‘Foundation’ Season 2 Episode 5 Recap: Psychic TV

I’m always saying this: You know your immortal robot servant no longer has your best interests at heart when she doesn’t teach you the cowgirl position. 

This week’s episode of Foundation — the best time in outer space you’ll find on television right now — contains far more shocking revelations, but it’s the fact that despite his enthusiasm for coupling with Demerzel, Brother Day — Emperor Cleon XVII himself — literally has no idea women can be on top during sex that stands out. Like, yes, this throws his intended, Queen Sareth of Dominion, for a loop, but I think she’d be a lot more taken aback if she learned her suspicions were correct and he really did have her entire family murdered in order to engineer their marriage. A conversation between Cleon and Demerzel after the ill-fated coupling confirms this. (Day describes the encounter with jovial irony worthy of Roger Sterling: “She suspects I killed her family. I had to accuse her of trying to kill me. We’re engaged!”)

But while that’s a secret Demerzel is willing to keep for Day, the concept of a Ginuwine-style pony ride is one she kept from Day as his sole instructor in the ways of love. And I’m serious, this really does mean she’s not looking out for him the way he thinks she is. Not just because a life without the occasional reverse cowgirl is not worth living, mind you — because Demerzel goes out of her way to reassure the nervous and relatively inexperienced Day that Sareth will be impressed with him even though, as a walking databank on thousands of years of human existence, she knows for a fact Sareth will think he’s a joke. Given that having sex with Sareth is, in effect, a component of high-stakes galactic diplomacy with the fate of Empire hanging in the balance, this is borderline treasonous. 

How does this square with Demerzel’s claim that she cannot act against the interests of Empire? One need only look around. She’s evasive with Dusk when he asks how he’d ever find out if his memory had been erased, after first learning from his lover Rue that she doesn’t even notice the absence of her missing memories, then from Demerzel herself that Day has free rein over their memories and his own. She’s a prime suspect, I’d say, in the mystery of why the original Cleon has a memory bank multiple times larger than all of his genetic descendants, who Dusk and Dawn suspect have been getting something removed from their minds all this time. And of course, there was that shot back in the premiere of her eyeing that ancient Empress covetously. This is one bad bot, my friends.

And the bot part of that secret is out. Sareth learns from Rue — via some too-trusting pillow talk by Dusk — that everyone in the palace has routine memory audits which in the Cleons’ cases are stored away permanently. With the help of her inside man, she gets her hands on the memory records of a health technician who helped treat Cleon after the assassination attempt, and whoever it was took a good long look at Demerzel’s bisected mechanical head. Sareth and her retinue are aghast, not only that the Cleons have defied millennia of taboo and are employing a robot, but that her fiancé is sleeping with her. Or it. 

The mysteries on the other end of the show are a bit further away from being solved. Plagued by nightmares about his slain son Raych (Alfred Enoch) that allude to a previous death in his family, Hari Seldon is informed by Salvor that he’s a clone of his former self, though what force made him, and for what purpose, neither she nor he nor Gaal can figure out. Nor can they quite put their finger on why they’re traveling to the planet Ignis beyond a sort of whispering in their minds that it’s the right place to be. 

Once they arrive, we find out why. After crash landing, they encounter Salvor’s boyfriend Hugo (Daniel MacPherson), presumed dead sometime during the time jump that ended Season One. That presumption is correct: It’s a psychic, or “mentallic” in Foundation parlance, in disguise. Ignis is a whole community of exiled and misfit mentallics from across the galaxy, summoned by their powerful leader, Tellem Bond (Rachel House). Tellem was wrongfully revered as a god when she was a little girl before breaking free of her religious community, hence her sympathy with the similarly spiritually estranged Gaal. (When Tellem tells the gang “Do not worship children — it is not good for them,” she could be speaking about every child star in Hollywood history.)

Tellem also has the number of our two heroines — so much so, in fact, that I could feel both characters suddenly and finally click into place for me in a way they’d never done before. Tellem asks Gaal how it feels to be “sighted” — that’s the mentallics’ preferred term for themselves — “but unseen by God,” alluding to the prayer stones she removed from her face before joining Hari all those years ago. It’s an elegant way to describe the fundamental disconnect in Gaal, how she can see patterns undetectable to all but a handful of people in history yet remains so skeptical — of the plan, of Hari, and of herself.

As for Salvor? Tellem says she spent a life “standing on the cold edge of your community, desperate to fit in.” I really didn’t care for Salvor’s Season 1 stoic-but-secretly-bleeding-inside persona, or Leah Harvey’s performance thereof — it’s very, very stock stuff — but this line makes Salvor make sense to me. She’s a woman who knows she’s different, resents it, then resents those around her for her resentment, so she keeps everyone at arm’s length, where she worries and suspects she might belong after all. Lots of smart or weird or artsy people have that particular malfunction, no psychic powers required.

As for Hari? His brain is “murk” to Tellem, presumably because of his mysterious cloning. Either that, or she’s bullshitting him, making him feel invulnerable so she can get closer to her real goal: finding and destroying the trio’s copy of the Prime Radiant to prevent the Second Foundation from ever coming into existence. She says this to her comrades just minutes after Hari says they’re all a key part of his plan. Someone’s gonna have egg on their face! Plus, there’s the whole unresolved issue of whether Hari is right and psychohistory precludes the idea that the future is unalterable, or Gaal is right and her visions always do come true. That, too, crystalizes things in ways the show hadn’t yet been able to accomplish.

It’s now customary for Foundation to feel like a well-balanced pinball machine, each segment of the playing surface exciting and enticing and holding its own. That’s certainly true of this episode (“The Sighted and the Seen”): I found the Trantor gang and the Ignis gang to be equally engaging. It’s hard to describe what a victory that is for the show, and for writers Joelle Garfinkel and Jane Espenson, considering where we were at this point a season ago.  

More than that, though, it feels like the big colorful murals that line so many of the walls of Empire’s palace. The sweep and spectacle of the thing is delightful, but it’s little details, like a green ribbon around an ancient emperor’s neck symbolizing his treason, that make the show sing. Stuff like Dusk looking at his buddy Dawn and saying of his own Dawn period, “I was so beautiful”; it’s an expression both of love for his young brother and nostalgia for his young self. Or on the lighter side, stuff like Demerzel leaving Day to his encounter with Sareth by grinning at him and brightly saying “Think of me!” while giving him an encouraging little fist pump. You can do it, buddy! — ah yes, just the tone one wants to hear one’s lover adopt.

Foundation is funny, exciting, lyrical, dazzling to the eye, epic in scope, and horny at heart, in service of the refreshingly non-pollyannaish goal of limiting humanity’s next dark age to a mere millennium. Even its hero’s journey involves getting off a few stops early and walking. That’s just one more thing to admire about the year’s best comeback.

(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.