Tonight I learned that if your bright and shiny spaceship can be brought down by what is little more than a rock, then you might want to keep your bright and shiny spaceship out of range of any rocks. On a more serious note, I was once again disappointed by a scenario in which being a person of faith and being a person of reason/science are presented as being mutually exclusive. It is particularly annoying in this sort of a setting, given that many of the most significant astronomical and mathematical discoveries in human history were made by men and women who were far from being atheists.
Seems like a real big set up, and they better deliver or this is going to be all the bigger disappointment.
I maybe in the minority, but I appreciated Gaal's backstory. If any, I thought her backstory should've taken even more time. I find it astounding that a teen prodigy raised by a religious tribe can learn and grasp complex mathematical theories in few months to few years, from scraps of books and scrolls no less. While the first episode was visually stunning, it was emotionally sterile. Her backstory brought more emotional depth.
Jumps between the present day Gaal and Terminus were only occasionally effective, and mostly distracting. The episode should've focused on Gaal and Gaal only. A relative newcomer Lou Llobell delivers a stand out performance.
Back in Terminus, clumsily choreographed fight scenes aside, the crash was an amazing sight. Yes, the empire crew were blinded by arrogance and meet their demise all too easily, but man, the crashed looked awesome.
Salvor is starting to come into her own. No longer a tough-as-a-nail-misunderstood-star-child-warden, she's starting to embrace and understand her roles in Terminus.
Foundation is a complex sci-fi novel and while this adaption is dumbed down, it still pays a great respect to intellectual details, requiring more deliberate pacing and patience. But puzzle pieces are starting to fall into places.
This episode really misses the Empire stuff (and Lee Pace), but the forward momentum on Terminus is welcome at least.
Wow. Best Episode since the Pilot!
It’s exciting, beautifully done and makes me want more and more. Great Sci-fi.
People yammering on about all kinds of things in these comments. Either too simple minded to understand what’s going on or just too lazy to be bothered. Great Show so far!
Big ship taken out with one shot ? Must have been Luke Skywalker maning the gun.
There's this quote from the showrunner Goyer from an interview:
Game of Thrones was really the first of these big, giant novelistic shows, and now with Foundation we can tell the story hopefully over the course of 80 episodes, 80 hours, as opposed to trying to condense it all into two or three hours for a single film
This episode felt just like a weird filler episode drawing out its very short plot from a few minutes to close to an hour just to have an episode. 80 hours of this? No, thanks.
If you need so much time to tell a very complicated story, a story so complicated that you jump back and forth in time constantly, perhaps do not waste it on Gaal "I have to see it for myself" Dornick prompting around missing authorization for where she is while Terminus is at war. The dichotomy of these two made Gaals scenes even more absurd, taking away any impact it could have had.
Never read Asmiov's work (yet) but I can see why people are disappointed about the direction of this.
Well, at least some stuff happened and an actual storyline began to form. It’s still moving way too slow though.
First thing out of the Warden’s mouth should have been, “They have a cloaked canon!” Having to suspend common sense and reality like that is a sign of lazy writers who don’t know how to avoid holes in the story.
For those thinking this got “renewed”, it didn’t. It was a two season deal with Apple from the start. Delaying the announcement of a next season (already being filmed in this case) is a Hollywood trick to make people think a show is doing better than it actually may be.
For me this show is still a dud.
The first half of this episode felt like filler… showing in detail what’s already been explained to us. (Though I’m all in for the gorgeous design of Synnax).
Things move along much better in the second half. Hopefully we start gaining some momentum in this series that I think has potential but has yet to deliver it.
The punching and kicking is lame but the overall plot is intriguing
Feels like I watched an episode of Star Wars. Why do hundreds of Stormtroopers -- err I mean Anacreonian soldiers with guns completely miss every target except for one stray shot?
Got some really cheesy fighting scenes in this one too, clearly the tremendous effects budget and team couldn't fix this one.
I wish they'd just stick to developing the plot that is being unveiled at glacier speed in a pointlessly convoluted order so I could figure out if I should drop the show. For instance, we were already told what Gaal faced on her home world preceding the events of the story and it felt really washed out because we didn't experience it. Now that some time passed and we just accepted the character's history, we're subjected to a flashback showing us what we already know and it ends up losing almost all of its impact.
This was such a welcomed episode. It was great getting back to Gaal after so much of the empire stuff. This is a personal opinion, for sure, but I really don't care so much for how much detail and depth is being put into the empire's story and that'll probably remain my opinion unless something extremely significant changes.
Learning more about Gaal brought a lot of understanding to the show. In the first episode I was quite curious how she was able to study and learn this level of mathematics (and view a problem from an extremely unique perspective using one specific book) while nobody else could, and she was somehow able to do this on her home planet that doesn't really have books and has outlawed the seeking of knowledge.
I really love Gaal's plotline in this story. It's what got me interested in watching the show and it's the reason I've continued to watch the show through the episodes that are a bit of a yawnfest for me. It was refreshing to get this backstory that brings so much more depth and context to the overarching plot.
It was also great to be able to spend some time on Terminus and learn more about Salvor and how the situation there has evolved since they landed. The show started with a lot of time skipping and that was a bit confusing but these past few episodes (and especially this one) seem to be knitting those bubbles of time we're skipping between together so we can understand the bigger picture. Nicely done.
The parts on Terminus are boring - don't care about any of the characters. I'd rather like to know about the Vault.
Gaal... we already know she comes from an ultraorthodox world where science is heresy... and that was elaborated on here. But I don't quite understand why she isn't executed, only ostracized, when the guy whose books she recovered was executed. And of course, Seldon's death wasn't quite that simple. And please, less technobabble. Gaal's a genius, I don't need endless minutes/diagramms pointing out that fact.
However, the most interesting parts remain the Empire-trinity. It's an interesting setup with inbred conflict - would any of us like to only be surrounded by identical copies, without conflict? No so sure about that.
This show is so frustrating. Lou Llobell is a fantastic actress, and her portion of this episode was almost great.
Full marks for the visuals for Gaal's section; the budget was well spent—the effects high quality, in that they looked real—and the photography and Lou were gorgeous enough for me to actually want to re-watch those scenes. Lou's acting was great (though her boyfriend was like a first year drama student), but the "Gaal is smart scene" just came out of nowhere, was emotional whiplash, and was preceded by pure drama bait on the level of a telenovella, making her character seem like she went from one draft of the script to another between scenes, and of course, they directed her to be smarmy and to mumble-rush past the nerdy talk, immediately following a complete emotional disembowelment. I swear to Daneel, these showrunners are fucking crash test dummies.
I could barely follow the scene where Gaal riddles out the destination, and the only reason I could was because I figured out what she was doing from the scene's context—not from actually understanding what was said. The dialogue in this show is generally hard to follow because the phrasing just whooshes right past your ear without making an impression, unless it's Jared or Lee refusing to mumbledash past their lines, and of course they're given the lines that are actually supposed to stand by themselves, because that's clearly where the showrunners' inspirations lay, unlike sentient fortnight character "Salvor Hardin", whose writing continues to be clearly outside of the wheelhouse of the writers, and I doubt they even had a defined character while writing it. With an inexperienced actor, it's hard to know how much is directing/production, and how much is the actor, but the acting is terrible, and the Terminus scenes do practically nothing but serve to drag the episode down, as it's like watching two different shows edited awkwardly together, of which Gaal's is great until it gets 'Abramsy' and nonsensical, and "Hardin"'s, whose gets almost interesting by the end, and considerably more visually interesting, but which still just amounts to "Hurt people hurt people".
The bullshit at the end of Gaal's section, which ends the episode, just pisses me off with how cheap it is. Did this originally air one episode at a time? Either way, the cheapest kind of cliffhanger.
Quite an intense and exiting episode, focusing entirely on Gaal and Salvor. I liked Gaal in the first two episodes so it was really nice to see her backstory and discovered how she won the math contest. Having to participate in the execution of her former mentor must have taken an emotional toll on Gaal and made her turn away from the Sleeper religion (though she did not seem very much convinced about the reliion from the get-go). It is great the show finally explains what happened to Gaal, she wakes from the cryo sleep after more than 34 years (apparently she did not age during this time since she looks just the same) and is devastated after learning about Raych's fate and even tries to committ suicide, but it is interesting to see her transition from complete despair to her old logical self as she tries to command the ship (which seems to me made for Raych and not her) using her knowledge. She quickly gets control over her emotions back. Hari Seldon is also back, somehow recreated from the murder weapon Raych threw into Gaal's pod.
Things are not going so well for Salvor since the Anacreons soon get the upper hand over the Foundation settlers. This time the huntress manages to outwit Salvor and destroys the force field protecting the colony, while her second-in-command shoots down the Empire spaceship that came to help the settlers. Then she forces Salvor to watch how her soldiers destroy the colony and everything the settlers have built so far. The Anacreon attack was very well-prepared, and now it seems that the whole Foundation went down in flames with all the artifacts the scientists have gathered for the future generations. Phara claims her main motive is revenge on the Empire but maybe she has some more complex endgame. She is definitely an interesting antagonist
Are Disney on the way to ruin this sci-fi classic as they did to Star Wars, I hope not, but this episode doesn’t fill me with hope for the series
all of these time jumps are starting to interfere with the enjoyment of the series. every other shot i'm asking myself if it's a continuation of the current time or if we've skipped time again.
Ugh, not another damn time jump
Very difficult to follow. Back and forward.
Shout by Liico ThalesBlockedParent2022-10-23T12:04:21Z
It just baffles me this type of comments where people complain of the time jumps. It is not that hard to understand and the books did the same thing jumping every 50 years or so. Go along with the story, this is not about individuals or specific characters, this is about foundation and the story of this plan no one knew how could save the empire.
Great show with great production value and a script well written that delivers information in different ways without explaining everything to everybody.