In the Flesh: Foundation Season 3

For two seasons now, Foundation has been the come-from-behind sensation among all its prestige sci-fi and fantasy ilk, an epic series spanning centuries and effortlessly mixing what feels like half a dozen distinct strains of science fiction — everything from philosophy-heavy meditations on human nature and its connection to technology to Jack Kirby’s New Gods-esque spectacle and psychedelia — at any given time. Lee Pace has played the same man, galactic ruler Brother Day, as a burnout on a mission, an icy tyrant, a petulant mama’s boy, and half a dozen other equally compelling variations. In this season alone we’ve had a robot cult operating on a fungal backwater, the Mule (Pilou Asbæk) spreading a plague of psychically compelled mass murder/suicide, an End of Evangelion-inspired torrent of mangled clone chunks pouring out of a shaft in the imperial palace on Trantor, and Brother Day confidently mispronouncing “giraffe”, a genuinely great joke.

In short Foundation’s third season continues in the second’s footsteps, offering up a smorgasbord of sci-fi concepts and spectacular set pieces inspired by Asimov’s golden age classic but wisely and thoughtfully streamlined and iterated on. The writers’ room, ranging from series co-creator David S. Goyer to playwright Caitlin Parrish, is at the top of their form, tossing off bangers like “it is the brazen head of God, and it will scream your fate aloud” without apparent effort. Series stalwart Terrence Mann, who plays Empire’s eldest avatar, Brother Dusk, has likewise never been better, a man so committed to normalcy in the midst of decay that his mind snaps like a twig, all his gentility and elder statesman posturing flowing seamlessly into the matter-of-fact genocidal madness of a man raised to understand the galaxy chiefly as a reflection of himself and suddenly confronted with his mortality and his own growing irrelevance. 

If there’s a weak spot here, it’s that the final twist concerning the Mule reads as underbaked, but in light of the strength of virtually everything else, it’s easy to forgive that one element getting lost in the shuffle. The pulsating, hypnotic rave club where the Mule holds court in the season’s third episode, the acting clinic Laura Birn as the robot Demerzel and Rebecca Ineson as her religious confessor, Zephyr Vorellis, put on during their backbreaker scenes together, the gently touching autumn love affair between Dusk and Foundation ambassador Felice Quent (Cherry Jones), the deranged Gainax-esque series finale in which anything and everything can and does happen up to and including Dusk murdering his own infant clone with a black hole’s plasma jet — this is the kind of thing big budget sci-fi was always supposed to be and so seldom is. Even if the significant creative staffing changes behind the scenes hamstring the show in its fourth season, what we’ve already been given is a minor miracle.