[DISCUSSION] Foundation S02E08 - The Last Empress (Spoilers)

Agree, great episode. While I'm sure the show would do interesting things with it, I kind of hope the direction with the mentallics isn't for this Tellem to try to move conscious into Gale, but Gale be dominant mind and just making Gale super powerful. Just wouldn't feel earned.

Same, this was so damn much fun!

It's like they decided to start writing plot finally!

I have this fear that the leader of the mentalics is in fact the mule in her whatevereth iteration.

Agree, best episode so far!

Loved the end of the episode when Dawn and Dusk discover that Demerzel is the Empire. It was something I was talked with my wife since season 1. I guess that for the end of season 2, Demezer is going to get rid of all the Cloud Dominion staff, Dawn and Dusk and retrieve new ones with forged memories. Funny how this season all three brothers were in love of someone different.

Yes.

I was afraid it would be a mid range sci fi but it’s turned out to be fantastic.

I personally dropped it, since it suffers from committee-approved writing: there must be random action scenes, love interests and personal stories of exceptionalism. If you don't mind the plot sometimes taking second place in favor of illogical standard Hollywood fare, it's well shot, with okay acting, and an overall nice aesthetic.

I'd say so. I have more faith in Apple keeping this show alive longer than Amazon or Netflix would have.

I think we're up to 5 or so different plot lines occurring at any given time per episode, so chances are you'd be interested in at least something going on.

Ya it's quite good overall. I would recommend.

Wait.

The beginning of the seasons are... so painful, truly unwatchable. There's smelling your own farts, and then there's whatever the hell this is, like GoT S8 kind of stuff.

But then something crazy happens around ep 4-5 and they turn absolutely on a dime to become actually pretty interesting.

2x08 was the best of the show, kind of by far. It's still a bit in the hole, but it has 2 more episodes to redeem the season.

Basically don't watch this show unless you're binging, it's cruel otherwise.

Ok, do not, I repeat DO NOT, watch this show while it's airing(releasing).

Binge the seasons, then ignore it till the next season is done.

The beginning of the seasons are TRULY abominable, like Jon Snow: "I DUH WANNIT" bad, or Michael Burnham season 2. Then midway suddenly the writing stops smelling its own farts and becomes decent, then actually good.

They just put SO much horrible, horrible, truly awful, it's not buildup, it's this nasty pretense to force the illusion of mystery at the beginning of the season, like they disorient you on purpose to seem smarter, but halfway through they stop and the whole thing becomes semi-coherent again.

As for the books, first: It's more than the standard trilogy, it takes so much from Asimov's extended universe, including where he joined his Caves of Steel series into the Foundation way later on, like the 80s.

There's definitely connections, but also, it's getting there by a different route, I don't hold this against them, you need room to create, just trying to make a near cult-scifi pulp book from the 50s into a show is silly.

My guess is that Cleon I (himself via the chamber, or via some sort of dual-personality presence with Demerzel) has been racking up memories this whole time because he isn’t truly gone.

Perhaps Empire had some analogue to the Prime Radiant, where his consciousness is tied to Demerzel in exchange for her continued existence.

From what I gather, each clone only gets their 75years of memories before they are put down for the next in line. With memory editing, they’ve slowly been getting smaller and smaller memory banks.

My guess is that Demerzel manipulate then making them "forgot" decision they took that she didn't want, until they came to the decision she consider is the correct one.

I wonder that till the end of episode. Him meeting OG Cleon makes me think he might not survive to try. I've been wondering about how all the past Cleon's nears the end had a similar amount of memories wiped. Dawn and Dusk just used the previous clones base line to compare their own and see if they were similar and not being too altered by Day. It's like they tend to follow a preset life cycle and hit stages in their life where memories need to be erased. I wonder if Dusk naturally becomes curious about the memory erasure in this part of his life.

Can't wait till the next episode with Demerzel and hopefully get some answers.

What if they are actually killed a lot. By enemies of the imperium or Demerzel itself, and the memory back up always lost some before the assassination. They always talk about the clones and how they would be replaced for a clone.

Iirc, Gaal had a vision of the future, where the Mule mentioned that Hober Mallow had pierced the side of Empire. She told Salvor about this, and Salvor told Hari in the Vault, and Hari wrote it on the exterior, which told Constant and Polly to seek Hober out. Everything in the timeline with Constant and Hober takes place after this.

It's confusing at first because the audience expects that events are happening simultaneously, but it turns out that the whole Constant plot line is actually a flash forward.

So Hober Mallow's interference in everything is really a predestination paradox stemming from Gaal seeing the future. Without her vision, he never would have met Constant and wouldn't have had any reason to rescue her from Tractor, and thus wouldn't have punched a hole in Empire's aura, so to speak.

Meh, they had to make the changes. The book cycles through characters every few chapters. You can't make a show without characters people can invest in.

I feel this way about a lot of things. It seems like there are near infinite movie and tv show scripts to make things from, but if it doesn't have some association to a thing people can recognize it is barely worth anything. Which is sad because there are likely countless amazing things sitting there unmade. Studios used to take more risk with low to mid budget stuff.

I'm a massive fan of the books, and it took me a while to accept the abomination this show is. But once I accepted this is a completely different tv series with only a loose resemblance to the books, I started to actually enjoy it.

If they'd just called it something else I'd have been fine with it.

It's not foundation but it's also not that bad. It's not that good either, but good tv is hard to come by