‘Foundation’ Episode 6 Recap: Keeping Up the Pace

Lee Pace shirtless. That’s it. That’s the review.

I kid, of course. If that were the review, I’d be out of a job real quick. But I do think opening with an Emperor Cleon shower scene tells us something important about Foundation: It understands that the Emperors are the most vibrant and appealing aspect of the story so far. Their sex appeal may not be the whole reason why, but it’s a part of it. Why not emphasize it?

Much like the Emperors themselves, Foundation‘s sixth episode (“Death and the Maiden”) is split into three sections. In the Brother Day storyline that kicks off the episode, the primary Cleon leaves the confines of the imperial capital world Trantor to visit the seat of Luminism, the galaxy’s most popular religion. His goal is to elevate one of the faith’s leaders, Zephyr Gilat (Julia Farino), to the supreme position of Proxima, offering to irrigate the desert moon on which the faith is based in exchange for her continued support.

But despite the counsel of his robotic assistant Demerzel—who, surprisingly, is a believer in Luminism herself—Day is outfoxed at every turn by the “heretic” Zephyr Halima (T’Nia Miller). It’s she who greets him when he arrives, not the adoring masses as he’d anticipated. And it’s she who commandeers the funeral service for the previous Proxima from the hands of Zephyr Gilat.

Addressing the throngs of believers and priestesses, Halima essentially recites an extended diss track against Cleon. The gist of it is this: Luminists worship three goddesses who used to be one entity—the Maid, the Mother, and the Crone. (Sound familiar, Game of Thrones fans?) Millennia ago, the Mother gave to her faithful the gift of reincarnation, a constant process of death and rebirth with no end point, since the potential growth of a soul’s knowledge is infinite. What a blessing, she says, that the deceased Proxima is not trapped in a stagnant body for eternity! 

All of this is greeted by rapturous applause and reverent bows, much to the chagrin of Cleon and Demerzel. The message being sent to Cleon is clear: Since he’s been cloning himself for 400 years, his soul is stuck in place, effectively rotting away. It’s a direct challenge to his divine right to rule. As for Demerzel, an effectively immortal robot, she seems genuinely hurt by Halima’s words. What place can an undying automaton possibly have in this woman’s cosmology? 

Long story short, the crisis of confidence Brother Day set out to defuse has now been made worse, since the likely new leader of Luminism—unless he steps in to stop it directly, risking the wrath of three trillion believers—has called him out to his face. How can he possibly recover without bloodshed?

The irony here is that if Zephyr Halima had checked in on Brother Day’s younger clone, Brother Dawn, she might have discovered that the Emperors are less stagnant than she thought. In a series of scenes, we learn that Dawn is decidedly different from his predecessors. Brought out into a nature preserve for his first experience with hunting by Brother Dusk, he immediately breaks Dusk’s all-time record for the most kills, a fact he covers up to avoid trouble. (The sinister imperial spymaster, Obrecht, discovers the extra animal carcasses later in the episode.)

After the hunt, Dusk brings him to the Gossamer Court, essentially a brothel designed for the Cleons; any sex worker they select will have his or her memory wiped after their encounter. But Dawn prefers to talk, not fuck, a fact Dusk learns from the woman Dawn had selected before her memory is erased.

Perhaps most crucially, Dawn remains smitten with Azura, an imperial gardener. He invites her up to his quarters to enjoy the view from the ledge outside his window. He reveals that he is colorblind, something no Cleon before him has ever been. He even tosses away the bracelet that generates his personal forcefield, effectively giving Azura the chance to kill him if she wishes. Instead, they kiss. Given that at no point have we seen the older Cleons seriously romantically involved with anyone, this is probably a big no-no—one that I doubt he can keep secret for very long.

The show’s third storyline is based on Terminus, which along with the Gaal Dornick stuff remains the show’s weak spot. I don’t think this is the fault of Lou Llobell, who plays Gaal, or Leah Harvey, who leads the Terminus material as Salvor Hardin; both characters are simply kinda flat as written, with Gaal reacting to everything with either dumbfounded shock or cool command, and Salvor a pretty generic tough guy.

Indeed, this episode gives Salvor the requisite tragedy that all movie and TV tough guys must have: the death of her father Abbas (a more or less wasted Clarke Peters) during a raid on the Anacreon invaders gone wrong. It was Salvor’s job to blow up their spaceships and strand them on Terminus, but she blacked out in the middle of her maneuvers, having an inexplicable vision of Hari Seldon instructing his adoptive son Raych to kill him and take the cryopod eventually used by Gaal to escape.

At any rate, the episode tracks Salvor from captivity to freedom to captivity once more, as she and her boyfriend Hugo and several key figures from the Foundation are forced to crew the planet’s last surviving spaceship by the Anacreon war leader, Phara. Apparently she’s seeking something called the Invictus, a legendary “ghost ship” with planet-destroying capabilities. If the vengeful Anacreons get ahold of this vehicle, they can drag the entire galaxy into conflict, instead of picking away at the Empire’s margins. 

It’s an interesting concept, though again, few of the characters involved in this storyline really pop off the screen, certainly not the way Dawn, Day, Dusk, and Demerzel do. My hope is that if we spend enough time with them together, the rival warriors Salvor and Phara may start to reveal more compelling, recognizably human traits. For Salvor especially, this is vital: Any character pegged as a Chosen One type—her boyfriend Hugo believes that Hari Seldon selected her and her extraordinary powers to unlock the Vault, defeat the Anacreons, and save the Foundation from its so-called First Crisis—requires a lot of work to avoid slipping into rote hero’s-journey tropes we’ve seen a million times before.

At its best—the Cleon storylines, the gorgeous shots of spaceships in flight and in battle, the set design for vast temples and palaces—Foundation shows us beautiful things we haven’t seen before. I want to see the show do the same thing with its leading ladies, that’s all.

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 6 on Apple TV+