Goyer is also willing to depart from the source material. This echoes the Asimov books’ atom-age belief in the power of reason over superstition. And Harris plays the visionary with a doomed-prophet rectitude that recalls his turn as a Soviet scientist in “Chernobyl.”
Hari’s protégé, Gaal Dornick (Lou Llobell), comes from a world whose leaders condemn scientists as heretics and refuse to acknowledge the rising of the oceans.
(He’s the Nate Silver of space.) When his calculations determine that the ruling empire will collapse, the bearer of bad news and his followers are exiled to a planet in the dusty cheap seats of the galaxy, where they work on a grand plan to shape mankind’s fate and shorten the coming era of chaos.Īt a time when “follow the science” has become a political statement, “Foundation” can play like a none-too-subtle commentary. The instigating figure remains the same as in the saga that Asimov began spinning in the 1940s: Hari Seldon ( Jared Harris), a “psychohistorian” who purports to be able to predict the future by number-crunching the data on mass populations. Like Trantor, the imperial capital in “Foundation” whose surface is buried beneath man-made layers, the story’s core ends up enveloped in levels upon levels of machinery. At the core of “Foundation,” the Apple TV+ series based on the novels of Isaac Asimov, is a similar idea: that any sufficiently advanced math is indistinguishable from prophecy.īut in this ambitious, overstuffed epic, that intriguing idea often gets lost in space. Clarke once decreed that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
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