Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Foundation’ On Apple TV+, A Sci Fi Epic About An Empire On The Verge Of Collapse And The People Who Try To Save It

Isaac Asimov’s novels have always been tough to adapt for the screen because the worlds he created are dense and detailed. Condensing that detail from the page to even a multi-episode limited series leaves out so much contextual information that it leaves the viewer confused. Is the latest adaptation, Foundation, able to crack that code?

FOUNDATION: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: A shot of stars and planets, with a voice over of a woman saying, “When I was a child, I told my mother I wanted to learn every planet in the Galactic Empire, beginning in the center, and moving out to Star’s End.”

The Gist: The scene is on a snowy, rocky planet called Terminus. A group of kids make attempts to get close to a hovering monolith that the colonists call “The Vault.” As the number of flags stuck in the rocks have shown, no one ever gets close. When one kid gets so close she actually passes out, their revived by a woman named Salvor Hardin (Leah Harvey); legend has it that she got the closest — but she tells the kid that story is just a myth.

Flashing back 35 years, on Trantor, psychological mathematician Hari Seldon (Jared Harris) and his son Raych (Alfred Enoch) are anticipating the arrival of Gaal Dornick (Lou Llobell), who is leaving her water-logged home of Synnax to study under Seldon. But there are other reasons why he needs her there, and most of it has to do with his calculations that signify that the beginning of the end of the Galactic Empire is about to start.

The Galactic Empire is ruled by three clones who together are different sides of Emperor Cleon; Brother Day (Lee Pace), the older Brother Dusk (Terrance Mann) and the very young Brother Dawn (Cassian Bilton). The Empire is so vast that it includes thousands of planets and trillions of people; according to Seldon, though, it’s all about to be plunged to an era of darkness and chaos that will spell the empire’s end. The Emperor has no use for Seldon’s work, especially Brother Day.

In fact, after Gaal arrives on Trantor — she briefly comes out of stasis during her transport’s warp jump to see all the colors it generates — then goes down a star elevator for hours on end, she learns from Seldon that they will both be arrested the next day. The reason why he wanted her there is because she is the only one who solved an equation that has flummoxed scholars for millennia and he wants her to prove or disprove his theory.

After they’re arrested, Gaal is given a chance to look over Seldon’s calculations; saying they’re correct or incorrect will generate a bad outcome for her, Seldon or both of them. After the trial, and right as the two of them are being escorted to what is likely one of their deaths, several suicide bombs go off around Trantor, causing massive destruction of the society on the space station and the upper reaches of the surface.

After that, Seldon, Gaal and his foundation are exiled to Terminus, on the outer edges of the galaxy. This is something that he anticipated, and he’s happy that Gaal sees in his calculations a silver of light on the other side of the darkness.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Foundation is a more inscrutable version of an epic like the 2000’s version of Battlestar Galactica.

Our Take: Based on Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series of novels and created by David S. Goyer and Josh Friedman, Foundation is trying to tell an epic story of the people who saved the Galactic Empire from those outermost reaches of the galaxy. They’re trying to tell the stories of the people who defied the Empire, who had abilities others didn’t, and how everything came together.

But the first episode is so confusing, so slow-moving and stuffed with jargon, that it’s hard to crack it open to get to the emotional underpinnings of the story. Asimov’s stories have always been this way; he was never shy about creating worlds that included terminology that were presented without much explanation besides context. The better adaptations of his work managed to drill through that and find the humanity in order to hook in viewers. We don’t get there in the first episode of Foundation, mainly because it’s too hard to keep track of just what the heck is going on in the first place.

It could be that the mythology of Foundation is just too dense to explain in anything other than dozens of pages in print. But we needed something to latch onto in the first episode, an event of some sort, or at least something other than many, many scenes of two people talking about things for which we had no context. By the time the suicide bombs went off, we were so checked out of the first episode that we had to rewatch the last 15 minutes to figure out just how and why Seldon, Raych and Gaal were sent to Terminus to do their work.

Because we’re going to be spanning decades, if not centuries, in this series, it feels like we’re not going to get enough time to know the main players as we jump back and forth in time. Maybe we’re wrong about that, but after the first episode it just feels like a world that doesn’t offer anything for us to root for or against.

That’s not to say that the performances of Harris, Llobell, Pace and the rest of the cast don’t help. They’re all game to bring the right emotional — or maybe in the case of Pace’s Brother Day, creepily unemotional — tone to their roles and the situations they’re in. We’re just not sure if we were able to get enough information from the first episode to follow any of them along on this journey.

Sex and Skin: None.

Parting Shot: Back to Terminus 35 years later, and Salvor goes right up to the Vault and reaches inside. “When Hari was formulating his plan, did he realize the galaxy’s fate would rest on what she found inside?” says Gaal in voice over. “I think he did. And I think that’s what he feared the most.”

Sleeper Star: Leah Hardin plays a big role as Salvor, who is important to this mythology. We just don’t know how much she means until the very end of the episode.

Most Pilot-y Line: There are no particularly dumb lines, but Lee Pace’s accent as Brother Day is largely from some undefined place. Despite his fine performance, we know that’s going to annoy us.

Our Call: SKIP IT. Foundation is a plodding, confusing tale of a civilization’s triumph over its almost certain doom. We’d love to see the parts that show the story’s humanity and hope, but the first episode was just too boring to draw us in.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.

Stream Foundation On Apple TV+