Hey everybody, this is Jason. We haven't posted anything in a while, but that's about to change, as we've been recording episodes about Foundation, and I just wanted to make
a couple quick comments before the actual episode starts. BB and I really struggled to get into the show initially, so much so that we scrapped the first couple episodes that we recorded and decided to just cover all of season one in one podcast because we didn't want anyone to sit through ten episodes of just negativity like that. You know, but I promise you that around midway through season two we completely change our tune and we are
really enjoying the series. We just recorded season two episode nine, and we are so excited for the finale and for season three to start. And yes, we did record all these episodes in advance, mostly because we couldn't like get our schedules together to be consistent. This also means that as you listen, we will be a few weeks behind
on the news. For instance, we just found out that the release date for season three is July eleventh, so we'll be putting out episodes between now and then so we can start covering season three as it releases, and I believe I'm going to have to double up some of these episodes in the first couple of weeks here in order for that timing to work out. Anyway, here's our coverage of Foundation season one, and remember we will like season two a lot better.
Welcome to spacing Out with BB and Jason this week covering season one of Foundation.
Welcome to Spacing Out.
I'm BB and I'm Jason, and we are here to discuss Foundation, which is currently available to stream on Apple TV. And we're taking a little different approach today because we're going to look at the entirety of season one, which was not the original plan. We were going to go episode by episode, and we started down that route and it just didn't feel right. I felt like we had.
Too much bad stuff to say.
There's a lot of negativity, especially coming from BB's Mike, but a lot of I think a lot of frustrations and not underderstanding what's going on, and just kind of realized that, like, this is a story being told over a season and not really like a episodic Yeah, not episotic at all, really, So we recalibrated and decided we're going to watch all ten episodes of season one and then come back and talk to it. And that's what
we're doing now. So I think we'll do like a quick spoiler free part of it, just to say how we felt about it, and then we'll go and pick apart some of the plot elements. And we haven't seen season two yet, so we're not going to spoil these season two at all. But we're talking about Foundation season one, and this aired between September twenty fourth and November nineteenth
of twenty twenty one. Is created by David Eskoyer and Josh Friedman, and in this season, Foundation chronicles the beginning of the epic saga centered on the collapse of the Galactic Empire and the efforts of mathematician Harry Selden and his followers to mitigate the ensuing Dark Age through the creation of the Foundation. The story spans multiple timelines and perspectives, weaving political industry, intrigue, rebellion, and philosophical questions into the fabric of a sprawling narrative.
Oh boy, vive check, did we like the season overall? How does it stand the test of time?
All?
Right? So, without getting into any spoilers for what happens, like, how'd you feel about this season of television?
It was all right. I wouldn't have picked it up personally. It doesn't feel like my cup of tea. But from the reviews of the second season, I'm interested in like at least finishing what I started. It's just like I don't know, I could tell it wasn't for me. So, yeah, it's above mediocre.
Yeah, I mean it's definitely it's visually stunning, and you know, it's got a lot of.
Like this, there's a lot of lore.
There's a lot of lore. I think the lore was often quite confusing.
Yeah, feel like this is like a fan edit, like this is this is for somebody who read the books and was really into that and now they made it into something for them. Like it doesn't feel like like if you're just any Joe off the street, I don't know if you're going to enjoy this. That's how that's my perspective. I'm any Joe.
I came at this as you know, someone who I just read the books this last year, and you know, I'm later I'll get into like some of the differences, but even knowing like the core of the story, like there was a lot of elements that were hard to track, hard to just follow all the storylines and what's happening sequentially, what's happening kind of in different timelines, and just yeah, a lot of confusion, but there was also still a lot of interesting things along the way that we're enough
to keep me invested to an extent, and there's a part of me that was like, I'm frustrated with not understanding what's going on, and I kind of land on the side where like maybe I'll like give it another watch and see if I understand it more. And I think you might have came down on the side or like this isn't working for me.
Yeah, it's just not for me. It's it's really it's a show about math and colonization, Like it's about like empires, and it's just not for me. I'm not the target audience at all. I think they were trying to get a diverse target with their casting, but it falls short for me as a diverse audience.
Meant yeah, also good performances in there, and so I'm hoping that we'll look back at season one and be like that was kind of rough, had some good elements, but you know, they figured it out from there. That's what my hope is. All right, well, from here on out, there might be spoilers things that come. So if you don't want to be spoiled, if we caught you off guard by doing a whole season at once, don't listen further unless you want to.
I like being spoiled in all aspects good than you are. I think it's good. I think it's just like I don't think it's as universal as they want it to be, you know.
It's Yeah, And we went into this like not really knowing much about what this show was. We were based on like, hey, this is like if you look up lists of like what are the good science fiction shows right now, this shows up on it usually pretty high on the list. And we watched the trailer for it, and we're like, hey, that looks really fun and engaging for.
As many characters as it has. I wish it felt more like the Game of Thrones in terms of the drama and the world building and the intrigue and stuff. It's just missing all of that for some reason for me, at least the first seasons of the Game of Thrones.
Trivia time, what facts or news could we uncover for Foundation.
Isaac Asimov wrote a series of eight stories for Astounding Science Fiction magazine between nineteen forty two and nineteen fifty and then later these stories were published into three books, resulting in the Foundation Trilogy, which is kind of how it remained for quite a while, and then Asimov returned to the series decades later to write two sequels and two prequels between nineteen eighty two and nineteen ninety three.
The original trilogy has won several awards over the years and it's held up as one of the cornerstones of science fiction. So several attempts that a film adaptation have accred over the years, and one point, New Line Cinema spent one point five million dollars developing a film trilogy before ultimately producing the Lord of the Rings trilogy. That's a hard left and you know, nobody watched that, so
that was a big fail for them. So then the rights kind of bounced around to different studios until Apple TV began development as early as twenty five fourteen, and in the book series had been considered unfilmable over the years due to its settings and the narrative taking place over thousands of years, and then another aspect of the books is that in the books the robots are just some obscure legend that barely get mentioned, and even the word robots only known to a few number of people.
But so Isaac Asimov. He also wrote a series called the Robot Series, and he may have heard of his like three Laws of Robotics. And he also wrote another series called the Galactic Empire series, And all three of these were separate entities, and then at some point later in his life he decided he was going to merge all of these and wrote some stories that connected them all and said they're all part of the same universe
in different parts of the timeline. So that's what we see in the show, as they're kind of bringing in that robot aspect to it. The series began filming in Ireland and also filmed in the island country of Malta and the Canary Islands. Season one was interrupted by the COVID nineteen pandemic and several locations were changed due to restrictions, and it took nineteen months to film the first season.
Hmmm, that's sad. That's rough for a film crew.
Yeah, and I do believe there's a lot of times that they intended to have like bigger scenes, bigger crowds, and they kind of had to reduce and change the way they shot things to cover for that. The series composer is Bear McCreery, and we know him from Battlestar
Galactica among many other science fiction shows. He's kind of the go to guy for doing sci fi television these days, and the season had a substantial budget estimated around forty five million, which rivals other epic series such as Game of Thrones.
Deep Space Dive. Let's break down some of our thoughts on this season. You can share your thoughts with us through email or social media. We may use your comments on an upcoming episode.
And yet they couldn't capture that magic. Nope, they were missing a character like little Finger or something, you know, somebody everybody loves to hate because they try the way that they painted Empire, they kind of want you to
feel bad for him because he's a clone. And I'm like, give me a fucking villain, bro, give me somebody I can sink my teeth into somebody who is like just fucking evil, Like there's no ifs answer butts, Like he literally annihilated two planets in the first couple of episodes, and later in the season he's crying about being imperfect. I'm like, I can't relate. I can't, I don't, I don't.
I don't know what to feel about this person. I feel like they they should have made it very clear that this is the bad guy, this is who we want to take down, this is our common enemy. And it's so wishy washy, and they spend so much time with him and and like making him like a tragic figures somehow.
Yeah, but like, I don't know, your heart's not really with him, no, like the youngest one, Yeah, like I felt for him when he kind of he was trying to hide his differences and falling in love and then getting betrayed, and like his journey was tragic.
Yeah, but they're all the same guy, so it's.
It's well, no, they're all corrupted.
Yeah, And that was the last we hear about it. And so my favorite was when the robot lady just mrked him. She's just like, wow, I made the executive decision, you bitches. And if she finds out the other guy's impure, he's running scared.
Yeah, I do not trust any of your feelings with that woman anymore.
Which she's a robot, right, but she's a robot with visions. That's weird.
Yeah, So she has some complexity to her, which.
I wish they explored more.
Yeah, and I'm hoping they continue to do that because you know, it was interesting that she had gone through that rite of passage on that. I don't remember the details of what that planet was, but that religious place journey.
Yeah, the Maiden. Yeah, the Maiden.
She had done that, and she definitely held beliefs about that that seemed almost conflicting for her. And then she was definitely had emotions at the end of the series when she ripped her face off.
Yeah. The fact that she don't have lips under there that manipulate that little flaps, it's just teeth, you know. It reminded me of Chucky. Oh that one. I think it's like Chucky two or three where they go to the Chucky manufacturing plant and you see how they build the little good guy dolls. I watched too much Chucky as a child.
I don't think I've seen Chucky outside of just like clips here and there.
No, can we watch Chucky and do a podcast about Chucky. It's kind of science fiction because it's about a man who possesses a doll, and the doll then goes on like a murder spree trying to become human again, and then they jump the sharks.
I thought you were going to say, look like a terminator because they have the skull with just the teeth.
Oh no, I'm sorry. I didn't do a Terminator reference. I did a Chucky reference instead. I don't know. It's also like anytime there's a world and this this kind of like a Star Wars thing too.
Uh.
I don't know why, but they're like, oh well, this is just a water world. Everything's covered in water. Oh well this this is a world with sand, everything's covered in sand.
Yeah, there's no like diverse ecosystems, Like you're the ice planet, You're the sand planet. Yeah.
I don't like that because the planet we live on here today, in this Earth has biodiversity. And it's just like how big are these planets that they're just cover I mean I can understand like a planet covered in water because that's where we're going.
Yeah, that's just the quantity of water on that planet.
Yeah.
Is it just that we're so special that it just doesn't occur? In other planets. I guess we. I'm trying to think of like Pluto and like Neptune and Saturn and Jupiter, and we are pretty special, I guess so.
But if it's a like a life supporting planet, you.
Think it can be more similar, you would think, But.
I don't know. Maybe it has to do with our rotating access and everything.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, our magnet our magnetism just a pet peeve of mine, like, oh well this what this planet is just covered in water, that's it. Where would you want to live if you got to choose out of those planets that they're all living in in this series?
Yeah, the water planet was like super religious.
Yeah, yeah, do you want to live in a really conservative planet?
Because I would very restricting, no science and.
If you read your fucking mark, like you're gonna die. The guy with the library was executed.
Yeah, And then you know the Foundation. They're kind of primitive and they're whole setup.
Well they live in tents mostly, yeah, or campers.
So they're kind of roughing it out there.
Yeah, and everyone's wearing a coat, which tells me it's cold.
And then you've got the whatever they call where the empire is.
But You wouldn't get to live on the palace with him.
No, you'd be in the city, somewhere.
In the multi layered city where some people have never seen the light of day except for that crack that form. I don't know. None of these planets seem like viable places to live.
I don't know. Maybe I'd go on those desert walks for the salt.
Mine help people. At least it's not cold.
Oh they seemed happy.
Yeah, I did, like that lady that challenged the empire though, Yeah, and she and she was right, but he didn't let her win because he cheated.
Yeah, he just made up some vision. Yeah, crazy, and now he knows he's like soul.
Listen, how do you do with that? That's crazy. I mean, as a person who doesn't believe in like a soul, I wouldn't be bothered. I'd be like, oh wow, But you know what would suck if, like when he got to do mushrooms and stuff, he didn't hallucinate, like any hallucigen it like anything where you hallucinate. It doesn't work on him because he doesn't have a soul. Then I'd be really cross. I'd be like, dude, these mushrooms suck.
They don't work.
Do you think that's how it works. If you don't have a soul, then you don't get to hallucinate, you know.
You don't get to look upon the face of God.
Yeah.
But also if you like open the arc of the Covenant, you'd probably be fine too. Yeah.
Yeah, so you're saying those Nazis had more soul than him.
Yes, Oh my god.
We can talk about women and their rule and saving the world and the hole of humanity and how their rules are super undermined because this big white guy comes out of this black obelisk and is like, everything is going according to Bland.
Yeah, you were all just my ponds. Yeah, and what's her name, Salvor. She's like, hey, I'm the one that like deciphered this stuff and brought that ship here and did all the hard work. And he's like, oh, yeah, thanks.
I guess I don't know who you are, but you did it, girl. Not even a pat on the back.
He can't I can't touch people.
Oh I didn't know. I forgot. He's a hologramd It's it's not even like unseen labor at this point. It's like very clear labor that is just blatantly ignored and taken advance, like taken for granted. And I'm really interested to see what the meeting of the two protagonists means in the future. Yeah, because I feel like they're already like this unlike individually, they're already like this unstoppable force like this like predictive, like I can see the future. Shit,
I can. The fact that like they can connect with each other over millions and millions of like light years away is crazy, and I feel like it's not insignificant or else they wouldn't show it, but it's just like right now, it's just kind of like this big mystery, and I don't know. I just I felt like I felt really bad for her for not getting answers when that guy showed up.
Yeah, so now it's driven her to go find her own answers.
Yeah, because she worked so hard to like save that ship and make sure that her people weren't dying and stuff like that, and like nobody was like, hey, thanks did a good job.
So you don't meet your heroes.
Yeah, and yeah, it just it sucked. I thought it was a really good plot twist that that guy's girlfriend was an insurrectionist. She wanted to overthrow the government. Oh of the Empire's girlfriend. Yeah, she was playing the long con.
Yeah. I wonder if that's the end of the first story or not. Because they kept her alive.
Yeah, but all of her family and friends we'll never remember her. Yeah, she's been erased from her life, which would suck. Where do you go, like they should? I mean, they could have just let her back out into the world, and it would have just been like starting over from scratch. You don't have any friends, you don't have any community, you don't have anything that like existing in the world without anything to hold you to it in terms of
human connection. What a lonely existence. But then they're also going to put her in solitary, which sucks. I don't like the Carcoo state in general, but this one seems really shitty. Yeah, and they're gonna feed her through a feeding tube, so she won't even get to eat or anything. That's like one of my favorite things to do. I was shocked also when like they came and got him, Like, I was shocked that his girlfriend ended up being an op.
And then I was doubly shocked when his dawn came in and was like got you bitch, Like that was the most intrigue and the most like that was one of the heightened spaces or storylines for me. That was like super memorable, very like taught like twists and turns and like very well thought out about like what was happening.
Yeah, it definitely felt like that. I think that was episode nine.
Why did it take that long to get here?
Yeah, because that felt like really like the climax of the season, and just like the way we ended up watching it. We watched it over a few months and we kind of had to take a break in there because there was like family stuff and holidays and going on. Then we came back and watched that episode and it was like, first I was like a little loss on what was happening. Those recaps weren't enough to like Kitchiga back in line. But but yeah, that was like a
wild ride of an episode. Yeah, because there was that storyline going on with everything on Terminus and the foundation with that ship.
See. I wish that the ship subplot would have been as exciting. It was just like Oh no, we're gonna jump. Oh no, it's gonna jump. Oh no, it's gonna jump. It just felt very like Cooi and like, oh, is it going to happen? I don't know kind of vibe I didn't. I didn't. I'm like, give me some action,
give me some intrigue. I want to see those two like women fighting, like really getting into each other's nerves and like finding them like as worthy opponents to one another, Like show me where the respect comes from on both sides. I don't know, very sad. I was just like I wanted more from a series that costs as much money.
I have a few things about how it compares for the books.
Okay, go ahead.
I won't drag this on too long because I know it can get tedious. But obviously, like the core concept is the same. You've got Harry Selden in Psychohistory and then the Galactic Empire, the Empire in the books, it's like already crumbling once you get past like the first section of the book, and like because in this final episode there they were faking like that their planets were destroyed or whatever, so the Empire wouldn't bother with them.
But the Empire is already like crumbling and like can't deal with things that far out in the books, so they're already like on their own, and you don't really follow the empire at all. It's all from the perspective of the Foundation and other characters, and the whole thing with the clones, like that cloned storyline is not part of it. Yeah, the Foundation is pretty much the same, and then a lot of the characters are like the
way the book is written. The books, the stories were written as a like kind of individual stories that deal with like a certain chunk of time, and then we jump forward in time we have new characters and a new crisis or whatever, and those old characters are maybe referenced, but they don't continue on. But like we have you know, Gail Dornick, and she's like a minor character in the first story of the book and that's it for her. But now we have her continuing on and becoming a
big protagonists of the Soul show. The same thing with Salver Harden and then Harry Seldyn is also a lot more involved in the show.
You said it's not as Culty in the books, right.
I don't think so. No, Yeah, they don't really like put him on a pedestal like that. He does show up in the vault kind of like the show has it, But the vault's not a mysterious thing that they don't understand. It's just like a time locked thing that when he's predicted that there's going to be a new crisis, he comes out, talks to them for a minute, and then goes away until the next.
One, like a kitchen time.
It's also like he can't really interact with people. It's like a pre recorded thing like, oh, at this point, this should be happening, and this should be happening, and this is an idea of how you should be dealing with it, and I'll see you later. And then sometimes he's wrong as well. Yeah, a lot more of like personal and emotional relationships struggles, that sort of stuff. The books are more like big ideas and intellectual challenges rather
than character to development and stuff. And then season one at least has really condensed some of the timelines, so we're not jumping through centuries, you know, we do move forward a few times, but.
It's like fifty one hundred years at a time.
Yeah, and we're keeping our characters alive through that, through the what do they call it, like the cryostasis or whatever. Yeah, So it's quite a bit different, quite a lot more stuff they're putting in between the events that happened in the books. And then I mean, like the episode one was pretty much a straightforward adaptation of the first story. From there on it differs quite a bit, and there's kind of elements of the books that you pop up in there, but by and large just starting to do
its own thing. And according to chat GPT, many people appreciated the show's attempt to modernize and humanize the material, making it more accessible to a wider audience, but then other people criticize it for deviating from the original source material.
Yeah, the original source material was so good, why did you deviate from it? I mean, I can understand how some of it's hard to translate television.
Yeah, I think they had to make us make it adapted for the screen.
And like, I would have loved a series where every two or three episodes to new cast a new ensemble and we're doing something completely different. It would have been challenging, it would have been unique, it would have been interesting, it would have been like a fucking trip, because that's never been done. You're always keeping your same people because that's like contracts or whatever. But whatever, Like you had the money. I don't know. I've never read the books though,
so I'm not like a purist. I just know that when I watched The Game of Thrones, that first season was the books. It was so good because of that, because it was such a loyal adaptation to the books. And then it became something different. It was still like taking a lot of information from the source material, and then when it started doing its own thing, that's when
it fell apart. And it's sad. I don't know. I like I said, it's above mediocre for me, like because of the settings and the actors, but the story for me, it's not hitting. But I don't know if I personally would be interested in something that's based off of a science fiction novel written in the forties and fifties. Yeah, I've never heard of the Foundation. I've heard of the robot laws, because that's more relevant to today's like AI technology,
like questions and how we interact with technology. But I don't know.
Math and.
The Falling of Empires.
It's well. I think the fact that like no one's really been able to put it to screen in any way has kept it more of like a like an old science fiction book that was great at.
The time like a classic.
Yeah, you know, it's kind of like you know, Doune was considered a really hard thing to adapt. They did give it a shot, and was that the nineties eighties?
It was the eighties, not the board worms. Oh that's flash Gordon. Sorry, I don't know. I think science fiction like sometimes it does translate, but this one, I just think they were doing too much. Like if they wanted to focus on emotions and interpersonal drama, they didn't. To me, they didn't do it well enough, because, like I said, the most entertaining part of this was watching uh brother Dawn, like getting bamboozled into leaving his safety and being switched
at birth. Another part that was interesting was when Gail's boyfriend stabs Harry and then throws the knife in the cry and the sleeping pod and then like zoots are out. Then we don't get any there's no resolution with that. We don't know what happens to him. We watched some videos of a court trial. I hate that.
Yeah, I'm still kind of unclear why a lot of that happened the way it did, and everything with Gail in in that ship talking to the fake Harry Selden was just I couldn't track it very well to figure out, like, what's the point of all this?
And it's just showing how smart Gail is.
They do bring up like that there's a second foundation, and that was the cool reveal and that's something from the books, and I was surprised that it came up this early. But yeah, so like there's that reveal that there's another foundation out there doing a similar thing. But that's really all I feel like I got out of that, which took you know, a good chunk of a couple episodes.
I don't know, I don't know. I'm just like I want to show up, I want to participate, But what are you giving me in return? What do I get? I get a bunch of girls that are doing all the work and none of the praise. Sad, sad. I don't know. I want to know how many women are in the writing room. That's something that I would be interested in or even directing or you know, because to me it feels like a guy show.
I mean, it's hard to know how many are in the writer's room, but in terms of writing the episodes, I'm saying one, two, three, four or five six episodes that have names I believe to be women's names.
Okay, that's more than half. Yeah, why are they doing this to these women? Are they misogynists? I don't know, but I do like the role that women play in this. It's just that the payback, the payout for like all this work and labor, is just not there. It sucks.
Interesting. I'm just looking at seasons two's writing credits, and Jane Espenson shows up on a number of these episodes. I know she's a really good writer. She's been on a lot of science fiction shows, including like Battlestar and Firefly.
Okay, well it happens. Should we watch the next season all of it again? Or should we do episode by episode?
What do you feel? Because I mean, I have reason to believe it's better, a stronger season than this.
Yeah, but I don't know.
Second season received more positive reviews from critics, with many agreeing that as an improvement of the first season, emphasizing the more accessible pacing, better plot, improved into personal characterizations, and overall satisfaction with the season's payoff.
Thank god. Okay, yeah, let's just episode by episode then, all right, hold me to it.
Well, that sounds like the plan. Yeah, so there's no spoiler section. No astral queen, Astral queen.
Who was the standout character in the season?
Oh, who's your astral queen?
So looking at the entire season, I mean, for me, like the only ones in contention would be, uh, Salvor and Gail. And I think Salvor just did so much more in the series.
She did all the work, She did all the heavy lifting. That's a good one. I picked the robot lady because she she read him to filth. She read him to filth when he didn't have a vision. She's like, to not have a vision, to not be able to see that is the worst read him down. And then when she straight up just like murdered that guy. And then when she was like sad with that one woman and she's like, yeah, you know your heart was in the right place, but he's going to kill you and it's
already happening. You're already dead. Don't challenge the empire, Yeah, because she's she should be in charge. She's the one who could stay there and lead and handle it for centuries. But a robot lead. But you know, I'm not a speciist, So yeah, I.
Think very few people know she's a Robot.
Which is weird because like, how many portraits have they done? How many family photos do you think they have? And that girl's always there with that square skirt.
Maybe they assume she's a clone too. Yeah, so yeah, that's our Astral Queens then, and we will be back to talk about season two.
And I think that's all we have, right, I think that's it.
Yeah, thank you for spacing out with us, and remember to respect and enjoy the piece.
Thank you for spacing out with Bib and Jason. You can help us out by subscribing and leaving a positive rating or review. Remember you can contact us through email or social media. Next time we will cover Foundation season two. We hope you will join us