Foundation
Cast & Key People
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Our Review
Apple TV+ spent a fortune adapting Asimov’s famously un adaptable classic, a series of short stories about mathematician Hari Seldon’s thousand year plan to shorten an incoming galactic dark age, and mostly got away with it by keeping the big ideas and inventing the connective tissue the books never had.
Jared Harris is gravitational as the doomed Seldon, and Lee Pace’s Brother Day, one of three clones of a 12,000-year old emperor who rule the galaxy as a living institution, is the best thing in the show: an immortal tyrant who’s starting to suspect immortality is a scam. The show swings between chamber piece philosophy and full blown space opera spectacle, and the plotting gets loopy in season 2 (there are entire plotlines that feel like a different, hornier show). But when it hits, the cloning theology, the Genetic Dynasties’ slow rot, Gaal’s time jumped grief, it’s prestige sci-fi nobody else is making.
Verdict: Watch it if you like big idea sci-fi with actual production value. The math checks out more often than not.
