Don’t sleep on Foundation, Apple TV+’s excellent adaptation of Isaac Asimov’s once-thought-to-be-unfilmable hard science fiction novel series that chronicles the 1,000-year fall of a galactic empire. The story that was long considered too expansive for Hollywood (although many have tried) finds the perfect home on TV in the hands of creators David S. Goyer (Batman Begins, Krypton) and Josh Friedman (Snowpiercer, Avatar 2). They’ve taken the hefty source material that sometimes reads like half-history book half-math dissertation and translated it into an entertaining drama that resembles something closer to Star Trek or Game of Thrones. The result is an adaptation that’s generally faithful to Asimov’s original work, but that also expands on events in interesting ways that the exposition-heavy novel didn’t in 1951. (But expect a few radical changes along the way, too.)
Many sci-fi fans consider Foundation to be the finest book ever written in the genre, so you might be familiar with the premise even if you’ve never read the novel. But here’s a primer: When Professor Hari Seldon (Jared Harris) develops a new branch of mathematics called psychohistory, which can predict the future of large societies, it leads to panic in the powerful Galactic Empire. Hari’s math predicts the fall of the 12,000-year-old empire in just 500 short years, which will lead to a 30,000-year Dark Age…unless the empire listens to him and helps him create the Encyclopedia Galactica, an archive of all human knowledge for those who survive the Dark Age to find. Yes, either way, the empire is doomed to collapse, but Hari’s plan could cut that Dark Age down to just 1,000 years of war, bloodshed, and death. While the empire’s rulers consider executing Hari for heresy, they instead decide to exile him and his followers to the remote planet Terminus, where Hari can build The Foundation and begin the work of compiling the knowledge they need to save future generations.
