‘Foundation’ Season 2 Episode 9 Recap: Once Upon a Crime

If I had to sum up the appeal of Foundation at this point, I might say this: At no point from the moment I heard that Isaac Asimov’s seminal science-fiction classic would be adapted for television until today did I anticipate that Hari Seldon, mathematician and prophet, would become an axe murderer.

Also, at no point did I figure that the Imperium was secretly under the guidance and control of the immortal robot who wheedled her way out of an ancient emperor’s Bluebeard chamber by making one of his successors so horny over the course of multiple decades that he’d both enslave her and grant her the galaxy as a wedding present. 

Also also, at no point did I figure that the supreme ruler of humanity would order the titular organization to be completely destroyed from orbit while wearing a mesh top.

But that’s where we’re at with “Long Ago, Not Far Away,” the penultimate episode of Foundation’s second season, and the latest in a series of back-to-back-to-back home runs. Written by Jane Espenson and Eric Carrasco and directed, as was its excellent predecessor, by Roxann Dawson, it’s TV genre entertainment at its grandest, sexiest, saddest, most mysterious, most violent, most spectacular, best.

Honestly, though? One of my favorite things about it is that it reveals how the fate of the species has been governed by one child’s determination to find all the Imperial palace’s “hidden Mickeys.” That’s how the hour begins: with the first Emperor Cleon, then just a bored and curious young prince, roaming around the castle, trying to touch every face he can find in its sculptures and murals and engravings. This leads him to accidentally unlock the secret passage where one of his more sadistic prisoners imprisoned a robot general named Demerzel near the end of humanity’s war against its rebellious mechanical servants. There she was tortured (at least so the Emperor thought; as a robot she’s incapable of feeling physical pain and merely faked it to manipulate him), disassembled, and stored in perpetuity, until li’l Cleon came along. 

Over the years, and as he assumed power, she’d keep telling him stories — first of history, then of sex — in order to keep him coming back, with an eye to securing her eventual release. This she secures after he’s aged into the stage we’d refer to at the current stage of Empire as “Brother Dusk,” but not without a complicated cost. Reluctant to immediately kill her liberator, as she could and perhaps should have, she allows him to insert what’s known in Star Wars parlance as a restraining bolt, preventing her from ever harming him, or anyone genetically identical to him. This is his big plan, as we know: preserving his dynasty using clones, thus ensuring Demerzel’s loyal service to Empire forever. He’s even created a new Law of Robotics to supersede the long-abandoned rules Zero through Three: She must always serve Empire.

Ah, but there’s a loophole, or at least so I suspect. While “Empire” is generally used to refer to the person of the Emperor, with “Imperium” referring to the galaxy-wide realm he rules, what does it mean if — as we now know is the case — the first Cleon intended for Demerzel to be not merely his servant or even his lover, but his successor? He immediately gives the quasi-liberated robot instructions to doctor the memories of his clones so that they don’t remember this aspect of the deal, allowing her to rule through them in secret. This is what today’s Brother Dusk and his companion, Rue, discover while stuck in Demerzel’s old prison themselves.

And where is Demerzel herself, now? Accompanying Brother Day, arrogant and erratic, on his mission to cow Foundation on Terminus. After a series of tense, taut, elegantly scripted confrontations not only with Foundation’s Director, Sermak, and its High Claric, Poly, but with the digital ghost of Hari Seldon himself, he orders General Bel Riose to bring his enemies’ wounded flagship, the Invictus, down onto the planet, destroying everyone on it. To my shock, Bel Riose follows orders, even though it means killing his stranded husband Glawen in the process; Glawen encourages him to do so, with the rationale that the dying Imperium needs a soldier with the smarts and strength of Bel alive, not executed for dereliction of duty. 

The genocide that follows is the kind of obscene spectacle of destruction that contemporary science-fantasy can pull off disturbingly well. Watching Terminus collapse into a swirling singularity, taking all the hours we’ve sunk into the place with it, reminds me of the grotesque acts of environmental desecration in James Cameron’s blockbuster Avatar films, of the unexpected and calamitous eruption of Godzilla’s full powers in Hideaki Anno’s terrifying Shin Godzilla, of the bigger-than-you-could-have-imagined green inferno in the Neill Marshall–directed Game of Thrones classic “Blackwater.” It’s all seen through the weeping eyes of Bel, through the horror and grief of the captives Brother Constant and Hober Mallow, and the excremental glee of Brother Day himself. 

You know who it’s not seen through, however? Demerzel. Having received an unknown transmission from Trantor, she announces her decision — it is clearly not up for debate, not even by Day — to return to the capital on unspecified other business. What’s more, she tells Day, she’s made these kinds of decisions and journeys all the time in the past, right under his nose. What’s more, she’s got no respect for this asshole whatsoever. “I apologize to you for what you have become,” she tells him, to his confusion and dismay. “It was my oversight.” When he questions and complains, bragging about his own unorthodoxy and intelligence, she nukes him from orbit, verbally anyway: “You’re a sperm, led by its waving flagellum, mistaking its random motion for complexity.” Real “You’re an errand boy, sent by grocery clerks, to collect a bill” hours.

While all this is going on, the episode keeps cross-cutting to Ignis, where the insane demigod Tellem Bond is slowly inserting her mind into Gaal Dornick’s body. Not if Gaal’s daughter Salvor has anything to say about it, however. In a super-weird, super-suspenseful sequence, Salvor barges into Tellem’s temple, uses these psychic-disruptor disk gimmicks to interrupt the ceremony, and flees back to the ship with Gaal in tow. But Tellem and her chief enforcer, the shape-shifter Ferzan (Mahmoud Aldachan), get there too, and pitched battles between Tellem and Gaal on one hand and Salvor and Ferzan on the other erupt. It’s the sudden reemergence of the duplicate Hari — once again in physical form, this time carrying an axe and not afraid to use it — who tips the balance in our heroes’ favor. “I never liked her,” he says after hacking Tellem to bits. Cutesy dialogue of the sort you’d expect a Buffy vet like Espenson to serve up? Yes. A cathartic laugh line nonetheless? Also yes.

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, this is, you guessed it, the best episode of Foundation yet. It achieves this through deft counterposition of moments of exhilaration and moments of despair. Take the origin story of Demerzel and the Cleons, for example. From one perspective it’s erotic as all hell: The nude, imprisoned Demerzel slowly seducing the Emperor with stories of all the debauchery she’d seen in her millennia-long life gives those of us who enjoyed this season’s ass shots of Lee Pace and Dimitri Leonidas but who hankered for something a little more in the Laura Birn range something to get excited about. Yet it’s offset by the genuinely revolting way in which the first Cleon reveals that he’s made Demerzel his sex slave: After asking her “Will you love me?” and receiving her affirmative reply, he says “How I wish I had asked you before I made it compulsory.” All of a sudden you realize this man is a true monster.

The siege of Terminus proceeds along similar lines. By arraying Foundation on one side, complete with a pair of rookie starship commanders designed to give us a little human interest to hang the thing on, and the likeable Bel and Glawen on the other, the show creates a situation where we can root for pretty much any side we want…until it becomes clear that one side is genocidal, and that Bel and Glawen are its powerless pawns. All of a sudden the immensity and excitement of the combat between the Imperial fleet and the Invictius goes rancid and tragic. Weaving it all in and out of Gaal and Salvor’s fight for their lives on Ignis, Return of the Jedi–style, is a rare case where the obvious influence is being honored rather than simply swiped from. Ditto the slow, Melancholia-esque collision of Terminus with the sinking Invictus.

And the performances? Series-best stuff nearly across the board. Rachel House, Lou Llobdell, Leah Harvey, Lee Pace, Laura Birn, Oliver Chris, Terrence Mann, and especially Kulvinder Ghir as Poly create a sort of moving mural of their own, in which various pigments of honor, bravery, cowardice, cruelty, sacrifice, and tyranny play off each other to create the overall emotional picture. 

The question now is how a season this strong wraps up in similar fashion. I’ve got a feeling it’s got something to do with the little golden geegaw Poly creates using an alchemical processor, making a point to give it to an aura-less Day to hold; there are enough suble-but-unsubtle glances and grins going around to indicate that various people know or believe there to be more than meets the eye to this device, Demerzel herself potentially included. It must surely also account for what will become of the Foundation project now that First Foundation has been incinerated; with Tellem dead at the hands of one of the Haris, is a psychically-powered Second Foundation now possible? And why exactly has Demerzel fled the front to return to the capital? I never thought I’d say this after Season 1 was such an aggressively mixed bag, but I’m dying to find out.

(This piece was written during the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. Without the labor of the writers and actors currently on strike, the series 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.