Review: Foundation TV series: mdlbear

mdlbear

Review: Foundation TV series

Oct 09, 2021 18:22

So far I have seen the first four episodes of Apple TV's series based on Isaac Asimov's Foundation series. My 7-day free trial period ended Thursday afternoon, i.e. before the fourth episode came out at midnight East Coast time. So, since they've already charged me for the next month, I could presumably watch three or four more episodes before I drop (kick) my subscription in disgust. After seeing Episode 4 last night, I'm not sure my blood pressure will take that many.
I think Gizmodo's Review said it best:
They said Foundation couldn't be filmed, and it still hasn't been [...]
For people who don’t know or care about the source material, the result is extremely pretty but not particularly compelling sci-fi. For people who know or are fans of Isaac Asimov and his work, I feel compelled to warn you that if you watch the show you will see a scene so enraging that you will tear your TV in two with your bare hands; then you’ll realize how utterly unnecessary the scene was, and tear it into four.

The New York Times said It could have been better, if only, like Hari Seldon’s disciples, it had faith in the plan, but I rather doubt that even intervention by the Second Foundation could save it at this point. Maybe the Mule works for Apple?
OK, if that quote leaves you baffled, the rest of this post (under the cut for spoilers) will be even more baffling, but on the other hand there's a slight chance you might even like the series if you stop here. Ignore the gratuitous violence and the plot holes big enough to drive a starship through, and just enjoy the absolutely gorgeous sets and the occasional sex scene. But I think you'd be better off reading the books.
I'm not going to summarize either the TV series or the books -- the Wikipedia articles linked in the first paragraph do a good enough job for my purposes, and in any case I expect that if you're still reading, you've at least read Foundation, if not the whole trilogy. Perhaps multiple times. Or the whole series. Anyway, onward!
Spoilers ahead. You've been warned.
Let's start with what I'm not objecting to. The gender-flips work well: Gaal Dornick as Hari Selden's protégé and Eto Demerzel as the Emperor's minister in particular. (We'll ignore the fact that Eto, who is really the robot R. Daneel Olivaw, doesn't appear in the original trilogy at all. They're in Forward the Foundation and the second sequel Foundation and Earth, both of which were written much later -- it's a reasonable way of shoehorning that bit of backstory into the first episode.) (We'll also ignore the fact that she's some kind of mathematical super-genius, who "counts primes" -- under her breath to keep calm.)
Gender-flipping Salvor Hardin, the tough, cigar-smoking Mayor of Terminus City, doesn't work quite as well, but it's not because they've eliminated the smoking -- the amount of smoking in the original series was kind of jarring re-reading it in the Twenty-First Century. Making her the "Warden" rather than the Mayor is less okay. Giving practically everybody on Terminus a blaster slung across their back is just wrong, and not just because it kind of clashes with Hardin's famous epigram, violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. (They do keep the line in, but the context is wrong and the sentence is started by Salvor's father. WTF?) Making Salvor Hardin some kind of psychic (in the fourth episode) is totally wrong.
Making the Emperor a triad, decanted from the cloning vats at different times, is mostly okay -- I suppose they need some way of keeping the same actor(s) in the role(s) across hundreds of years of history. But keeping the Emperor a major character is mostly not okay -- it's just pointless padding. The Emperor is only on-stage in the first chapter of the book.
Now we get to the WTFs. The encyclopedists, all 100,000 of them, are shipped off to Terminus in a "slow ship", a voyage of 800-odd days, because the Emperor doesn't want the colonists to have hyperdrive. Um... First of all, you don't get halfway across the galaxy in 800 days without hyperdrive. Second, by the end of the first book, the Foundation's traders have smaller, faster, and better spacecraft than the Empire. They must have gotten the plans somehow. Maybe as part of "all human knowledge"?
The scene on the colony ship at the end of Episode 2, which has Dornick getting shoved into an escape pod in the middle of nowhere, is where I realized that they'd jumped the shark.
And finally, WTF is the Prime Radiant -- the marvelous mathematical gadget where the Second Foundation keeps its centuries worth of equations -- doing on Terminus? It has a nice flashy holographic UI (this is Apple, after all), but without projecting onto the walls like the original there's not way they can make it a usable UI.
Reviews mentioned, with their actual titles:

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series, review, asimov, spoiler, tv, foundation, sf