Within the first five minutes of “In Seldon’s Shadow,” the second season premiere of Apple TV+’s high-concept sci-fi colossus “Foundation,” Emperor Cleon XVII (Lee Pace), monarch of the Galactic Empire, is caught in flagrante delicto with his majordomo, Eto Demerzel (Laura Birn), by assassins, and takes a page out of Michael Davis’ “Shoot ‘Em Up” in response: He massacres them in his birthday suit.
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In the best way possible, everything about this sequence is plainly wrong. For one thing, it’s bad footing for an emperor to do the sideways tango with their head of house (especially when their head of house nannied them as a baby); for another, the assassins have skin where they should have eyes, a nice detail right out of Adrian Lyne or Guillermo del Toro’s playbook; for another still, Demerzel suffers a half-decapitation right off the bat, but goes full Kano moments later with a hand-thrust through one assailant’s chest. (She also happens to be a robot.) All the while, Pace pirouettes and pivots and parries his attackers’ strikes. If the show stops well short of going full frontal, the mere suggestion of his protruding Peter bouncing in the breeze colors the choreography with naughty thrills.
“Foundation,” of course, isn’t a show in dire need of kink. What held the first season back has nothing to do with bedroom scenes; mainly, the series choked on the just-too-muchery of adapting Isaac Asimov’s same-named gargantua series of books, first published in the 1950s and revisited in the 1980s to 1990s. That’s a ton of text to turn into television, and though television is a suitable medium for Asimov’s work. In this ten-episode season order, each episode clocks in at under an hour a pop denies the narrative adequate breathing room. Structural problems aren’t sexual problems. But “Foundation” performed such an impressive amount of buildup in its premiere season that even a handful of cascading climaxes don’t allow the narrative an appropriate release. So there’s something poetic about creators David S. Goyer and Josh Friedman’s choice to open season 2 with horny energy unbridled by plot concerns.
Cleon XVII is beset on all sides by ruling class woes, a steadily shrinking control of his interstellar kingdom in particular. In the century and change following the events of “The Leap,” season 1’s finale, the Empire has lost luster while the Foundation – a long-gestating reboot of human civilization, meticulously planned by dearly departed psychohistorian Hari Seldon (Jared Harris) – gains traction among nations either neglected or impoverished by the Cleonic dynasty. It’s enough to make a clone consider marriage, a first in the Emperor’s line because political marriages tend to produce children, and who needs those running around when there are perfectly good baby Cleons bobbing around in well-secured vats, waiting to be decanted?
Cleon XVII, that’s who. As “Foundation” reveals in the final stretch of season 1, those tank babies aren’t genetically perfect after all, and on top of that, Empire’s list of allies grows thin. Courtship of Sareth (Ella-Rae Smith), Queen of Cloud Dominion, is about the only good play Cleon has. However, his “brothers,” Dawn (Cassian Bilton), Day’s eventual replacement, and Dusk (Terrence Mann), Day’s retired predecessor, have reservations.
That fundamental hesitancy comprises the series’ reconciliatory season 2 theme. Everyone, it seems, has reason to doubt. Gaal (Lou Llobell) doubts Hari, her former mentor, and all of his wisdom, not to mention the future, which per her powers of prescience, looks like a drag; Salvor (Leah Harvey) doubts Gaal for distrusting Hari, though Salvor’s feelings might also have something to do with the fact that Gaal is her mother (just chalk it up to time travel and cryo-sleep shenanigans); Brother Constant (Isabella Laughland), a “cleric” for the fledgling Church of the Galactic Spirit, has doubts about her mission, or at least its methods. In a way, the joint misgivings among these characters are a relief. If folks living thousands of years ahead of us can’t shake the sinking feeling in their stomachs that grim tidings await over the horizon, then it’s more acceptable that we in 2023 can’t, either.
As uninviting as it sounds to absorb that much existential dread in 50 minutes of running time per episode, “Foundation” makes the experience of fearing for humanity’s endurance a genuine pleasure. What is lost in the move from season 1 to 2 is the joyless task of establishing stakes, characters, and the universe itself; the details of each have their own delights worth relishing, but together make season 1 a minor slog. The maintenance required for the “Foundation” plot to make even a glimmer of sense is exhausting and often fights against the show’s better merits – the ensemble cast, the set design, and the effects work. In season 2, that maintenance is complete.
Goyer and Friedman, and their deep bench of writers and directors, did the hard part. They shepherded the show’s rising action. Now we get to kick back and bask in falling action, and even in season 2’s first few episodes, the action does indeed fall; there’s setup for the season’s overarching themes and plot threads woven into the fabric here, of course, but when something, anything, happens, it has an upfront consequence; where “Foundation” invests in far away futures in its first season, it is grounded firmly in the “now” in its second. The reprieve from leaping forward and backward in time, and the resultant urgency even small moments gain from the season’s mooring in the present, is not only welcome but vital for giving “Foundation” a reason to keep going – and for us to keep watching.
That’s a change in tenor worth embracing. “Foundation” already has enough to recommend it, thanks to rich, textured visuals and concrete world-building; married with purpose, the show may finally fully realize its aesthetic promises on the back of much-needed dramatic immediacy. [B+]
