‘Foundation’ Episode 5 Recap: Attack Formation

We’re five episodes deep into Foundation, and from Salvor Hardin to Gaal Dornick, our heroes face what could be an insurmountable task. No, it’s not the attack by Anacreon forces that Salvor tries and fails to fend off. Nor is it Gaal’s need to figure out where the ship on which she has been stranded is going when the ship itself won’t tell her. The big challenge is this: Can the rest of the Foundation cast hold things down without the presence of Lee Pace’s beautiful, beautiful Emperor Cleon? I’d say that after this ep (“Upon Awakening”), the answer is a qualified yes. (Lee Pace hive, feel free to roast me when you link to this review.)

We’ll start with Gaal’s storyline, since that’s where the episode itself begins. And I mean begins begins—it opens with a flashback that rewinds us all the way to Gaal’s youth, when she was training as an acolyte in her homeworld’s major religion. We watch as she and other acolytes apprehend a former university instructor, rooting around the ruined facility’s library for forbidden books. We watch as she participates in his ritual execution by drowning—appropriately, given that drowning is a fate that will befall countless people on this world due to anthropogenic climate change. (Sigh.)

And we watch her dive underwater to retrieve one of the books that were sunk to the bottom of the sea along with the instructor. This is how she wound up solving the “Abraxas Conjecture” and came to the attention of Hari Seldon, who extends an invitation to Trantor. You know how that turned out.

Years in the future—34 years and 223 days after she was placed in cryosleep by her lover Raych Foss following his murder of Hari Seldon, to be exact—Gaal awakens in an empty ship. The knife Raych used to kill Hari, which wound up in the escape pod with Gaal, serves as a key, and indeed the whole ship is programmed to obey Raych’s commands. Not being Raych, this places Gaal in a bind. But with some deft calculations and a risky spacewalk, she’s able to manually piece together the ship’s forbidden destination: Helicon, Hari’s homeworld. Given that Gaal has gone down in history as an accomplice to Hari’s murder, this is…less than ideal.

But then something very strange happens. Gaal discovers pools of blood on the floor that somehow disappear after a few seconds. But they lead her to…Hari Seldon? We did learn during Gaal’s interrogation of the ship’s computer that Hari received a burial in space with a casket of his own design, a line of dialogue that basically reads as HARI IS UP TO SOMETHING in big block letters, so his arrival on the same ship as Gaal makes sense.

The only thing is that I don’t remember Hari Seldon glitching like a faulty hologram before now. Do you?

While Gaal attempts to make sense of it all, Salvor is desperately trying to protect the Foundation itself. But because the colony’s leader, Lewis Pirenne, refuses to listen to her, her efforts are in vain. Lewis acquiesces to the demand of an incoming Imperial rescue ship and brings the captured Anacreon huntress, Phara, to the colony’s generator tower (or something to that effect—this is sci-fi on TV, you can get a little handwavey about such details if you want). Once there, she rips her eyeball out (!) to reveal an electromagnetic grenade of some kind, which she uses to shut down the tower.

It’s a disastrous move for the Foundation. Their perimeter energy shield switches off, allowing the Anacreons to stage a full invasion. Meanwhile, a huge gun that they’d cloaked from the incoming Imperial jump ship opens fire, blowing the ship out of the sky. After a tussle with Salvor (filmed, rather annoyingly, in near-darkness), Phara reveals the method to this madness: The surviving Anacreons blame Hari Seldon’s predictions for inflaming the Empire, goading Cleon into the saturation nuclear bombing of their homeworld. They had to wait over three decades to pull it off, but this is their revenge.

In effect, this episode concerns itself with a pair of mysteries—the nature of Gaal’s predicament and the truth about Phara’s plan. Admittedly, I found the latter a more gripping narrative; there’s something darkly exciting about watching your heroes sprint after enemies who are perpetually two or three steps ahead of them. Gaal, by contrast, mostly barks commands at a CGI computer readout, making her personal mystery somewhat less engaging—though there’s a breathtaking slo-mo shot of her in the shower as the ship flips around en route to its final destination. The ship itself is a lovely thing to look at, too, all cavernous pyramidal hallways and stark bar-shaped lights. (If you’ve ever played No Man’s Sky, it’ll remind you quite a bit of that game’s space stations.)

What I’m getting at is that if the visuals are strong enough, a show can get away with a lot. My interest in the Gaal storyline waxed in that slo-mo shot, while my interest in the Salvor storyline waned with that dully staged fight scene; the computer conversations and the spaceship crash flipped that dynamic. It’s not quite the cycle of destruction and rebirth that the rogue professor in the flashback speaks of, but it’s similar: It’s Foundation finding a balance. Even without Cleon, I think there’s ample reason to believe it will hold its course.

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 5 on Apple TV+