Isaac Asimov is almost impossible to adapt. Despite writing and editing over 500 books, redefining the laws of robotics and inspiring countless other writers and thinkers, from author Douglas Adams to economist Paul Krugman, no-one has ever been able to successfully put his work onto the screen. The only two major attempts were I, Robot, which isn’t even based on the Asimov book series whose name it co-opts, and Bicentennial Man, the less said about which the better. Enter Apple TV+ and its big-budget adaptation of Asimov’s award-winning Foundation.
The series begins with maths professor Hari Seldon (Jared Harris) who creates a mathematical equation that predicts the oncoming end of the seemingly omnipotent galactic empire. Seldon and his followers are exiled by the empire to the distant planet Terminus, where they try to create an archive of human knowledge to kick start a future society. An Encyclopaedia Galactica that can keep humanity alive after the empire’s collapse.
Inspired by Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and the philosophy of Plato, the galactic empire itself is stilted and unchanging. It’s ruled over by three differently-aged genetic clones of an original emperor (played by Cassian Bilton, Lee Pace and Terence Mann) who each train their younger counterpart to be the ideal successor. Their empire is the kind of soft dystopia where “enjoy the peace” feels like a threat.
The series charts the efforts of Seldon, his mathematical protégé Gaal Dornick and other followers, like Salvor Hardin’s attempts to build a colony and archive on Terminus as well as the emperors’ quest to stay in power across various decades. Underpinning the series is Asimov’s concept of ‘psychohistory’, the idea that by studying society and history effectively enough, you can predict the behaviour of societies long into the future.
The hope for Apple is that it can be a brand-making blockbuster; a Game of Thrones-in-Space style epic that can propel its streaming service to the same heights as Netflix, Amazon and Disney. And you can tell Apple has gone all out for the series. With sky-high production values viewers are treated to some of the best sci-fi CGI in a very long time, huge wide-angle shots of gorgeous alien scenery, and a diverse array of beautiful and intricately designed worlds. In typical Asimov fashion (he was always accused of being an “incurable explainaholic”), the show relishes in delving into the gritty detail of the countless worlds it explores. From intricate sociologies and histories of different home planets to the attention to specifics on the science of space travel and colonisation, the detail and lore of the universe is endless.
But it doesn’t always hit the mark. The central concept of psychohistory only really enters the show as fawning narrations about how “math is pure” or how “math explains what words can’t” and so on – empty platitudes that say nothing while also failing to delve into any of the actual mathematics. Such missteps are easy to forgive, however, given the rich and lush detail everywhere else.
It’s often said sci-fi is never about the future but the present – and there’s some truth to that in Foundation. The references to climate change are pretty on-the-nose (rising sea levels flooding worlds, politicians ignoring inconvenient science, humans struggling to solve existential issues), but ultimately don’t feel forced. Overall, it makes a unrivalled basis for a world-class sci-fi series.
And yet, in the midst of this lush world-building, something is missing. It isn’t that the acting was bad (although the amazing Jared Harris, who was billed as the lead, appears infrequently) or that there aren’t good moments of writing either. It’s more that you find yourself wondering why anything that happens in the show particularly matters. It’s hard to mourn after terrorist bombings that leave hundreds of millions dead when you never really see a body, or a broken family (you barely even see damaged buildings). Or care about the supposed downfall of a galactic empire when that entire crisis largely happens off-screen. At times, it really does remind you of Game of Thrones-in-Space, insofar as it wastes time on a lot of pointless sex scenes and political intrigues that aren’t all that intriguing. Generally, the show is at its worst when it tries to be ‘human’. Much like the stilted empire that serves as the show’s centrepiece, there’s something wrong at the core of Foundation.
In the end, Asimov disavowed the idea of psychohistory. Unlike individual molecules, he said, human behaviour “is far too complicated” to map and human history is “so chaotic that it probably can never be predicted”. Drawing absolute lines between the individual and the society they form a part of doesn’t really work. But much like the theory itself, and frankly a lot of Asimov’s writing, Foundation finds itself dwelling on the abstract molecular mass of society, and ignoring the individual parts of it. And without that human core you increasingly find yourself struggling to locate Foundation’s soul.
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This article was originally published by WIRED UK
