‘Foundation’ Episode 7 Recap: Revelations

Well now, that was certainly an episode, wasn’t it!

Despite a generic-sounding title, “Mysteries and Martyrs,” that initially had me dreading a bunch of equally generic sci-fi goings-on, Foundation Episode 7 turned out to be an absurdly jam-packed installment. With fully four engaging storylines, striking outer-space visuals, and startling deaths and resurrections, I don’t know if it’s the best episode of Foundation yet per se, but it’s certainly the most fun to watch.

Let’s get right into it with storyline number one, Salvor Hardin’s forced journey to the “ghost ship” Invictus. Buried inside an asteroid field where a bunch of Anacreon scavengers just happened to stumble across it, this “world-killer” ship—it’s a massive set of interconnected rings—is the whole reason for the so-called barbarian kingdom’s raid on the Foundation to begin with. If they can successfully commandeer the ship, Phara and company plan on jumping it straight to Trantor, which they will then blow to hell. 

Getting to that point, however, will require a level of cooperation and trust that the Anacreons and the Foundation crew seem entirely incapable of managing, thankfully enough for the people of Trantor. Phara’s leadership comes across as clumsy and bloodthirsty, as she sacrifices one Foundation member after another for the cause. The commander of the Empire’s rescue party gets shot in the head the moment he enables them to enter the Invictus, his purpose served; Salvor’s boyfriend Hugo misses his landing point on the ship and sails straight off into space. (I think it’s possible Hugo is actually aiming for a nearby abandoned mining facility in order to call for help, but we’ll see.)

A fight inside the ship sees more of the crew die, more or less needlessly, in a failed mutiny by the Foundation folks. If Salvor is really the tactical genius she’s made out to be, she’s running out of time to show it: Foundation leader Lewis Pirenne figures out that the Invictus is counting down to another jump through space, and Salvor deduces that the original crew lost control of the vessel some 700 years earlier, randomly jumping from place to place and effectively stranding them in deep space until they turned on each other and starved to death. With various defense mechanisms still in place and only a few hours left on the clock before the next jump, the race to control the ship is on.

In storyline number two, the Emperor Cleon known as Brother Day persists in his attempt to stamp out a potential schism within the Empire along religious lines, as the ascendant Zephyr Halima threatens to turn the three trillion followers of Luminism against him. But the two leaders are arguing at cross purposes: Cleon assumes Halima wants what any other political figure would want, a quid pro quo, but Halima assures him her belief in his soulless inferiority is genuine, and her only “ask” is for him to abolish the Cleonic genetic dynasty altogether. 

Though Cleon shows flashes of temper with his robotic aide Demerzel, who knelt along with Halima in public and thus appeared to defy his wishes (though she promises him her programming would never actually allow her to defy him at all), he calms himself down enough to come up with a new strategy to win over the Luminists. He will walk the sacred pilgrimage known as the Spiral, a dangerous journey through the desert that leads most pilgrims to suffering, blindness, and death. Hey, what could go wrong? (Judging from the Cleons’ track record in the series thus far, plenty.)

Speaking of the Cleons, Day’s younger “sibling” Dawn continues his illicit assignations with Azura, the palace gardener. (Note that he has no bellybutton when her hand traces his torso, just as Brother Day lacked one when he looked in the mirror last week.) When she gives him a gift intended to rectify his colorblindness—one of many slight but telling differences from his predecessors that he’s trying to keep secret—he shows her a room in the palace where extra Cleon clones exist in stasis, downloading the current Emperors’ thoughts and experiences so that they can be placed into action should any calamity befall the current versions. If Day or Dusk gets wind of even one change from the Cleonic norm within him, he says, he’ll simply be killed and replaced.

This leads Azura to a bold proposal: Head down into “The Scar,” the area of the capital planet Trantor left open to the actual sky by the collapse of the Starbridge, where he can get a new appearance and have the nanobots that track him removed from his bloodstream. Dawn seems tempted, enough so to send his little dragonfly spy drone down into the Scar to scope the place out, but since he’s always under the watchful eye of Brother Dusk, escape will be difficult, should he even choose that path. (I think there’s an equal chance he simply has Azura killed. These Cleons are tough customers, after all.)

In the episode’s final storyline, Gaal Dornick gets to the bottom of the digital specter of Hari Seldon she’s encountered on the ship to which her escape pod brought her. He’s the digital recreation of the original Seldon’s brain, uploaded into a secret storage compartment in the knife his adopted son Raych used to kill him. The idea was that Hari was more valuable to the Foundation as a foundational (no pun intended) myth rather than a flesh-and-blood man, particularly since a degenerative brain disease would have left him little time to run the Foundation himself at any rate. Better to preserve himself as a legend than allow his all-too-human weakness to gum up the works.

Many aspects of Hari’s grand plan went wrong: Raych was supposed to escape and leave Gaal behind to run the Foundation in Seldon’s absence, especially since the Foundation’s “First Crisis” was only a few decades away. (It’s currently happening to poor Salvor Hardin.) In fact, Gaal wasn’t supposed to crash the party at all; it was her unexpected appearance in Seldon’s quarters at the moment of truth that led Raych to jettison her in the escape pod and leave himself behind for execution by Seldon’s outraged followers. 

At the digital Hari’s prodding, Gaal finally owns up to what we in the audience have suspected all along: She has psychic abilities that allow her to “feel the future,” which is how she realized something was wrong with Raych and ran to Seldon’s quarters to investigate. It’s the same ability that cued her into the fall of the Starbridge before it happened, and which has allowed her to anticipate people’s words before they speak them. It seems very similar to Salvor’s similar abilities—and it also seems to fall well outside Hari’s area of expertise, the mathematical prediction of human behavior. How does super-human behavior factor into his equations, if at all? I’m guessing we’re about to find out.

So there you have it. A dense episode, full of stunning vistas (the Invictus, the leap through the asteroid field), personal journeys (Day’s plight with the Luminists, Dusk’s puppy love for Azura), and startling revelations (Phara’s plan to destroy Trantor, Gaal’s psychic abilities). In short, it feels like the first Foundation episode in which everything clicked, from the grand sci-fi images to a balance between the Cleon, Gaal, and Salvor storylines. If the show can stay steady on this course, we could be in for a hell of a destination.

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 7 on Apple TV+