Here's the first trailer for Foundation's third season
Apple is debuting its long-awaited adaptation of Martha Wells' Murderbot next week (May 16th), and it'll be followed by another big SF adaptation: the third season of Isaac Asimov's Foundation. The streaming service has released our first look at the upcoming season, which will debut on July 11th.
The show debuted in 2021, picking up some of the big pieces of Asimov's classic science fiction novel, making some updates and adjustments as it did so. Set in the very distant future, humanity has spread out through space and is governed by the Galactic Empire. A mathematician named Hari Sheldon has pioneered a field that he calls psychohistory, in which he uses statistics to predict the future, and through his calculations, predicts that the Empire is headed for a downfall, which would plunge the galaxy into a chaotic dark age for millennia.
To stave off that fall, he sets up The Foundation, ostensibly a repository for all knowledge, but in reality, it's a community with the seeds to restart and rebuild human civilization.
Asimov was inspired by Edward Gibbon's History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire to write the stories that eventually made up Foundation in the 1950s, and the show has followed the story in broad strokes. The first season introduced us to the concept of psychohistory and the Foundation on the planet Terminus, but introduced some other concepts like Emperor being a trio of clones.
The second season (which I have yet to finish – it's on my list) has been setting up the conflict between the Empire and the growing Foundation, and began teasing the coming of an existential threat to the Foundation in the form of a man known as The Mule.
The Mule's arrival seems to be the focus of this coming season: a war is coming, and in the books, he's a superhuman individual with some psychic powers, and who's working to take over the galaxy. With his introduction, we've moved into some of the territory of the next book in the series, Foundation and Empire, and judging from the trailer, we've got a bit of action headed our way this season.
I've generally enjoyed the series. It's certainly taken liberties with the source material, but as I've noted in the past, "it's worth looking at the elements that play well to that new medium, and what parts of the story are most compelling." Foundation is a strange book, in part because of how it's a fixup of a bunch of shorter works, but also because it shifts wildly in tone from story to story. You go from some really heady concepts (for the 1950s) to people shilling washing machines.
The series has picked up a lot of the broader concepts and run with them, and the resulting show is slick and while not exactly in the same class as shows like Game of Thrones (the early seasons, anyway) or Andor, I think it's one that'll hold up in in the years ahead. Plus, the studio behind the show has thrown a lot of money at designing the world, and it just looks astounding. The trailer shows off some really fun imagery and spaceships, and if nothing else, the scenery makes it worth it.
Foundation is just one of a handful of science fiction shows running on the streaming service: the first season of Murderbot is coming on May 16th, and we've got the upcoming fifth season of the alternate history space drama For All Mankind, an adaptation of William Gibson's Neuromancer, both coming sometime this year. There's also new seasons of Silo (based off of Hugh Howey's Wool books) and Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, and some new shows: Star City (a spinoff of For All Mankind) and Wycaro 339, from Breaking Bad's Vince Gilligan.
I need to catch up on Season 2: I kept getting distracted when it debuted in 2023, but there's plenty of time to catch up before it debuts in July.