‘Foundation’ Season 2 Episode 4 Recap: Fun and Prophet

I didn’t even realize Lee Pace wasn’t in this week’s episode of Foundation until after it was over. How’s that for a high compliment? 

Seriously. To subtract Lee Pace’s Cleon — your leading man, your most interesting character, the biggest face in your marketing, the internet boyfriend of the show — and still have it click on so many levels that his absence goes unnoticed? To say nothing of Gaal and Salvor, whom I’m enjoying more by the week? If ever there were a sign that my “sophomore surprise” theory that Foundation, like Halt and Catch Fire, The Leftovers, and Billions before it, has made a quantum leap in quality from its rookie season to the next. 

In trying to think of what to write about first, I’m going to pretend I’m Empire’s Shadow Master and relay all the intel this episode gathers about Foundation and its various doings. It does this via both a reconnaissance mission by Bel Riose and his right-hand boyfriend Glay Curr to Siwenna, the planet visited by the “clarics” Poly and Constant during their first appearance, and via information relayed in conversation with Poly, Constant, and good ol’ Hari Seldon himself. (This is a different Hari than the one we’ve been seeing so far this season, mind you. And he’s in the possession of a different Prime Radiant, which is also the same Prime Radiant. It’s complicated!)

Anyway, here’s what we now know that we didn’t know before:

• The protective “personal auras” Constant and Poly use to deflect attacks by skeptical audiences is an independently developed version of the technology used by the Cleons to prevent people from touching them. In other words it’s an ultra-elite item — which Foundation can afford to hand out to its traveling salesmen.

• Foundation has also developed a new form of jumpship technology called “whisper-ships.” Smaller than the massive craft used by Empire, they also don’t require the genetically bred Spacers to pilot them when they go past light speed. Bel and Glay’s informant, the ill-fated vintner Ducem Barr (Jesper Christensen), tells them rumor has it the ships have a mind of their own, while Glay speculates it’s involves some kind of organic computing. But a scene toward the end of the ep heavily implies that Beki, the scary-looking quadruped Poly rides around on while proselytizing, is actually psychically connected to their ship, since she stays with it even after Poly and Constant are reassigned to a different vessel.

• For the very first time, even after all these decades, Empire learns of the existence of the Vault. Probably not great.

• Via Hari’s digital ghost, we learn that he knew Foundation would reach a “religious phase,” which he plays up to in ways large and small — from referring to Brother Constant as “my loyal child” to treating his devout acolyte Poly with great respect to torching Warden Jaegger to prove he’s a wrathful god. (And to keep the overzealous Warden from declaring himself the one true voice of the Prophet.) The religious phase will be replaced, he says after a dramatic pause, “by another mechanism.” Hmmm.

But Empire aren’t the only ones snooping around. Queen Sareth and her pals from the Dominion, Enjoiner Rue and Handman Hahn (Haqi Ali), are on the hunt for the truth about her family’s untimely death in a zeppelin crash. (As TV causes of death go it’s right up there with Cheers’s Edde LeBec dying in a tragic zamboni accident.) She suspects Brother Day’s hand in it, in order to force an advantageous marriage with a royal family that would otherwise never have accepted it

To get to the bottom of it, she has a strategy with at least two prongs. First, she butters up Brother Dawn by using what she describes as “courtesan tricks” — wearing little makeup to convey comfort and openness with him, crying on cue, flirting up a storm, all but saying she’d rather marry him than his older “brother.” As the young queen, Ella-Rae Smith is so beguiling in this segment that I was ready to tell her everything I knew.

Meanwhile, however, her minions have recruited an informant, palace guard Markley (Afolabi Alli). She tasks him not only with digging up info on her family’s death, but also on how Day managed to defeat a phalanx of “the galaxy’s best assassins,” specifically requesting visual records of the event. Such records would reveal Day’s sexual relationship with Demerzel…and the big secret that Demerzel is a robot, the likes of which have been taboo for millennia, if I’m recalling my Asimov correctly. (Which I may not be, not that it matters much for this very loose adaptation.)

And I suspect that Rue’s rekindled relationship with Brother Dusk — whom she bedded as a courtesan years earlier, only to have her memory erased per imperial standard — is prong three of the probe. That doesn’t mean that their interaction isn’t pretty hot stuff, from Dusk’s perspective at least; his eagerness to show her video footage of their “joyous copulation” way back when is palpable, thanks to Terrence Man’s subtly but unmistakably randy performance.

Speaking of randy performances, the chemistry between Isabella Laughland’s Constant and Dimitri Leonidas’s Hober is also really somethin’. I think that mostly comes down to Laughland, actually. (Not to diminish Lenoidas’s work in the slightest; it take some skill to pull off glib cracking-a-joke-to-make-light-of-the-grandeur jokes like saying “I wouldn’t go that way, I took a dump over there” in the middle of the cavernous vastness within the Vault.) A combination true believer and flim-flam woman, a virgin with the confidence of a seasoned romancer, a woman with “small possibilities and particular likes” as she puts it, she comes right out and tells Hober how attracted she is to him, and how much she regrets that they’ll never have a chance to consummate that attraction.

That’s because the episode ends with our heroes receiving their own marching orders. Hari sends Poly and Constant to Trantor, of all places, where they’re to give Empire the hard sell about Foundation personally in order to avoid the coming war. Hober Mallow, whom Hari requested by name at the suggestion of “a passing ghost,” is being saved for a different purpose — developing some as-yet-undisclosed stick as a counterpart to Poly and Constant’s carrot. “The person who extends an open hand in friendship had better have a blade in a fist behind his back,” Hari sais epigrammatically.

In point of fact, this episode is full of lovely, perfectly florid science-fantasy dialogue of that nature. Hari is a fountain of them: “For a god to be effective, you have to be intermittently wrathful,” or “Let no being presume upon my mercy.” After Bel provokes a deadly battle with bandits on Siwenna’s roads, Glay begins to worry if prison has given him a hair trigger that will ill serve him as a general: “By the time you recognize an atrocity, you may have already been complicit in one.” Paging J. Robert Oppenheimer!

Put it all together and what have we got? Intriguing storylines across the rapidly widening canvas of the show. Compelling new characters and performances an order of magnitude livelier than the supporting players from Season 1. Dialogue that’s alternately poetic, cheeky, and arousing, all written by Leigh Dana Jackson and showrunner David S. Goyer with equal skill, intelligence, and wit. And of course the usual onslaught of casually bitchin’ imagery, which you’ve been seeing peppered throughout this review. What more can I say than the thought that popped into my head the moment I saw the first spaceship this week: Foundation is so cool, man.

(This piece was written during the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. Without the labor of the writers and actors currently on strike, the show being covered here wouldn’t exist.)

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.