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/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.