I have never read the book for the Foundation trilogy or any of the books in the series. I’ve seen fans of the book be critical of this adaptation for not being faithful to Asimov’s original intent. I am unsure if I am better off having not read it yet and enjoying this TV series in ignorance or if I should have read the book first so I can properly understand the point Asimov was trying to make. None the less I cannot change the past and it is what it is. I enjoyed this show if for nothing else than the spectacular visuals for much of it. The very first episode had a beautiful depiction of an extremely large space elevator as well as its amazing destruction. A space elevator of this magnitude falling to the planet such as Trantor with its many layers of civilization and the entire planet being covered with a single city was truly incredible.
However, from then on the show has this stark contrast between all of the scenes featuring the Empire and everything else on Terminus. This is where our protagonists Gaal Dornick and Hari Seldon were sent to build the foundation that would reduce supposed dark ages following the inevitable collapse of the Empire. All of the scenes featuring the plot on Empire I found exciting and really well done while all of the scenes on Terminus and with Gaal, Hari and Salvor to be quite bland and stereotypical. Which is curious considering the Empire plot is mostly content written for the show and the plot on Terminus is vaguely resembling the plot Asimov wrote in the original trilogy.
My biggest gripe with the show might be that the plot from my understanding is often contradictory. The way Hari originally described the concept of psychohistory and its mathematics was that it takes a sufficiently large population to make any accurate predictions about future trends. No mere individual is significant enough to make any deviations in those trends. Yet rather consistently we see Gaal and even Hari himself make statements that they absolutely need to do some urgently as the fate of the galaxy depends on it. I don’t see how this can possibly be the case if the concept of psychohistory is to be taken as legitimate.
Despite some glaring inconsistencies I still enjoyed my time watching this show and look forward to the likely season 3 that is coming. In the meantime I might have to read the book to finally see the story as it was originally intended by Asimov.
3.5 / 5 Stars
I haven't seen any of season two yet, but enjoyed the first one with the understanding that it was an adaptation. I had always said that any attempt to bring the Foundation books to TV or movies would have to take the general plot and ideas and heavily adapt them to make them work. The Foundation stories are both very dated in characters and in science fiction to make them believable to today's audience, and were originally short stories that eventually were combined for a large scale galactic story spanning centuries with lots of different people. You might be able to pick out from these points as to how the TV series handled those issues in a new imagining of the overall concept of an Empire that both in its peak and yet doomed to collapse, and the attempt to minimize the effects.
Read the books. They won't spoil anything since the series is using things but in different ways. There are later prequels written by other authors to fill in more of the story with the permission of Asimov's estate, and while they're not too bad it's a similar problem to try and use and capture the original magic while being more up to date with new ideas. It doesn't always work.
Do you remember what those prequels were called? I could have sworn there were some prequels written by Asimov himself. Specifically Prelude to Foundation and Forward the Foundation.
He had a few that were published after his death, presumably finalized and edited by someone else. The other ones are: Foundation's Fear by Gregory Benford, Foundation and Chaos by Greg Bear, and Foundation's Triumph by David Brin.