Foundation
Foundation is a collection of short stories that was first published back in the 1940s. It tells the story of an empire’s decline over a thousand years after a mathematically gifted but tactless academic named Hari Seldon shares his forecast that the empire will collapse based on a mathematical formula called “psychohistory.” The fall is inevitable; the question is whether the subsequent uncontrolled turmoil will endure a few hundred years or 30,000, he informs the enraged emperor. The exchange is roughly comparable to Chris Whitty’s first briefing with Boris Johnson in early 2020. With its season finale, Foundation’s first season brought the most ambitious show on Apple TV Plus to an end and marked the end of its first chapter. The epic sci-fi series, which is based on Isaac Asimov’s centuries-spanning series of novels, has evolved far beyond its original episodes’ quasi-magical space math to include a variety of plots, from conflict in the Foundation’s new home on Terminus to the complex imperial politics of Tranter. Following the ending, Chaim Gartenberg and Andrew Webster of The Verge are re-watching the program to determine what worked, what didn’t, and what they hope to see in the already-announced second season.
The pieces in this collection are generally compelling on their own. The highlight of the show is the “genetic dynasty” of successive Lee Paces who rule the disintegrating empire with an iron fist, in large part due to Pace’s compelling performances as the cloned Brother Day. Also, entertaining sci-fi fodder is Salvor Hardin’s cat-and-mouse battle with the Anacreons on Terminus. The final part of the narrative, which involves Gaal’s protracted drama as she travels around in cryo as the program teases her unknown abilities, is… less interesting. The show is affected by the operational issues involved in managing a multi-season TV series. Some characters, like the Cleon clones or the supposedly indestructible robot Demerzel, fit nicely with the themes of the show and add to the impression of the Empire’s vastness. To maintain important characters like Hardin and Gaal around throughout several eras of the show so that the actors portraying them could provide some continuity for the following season, the show seemed to be winding itself into knots by the time of the finale, though.
The fact that Asimov’s tale spans a millennium, has an anthological structure, and includes a consistently changing cast of poorly drawn characters doesn’t immediately lend it to the screen, but Goyer, who pitched it to Apple as a millennium-long game of intergalactic chess, has gone out of his way to give Asimov’s emotionless and cold masterwork a more human side. By concentrating on a core cast of people and employing a range of narrative and structural strategies to keep them on screen much into their natural lifespans, he achieves this.
Dune
The Sci-Fi Channel’s predecessor, Syfy, experienced a brief rebirth in the late 1990s and early 2000s, producing shows that set the standard for a ton of exciting entertainment to follow. Without programs like Farscape, Battlestar Galactica, and Stargate, it is unlikely that the present television landscape—where programs like Westworld and American Gods are regarded as high-quality entertainment—would exist in the same way. The two Dune miniseries were also created during this time. The first was released in 2000. With three feature-length episodes that covered each of the “books” in the Dune novel, the television adaptation of Frank Herbert’s Dune cost an estimated twenty million dollars. It had an international cast and won Emmys for cinematography and special effects. It was a significant undertaking for the network, and it continues to rank among Syfy’s top three-rated shows to this day, along with its follow-up Children of Dune. The Dune miniseries is a great example of how closely a book adaptation should hew to the source material to provide satisfying viewing. When literature transitions to the big screen, this is a question that needs to be taken into consideration, but the balance is rarely attained.
And even while the Syfy miniseries is superior to all other available versions, it falls short of stunning heights since it tries to closely resemble the written material. The pacing of the entire thing is one of the elements that look off; while it makes sense to adapt each chapter of the book into a full-length picture, the tale inevitably lags at several moments that make sense in writing but not on screen. As if to ensure that no one watching is left behind, the story appears to be overexplained in certain areas. Although it’s a good instinct, there are times when it gets boring. The cast in the series is a diverse group of talented actors, yet some are better at playing their roles than others. Alec Newman, a Scottish actor who was chosen to play Paul Atreides, isn’t nearly eerie enough when the situation demands it. Paul is also too old to play the role, but writer-director John Harrison made that choice on purpose because he was worried, that he wouldn’t be able to locate the necessary talent if Paul were cast as a teenager. Making that decision presents a challenge because the script portrays Paul as more teenager-like than the book ever did; Paul has numerous instances in which he is petulant and too stubborn and fails to detect the motives of people, in the same manner, Paul does in the story.
Foundation and Dune Comparison
Foundation is perhaps the most extravagant television series, with a budget that would put most blockbusters to shame. It combines stunning location shooting in Berlin, Iceland, and the Canary Islands with jaw-dropping production design to give the various worlds a tactile realism that green-screen alone could not. Foundation is not for the faint of heart, even though it excels in both breadth and spectacle. This is a piece of hard science fiction with philosophical and deep topics that regularly jumps back and forth through decades, and occasionally centuries.
Compared to Denis Villeneuve’s Dune: Part One, Foundation is not fully superior. Personally, this writer believes that Villeneuve outperforms Foundation director David S. Goyer in terms of visual storytelling. The movie Dune is incredible; Inverse’s early review of it calls it an “epic sci-fi classic.” However, Dune also has a major flaw: it’s unclear whether or when a sequel will be produced. This is significant because Herbert’s first novel isn’t even fully covered in Dune. Critics have already complained about Dune: Part One’s “abrupt” conclusion, which can give viewers the impression that they are watching the start of a lengthy epic without a certain conclusion. It won’t be to everyone’s taste to see an 80-hour, epoch-spanning narrative, but Goyer’s plan for Foundation is to adapt it into eight separate television series. But for those up for the challenge, the first season of Foundation is a stunningly audacious project that will amaze as much as it perplexes and establishes the groundwork for some of the most ambitious television to date.
While Foundation is a collection of unrelated stories about bureaucrats and traders, Dune is a fairly traditional story of courtly intrigue that happens to be set in space. Or maybe it has to do with the philosophical stances taken in the two works. Asimov and Herbert adopted polar opposite positions in their long-term outlooks: Foundation’s esoteric pessimism in one corner, and Dune’s trust-the-plan humanistic optimism in the other.
