‘Foundation’ Episode 8 Recap: The Passion of Lee Pace

You have to hand it to Emperor Cleon. Most all-powerful galactic overlords would have a hard time suppressing a heretical sect of their star-spanning realm’s most powerful religion, led by a priestess who’s basically called him a soulless abomination. Most would also struggle to prove her wrong by completing a religious pilgrimage that kills 50% of its pilgrims through heat, thirst, and exposure. And most would probably keep their shirts on while doing so.

Not our boy Cleon, though! In this compelling episode of Foundation (“The Missing Piece”), actor Lee Pace is at his most shirtless as Brother Day, the primary Emperor, who takes on the challenge of walking the Spiral in order to regain control of the Luminist religion and its three trillion worshippers. It’s a gamble, no two ways about that: It’s his first time experiencing true physical hardship, it puts him at risk for galaxy-wide humiliation and rejection, and since he has to leave his protective shield behind, he’s in grave life-or-death danger for the first time in his cloned life. At one point, he requires the help of an elderly pilgrim (Michael Elwyn) whom he befriends on the way just to get up off of one knee and continue the trek.

But once he reaches the sacred cave at the Spiral’s heart and immerses himself in the pool called the Mother’s Womb, he’s golden. He emerges to tell the three Zephyr priestesses who oversee the pilgrimage that he had a vision of an ancient three-petalled flower—three petals from a single source, just like how Luminism’s three goddesses were once one being, and just like how he and his brothers Dusk and Dawn all stem from the same genetic source. How could anyone with a vision like that be the soulless abomination that the rogue Zephyr Halima has labeled him?

With that, he wins the day and ends the schism. As he departs the moon where the pilgrimage takes place, he can’t help but heavily imply to Halima that if she hadn’t given a speech effectively labeling him a monstrosity, he’d never have had the idea for his successful pilgrimage in the first place. Then he adds fatal injury to insult by forcing his robotic servant Demerzel, who must be loyal to him at all costs, to poison Halima to death, despite harboring her own grave and now redoubled doubts about Cleon and his soullessness, since she can tell he was bullshitting about his sacred religious vision. (He’d seen one of those ancient flowers in her quarters, it turns out.)

(Note: I guess in this adaptation of Isaac Asimov, his First Law of Robotics—“A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm”—no longer applies. Unless, I suppose, the Zeroth Law—“A robot may not harm humanity, or, by in action, allow humanity to come to harm”—supersedes and overrides the First Law, and Demerzel’s robotic mind has deduced that Cleon’s success among the Luminists hinges on Halima’s death. It’s complicated!)

While Cleon’s master plan goes off without a hitch, Hari Seldon’s, it seems, has not. His digital self tells his protégé Gaal Dornick that he needs her help to build a Second Foundation, independent and hidden from the First, on his homeworld of Helicon. There’s also some back and forth about her gift of psychic prescience, which if handled improperly could jeopardize the entire field of psychohistory, a mathematical discipline predicated on the idea that people are basically the same. (No room for rogue psychics, in other words.)

But Gaal isn’t having it. Hari already failed to predict that Gaal would burst in on his pre-planned assassination by his other protégé (and her lover) Raych, or that Raych would voluntarily take the fall and send Gaal out into space in an escape pod in his place. So she’s not about to simply take his word for it when he tells her she’s vital to the plan for the Second Foundation and the preservation of human kind. 

Her only leverage, though, is to risk her own life by destroying their vessel’s temperature regulation system, allowing herself to boil to death rather than complete the voyage. Digital Hari is forced to allow her to leave in the escape pod once again, which she programs for an 138-year journey back to her homeworld of Synnax. I don’t know about you, but I’m hoping this stop-and-start storyline reaches its destination sooner rather than later.

The final piece of the puzzle is Salvor Hardin, who like Gaal appears to have some telepathic abilities, in her case taking the form of both clairvoyance and unnaturally good luck. But by the time she reaches the bridge of the planet-killing spacecraft the Invictus, her party is down to just four members: herself, Foundation leader Lewis Pirenne, Anacreon huntress Phara, and Phara’s lieutenant, Rowan (Pravessh Rana).

By that point, it’s clear that there’s no talking Phara out of her plan to use the Invictus to raze Trantor, even though the Empire will likely retaliate by killing every last Anacreon it can find, and likely wiping out other worlds on the rim of the galaxy for good measure. Salvor manages to get the jump on her captors for a bit, giving her and Lewis just enough time to devise a plan to take the Invictus back to Terminus, if her enhanced mind can somehow interface with the ship’s AI.

But Phara and Rowan burst in, shooting Lewis, and a fight between Phara and Salvor ensues; Salvor’s just about to deliver the killshot when her luck fails her and her gun runs out of ammo. As Thespin ships called into action by Hugo (who’s still alive out there; my theory was correct, hooray!) attack, the ship jumps to an unknown destination, and Salvor finds herself wide awake for the maneuver. That’s a one-way ticket to madness for the average human brain, but as we saw with Gaal, it’s possible for people with extraordinary mental abilities to weather the journey. 

Where will that journey end? It’s an open question, and it’s to the show’s credit that at this point I’m actually interested in the answer. The Cleons are still far and away the most interesting thing about Foundation—ironically, given that they have no basis in the source material, not that the Gaal and Salvor storylines are any more faithful to the books than Brother Day’s. But we’re getting to the point where the Gaal and Salvor material really has to deliver if the show is to avoid feeling lopsided for its entire duration. I’m looking forward to seeing whether the show lives up to that challenge.

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 8 on Apple TV+