I think only reasons we have clones is for the viewer to care more and to have something resembling characters that stick around more than two episodes.

But yea i like that decision instead of a lineage of new guys, even if it makes it slightly harder to follow the timeline.

I don't mind gender swapping any of the hundred white guys from the source material, but i don't really see a huge necessity for never ending empowerment moments. I really hated that isolation bit. There's no good way of making that interesting. I can see why people would make exemptions for Tom Hanks and football, but the opportunity cost for source material doesn't exist there.

hah the statistician is played by ian mcneice, a legitimately stellar actor who also.. .wait for it... played baron harkonnen in the bbc dune miniseries.

ok caught up.

im fast forwarding through a lot of big daddy kane hair and lisa bonet hair and honestly its making this a lot more enjoyable but when i end up with like 17 minutes of meaningful footage in ep 5, it takes a bit of shine off the thing.

also i havent read the source material but i definitely feel like there are a lot of early 1950's style plot twists in the mix and they havent really aged well?

ill say this much, im absolutely positive herbert read foundation before he wrote dune. which is a hearty compliment. but yeah...

regarding the relentless empowerment, it seems grossly out of place. harry in his hologram describing his peers outrage at being bested 'by a woman, no less' was just fucking stupid and needless and awkward. its bad writing.

and to put a slightly different spin on this, perhaps the empowerment shit wouldnt be so off putting if the women of color parts were better written? couldnt hurt im guessing.

The hero of the source material is essentially Psychohistory>Foundation>Hari Seldon. The Foundation oversees that the Seldon Plan comes to fruition and improves it while working on predictive models. The villains are whoever oppose that. Going further from here would be too spoilery.

Asimov wanted to write a short story about a fall of an empire. Once his publisher wanted more the story became more about psychohistory. Psychohistory is just about large groups having a certain predictability compared to individuals. Our conveniently closest relative is in economics and just like in economics you can manipulate masses to certain directions. Macrolevel changes are slow and follow certain trajectories, but they have built in points where they change direction. To a degree the trajectory is set in the short term and crashes are set in the long term. They are all based on previous events. We're highly limited in what we can do to change course in a very short period of time, but we can kinda plant seeds for the future. How any of it pans out depends on the accuracy of our predictive models.

And that's the series. GL with that.

lmao ok im reigning in my expectations.

its a real shame that they couldnt just say 'ok lets pace this like an actual story', like the BBC did with tinker tailor.

but learning about how loose they are playing with the soure material explains so much... it also really underscores how they are going WAY out of their way to paint empire in overtly racist strokes, eg there are virtually no people of color to be found in those scenes, while saturating us with shoddy black/arab fremen knockoffs in every other culture they build out.

lets just say its holding up poorly to scrutiny but fuck it, ill stay on this horse.

EP6 was mostly stupid but at least something is happening.

There's a good amount of tropes used in the worst possible way. I'm not a huge fan of the "red shirts"/"mooks", random capture trope things or toddlers do stuff. I expect that from any Star Wars related tittle, but it's there because of the target demographic. It's insanely hard to try to sell that to anyone who has read the books or anyone that would be interested in diplomacy, power struggle or anything that takes more than 10 seconds to resolve.

If you're trying to remain somewhat loyal to the source material, just go with the GoT plan. You can't replicate Mandalorian. Give us tiddies and dragons. You can hang dong for the ladies. But you're not a SW title. There's no nostalgia. No one is giving you a pass for stupid shit.

Empire stuff remains the most interesting part. So far nothing about the Foundation seems interesting or competent. I'm fully rooting for the Empire to squash those puny insurrectionists and get back to the good stuff. At least they have a kid friendly harem.

so... boy is this show not very good.

it feels like FX channel caliber nonsense.

excluding empire, none of it is really watchable. and now they are watering down empire.

i dont give a shit if a single other character lives or dies right now. none of it would mean anything to me. to the last, they do not do or say interesting things.

id watch 300 episodes of empire just swimming against the tide of collapse and id do it loyally.

but believe it or not i actually dont care if huntress punches someone in the face, or if one of those kids gets sold into slavery, or if little miss big daddy kane hair figures out how to morph one of the vaults into that S symbol we used to draw on our school books, none of it matters to me because i dont care about any of it. oooo are we going to do wacky adventures where her skell boyfriend misjudges an old smuggler friends loyalty? will huntress punch someone in the face again? will the only black person on the screen make another impassioned speech which confounds the status quo?

its like you said, ive seen it all before, which is a shocking failure in a show with a predicate reality that ive literally never seen before.

also randoms whose taste i trust are saying this show is nose diving so its not just us, this is really burning up on accidental re-entry at this point.

im sure season 2 will fix everything tho.

haven't seen any of the show yet, but I've re-read the first 5 Foundation books for the first time in 30 yrs, and I feel like its worth mentioning that the series was great because it was first, and it was an innovative idea, but the books are not well written in any sense that we'd consider timeless. They were adapted magazine stories made longform.

Books 1-2 are the same thing over and over, a cavalcade of exposition. People take sides, an unexpected thing happens, and someone tells you why whatever happened at the end, that shit was unavoidable somehow.

A: Hey, we got a problem. We need to side with these cats.
B: No, we got TWO problems. We should side with THESE cats.
C: Just hang out, Seldon said it'll be good. (Durr, sez everyone. Pick a fucking side!)
PROBLEM SOLVES ITSELF OR MAGIC OR WHATNOT
A: What happened? Our enemies perished! My problem is solved somehow!
B: What happened? Our enemies perished! My problem is solved somehow!
C: We didn't do shit! Hari Seldon said all this shit was gonna take care of itself if only we were acted like we were paralized or froze like deer or whatever, and it's all good now!

like wtf they are just absolutely burning through principles. also im 90% sure we've seen the 'this ship jumps to a random location every X seconds' plot before... maybe battlestar galactica?

which btw was very good..

i have this real awful suspicion that her boyfriend faked being out of control then snuck back onto his ship and etc etc and somehow shes rescued or something.

eyerolllllll

liked tonights episode more than most of the others but the jumps between plots gets exasperating.

I read the Foundation books a long time ago, but dont remember much except for the super broad strokes. Based on trailers it seems the show runners mostly ignore the actual source material and turned the story into a Wokastrophe. Is this a fair assessment, or is this actually worth watching? Keep in mind I am completely uninterested in consuming any entertainment infused with 21st century US leftist grievance politics, and it looks like there is enough of this going on in this series that it just isn't for me. Is this fair?

ive been reading some reviews of the last ep on avclub and its eye opening. like apparently they might be hamstrung to an extent because they didnt secure the rights to an adjacent / supporting series of books which inform Demerzel's true nature vis a vis Zeroth Law. hence her merc'ing that broad on Day's orders.

i get the feeling we are basically treating the characters like tea leaves and swishing them around and where they settle in season 1, that will more or less provide the roots for season 2 to take form. because this whole fucking season is about swishing characters around and so far there really isnt a lot of obvious logic to it.

also an honest shout out to Day confronting his lack of humanity and being shook to the fucking marrow. we have 2 eps left and so far its pointing in the exact direction we predicted early on; Empire is clutch as fuck and most everything else is obvious and shitty extrapolation.

i havent read the books and i came into this cold so im not going to treat this like a spoiler because its pure conjecture;

Zeroth Law is basically the protocols by which a robot exists, its a moral framework that cannot be violated through act of will. one of the core principles of that framework is that robots cannot harm humans / humanity. this btw is why theres so much outrage about Demerzel killing Halima; people who read the books are really struggling to make sense of it.

i think the reason they might be playing coy with openly defining Zeroth Law stuff because if they fleshed it out, it would paint a fairly direct line from the end of ep 8 to Demerzel killing Empire.

Empire's inability to have a vision in the salt cave means he has no soul and is not, by strictest definition, human, which was Halima's accusation.

so at some point the evidence could / would relieve Demerzel of the moral confines of her protocols and allow her to end Empire possibly.

which lets be honest is a bit of symmetrical plot architecture that plays very well on paper.