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Foundation - Apple TV+ series

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SalvorHardin
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Foundation - Apple TV+ series

#445056

Postby SalvorHardin » September 24th, 2021, 2:45 pm

With my contract now having finished early, freeing me up to go back online, I couldn’t resist putting up a review of the first two episodes of “Foundation”, Apple TV’s new series.

For those who’ve never heard of it, Foundation is a series of science-fiction short stories, written by Isaac Asimov mostly in the 1940s, which were turned into books in the 1950s. The series spans a period of over 1,000 years in a far future where humanity has spread throughout the galaxy in the form of the Galactic Empire. A mathematician (Hari Seldon), using his newly invented field of “psychohistory”, has predicted the imminent collapse of the Empire followed by a dark age of some 30,000 years. Seldon reckons that by establishing a foundation on the edge of human space to produce an encyclopaedia of all human knowledge, this period can be reduced to 1,000 years.

Foundation has long been considered to be unfilmable. But then again so was LA Confidential and that worked out pretty well. They’ve made a lot of changes to the books, but have kept the overall structure. No surprise there as the stories aren’t action-packed and many characters are a bit one-dimensional. In addition to adding many subplots and quite a bit of action, the show’s creators have changed the sex of three major characters in the first book (and probably many more later on). That isn’t a surprise given that there are hardly any female characters in the books.

The look of the series is excellent; lavish imperial decadence meets frontier chic with lots of high-tech. I’d be amazed if it doesn’t win lots of awards for production design, costumes, etc.

Hari Seldon is as expected, a mathematician who’s determined to change the course of history. The Emperor has a much bigger role in the TV series than in the books and he’s a quite different (one man in the books, he's now three clones). From what I’ve seen so far, and inferred from comments about later episodes by those who’ve seen them, Salvor Hardin has gone through the biggest change by a long way.

In addition to being female, Salvor is no longer the highly pragmatic (and devious) Mayor and de facto ruler of a small but highly advanced colony world on the edge of civilisation. Here she is an outdoors type, living on a newly settled planet who possesses something like the combat and survival skills of Aragorn (from Lord of the Rings) with a touch of Luke Skywalker (Salvor seems to be the only person who can approach a certain artefact). She appears on the scene some 50 years earlier than in the stories in a very different situation.

Lots of reviewers dislike the show, I suspect because there’s a lot of talking, not much action and it’s a bit complicated. Mathematics underpinning the entire plot probably doesn’t help given how many people instinctively recoil from the subject. For me, those things are a big plus and I’m enjoying what I’ve seen so far.

Here’s the trailer. Two episodes have been released with the remaining eight being released one per week on Fridays.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X4QYV5GTz7c

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundation_(TV_series)

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