Foundation (2021)

[Greg]

By the time this airs, I will have cancelled my subscription. To be fair, I was never a big fan of the series. Especially when the second foundation series came out.

[Greg]

Since Ted Lasso is running long, I still have my subscription. We checked out the first two episodes on Sunday.

It looks great. It's 200 million dollars spent well. The story is kind of meh. But I always thought the Future History story was meh to begin with. There is some action. Lee Pace plays Brother Day the middle of three clone emperors. Jared Harris is Harry Seldon the inventor of the math behind Future History. Lou Llobell plays Gail the genius who might be the key to saving them all. In the first episode Gaal comes to Trantor seat of the empire because she has solved a math problem marking her as one of the greatest minds in the galaxy. But it also makes her a target of the empire. They want to arrest her and Harry Seldon for causing disruption in the Empire. The series is bookended by a mysterious object on a planet that can only be touched by one woman.

S1Ep2 Harry, Gaal and the Foundation are on a slow ship to Terminus to set up the foundation. Most of this episode is Gaal running around in a bikini top and shorts for some reason. Back on Trantor they are still investigating the big shock from the first episode. The story still isn't very involving.

It all comes down to Future History. Future History basically says all large scale events can be predicted through math. It's kind of a hopeless theory. There is a bad future and there is nothing we can do about it.

[thatguy]

Finished the finale. It was a pretty show, but it suffered from some stiff writing and less than charismatic acting. It got overly sappy in places and a lot of things came together almost magically. I liked Lee Pace in Pushing Daisies and “The Fall”, but he was pretty flat in this. Jared Harris was probably the strongest actor, but almost all his lines sounded like he was delivering prepared speeches. 

Meh. 

—tg
PS: note - I haven’t read the book. I have no idea how well this adaptation follows the original. I did read a review where someone was really mad that they introduced a death-star like powerful weapon/ship to aid in their battle in this and that wasn’t in the original. They the original was about humans using maths to unfuck their situation, rather than force. 

[King Bob]

Now that we got an internet upgrade and I figured out how to install the app on our old (but not that old) TV, we're watching more Apple TV.

As said above, it looks great. I'm two eps in. The first one was good, the second a little rambling. It has almost nothing to do with the book except for the main idea of psychohistory. No one has smoked a cigar yet, which for some reason happened a lot in the first book (I haven't re-read the others yet and may not.) The sudden (not in ep1 but in full bloom when ep2 starts) love story with Gaal Dornick is silly and they have no chemistry. All the imperial imagery is entertaining.

[King Bob]

Just finished this. Diverges from the first book a lot, and I imagine from the later ones as well (I haven't re-read them and can't remember much of anything). However, it was pretty good. The cloned emperor bit was clever. And it looks great. They used cold sleep to bring together different timelines, which seems a bit lazy - like using time travel can be - but we'll have to wait and see if there's another season to see where they go with it. It didn't exactly end on a cliff hanger, but no real resolution either.

[King Bob]

Into the second season now. It's getting better. Got a new twist in the last episode that I didn't see coming.

[Drunk Monk]