History Series / Foundation2021

* AdaptationAmalgamation / DividedForAdaptation / HardToAdaptWork: It would have been extremely difficult to film the the original short stories as decent videos. They have been almagated together, then divided into seasons and episodes.

* ShoutOut: The Imperial jump ships bear a striking resemblance to [[{{Franchise/MassEffect}} Mass Relays]].

** During Hari Seldon's time, the Empire was already past its peak but this was not yet evident to most people. In episode 3, signs of that decline have become impossible to hide: we see that the Empire [[spoiler:has not repaired the destroyed Star Bridge in the intervening decades, nor continued to enforce its blockade of Anacreon and Thespis]]. There are also little hints throughout Season 1 that there's a broad pattern, galaxy-wide, towards infrastructure collapse and cultural stagnation: Synnax's poles are melting due to overmining, but its people shun scientific solutions and just cling to religion. Also it's mentioned that the water desalination infrastructure on the Luminist planet has collapsed. These are planets still part of the Empire: out on the Periphery, the first planets have degenerated into outright "barbarism" as their tech base has collapsed (they need Foundation specialists to restore and Imperial dreadnought because they no longer possess this ability). When Seldon is confronted by the Cleons they insist that they're in an era of stability, with their genetic dynasty of cloned emperors putting a stop to any major civil war in the past four centuries - to which Seldon points out this is also a sign that the Empire has grown too static and unchanging (a similar exchange happened in the book, which didn't have the clone Emperors, but where Seldon directly points out that the lack of recent civil wars is really a bad sign because it's a peace due to ''exhaustion'').

** This continues into Season 2, as Cleon XVII (the current Brother Day) feels his mortality creeping in due to [[spoiler:the corruption of the imperial genome]], and is desperate to compensate by having children to procreate like a normal person.
** Cleon XVII's actions as Brother Day, while done out of a certain level of desperation, are nonetheless more proactive than Cleon XVI was when he was reigning, something the latter now deeply regrets, wondering if he'll be forgotten as just a footnote in the Genetic Dynasty's history.

** Seldon predicts that a galaxy-wide apocalypse will occur in 500 years or less, with tens of thousands of planets either reduced to barbarism or destroyed outright.

** During Hari Seldon's time, the Empire was already past its peak but this was not yet evident to most people. In episode 3, signs of that decline have become impossible to hide: we see that the Empire [[spoiler:has not repaired the destroyed Star Bridge in the intervening decades, nor continued to enforce its blockade of Anacreon and Thespis]].

* EarthThatUsedToBeBetter: Humanity has colonized so many planets over the past several thousand years that nobody knows where the species originated. In a flashback where Salvor Hardin asks her father where they came from he lists Alpha Centauri, Sirius, and "a little planet called Earth" as possible homeworlds.

* YearInsideHourOutside: Time flows differently inside the Vault. When Poly and Costant follow Hober Mallow inside, they find that he's been wandering it for two days while from their perspective, it's barely been a few minutes since he went in. [[spoiler: It's also why that version of Hari is still so stable compared to the one with Gaal who spent almost a century and a half of captivity in real time.]]

* NotTheFallThatKillsYou: When Cleon XIV jumps out of the palace window, it's shown that he survives thanks to his personal force deflector. However, while the deflector prevents the actual impact, it does nil to slow down the abrupt stop that would have actually killed him.

* MeaningfulName: Demerzel's name sounds very close to the anglicized pronunciation of ''mademoiselle'', which was once the traditional form of address for a governess. Her service to the Cleons often involves acting as a governess.