News Foundation Adaptation Series Officially Ordered by Apple

I wouldn’t exactly call Hardin having the theocracy he set up going full inquisition on his opponents in the Second Crisis non-violent.

 

I might have to re-read the books, it's been more than 20 years

 

I had a question...

The shadowmaster comes and tells Brother Day about the revolution's reach being more extensive and says that it was more than Brother Dawn who have been "corrupted". Brother Day asks if he was corrupted and the Shadowmaster says "possibly... yes..."

My question is basically this - was the shadowmaster trying to be noncommittal at first and then confesses that Yes, indeed Brother Day is affected for sure... ? Or was it just that Brother Day may possibly be corrupted? And that it's not known that it was.

Cleon I is definitely affected. I think the Cleons have one option to continue - Brother Dusk wasn't affected. And they decide to replace Cleon I with Brother Dusk's body (once he's dead) and continue their merry way... (Tho' I confess I don't know if Brother Day would be allowed to continue by the Cleon "Legacy" folks (the shadowmasters, Demerzel etc) if he was corrupted for sure.)

Also I don't quite know where Demerzel is in the whole scheme of things - is she the main spider at the center of the web? Also is she benevolent like R Daneel Olivaw is supposed to be or is she a more malevolent (let's just say more machiavellian influencer?) version...

I thought Lou Llobell is the find of the series. She is magnetic when on screen. Harris and Pace are of course good. I'm a little disappointed in the girl playing Salvor Hardin (Leah Harvey?). But I'm willing to watch more. Cos Hardin also has to grow into his role.

 

Demerzel (or R Daneel Olivaw, if you like, but the show doesn't have the rights to use that character's name, I understand) is playing the long game through the application of the zeroth law of robotics.

With the addition of this law, the good of humanity as a whole takes precedence over the fate of a single human. I think this is the source of eir need to adopt a religion and the anguish that having to murder any human causes em. Whether ey was the instigator of the destruction of the star bridge remains to be seen but I do think ey is in league with Seldon and whatever lies on Helicon. I suspect the Spacers are a lot more important than we've been led to believe so far. I also don't think Demerzel is the last of eir kind.

 

I don’t think he actually killed everyone she knew. That was just a bluff

 

I'm not so sure but as it was Brother Day there can be some doubt, Brother Dusk on the other hand the would have been no doubt.

 

Killing everyone she ever knew, and everyone they ever knew, is exactly the same level of needless spite that had Cleon 13 assassinate Zephyr Halima after he'd won her over (and to make Demerzel carry it out in order to crack the whip after she picked her religion over her deference to him). The prospect that they'd all had some genetic variation does add some interesting ambiguity with Cleon 11 advocating for mercy after the attack on the Star Bridge, and wanting to rebuild it rather than just letting the Empire fall apart around him, while 12 was consistently bloodthirsty and pissed-off, and 13 seems to swing wildly between those two extremes, being open minded and adventurous in terms of politics, but also having an extreme sensitivity to personal slights.

 

Why would he bluff? You bluff when you are still acting to win or you want something from someone but don't have a 100% way to make them do it.

He won - the conspirators have been found and already killed, he has her captured, their plan failed and now he can get revenge. What's a few hundred lives for someone who rules over trillions? We have already learned that he's a master manipulator when he dealt with that religious faction on the desert planet by using their religion against them because he studied them before he arrived ( he never intended this quarrel to be a fair fight).

So if we extrapolate this it's not too far fetched to assume he is a vengeful character and given the ressources he has on hand it's no effort to condemn people to death, for him it's just a number and he wants to see her terrified face when he explains her punishment - sadism in perfection.

 

It's certainly possible he lied out of pure sadism (because it's not as if she's in any position to verify a single word of it), but then we know he has both the power, and the petty vindictive inclination to actually do it. So he most likely did exactly as he said, for his own personal pleasure as anything else.

 

IIRC, executing a traitor and everyone associated with them to the n-th degree was practised in ancient China under Legalism. I can't recall the specific example from history. It does seem like something a Cleon would actually do. Killing 1500 or so people as retribution is perhaps more restrained than the punishment meted out on Anacreon and Thespis by his elder clone.

 

Probably a good thing they didn't try it while the previous Cleon was in power.

 

Well the difference there is that flattening Anacreon and Thespis was a very public show of "strength" and metering out of "justice". This is something literally only Empire (and maybe his shadow operatives assuming he doesn't have their memories wiped) will EVER know about.
Wiping out two planets has wide reaching consequences, while wiping out everyone that have ever had even secondary contact or association with a single person is done purely for Empire's personal satisfaction as the same outward effect could have been achieved just by killing her, and some selective memory wipes.

 

I don't think the show would do this....but the pettiness of killing everyone she knew....if any of the operatives saw this as being petty (or someone within the government who might see this action from a distance).... this would be a seed that could cause the Empire to fall from within (i.e. doubt that the leader is in their right mind).
It would be fascinating if they explored that....

But it seems like while this story SHOULD follow GENERATIONS of people, because it is a TV show, it feels like they are "forcing" characters to stay longer than they realisitically should, to help conenct the narrative for the viewer.

 

I'm ok with that. I'm interested to see where Salvor and Gaal go from here. If the Empire storyline goes forward 138 years, I imagine we'll see a new set of Cleons. I think consistency is important in a TV show.

 

Yeah, having introduce a totally new set of characters every season would rather hamper the show's ability to effectively tell the story (to say nothing of having to cast them every time.)
Pretty sure I said back when the show was announced that they'd have to do something like this to allow a single character or group of characters get to see out the full breadth of the plan. I think I even suggested cryo, cloning, personality upload, or a robot character. I just didn't think they'd do all of the above!

 

Though I wonder if there will be a new actress for Demerzel next season. Would assume that she's had to change her apperance over 10 millennia and that her scene at the end wasn't just in anger over what had happened with the Cleons but that she needed to re-invent herself.

 

A friend and I were discussing this very thing tonight.

 

I doubt it. On the one hand you don't want to recast unnecessarily when the actor they already have is working out fine, and from an in-universe perspective, there are so few within Empire's inner circle they would see her on any kind of regular basis that there would be little chance of someone noticing her suspicious lack of aging.

 

It depends.

It seems ages ago the show Heroes initially tried to do the same concept - every season a new set of people with supernatural/superhero powers but that plan quickly fell apart when some characters/actors proved to be so popular that they didn't dare cut them from the next season, e.g. Zachary Quinto's villain Sylar ( that the show quickly fell apart in quality after the stellar first season had little or nothing to do with the cancellation of that plan, it just seems the writers were surprised the show was such a hit and didn't have a cohesive story planned out).

Foundation as it was written worked because the periods were separated well enough that one ( at least me) only needed a few pages to readjust to a new character because the ultimate story was what was driving the books and what kept the readers engaged.

It may have worked on TV as well but the show obviously decided against it. The cloning of the Emperors was a brilliant idea - had that science been around in Asimov's time he may have used it himself. With Gaal and Hardin they are stretching the possibilities - they both made the time jump by using convoluted reasons but if this goes on for more than a season and they invent another way to make them skip decades or more it'll be very hard to remain believable within the entire framework of the story and one of its cornerstones - individual actions can't be predicted by Psychohistory yet the same individuals are doing so for hundreds of years ( Demerzel/Olaw is the exception and actual lynchpin around the entire Foundation saga is actually built).

 

Well, my overall impression of the show after the first season is fantastic. I thought it was well written and it kept my interest. There were enough changes from the original that I couldn't assume anything.

That said, as an adaption it sucks. It takes far too many liberties. Especially with having the Spacers and Demerzel's actions. She is supposed to be governed by the 3 laws of robotics (a core value of Asimov's). That assassin/henchman character should have been the one doing the dirty work. So there are a few things that have really pissed me off, but I think at its core it is following the main idea of Asimov's series fairly well. Some keep commenting that psychohistory isn't supposed to work with the individual, but the way Asimov wrote the stories the plots frequently hinge on one person doing the right thing for each crisis to work out as Seldon intended. In his books you can point to the Second Foundation working behind the scenes, but in this, they haven't been founded yet. I found Halcion to be an amusing location to place it, but its location is not terribly important, except when the Mule tries to find them.

But it worked in the right areas for me to be overall happy with it.