‘Foundation’ Episode 2 Recap: Bad Romance

Well. That was unexpected!

Taking a radical departure from what was already a radical departure from Isaac Asimov’s original novels, the second installment of Foundation (“Preparing to Live”) serves up an episode-ending shock to the system that changes, well, pretty much everything about where you might have thought the series was headed. Literally so, insofar as it takes place on the ship taking a four-year-plus journey to the remote planet of Terminus, where Dr. Hari Seldon plans to establish his civilization-preserving Foundation project. There’s just one catch now: Dr. Hari Seldon will not make it to the promised land.

But long before Seldon is stabbed to death by his adoptive son Raych right before the horrified eyes of his heir apparent Gaal Dornick, this second episode (released simultaneously with the series premiere) has other surprises in store for us. For starters, Raych and Gaal have become an item in the weeks and months they’ve spent together on Seldon’s spaceship, a very steamy relationship they’ve tried to keep secret from their shared mentor.

The episode, written by series co-creators David S. Goyer and Josh Friedman and directed by TV journeyman Adam Bernstein, drops us into this relationship with little to no warning; suddenly, Gaal and Raych are making out in a swimming pool and having sex on a holodeck, and we’re simply expected to take it in stride. You’ve got to respect a show willing to make such bold narrative leaps from one episode to the next.

While Gaal and Raych deal with their clandestine romance—which, it should be noted, includes a zygote that Gaal has surgically removed and stored for transport, per the ship’s protocols—and Gaal and Hari deal with the workaday business of the ship’s community—mingling with the help in the laundromat, sitting in on budget committee meetings, all that jazz—the triumvirate Emperor of the galaxy has his own business to attend to. In the weeks since suicide bombers from the warring planets of Anacreon and Thespis destroyed the planet’s vaunted starbridge and caused the death of 100 million people, some 100,000 of which are still orbiting the planet as meteors waiting to happen, no further information has been procured to determine who is truly at fault for this brazen, coordinated attack. 

The three Emperors are of three different minds as to what to do with this failure to unearth the culprit. The elderly Brother Dusk urges caution to his brothers, even as he blows up at the planets’ captive ambassadors in a pair of dinner meetings cleverly intercut to seem like a single scene. He even travels to meet the Synnaxian seer priest (Brian Bovell) that Gaal contacted before her departure, to see if either he or she could really see the future as their religion insists. (Let’s note here, for the record, that Gaal does indeed seem to have some gift of prescience, insofar as she realizes something is very wrong before she runs to Hari’s quarters and finds Raych in the process of murdering him.)

Brother Day, the leader of the trio, has an altogether bloodier solution in mind. While staging a public execution of the Anacreon and Thespin delegations—sparing only the two lead ambassadors, so they can be sent back home to relay their failure to their people—he orders the imperial fleet to bombard the two planets, reducing them to flames that can be seen from space. Captured with the stately (if largely computerized) camerawork that is the show’s stock in trade thus far, it’s a beautiful image of horrific violence, seen from an elevation that aestheticizes the carnage. Watch some cable news coverage of American bombings and drone strikes sometime and get back to me about whether this even qualifies as “science fiction.”

As for Brother Dawn, the youngest of the crew? The catastrophe has left him scared, and only Demerzel (Laura Birn), the trio’s robotic advisor, seems able to really understand and educate him. It’s a tough position for the kid to be in: His whole “genetic dynasty” is predicated on the idea that the first man in their line, Cleon I, was so confident in his ability to rule justly that he decided to continue his reign in perpetuity.

If the two storylines have a unifying thread, it’s in the younger adults’ loss of faith in their elders. Brother Day has no time for Brother Dusk’s melancholy, for his pacifism, for the time he spends painstakingly restoring their quarters’ grand mural now that Brother Day has blown up its previous caretaker. Raych’s belief in Hari—prior to murdering him—seems to have been shaken by Gaal’s revelation that Seldon’s calculations have missing pieces that may or may not affect the outcome of his predictions.

So we’re left with the episode’s final moments, in which Raych races Gaal into an escape pod and blasts her off into an asteroid field as the main ship moves on. Was his killing of Seldon a rogue action, or was it all part of Seldon’s plan? My guess is the latter, but it’s just a guess. And that’s a beautiful thing. A science-fiction series that legitimately keeps the viewer guessing, instead of merely confused by unclear storytelling, is something worth preserving.

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.

Watch Foundation Episode 2 on Apple TV+