Bonus review: Foundation Hatewatch
A stream-of-consciousness log of me watching Apple TV's Foundation
I rented a few movies from iTunes for a recent flight crossing the continental United States. But due to an error, the movies didn’t download. Thus, for my in-flight entertainment, I had to watch content that I had downloaded to my hard drive but forgot to delete. I wound up rewatching the Apple TV series Foundation under duress.
The following post is synthesized from notes I took during the flight.
This post contains spoilers for Foundation. People who have not seen the show are strongly encouraged to read this post to get it out of the way.
S1E1: “The Emperor’s Peace”
When I first watched the first episode, I gave it a 4/10. Rewatching it, it’s actually a little better than I remembered.
In the books, Asimov doesn’t give much details about the various planets in the Galactic Empire, with the exception of Trantor. The show does a decent job of fleshing out the various planetary cultures. The effects and costuming are good. The writing, however, can be summed up with a quote from another Jared Harris show: “not great, not terrible.”
Screenwriters have a saying: “show, don’t tell.” Never write a line of dialogue that says “here comes Emperor Cleon, he’s a dick!” Instead, do something that shows that Emperor Cleon is a dick.
But there’s a corollary, too: don’t hit your audience over the head with showing. The first scene with Emperor Cleon has him execute a kindly old man maintaining an animated painting. It’s so forced and ham-fisted that it feels like an overreaction to feedback about a scene where someone says Emperor Cleon is a mean dude.
I know it’s cool to hate on the movie Avatar, but it has one of the best cases of “show, don’t tell” I can think of. When we first meet Grace Augustine (Sigourney Weaver), she comes out of the uplink and demands a cigarette. She’s in a foul mood and rebuffs Jake Sully. The next time we see her, minutes later, she’s in her avatar body and acting all happy, and is even nice to Jake. Grace is unhappy as a human, and happy as a Na’vi. It makes her going native later in the film believable. It’s very subtle. You might not have noticed it, but your brain did.
Another thing that disappoints me is the music — there’s no memorable melodic theme introduced in the first episode. This is especially disappointing since the show’s composer, Bear McCreary, composed fantastic music for Battlestar Galactica. The show’s main title sounds so uninspired and unmelodic. Game of Thrones brought us a great melody within seconds of its opening credits.
Episode rating: 5/10
S1E2: “Preparing to Live”
Awful, awful episode. Honestly one of the worst I’ve seen on any show.
This episode has two plots:
The clone triumvirate investigates the bombing of Trantor’s space elevator.
Seldon and Gaal are en route to Terminus aboard a starliner, and are making preparations to found the colony. The preparations are Gaal talking to her friends about who she’s sleeping with and running simulations on the ship’s holodeck.
David Mamet has a rule-of-thumb on writing: a story is like a joke, and the point of a joke is the punchline. If there’s any part of your story that does not build towards the punchline, cut it.
What’s the punchline of this episode? I’d say there are two, one for each plot:
Emperor Cleon publicly hangs officials from Anacreon and Thespin for the crime of bombing the space elevator (in the previous episode), and then orders an orbital bombardment of their planets.
Hari Seldon is murdered by his son, who shoves Gaal, the only witness, into an escape pod and jettisons her.
The first punchline doesn’t belong in this episode. It should have been the last scene in the previous one, where the bombing of the space elevator is the central point of the plot.
Very little in the episode builds up to the first punchline, and nothing at all builds up to the second. It just happens out of nowhere. There’s no foreshadowing of his death, no tension built up, nothing.
There was one scene that I liked, where Brother Dusk makes an unsanctioned visit to the lower levels of Trantor. But I don’t see how that scene fits into the greater story.
Therefore, I would have moved “Cleon the executor” to the end of the first episode, put Seldon’s murder somewhere else, and cut the middle forty-five minutes.
Episode rating: 0.05/10
Misc notes: Isaac Asimov was a real scientist, and naturally, the Terminus colony in his books was powered by nuclear reactors. In the show, they’re planning to have it powered by geothermal energy. This is a signal that something is very wrong.
S1E3: “The Mathematician’s Ghost”
Credit where credit is due: there is a segment of this episode longer than one scene that’s actually really good.
The episode starts 400 years in the past with Cleon I establishing the clone triumvirate, and then cuts to the present day, which is 19 years after the previous episode. Brother Dusk is preparing to be retired (euthanized), Brother Day will be promoted to Brother Dusk, Brother Dawn will be promoted to Brother Day, and a new Brother Dawn will be born.
The first 20 minutes, which deal with the inner workings of the clone triumvirate, are actually intriguing, and even have some emotional weight. These 20 minutes would have worked well as a standalone episode. A 20min episode, you say? Yes, I answer. This is streaming, not network television. We don’t have programming blocs or commercial breaks to plan around. There’s no reason why every episode needs to be an hour long.
The next 30 minutes are terrible. We skip forward again, this time another seventeen years. The Terminus Colony has been established, and the scenes that round out the episode is either repeated content (like going into the “null field”) or just a bunch of filler (like the meeting about water clocks). The only scene with any consequence is an “incoming ships!” alarm at the end.
The first 20 minutes are good, but the rest of the episode just should have been cut.
Episode rating: 3/10
S1E4: “Barbarians at the Gate”
Terrific episode, actually. Throughout the flight I had been struggling to fall asleep, and this episode did it for me.
Conclusions
Foundation the series has galactic scope and is spread across hundreds of years. In theory, this should make for a fun show. But what should be the show’s greatest strength becomes its greatest weakness. All the jumping across lightyears and centuries means there is no constant protagonist. Keeping track of where and when we are becomes a chore.
Game of Thrones managed to also present an epic scope and ensemble cast, but only because the first season gently introduced us to the world of Westeros with a protagonist (Ned Stark) and story (the plot against Robert Baratheon) and villain (Cersei Lannister). There is no such constant in Foundation.
The writers of the show are not entirely to blame, because the source material isn’t that great for a television adaptation. Foundation is an incredibly important part of sci-fi history, but it is not a story with a world, but a world with a story. The Foundation books aren’t novels with a single plot, but rather a collection of novellas with several.
The show’s greatest deviation from Asimov’s source material is, not coincidentally, the best part of the show: the imperial clone triumvirate. But this also has a downside: Emperor Cleon, the villain, is the only character that appears in every episode. This unintentionally makes him the main character of the show. I wound up thinking a show starring Lee Pace (who is legitimately fun in this) oppressing a different planet every week would be better than a show about a scientific foundation. This is a disastrous failure on the part of the writers.
What’s most disappointing to me is that I can think of a way to fix many of these problems. Apple TV presents Citizen Kane in SPACE! with Hari Seldon as Charles Foster Kane would have been a viable way to adapt the Foundation novels. Begin after Seldon’s death with Gaal Dornick writing his biography. Each episode can then follow the basic structure of “You wanna know about Seldon? Let me tell you about the time…” followed by a flashback to Trantor, founding Terminus, etc. Then when Gaal gets enough information, she can open the Vault to discover the Seldon hologram in time for the first Seldon Crisis™.
The show has a 71% critics score on Rotten Tomatoes, and the reviews generally follow the format of “the writing is a little bad but it’s a good show because the VISUALS are stunning.”
This is pure cope. First, the visuals aren’t bad, but they’re not great either. The Star Wars prequels, now 20 years old, look much better. Second, you cannot use VFX to polish a turd of a bad script. This has been true since the time of Aristotle. From the Wikipedia article about his treatise Poetics:
Opsis / spectacle — Refers to the visual apparatus of the play, including set, costumes and props (anything you can see). Aristotle calls spectacle the "least artistic" element of tragedy, and the "least connected with the work of the poet (playwright). For example: if the play has "beautiful" costumes and "bad" acting and "bad" story, there is "something wrong" with it. Even though that "beauty" may save the play it is "not a nice thing".
lmao