Foundation: Set phasers to Overambitious – season two is like Game of Thrones on psychedelics

Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series is perhaps as close as science fiction has come to a Lord of the Rings-style sacred text. It has loomed over the genre for decades, a revered saga regarded as a must-read for students of the form. And, as with The Lord of the Rings, it was long considered unfilmable, with its sprawling cast, millenniums-spanning narrative and, at its core, knotty obsession with the psychological underpinnings driving human civilisation.

All of these components are sprinkled into season two of Apple’s ambitious adaptation. But Foundation (streaming from today) splices Asimov’s meditations on the future of humankind with gonzo action and performances that veer from feverish to barnstormingly bonkers. A hint of what lies in wait is provided in an early scene in which Galactic Emperor Cleon is in flagrante with a robot. An assassin leaps from the shadows. A nude Cleon fends off the attacker using his robot lover as a shield. It’s like Game of Thrones on psychedelics.

Foundation is partly shot at Troy Studios, in Limerick. It is, by some estimates, Ireland’s biggest screen production, employing a crew of about 500 (though much of series two was filmed in Prague). You can see all that effort on screen. This is sci-fi with phasers set to Overambitious. And in its second season, very loosely based on books two and three of the Foundation saga, it puts the pedal to the floor with a vengeance.

David S Goyer, the showrunner, has described Foundation as a “remix” of the books. Nobody could accuse the new batch of episodes of showing undue reverence for Asimov’s writing.

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Cleon, the best character, is largely a show invention. (He features in a very different form in a Foundation prequel.) An eternal being cloned across the decades, he walks among his people in three incarnations: a young man (Brother Dawn), a middle-aged one (Brother Day) and a greybeard (Brother Dusk).

Brother Day is played by Lee Pace – he of the naked robot wrestling – whose performance might strike some viewers as a masterclass in overacting. Day understands that the Galactic Empire cannot last forever. But if it is to crumble he wants it to go down fighting. As season two opens he is planning a strategic marriage with another interstellar power block, though he knows it will take more than this to stave off the Foundation.

The Foundation is an organisation devoted to keeping alive the light of human civilisation when Cleon’s realm falls, as all empires must. In the books, its founder Hari Seldon is a peripheral figure who pops up early on and then retreats into history But on the show he is played by Jared Harris, a big name who must be woven into the story no matter what – and so he has been granted eternal life as a digital construct.

Harris is, of course, the son of Richard Harris, and to film a series in his father’s hometown must have been emotional. He is certainly committed as Seldon, who has teamed up with his former acolyte Gaal Dornick (Lou Llobell) and Dornick’s daughter Salvor Hardin (Leah Harvey) – who is older than Dornick because of the time-bending vagaries of interstellar travel.

It’s bonkers as anything and lacks the Asimov novels’ cool hum. It also seems wary of leaning into the best of the Foundation books, Second Foundation, and its fantastically tragic villain, the Mule (though his presence is hinted). But Apple seems committed to this daft enterprise. For Foundation and Troy Studios, the feeling is that the best is yet to come.