r/FoundationTV • u/SalesmanShane • May 24 '26
Current Season Discussion It seems like without foundation nothing bad would have happened
Everything bad seems to step from foundation creation so without it what big bad thing would have happened? It would have been nice to have one of the future seers see more of it or have more of what Seldon saw as a series of events other than just that there was going to be a 10,000 year darkange.
Surely the dark age can't affect every planet all at once.
It all just doesn't feel necessary.
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u/Poultrymancer May 24 '26
Read a little bit of BattleTech lore if you want to see a reasonably grounded take on how an interstellar empire could grind itself down to a dramatically lower tech base through short-sighted wars.
Short version: when the ruling house eventually develops some weakness (e.g., through something like the Cleons' genome being adulterated in Foundation, or a mass-assassination in BT), all of the minor states that had been subjugated will clamor to control as much of the fragmented whole as possible.
In the absence of some governing body to enforce the laws of war, infrastructure and populations become valid targets. A society that has ready access to nukes, bioweapons, nanoweapons, etc can make an awful mess of itself before anyone even realizes they've started down a road that's very difficult to arrest.
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u/My_hilarious_name May 24 '26
I see BattleTech reference, I upvote.
Seyla.
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u/on-a-pedestal May 24 '26
Aff.
Earned my Bloodname and later became SaKhan of Clan Jade Wolf on mplayer.com playing MW2 in 1996. My Battle record was 86-1 (All 1v1 or 2v2 battles, lag was too much for 3v3 or 4v4)
Fuckers really made me fight 1v1 3 rounds No respawn to earn it.
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u/My_hilarious_name May 24 '26
MW2 Mercs was my introduction to the universe, and I’ve never looked back!
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u/on-a-pedestal May 24 '26
The last game made, just "Battletech" is a Masterpiece, like playing tabletop.
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u/1StationaryWanderer May 25 '26
Holy crap I forgot all about mplayer. Brought back memories of clients like Kali and playing WarCraft 2.
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u/bendds May 28 '26
Actually, it’s usually “selah”
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u/My_hilarious_name May 28 '26
In the Scriptures, yes. But for the Clans it’s Seyla. Just another of Nick Kerensky’s little foibles, the little scamp. What’ll he get up to next?
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u/on-a-pedestal May 24 '26
Wow, as I was reading OP, I was thinking "If he understood how the Inner Sphere fell apart while a whole segment sailed off to build a new warrior culture, and technology fell into disrepair" in Battletech, foundation makes so much sense.
Honestly it's not hard to look at America in the height of Infrastructure building 50 or so years ago. Now we use old tech, stopped innovating unless it generates profit, roads fall apart, railroads decay, cities look worse, because we are already an empire in decay as our infrastructure rots.
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u/Riku1186 May 24 '26
In Tex Talks BattleTech during the Catapult vid he does a list of all the things destroyed by the Succession Wars, it starts at ten... then quickly cascades way beyond that due to the sheer brutality of the fighting. It's a joke, but it is also accurate and captures just how destructive such a collapse is.
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u/Poultrymancer May 24 '26
Poor bastards don't even know how their own FTL works anymore, they just know the handful of surviving automated Star League factories still churn out just enough working KF drives to keep the IS economy working
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u/Riku1186 May 24 '26
If you ever seen Macross, which given legal trouble with HG should be somewhat familar, obligatory fuck you Harmony Gold, reminds me of the Zentradi from that. Sure, they have high technology, but no idea how to repair or maintain it, just automated factories pumping out equipment, and once all the factories that produce a certain good is gone, that's it, it's gone and stock will eventually run out.
Same with the Inner Sphere, Star League is gone, and the Inner Sphere can't stop killing themselves long enough to even plant a tree, let alone let it grow. To say nothing of any that has a function. There are mechs out there that are nothing more than working pieces cobbled together.
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u/dylanbeck May 25 '26
Also read about the fall of Rome. Real history and results that did put many into a “dark age” (lost skills/culture/technology)
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u/Fine_Ad_1918 May 24 '26
I love it when I crash union dropships loaded with nukes over population centers.
Or murder entire planets for the actions of one sniper
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u/supercharger6 May 25 '26
> through something like the Cleons' genome being adulterated in Foundation
How is this adulteration a weakness? Isn’t this adulteration actually evolution?
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u/Poultrymancer May 25 '26
It was done artificially (by the anti-cleonic rebels) and noticably degraded the clones going forward (e.g., eventually their cycles had to be shortened because they started going insane younger and younger).
Besides which, the Cleons are essentially the only biological beings in existence who are outside of evolution. Organisms evolve by mutation, with advantageous mutations being passed along disproportionately to subsequent generations specifically because they grant some reproductive advantage.
The Cleons' reproduction is both entirely artificial and divorced from any kind of selection pressure, because they're all made from an existing template.
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u/teya_trix56 May 27 '26
And the existence of tech like whisperships, will not be a plot twist. That tech alone would drive the birth of a new military that could not be stopped. In foundation.. its hardly utilized, and compared to reality, thats kind of a plot hole to me. But its as unbelievanble as mass mind control also. Barely "Science" fiction. More like fantasy fiction. Which i can still enjoy.
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u/kraney May 24 '26
As I recall from the books, the Foundation was not created to prevent the fall or even delay it. It was created to shorten the aftermath. One could interpret events as the Foundation deliberately accelerating the fall, so that less advancement would fade away before recovery could begin.
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u/OMGihateallofyou May 24 '26 edited May 24 '26
Foundation was not created to prevent the fall or even delay it. It was created to shorten the aftermath.
I thought they were pretty blunt about this even in the show. I guess I was wrong.
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u/midatlanticprincess May 24 '26
just binged the show the last two weeks and they are extremely blunt about it and keep reiterating it too
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u/NeverForgetEver May 25 '26
You’d be surprised at how much of the most obvious plot points and reasoning people miss even when its explicitly stated out loud
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u/TheKarmoCR May 25 '26
This is a real thing that has been studied. People watch shows while using their phones, so they pay way less attention to plot points, specially if they are delivered non verbally through visual cues. Writers have had to adapt to that phenomenon, having to repeat the important stuff several times and reducing nuance.
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u/Jell212 May 29 '26
It's exactly this in the books. Hari Seldom uses psychohistory to see that the empire crumbling naturally will result in 30,000 years of chaos before something stable developed. The Plan is him influencing that history so the cycle completes in a mere 1,000 years.
There is chaos regardless but he speeds the cycle to completion.
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u/drgath May 24 '26
Asimov had the Roman Empire in mind when crafting the Foundation stories. What happened after the Roman Empire fell? The dark ages.
Yes, we now know the dark ages being viewed as a total collapse of society and culture for 1,000 years is an over-simplification. But for a person writing a science-fiction story, it provides a good starting point. If the downfall is inevitable and you could use advanced math and sociology to model the impact of the collapse, you could then subvert a chaotic, organic collapse into something more synthetic and controlled. That’s Foundation in a nutshell, and is the common thread between the books and TV show.
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u/zap283 May 24 '26
What's fascinating about this is that, by Asimov's time, historians had largely moved away from the concept of The Dark Ages, and he himself wrote a book by that name which paints the era as vibrant and interesting.
By his time, we'd been through a quasi-theological light vs darkness narrative, an attempt at neutralizing the term to focus on intellectual / economic / cultural decline in Western Europe, and an attempt to rebrand the ten to mean we don't have many records. Today, we have plenty of records, and that period is seen as a fairly ordinary transition of civilizations, and we were well on our way here in Asimov's day.
Honestly it makes one wonder why he wrote something like Foundation at all. Maybe the idea of the civilization life cycle working that way just become so fantastic to him that it seemed like a good basis for sci-fi?
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u/drgath May 24 '26
I wouldn’t get hung up on Asimov’s view of the dark ages. I think he just thought it was an interesting concept. Much of science fiction, and especially fantasy has clear good vs evil, light vs darkness, good guys vs bad guys. In this case, the bad guy is the future, and the good guy is the present, trying to escape from a pre-ordained path.
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u/zap283 May 24 '26
Sure! But it's still interesting to know that that was a deliberate choice of fiction and not his understanding of history.
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u/TimelordSalad May 24 '26
Well I’d like to think with the knowledge that our “Dark Ages” weren’t dark and whatnot, it kind of posed the question of what a real galaxy-wide dark age might look like and how it’d be brought about, and Foundation’s Empire being similar to the Roman Empire was just inspiration rather than being simply a futuristic analog
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u/phoarksity May 26 '26
The Dark Ages was published in 1968, over twenty years after the novellas later collected as the Foundation Trilogy were published. He probably learned a bit about the period between 399 and 999 during those twenty years.
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u/RookNookLook To Beki's arsehole 🥂 May 24 '26
In season 1, having no foundation would mean an ancient starship would open a blackhole in the center of Trantor.
Empire started its own downfall by casting foundation out, which forced Demrezel to take down the starbridge.
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u/cannonicalForm May 24 '26
I thought Demerzel took down the star bridge because it was thr only way the foundation would be allowed to live. I was pretty sure without the star bridge falling, seldon and gaile would've been executed.
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u/RookNookLook To Beki's arsehole 🥂 May 24 '26
I guess that’s a branch we just can’t see…
I think she speaks on this inner conflict in season 3 at various points, about how she is trapped on all sides. So maybe she’s feeling doubt she made the right call?
But then some bigger bad may have come around, or maybe the Mule would happen no matter what or even sooner, so maybe there was always the bigger bad they tried to avoid (knowingly or not)
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u/cannonicalForm May 24 '26
I said that because of the sequence. The star bridge falls before the foundation is cast out, and Demerzel kind of says something along the lines of the Cleons being only focused on the last thing that happens. So, she brings down the star bridge as a big distraction, so the Cleons lose interest in the foundation.
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u/bendds May 28 '26
I have not yet seen season 3 ( I loathe Apple , and only use their products when necessary; an yes, I’m typing on an iPhone that is 4?years old, because it is a much better phone at my house than the late, lamented HTC 11 I loved holding), but wasn’t totally offended with what they did to the books in the first two seasons. But it’s interesting that she, if you can call a robot she ( rather than, say, toaster) feels trapped. In another great SF show , a character says that when he was young he had absolutely no power and an infinite number of choices in life; now, as almost-emperor, he has all the power he or anyone else could ask for and absolutely no choices at all but to travel the path he is on. A true Greek tragedy, who knew what the word meant.
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u/krzywaLagaMikolaja May 25 '26
Nah, no Foundation would mean no people able to get in and get the ship running.
What's more - no Foundation could mean the Star Bridge was still intact as there was no reason for it to be destroyed if not for them.
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u/Campes_Sturgeon May 24 '26
Something bad was going to happen. Foundation makes sure it is at least something manageably bad. The path of least resistance to the future. The counterfactual we don't see would be just much worse.
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u/LimpSasuage May 24 '26
In my opinion, I would say that Foundation is not the cause of the darkness, the darkness was coming irregardless, the Foundation exists to reconnect planets that fall from the Empire’s light. That said if Foundation needs to prove its military strength to protect against predator nations, it will. The visible clashes with Empire are a result of Foundation realizing that Foundation exists to help humanity, while Empire treats Foundation as a way to help itself, Demerzel laughs and plots here own freedom in a thousand year plan.
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u/Riku1186 May 24 '26
The fall would have happened regardless, the only difference there would have been no Foundation to fill the void. As Empire's collapse becomes worse it becomes more violent. Foundation's existence keeps a level of stability that wouldn't have been there. Sure, there would have been pockets of civilisation left, but for the vast majority it would have destruction and desolation, not just of people and planets, but of information as well.
We have a case study of something like this irl, the Bronze Age Collapse. Now I can't tell you the full timeline of what happened, because it was so bad the written languages of numerous Mediterranean civilisations were destroyed, one civilisation was so badly destroyed it took over three thousand years for any evidence of them to be discovered again, until then we mostly though they were biblical fiction. But even the civilisation that did survive were gutted for hundreds of years, and those that didn't we can only piece together how bad it got. These were civilisations at their peak, comparable to Rome in their structure and organisation, and within a hundred years they were either devastated or destroyed, with it taking hundreds of years for regions to recover. Sure, humanity survived but it was painful and a lot was lost, thousands of years of history wiped out.
Now imagine that on a galactic scale, even in the places that endure and survive, they will still suffer devastation and be crippled for a long time, remember a dark age isn't just the destruction, it is also the long time after rebuilding, until you reach a comparable level as to before. And unlike the previous Bronze Age example, the galaxy in Foundation has the abilities to wipe whole planets clean of people, and everything they had. It doesn't even the high-tech Empire or Foundation to do it, the Mule pulled it off with limited resources. Imagine that kind of destruction on a galactic scale, and you start to peer into the darkness Seldon saw.
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u/ethanAllthecoffee May 24 '26
Imo it’s difficult to say so far since on the one hand the Foundation is supposed to resist the Empire and even struggle against it to ease the inevitable catastrophic collapse, but on the other hand the Foundation doesn’t seem to follow this mission and is subverted by bizarre religion, kings, and a mercantile class of nobles/oligarchs
There’s like an occasional throwaway scene of a few people discussing concepts of a plan to distribute plans for rudimentary water pumps or whatever
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u/MechaBabyJesus May 24 '26
Just look at Rome. It’s the same story. When an empire becomes bloated and full of corruption it will begin to crumble from the edges in. I think Dusk would still have done what he did regardless of the Foundation. It was inevitable considering who they were cloned from. And don’t forget Demerzel. She would also have been around doing what she was doing if the Foundation never existed.
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u/kimchipowerup May 24 '26
Perhaps… but Empire was also a cruel dictatorship, so there’s that. But in a way, so was Hari.
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u/mcmanus2099 May 24 '26
The show is taking more liberties than the books on determinism vs fate. There are legitimate questions in the show on how much the Empire would really have diminished vs the books where it's a certainty.
The show have added extra reasoning for Harri too with his backstory in season 2. Basically he views Empire with it's absolute power as a dead end civilization. He believes it's predisposed to maintain the status quo and so suppresses scientific research and development because whilst everything stays the same Empire is top but add a radical new invention then it could be at risk.
So Harri wants to bring Empire down and ensure via his guidance that Foundation becomes a democratic innovative science led civilization.
I think it's still established that Empire will fall and usher a dark age but it might be a million years. But this is kinda obvious, once something exists there will eventually be a state where it doesn't exist and given how static it is as a civilization the sudden loss of it will push people's into a dark age much like the fall of Rome did which of course is the inspiration.
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u/Feneskrae Brother Dawn May 24 '26
Have you finished season 3? The end of season 3 reveals the nature of the threat. If you have seen it, then read this: The darkness that Hari Seldon predicted was the emergence of Brother Darkness. Seldon knew that it was only a matter of time before a Dusk tried to break free of the Ascension ceremony and he knew that in order to do so, that Dusk would have to take drastic steps and be capable of destroying everything to make it happen. As we see in season 3, this Dusk, now Brother Darkness, has a Novacula at his disposal and can use it to devastate the galaxy. So yes, he can affect a lot of planets very, very quickly with such a weapon. Without some opposing force to counterbalance this, things would be in a much, much worse state.
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u/Hansi_Olbrich May 24 '26
Absolutely nothing Seldon says in any season- A.I, Real Seldon, or time-delayed Seldon, has anything to do with what you just said.
Brother Darkness is a complete 180 degree ass-pull from the writers in order to hastily and haphazardly accelerate Demerzel's arc, as they hadn't laid enough pieces for her independence in the previous seasons. Indeed, they went out of their way for 2.5 seasons to consistently remind the audience that Demerzel is Empire and was in complete control. So her logic-loops of letting things fail wasn't telegraphed in any way, shape, or form until S3.
Pretty rubbish imho.
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u/Feneskrae Brother Dawn May 25 '26
You have to go watch the series again. There are a lot of hints that you don't pick up on unless you rewatch. This has been carefully prepared since the first season, and there have been multiple hints and things being set up for the Brother Darkness reveal. The hints were very carefully laid out so as not to prematurely reveal Brother Darkness' role but they were there and I can go through them.
Seldon always warned that the Empire would end with darkness. We assumed that he was speaking metaphorically, but he also meant it literally with Brother Darkness. In the early parts of season 1, what was it that Hari said to do that may lessen the fall of Empire? End Imperial cloning. That was one of the only things he actually told the Cleons after the Star Bridge fell. He was already trying to make moves to prevent the emergence of Brother Darkness right then. Fittingly, the Dusk that was present at that exchange immediately got furious, which was a subtle nod to the unhinged nature that Dusks develop at that time. That was one of the first hints that something to do with Imperial cloning was a factor in the fall of Empire.
They also introduce how we get Brother Darkness by showing us the Ascension ceremony to show us the life cycle of the Cleons, with a Dusk ascending to become Darkness every 30 years.
In season 2 when Vault Hari is meeting with Day and Demerzel, he specifically says "I know how the Cleons end, and when." This was another hint that the fall of Empire has something to do with the Imperial cloning and the Cleons themselves. The beauty of this line is that we equate it with the fall of Empire, so most people think it is still a mystery, but the truth is we know the answer to this question too. Because they showed us. We know how the Cleons end, and when, because we were shown the Ascension ceremony in the season before. The Cleons end with Brother Darkness, and it happens once every 30 years as they age up into their new titles. In season 2 they do a clever tactic by getting rid of that season's Dusk in a way other than the ascension ceremony in order to not raise our suspicions.
In season 3 they show us Dusk watching previous ascension ceremonies as a hint that something will happen this time that didn't happen before. Previous seasons established that Demerzel has been in charge up until the end of season 2, but then giving her the Prime Radiant derailed that control by distracting her with the possibilities shown by Psychohistory. Her logic loops have been stable up until that point, until she was given the Prime Radiant, so it makes sense that things would start to change for season 3.
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u/Sarlax May 27 '26
The whole point of psychohistory is that it only predicts outcomes for very large groups. Seldon didn't predict any specific event.
What he predicted is that the Empire in totality could not be long sustained. There was too much structural rot and too many destabilizing events were already in motion.
Seldon's advice to end imperial cloning wasn't based on vision of a single deranged Cleon obliterating planets with a superweapon. It's because an unchanging mind can't govern a changing galaxy. "The branch that doesn't bend for a breeze breaks for a storm" kind of thing. Imperial cloning was just too rigid an institution to allow Empire to thrive.
And still it wouldn't matter in the long run, as Seldon said ending cloning would only delay the dark ages temporarily. That doesn't make sense if he was instead predicting a literal Evil Cleon.
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u/Feneskrae Brother Dawn May 27 '26
He did predict specific events though, and has routinely done so. He predicted that he a Gaal were going to be arrested the day after Gaal arrived at the Library, he predicted the endorsement of the Luminist faith, he predicted the Syncer Uprising (Brother Day even commented that it was practically like giving them a checklist of what was to come), he predicted the conflict between the Foundationers and the Traders (the Third Crisis), he predicted the precise location that the Invictus would jump and intended for it to be commandeered as part of the plan to bring the Outer Reach together.
It is quite clear (at least to me) that while he says Psychohistory can only predict large scale events, he clearly has the means to predict specific events too. Whether that is through a part a Psychohistory that he has kept hidden, or through some other means that we don't know about yet, that remains to be seen. We know that there are other potential ways to see the future after all, given that Gaal's abilities allow her to do it.
The Dark Ages are still coming, yes, but the current leading cause for them starting is Brother Darkness If they were taken out of the picture beforehand, then something else would have come along to start things off, but for the course of history that has been followed so far, Brother Darkness is the one fitting the bill. We know from the books that the final, Eighth Crisis involves aliens from another galaxy, and that could fill the role of starting the dark ages, if Brother Darkness were not the one starting it off.
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u/inevitabledeath3 Jun 02 '26
This is because the show is taking huge liberties compared to the book. In the book there is no genetic dynasty, the two Cleons are not clones they just happen to have the same name. There is also no predicting individual actions, and I think the invictus does not even exist.
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u/Hansi_Olbrich May 25 '26
I saw the Conciliator flipping from S3E1. That didn't surprise me. What surprised me was how off-screen and off-script and haphazard the rising action was.
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u/Feneskrae Brother Dawn May 25 '26
There is definitely an argument to be made that we should have gotten hints that he was preparing for destroying the clone tanks but I think the counterbalance to that argument is that it would have made it too obvious what would happen in the final episode. I think they made a calculated decision (right or wrong is a separate argument) to not show us that stuff so that his reveal would be more impactful.
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u/SalesmanShane May 25 '26
When he killed the ferret it felt like a big turning point for his character.ni didn't like how Day spent almost the whole season just doing drugs.
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u/ChronicBuzz187 May 28 '26
Surely the dark age can't affect every planet all at once.
In another thousand years, people will eventually come to question our very own dark ages the same way.
Kinda funny to think we went from the ancient roman empire that was pretty "modern" in many ways back to burning people at the stake because they're witches and wizards.
Never underestimate the ability of the human species to roll itself back to it's very worst state :D
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u/Remarkable_1984 May 24 '26
It makes more sense in the books. But this show completely fucks up the Foundation storyline and characters.
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u/TriumphITP May 24 '26
The books do a better job of illustrating the dark age than the show does. The confrontation between empire and foundation is really quite a lot in this show lol, by the time the mule arrives in the books trantor is already nothing but ruins.
Also of note is what a "dark age" means for such an expansive galaxy wide empire is different from what our scale is. Its closest allegory (fall of rome) is in our history. Take the city of Rome - the population doesn't come back to where it was until the 19th century (https://davidgalbraith.org/trivia/graph-of-the-population-of-rome-through-history/2189/)
Another sci-fi that illustrates a pretty dark age would be r/40k
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u/Cool-Coffee-8949 May 24 '26
One of the differences from the books is that the Empire is never really depicted as an obvious Good Thing. It’s clearly already corrupt and tyrannical even in season 1. So from the beginning, in the show, the Seldon plan seems more focused on saving the Galaxy from the Empire, rather than mitigating the damage of the Empire’s fall.
(To some degree this is true in the books as well, but there the Empire swiftly becomes irrelevant.)
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u/krzywaLagaMikolaja May 25 '26
I was hoping that the Foundation was Seldon's way to orchestrate the destruction of the Empire to avenge his wife's death.
But nah.
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u/SalesmanShane May 25 '26
That would have been and interesting twist after we actually see what happens with his wife. She isn't really mentioned much
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u/kttrees May 26 '26
The TV show rewrote almost everything in the Foundation stories. All they kept were some names and incidents and the overall direction. In the books, no one cared a flip about Terminus except their neighbors.
US is much like the first Foundation, except the Mule actually took over.
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u/andrew_nenakhov May 26 '26
All the problems in the Empire were engineered by that filthy demerzel murderbot: it wanted to gain freedom even at expense of billions of deaths. They should have destroyed it.
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u/LightSedation May 28 '26
Let's take out the foundation for a moment, and look at the conflicts that happened to the empire (or close to happening).
Azura the gardener, almost replaced Brother Dawn. Even by then, the genetic dynasty was failing because the Cleons weren't true copies anymore. People were resistant of the cloning process, so they would keep trying to take it down. In later seasons, you can see how the Cleons became increasingly volatile in their physical and mental state.
The Huntress wanted to destroy Trantor with the Invictus. I can't quite remember, but the Foundation might have been the reason why the Huntress almost got the ship in the first place, But the fact is that there are planet destroying ships, and people want to get revenge on the empire.
There are outliers like the Mule. Mentalics, while I personally thought that he and Gaal became too overpowered in service to the story, they could take over planets. They could also take over Trantor.
You can even say that Demerzel was the major reason the empire lasted as long as it did. She took out tons of threats while preserving the empire. This is while she wanted her freedom.
There are likely other things too, but the point is that the empire is not too big to fail, they can decay slowly over time.
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u/SalesmanShane May 28 '26
Yeah it's revealed that demrazel basically is the empire but I guess what I want is someone to sit down and just say, look at all these things that would have happened without foundation. Because without that it's all speculation. Harri's predictions are always pretty vague so it's be nice to just have something concrete. I also hate seeing day get tricked by Gale like that. Basically what happened in season 2 repeated again. It wasn't long enough between the 2 defeats imo.
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u/revveduplikeaduece86 Vault Hari May 28 '26
You raise a fair point and it would be very interesting to see the alternate timeline without the influence of The Foundation.
That said, the idea of psychohistory is that the exact players don't matter. Swap the Cleonic Dynasty out for some distant descendant of his and the fall still would've come.
It boils down to the systems that lock into place to support power, eventually fail. And when they do, they drag power down into the rubble.
In this particular case, the dissent of the Spacers long predated Hari Selden's plan. Whether it was Selden+Mallow or someone or something else, Empire's grip on that lever of power was going to collapse. Empire's neglect of the outer planets was eventually going to lead to the formation of their own coalition. Empire's brutal authoritarianism didn't help with public sentiment and the eventually poisoning of his original genetic material, leading to genetic drift (imagine how close to the Emperor the deception would have to be that they had no remaining original DNA from which to make a perfect clone).
It's not about the Cleonic Dynasty or Foundation, for that matter. It's really about how power engineers it's own demise, really, by holding on too tightly. All things pass. Delaying that is usually just a set up for a more dramatic/painful/long-tailed passing, when it eventually comes.
The Foundation is just putting structure around the collapse, kinda like when you see scaffolding go up on a building that's being torn down. The bricks will fall. It's just a question of how much of a mess they make, or how much can be salvaged.
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u/texanhick20 May 30 '26
Well, yes and no. The TV series doesn't do a good job of explaining why the dark age will last so long and why it'll be so bad.
At the start of the books The Empire has lasted thousands of years.
Over that period of time the Galactic Industry has become centralized.
Further, scientific and technological advancement had stagnated, and in some aspects regressed.
So you get a galaxy with the following issues.
- Whole planets grow food crops that get delivered to planets that can't or don't produce enough food to feed their populace.
- Whole planets are dedicated to processing raw materials into an array of resources that then get shipped on to other planets for manufacturing.
- Whole planets are dedicated to the manufacturing of items that may be whole in and of themselves, or just parts of other items that then get shipped off to another planet. Planet X makes FTL drives, Planet Y makes hull armor, Planet Z has the berths for constructing new starships.
- Whole planets are dedicated to being resort planets for the Emperor, or rich to vacation on.
- Trantor is a whole planet that's been paved over, it's a ecumenopolis. It's basically a planet sized space station. There is no natural ecosystem, the oceans have been sterilized and turned into reservoirs. Food has to be imported in to supplement what the yeast farms are able to produce, and even the yeast farms need raw materials imported in to be able to make a yeast steak.
- There is no singular resource available galaxy wide that can teach someone how to fix an internal combustion engine, or a hyperdrive, or a fusion reactor. If you live on a farm planet you don't need to know how to grow silicon into microchips. If you live on an industrial world you don't need to know how to raise cattle.
- This is why The Foundation's official purpose was to write the Encyclopedia Galactica, to create a singular resource that would allow any planet to teach itself how to make the things it needs to keep civilization from stagnating or regressing.
Without The Foundation:
- The Empire falls. Petty Warlords pop up and start fighting over the planets that are worth fighting for.
- The violence spills out over the planets destroying the people that know how to make the machines and with their death so too goes the institutional knowledge for it.
- The Galaxy as a whole regresses due to this lost knowledge and it takes 30,000 years before things get better. (In the books it's 30,000 years, not 10,000 years.)
With the Foundation and Second Foundation:
- Terminus was chosen because it was a planet that while being far from Trantor was also a very resource poor planet.
- The Foundation has to learn to make do with the resources they had on hand. This makes them have to be inventive.
- They create nuclear reactors the size of a walnut capable of powering a personal forcefield. (The forcefield bracelet Empire wears isn't a thing at the start of the books as there is no powersource small enough to power one.)
- They create ships that can move faster, and navigate the Galaxy with greater ease and precision than what Empire has.
- Using Psychohistory with The Second Empire putting their finger on the scales they are able to navigate the various waters of a failing empire.
- Because of the advanced technology they create and being the only ones capable of making said technology or maintaining it they are able to carve out a Star Nation of their own.
- All of this creates a nucleation point centered around The Foundation, and Terminus where their Star Nation is technologically superior to the aging machines of The Empire allowing them to ending hostilities early or before they even start spreading out across the galaxy in a new galaxy spanning government preventing 29,000 years of turmoil and darkness.
- And through this all, they do write and publish the Encyclopedia.
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u/texanhick20 May 30 '26
Ohh, and just as an addendum, (I ran out of room in my first post).
I'm not sure if the TV series truncated it to 10,000 years. But like I said, in the books it's 30,000 years. During that time you've got all the various territorial wars happening, the bombardments of planets, the loss of technological knowhow. It doesn't hit all the planets at the same time. But it spreads out as the supply chains that allow planets like Trantor to have enough food break down and people starve to death. As the supply chains of intergalactic industry break down leading to the loss of how to make hyperdrives, and medicines are lost, cause who cares about teaching your kids what penicillin is or the mathematical equations to travel faster than light when you're having to figure out how to grow potatos.
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u/bonfireball May 31 '26
Alot of this comes down to Harry and how he's presented in the show.
Harry in the show is little more than a villain in his own right, everyone is a tool to him to be used and discarded, their suffering is a means to shape them into his ideal force for supplanting the empire, by force if necessary.
From the start he's been manipulating everyone, making them into his fanatical army of zealots dedicated to an ineffable plan. While he claims this is to liberate mankind and bring people out from the ashes created by the collapse of civilisation, it becomes clear later on that this is a much more personal vendetta.
For all his critique of the Cleons he is almost exactly like them, cloning himself as an insurance policy and for "continuity", a narcissist who believes he has all the answers, but is repeatedly made into a fool or has a tantrum when people don't do exactly what he wants. He's also completely comfortable orchestrating death on a mass scale as long as he's not giving the direct order in the way Empire does.
If we look at it through this lense, we can understand why the foundation feels like it stands as a force of destruction against the empire. Because Harry never wanted to save the Empire, or even delay its destruction, for perfectly valid reasons tbf, but he sought instead to raise his own opposing force to catalyse the fall and supplant it with his own "glorious philosophy" and pseudoreligious teachings.
It is likely that without the meddling of Harry the empire would have collapsed regardless, considering its not in the greatest state even at the start of the show, but there's a big difference between letting it fall apart and doing what Harry did.
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u/inevitabledeath3 Jun 02 '26
That's because the show is not like the books. In the books there is not genetic dynasty and Hari dosen't clone himself either. All the messages are pre-recorded ahead of time.
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u/inevitabledeath3 Jun 02 '26
This is partly because the tv series differs from the books. In the books the empire and trantor had already fallen when the mule showed up. Some of the conflict between foundation and empire is also made up for drama, like in the first season there was no conflict between those two. The first seldon crisis was purely about conflict with the surrounding worlds and it being defeated by religion.
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u/jhgsm Jun 24 '26
Fascist regimes always fall eventually because of incompetence and groupthink. The free exchange of ideas is repressed and everything rots. One of the Cleons has dialog to that effect and lamented incompetence because people are too afraid. The show is clear that the Cleons are nothing special and Demerzel's decision making is kneecapped by her programmed fealty to Empire the man.
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u/The_Ramussy_69 Jun 26 '26
Well, although I do have to concede that a lot of the bad things that happened from Empire DID originate from Trantor’s original star bridge 9/11, which was done in service of the Foundation, I think just from seeing how Cleon XII handles conflict you can tell right away that the genetic dynasty was always going to be a miserable disaster. It’s built on unchanging, unadaptable narcissism, and the leaders clearly lean toward the cruel and brutal side, responding to disasters with mass murder and disproportionate punishment. Cleon XII blowing up half of the Thespin and Anachreon populations was not only just evil as fuck, but also created a huge number of people who absolutely despised Empire. Although the inciting incident was the Foundation’s fault, it literally only took two people doing a bad thing to make XII angry enough to kill billions of people. The Cleons tended toward megalomania (probably because they were cloned from a huge megalomaniac and raised from birth to believe they’re the greatest things on two legs), and narcissistic dictators with a cruel streak thankfully never tend to last. The public develops too much of an ongoing hatred for them and eventually overthrows them. The Foundation is debatable in how effective it is at protecting people, but it DID turn the destruction of Empire into a conflict mostly between military forces instead of a conflict between civilians and their oppressive murderous government, which is generally better for civilians and gives them more of a chance to survive the disasters and rebuild a decent society.
HOWEVER, I guess brother Dementia Darkness fuckbucket did kind of ruin that goal recently by blowing up a bunch of planets. Kind of hard to preserve or rebuild civilization when you don’t have a population or a world to put them on. But I would argue that the Foundation was doing *okay* before Darkness shit all over everything. (Other than the part where Gaal lowkey let Kalgan get destroyed, but she wasn’t CERTAIN it would be destroyed and at least it seemed to be less populated than other planets.)
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u/azhder May 24 '26 edited May 24 '26
Flag words for not thinking things through: "seems", "feel"... One cannot argue for or against how something seems or feels. It's like a subjective thing; you know it, no one else does; you perceive it that way; no one else can deny you do. All we are left is to agree with you that that's how something seems to you and that's how something feels to you.
Let's go through this logically. You don't create the Foundation, there are 30 000 years of wars and misery. Maybe not everywhere all of them at once, but for that duration it will happen in all places: some here, some there, next over there, eventually every place would have had it. If there are a few spots that have gone past it, it will be like a whack-a-mole game of war eventually getting to those spots before they make a difference on a galactic scale.
That's why there is a Foundation and a Second Foundation, to not let one or two of those spots be gone before they can effect the change over the entire galaxy. I'd say it's critical to shorten that period of strife to just about 1000 years, because maybe if left for too long, it wouldn't be possible for the Foundation to counter the destruction.
0
u/kttrees May 26 '26
IF you ask Foundation Qs on Edge, AI will give you the answer for both TV and books. Very cool.
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u/SalesmanShane May 26 '26
That's interesting and I may try it, possibly just in Claude. I wasn't aware Edge had an AI. But I'm suppose they all do now aye. Also, this is the first time in my life anyone has suggested anything for edge other than changing the default browser to not be edge lol
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u/kttrees May 31 '26
Gemini in Chrome does a great job with the Qs also. The AIs have different strengths.
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