in Season 1, before rebels messed with the clones’ gene pool and started screwing up the royal line. And when Demerzel (who gets half her head chopped off by the assassins; don’t worry, she gets better) interrupts Queen Sareth’s reception by telling the Cleons that reports of the Foundation’s demise over a century ago have been greatly exaggerated, they collectively realize just how out of touch they’ve been. Even then, it’s Demerzel who counsels them to monitor the situation rather than simply charging in guns blazing; Day realizes this is the only way they can truly ascertain how far the mysterious organization’s tendrils extend.

On the faraway planet of Synnax, waterlogged by decades of anthropogenic climate change (yeah, it’s grim), Seldon’s one-time protégé Gaal Dornick (Lou Llobell) meets Salvor Hardin (Leah Harvey), the daughter she didn’t know she had. (Donated zygote, decades in cryosleep, yadda yadda yadda.) Each armed with slightly different psychic powers, they use the Prime Radiant — Hari’s big future-predicting equation, solidified in the form of a kind of nicer and prettier sci-fi version of the Hellraiser puzzle box — to determine that the Foundation’s Second Crisis is at hand. Worse, they learn that the timeline has diverged from Hari’s prediction, leading to a cascade of Crises that will make the coming fall of humanity last forever instead of a mere 30,000 years, which Hari had hoped to reduce to just one millennium. 

With a hurricane on the horizon, the mother-daughter odd couple (Salvor is actually older than her own mom due to the vagaries of space travel) swim to Salvor’s sunken ship while sharing oxygen, leaving Gaal to voluntarily drown and be revived, The Abyss–style. But before they can take off, the “digital ghost” of Hari appears. Furious with Gaal, who rejected his plan to travel to his home planet rather than her own and create a necessary Second Foundation, he’s come for a reckoning.

And he’s come from the episode’s third storyline, which sees actor Jared Harris giving it his all while trapped in a phantom zone of pure Escheresque sci-fi psychedelia. First filmed in harshly lit black and white, then in a sort of cold cathode-ray blue, Hari hashes out his situation with the help of a mysterious figure who first appears as his late wife and collaborator Yanna (Nimrat Kaur) and then as the influential mathematician Kalle (Rowena King). Turns out he’s an alternate copy of himself from the one stored in the Vault at the Foundation’s home base on Terminus; his followers back there, led in part by Warden Jaegger Fount (the great Holt McCallany, much beloved as Bill Tench in Netflix’s quintessential two-season wonder Mindhunter), are awaiting the other copy’s reemergence from the Vault even now. This Hari been uploaded into the Prime Radiant by Gaal, who doesn’t trust him due to their falling out. A series of flashbacks to his abusive childhood and geometric trompe l’oeil effects sequences guide him out to confront his one-time heir.

Now I know what you may be thinking: Psychohistory, schmychohistory — Lee Pace has a fight scene in the nude! And yes, indeed he does! And Laura Birn murders a guy with half a face. And Queen Serath looks and dresses and acts like if you gave a frighteningly smart supermodel command of an army. And her ship is a beautiful chandelier of light. And we see it against the newly minted Rings of Trantor, which are in fact nuclear payload delivery mechanisms on a scale so huge that Serath is almost obligated by law to make a crack to Cleon about overcompensation about them. And seemingly every important conversation plays out in silhouette against a piercingly lovely light source. And Llou Lobell and Leah Harvey join their fellow very attractive human being Lee Pace in getting their kit off, or most of it at least, when they go swimming. And they save each other’s lives with a kiss while floating in the green womb of the sea. And Hari spends the whole episode inside the cover for Dark Side of the Moon. And on and on the list of delights goes.

From this you can tell two things. First, and most importantly for the future of the show, Goyer and Espenson have finally figured out how to make the comparatively inert Gaal and Salvor material, which always paled in comparison to the Cleon stuff despite being asked to occupy equivalent screentime, sing. Turns out you just had to have them meet and be vulnerable with each other, instead of over-relying on generic Star Wars protagonist chosen-one space-jockey shit. 

Second, while Foundation’s brand of really over-the-top Science Freaking Fiction isn’t for everyone even now, it dashes off one magnificent image after another, while big SFF adaptations with multiples of its budget struggle to put together a single shot you’ll remember five minutes later. For real, I was pausing to take notes for the umpteenth wolf-whistle-worthy shot in this thing and discovered I was only fifteen minutes into the episode. As big bright TV visions from fantastic-fiction landmarks go, Foundation absolutely crushes the competition. Would this be true if it didn’t feature one of the world’s handsomest guys fighting ninjas with his ass showing? Probably. But fortunately, we’ll never have to find out. 

(Oh, one more thing: This review was written during the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. Without the labor of the writers and actors currently on strike, the show being covered here wouldn’t exist.)

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.