Foundation

July 2023

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S02E01

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S02E02

"i was conscious the entire time" says hari. holy shit, how long was that, again?? as long as salvor has been alive at least right? can she be forgiven for acting thoughtlessly??

oooo i love a split clone trope. who is who and what does it mean if the two parts of yourself are in conflict?

i Also love a wall of water wave trope :) holy shit what a visual. oh, above the storms it's sunny & beautiful. it's all gonna be okay :)

hello lil red riding hood. the hungover man says "dear seldon" as in hari ?? and once again the teachings of the math of hari seldon are put in opposition to religions. the red-cloaks don't seem particularly devout (?) though

"or more precisely, they don't remember hiring someone to kill you" love u demerzel. "they'll have no recollection of seeing us so compromised." sooo interesting that she can do that!! also shows how she is so instrumental in day's projection of himself as absolute. he would be so epically screwed if she ever decided to move against him—he trusts her even more than his brothers, who are now separate from himself

oh there's something so chilling about demerzel lowering her arms when day walks away. she's making eye contact with one of the old empresses, whom day said was so great. what's up with that???? (demerzel pre-dates cleon, right? i think i remember in season one that she was like ten thousand years old. so she would remember the ancient empress, the rise and fall of that dynasty?)

whomst the fuck is this old lady to tell them how to eat? oh holy shit is she telling them how to be more like cleon i?? yup yup yup. god but that shows so well the tiny cracks in the perfection of empire

"you said the math was off-course, so let's fix it" says salvor. interesting to see her practicality against hari's (and to a lesser extent gaal's) theoretics

huh interesting to see dawn/day/dusk attempt to be charming. even though dawn & dusk still don't approve of this marriage? sareth seems a trouble maker

"assassination by procreation" what a juxtaposition. which kind of also drives the point home—with genetic drift, the cleonic tree is already dead. marriage and a biological offspring is the tree's last ditch attempt at life. and if he does it this way, no one will ever ever know that there was a drift to begin with.

asexual versus sexual reproduction. pros & cons. generally sexual reproduction is "fitter" right? or is that a very animalia-centric view?

also. why doesn't the current day just say fuck cleon i, i'm the blueprint now. he's close enough to cleon i that no one outside of dawn/day/dusk would be able to tell. and that solves the problem of genetic drift.

oh i like the colors of this sivenna

fancy magic show they've got on. they're proselytizing? hm. bit gross not going to lie. "one of the worst punishments is having your wish come true."

as they're jumping this reminds me—we never did find out why gaal was able to stay awake during jumps.

"150 years upstream??" "why not?" lmao great question salvor. aw she's counting primes again. man gaal REALLY plays fast & loose with her own life. she's just constantly jumping headfirst into danger. does she believe she's indestructible? she just calculates the odds and decides she's fine?

circles and circles, the self-fulfilling prophecy. looking forward, looking back. and once again, how fixed is the future??

WAIT THAT'S POLY??? the lil boy from s01?? also. how is he so old and yet doesn't look that old? "are they deadly? no wait, are they expensive?" fuck yeah poly

brother constant doesn't look anything like sermak. maybe to be expected if they're still doing the whole sperm + egg + surrogate thing like how salvor was born? and who's this pater?

foundation's red against empire's blue.

and once again, how fucking INSANE must it be to live in the shadow of your prophet !!!!!! but also he's just a fucking asshole mathematician!!! it's so wild to see the legacy/mythos of hari/salvor in one scene, and then actually get to see hari & salvor interact in the next. okay jaegger, cool it down a lil. "wither? jackass" SO true poly

"hober mallow"?? so. does the hari on terminus know what the hari with salvor & gaal knows? also "get hober mallow" feels a lil ambiguous. get him and then what?

also i hate to say it but hober mallow sounds like a hobbit name. a friendly chocolate-maker. someone like that.

gaal sees salvor dead. but again, HOW FIXED IS THE FUTURE i have questions !!!!!!!!!

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S02E03

okay so salvor & gaal both think the vision will happen, that salvor will die. and salvor raises a good point about plot armor—is it impossible for salvor to die before then?

once again, hari does whatever he wants and doesn't tell anyone. welcome to oona i guess!!

poly thinks the incineration of jaegger is a judgement. hari's judgement? "how could seldon's math foresee someone specific like hober mallow?" great question. also it occurs to me—do we have confirmation that hober mallow is a person? could it be a thing? lmao same thought, brother constant

"humans will wallow for a very long time." reminds me of what L was saying about the world of the last of us. if the world changes, and it's impossible or near impossible for it to go back to how it was before—what level of sacrifice is justified to try to bring the old world back? at what point do you say—this is how it is now, and we have to deal with it rather than trying to go back? even if it's "worse"? i guess this is different though, because the great universe changing downfall hasn't happened yet.

oh okay so poly knew hober.

it's kind of funny that hari is wearing like a very normal white button down shirt like is there a j crew on terminus. god he's so fucking annoying slap that boi back into the radiant if he's going to be so secretive all the time

!!! empire told bel they executed his husband and then dumped him in the salt flats!! as in season 1 they really know how to do punishment. although i have to say i'm feeling a lil suspicious of demerzel. there was really no better person for the job than the dude you took everything from?? she seems to have a soft spot for him maybe

"traditionally doors have hinges and maybe a knob" gaal i love u

"i don't know what's going to happen next" hari did that hurt you to say

a castler!! what a neat piece of tech. also that forcer has great eyeliner

bel riose seems so strong. thought his husband was dead, forced labor for six something years, still speaks as he does to empire. "just the two us" and day dismisses dawn and dusk. i feel like earlier day would have kept his brothers around since they're all the same. SO interesting that bel shows his loyalty like that.

OH MY GOD

says don't kiss me while i'm still 713!! get that man a shower and then get that man a kiss!!!

day and demerzel creeping in on bel & glawan!!! "do you know how lucky we are to have you" FUCKING RIGHT DAY DEMERZEL IS THE BEST AND YOU SHOULD KNOW IT. god the way she reassures him with her hands around his neck !!

"something is off, this whole planet is wrong" and from season one, salvor is good at seeing lies. who is in the cave!!

"you and him, you've got your own language. and i don't speak it." are gaal and hari the only two real psychohistorians? if no one else can understand the math?

hober mallow is very nonchalant about his imminent death. he's got another bracelet, right?? lmao called it

"for the sake of all these people, i don't have the luxury of settling the score" bel i love you already. moral responsibility over personal revenge !!

AWWW they're all saluting him. "welcome home" !! home!! also i'm so immediately intrigued by she-bends-light

wait why don't bel/glay/she-bends go to the creches? or maybe that happens after the scene cut

jeez, the beggar's been through a lot. is that mining equipment trying to kill them??

hari's alive again??? what IS this place?? TWO "i don't know"s from hari in one episode??

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S02E04

kind of creepy to see constant & poly at the helm of the ship, passed out

wait so why did they strap hober to the potatoes if that's a perfectly good bunkbed back there

what's this flirty thing between constant & hober??? although i don't think i hate it? it's out of nowhere but they both seem like mischievous people. i DO love a culture with rules about sharing names. also i just KNOW the writers' room was having a blast coming up with names for hober to guess

wait okay so constant literally says her pater is sayta-thespin to hober, but then also refers to sef as her father, and hober was surprised sef had a child. i assumed pater meant father, but maybe not??

sareth knows courtesan tricks?? interesting skillset for a queen. "empire makes everyone into a courtesan" oh interesting thought there. an implication that empire has more money & power than everyone else, and can only interact with others via money & power, and never genuinely/honestly?

rue & dusk were a thing—how old is rue?? i didn't think she was very old. oh now this is a VERY interesting walk. okay so given what sareth said to rue, this display of emotion, while i don't doubt comes from somewhere, still seems like it has to be a careful construction, right? she's looking for a response from dawn. also i feel like yes Of Course day is absolutely capable of wiping out most of a royal family to put sareth in exactly the position he wants. sareth pushes dawn—asking if he thinks he is capable of such a thing "since they are the same man." does she suspect that the dawn/day/dusk trio aren't as in sync as they try to appear? interesting that dawn doesn't deny that he could one day become capable.

"if day thinks it's to his advantage to deal with the weakest member of my family, he's wrong." OH THE LAYERS. (1) is she implying day is wrong because she is Not the weakest member of his family? (2) he's wrong because day's not at the advantage, sareth is? (3) isn't she doing the same—going after dawn first to figure out what's going on?

touches his arm and then says "since you are the same man, have you ever wondered why they don't have us marrying? i think we'd have suited" again emphasizing that they (should) all be the same man. and maybe sowing a lil doubt/tension between the brothers?

rue says last five generations have gone for a bolder art style. a sign of the change in the cleons?

they walk past a section of the mural with a écorché in profile, under a diamond with symbols that look suspiciously like our sun and solar system. no pluto though >:( maybe this is the story of how humanity left earth? écorché => something revealed, muscles straining.

what's erasure?? why does rue want the union to happen?? oh holy shit, rue & dusk had sex and then her memories of the sex got erased???

holy shit skydiving from a spaceship? neat as fuck. AND with the superhero kneeling landing, 10/10 for style

this show is uh. not gracious towards the inhabitants of siwenna. also that one person didn't even hesitate to fire on them even though the leader was very clearly being used as a shield at the time??

glay getting mad at bel for starting the fight early, wondering, although he is here in front of me, did the empire still take my husband away?

hober mallow asks some good questions

sef does not seem that concerned about the fact that his daughter just literally walked into the light

"i see by your robes the foundation has entered its religious phase" oh c'mon. calling someone's religion a phase?? even if you're the prophet it was based on

poly says they're in a tesseract, a polychoron, a four dimension object in three dimensional space. call back to e01! i wonder when the crew leaves if much more time will have passed on the outside than inside

"where the stars are scattered thinly" sounds like some kind of codeword. "ta da" lmao

the two soldiers with blood on them go immediately to look at the books. in the midst of death we are in life and all that

also funny to see bel and glay take brother constant so seriously as a threat

asking someone to kill you with a please????

it's a quantum computer?? neat

why does sef look like some dutch noble painted in the 1500s

"for god to be effective you have to be intermittently wrathful" DUDE. first it's, no no call me doctor seldon not the prophet, and now you're equating yourself to a god??

ooo poly puts down the wine glass

"yeah i can be a blade" i feel like hober is accepting all this more readily than i would have thought. planning on skipping out?

oh so maybe rue does remember being with dusk before? being able to block/reverse a memory wipe is so wild

markley's uniform is cool as hell

"it's been three years" "three hours" "you never can play along, can you?" :)

why does beki stay with the ship?

also if we hadn't just seen seldon telling hober he had another mission, i would have totally thought hober was making something up to escape with the ship. although that could still be what's happening?

constant i'm screaming, how forward, how straightforward. constant my demisexual queen

i'm calling it now, they're going to meet again and drink that wine

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S02E05

i'm back it's been months don't even worry about it. thank god for these notes otherwise i'd have to start from the beginning again

"do you trust me?" "i wish i'd never met you" SO true raych, hari sucks. "it'll help if you're angry." i'm getting reminded of katie & forest from devs—the weird almost condescending tone of being kind of emotionally manipulative and also emphasizing that they know what is going to happen. raych/hari have a father/son relationship? and if i may do a lil biblical parallel here—i'm thinking thoughts about god ordering abraham to sacrifice isaac. reversed and condensed: hari plays both god and the father, and asks his son to kill him. the thing about humans is that we love a messy family drama.

IS RAYCH THERE IN THE PRESENT? wait no, dream. yes dream? another ghost in the machine? you fucking tell him raych. ah but still the father sacrifices the son. "we both know it wasn't the first time." interesting interesting

and does he bleed like a man?

now this is a fucking dense conversation. the irony of the clones, the religious phase. it's okay salvor you can't die yet!

sareth said the version of her that was shy died with the rest of her family.

lmao day fretting to demerzel about having sex with sareth. and demerzel saying he'll be fine!!! "think of me" she says with a wink, i'm SCREAMING. i wonder if, once they're married, day still plans on having sex with demerzel. would he even see it as cheating?

this is so fucking awkward lol. oh but he is smart isn't he—goes from bed mode to king mode like that. and she's smarter to throw it in his face. doesn't pretend like she isn't interested in the assassination attempt, but spinning it differently. now his pride is in it more.

okay so he Did kill her family

he KEPT the memories of him and rue?? and in the memory he explicitly says he dials the aura back. feels like rue's trying to do the same thing sareth is. "you're lucky to be able to trust your memories" do we think that's an honest statement or is she trying to plant a seed of doubt that dusk can't trust his memories??

WHAT IF IT'S THAT GUY FROM S01???

HOLY SHIT I'M RIGHT

what a love story. he decides to just go to sleep when he knows salvor isn't in the world. sleeping beauty man :)

PLEASE DON'T LET THIS BE A TRAP. PLEASE LET IT BE HUGO AND NOT SOME WEIRD TRAP

"would you have done it differently?" "i like to think that i would" honestly not the response i would have expected hari to give. i wonder if his other clone self would say the same. "but an embryo is a very different proposition to an actual person" so true hari. "hide the radiant and don't tell me where"

interesting for gaal to be a mother who was never pregnant, who never raised a child.

NO NO NOOOOO

is that keeper person reviewing all the memories himself? how would you not go insane

dusk finds out day can alter his or dusk's or dawn's memories. were dusk or dawn allowed to alter memories before or is this a recent rule? oooo demerzel's memories can't be altered—and she says again that she has to do what is best for empire, not just best for day. "i will always be here, as i always have been" BEST CHARACTER IN THIS WHOLE THING I SWEAR what a fucking line

WAIT SO PEOPLE DON'T KNOW DEMERZEL IS A ROBOT???

wait can they TALK to cleon i??? praying to the self?? holy SHIT. also there's no way day doesn't find out about this right. HOLY FUCK when cleon i raises his hand, he does a TWO FINGER SALUTE NOT THREE. 16/17/18

i wonder why the cleons still have murals of pre-cleonic history around. like it helps for the plot but also does that fit in with how his character would decorate his palace?

dusk xvi confesses he wanted something else from life.

okay but missing half your memory?? that would truly be wild not to notice at all

gaal and salvor can hear the whispers, and hari can't? tellem bond, seventh bodily incarnation of pa'a. gotta say, i love a child goddess character. lmao at salvor not doing the salute—but of course they already know who she is, if they knew to trap her with the hugo person. is it just me, or is there a weird echo when tellem speaks?

tellem says gaal and salvor are sighted and that hari is incomplete in some sense. "do not worship children, it is not good for them" now there's a whole trilogy in that sentence. why does she want to destroy the prime radiant?? what does she see??

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