Series / Foundation (2021)

aka: Foundation

Change your fate.

"The Empire will fall. Order will vanish. Interstellar wars will be endless. Ten thousand worlds reduced to radioactive cinders. Nothing we do can prevent this... But we CAN shorten the dark ages that follow."

— Dr. Hari Seldon

Foundation is a Science Fiction TV Series serving as a Adaptation Inspiration of Isaac Asimov's Foundation. The show was produced and released through Apple TV+, executive produced by David S. Goyer and David Ellison. Members of the production team include Josh Friedman, serving as scriptwriter, and Robyn Asimov, as executive producer.

Millennia in the future, all of humanity lives under the peace and shadow of the Galactic Empire. This peace is disturbed when a university mathematician named Hari Seldon (Jared Harris) begins publishing future predictions based on mathematical formulas that indicate the Galactic Empire is in a slow death spiral. The emperors of the Triple Throne, Brother Dawn (Cooper Carter & Cassian Bilton), Brother Day (Lee Pace), and Brother Dusk (Terrence Mann), clones of the original Emperor Cleon I at different stages of his life, must decide whether to heed Seldon's warnings or eliminate him. Stuck in the middle of this power struggle is Seldon's newest assistant, Gaal Dornick (Lou Llobell), who may hold Seldon's fate - and the future of the Galaxy - in her hands.

The show premiered on September 24th, 2021. On October 7th, 2021 it was renewed for a second season, which premiered July 14th, 2023.

Trailers: Teaser #1, Teaser #2, Full Trailer, Season 2 Teaser, Season 2 Full Trailer.

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Foundation provides examples of:

• Absent Aliens: No non-human sapient species have appeared or been referenced so far, although one theory regarding the Vault is that it was built by alien Precursors long ago.
• Abusive Parents: During their conversation inside the Vault on Terminus, Hober Mallow and Hari Seldon talked about how their fathers often beat them, and how they ran away from home to escape their father's fists.
• Adaptational Abomination: The Prime Radiant, in the original books, was merely a computer database for making psychohistorical predictions - a hyperadvanced one, but otherwise mundane. The series makes it into a full-fledged artificial intelligence whose hardware is comprised of four-dimensional objects somehow folded into three-dimensional space.
• Actionized Adaptation: The original stories are nearly devoid of on-stage action, albeit they contain wars that devastate whole planets.
• Adaptation Amalgamation / Divided for Adaptation / Hard-to-Adapt Work: It would have been extremely difficult to film the the original short stories as decent videos. They have been amalgamated together, then divided into seasons and episodes.
• Adaptational Angst Upgrade:
  • In the book, Gaal Dornick was simply a provincial mathematician joining the Seldon Project. In the show, she leaves her home world one step ahead of a lynch mob that considers science heretical, and has had to deal with isolation for her beliefs all her life.
  • In the books, Raych was a street kid who had never known his birth parents and was Happily Adopted by Hari Seldon and his wife Dors Venabili. Here, his father was a widowed heatsinker who suffered a severe injury at work; Raych fell in with Seldon after he caught him stealing textbooks to sell for medical treatment, and ended up neglecting him in favor of his new mathematical career, which drove his father to drink. Raych's lingering guilt over this, combined with his anger at Seldon for his part in it — not to mention the fact that Seldon never even remembers the details — ultimately drives him to murder him.^{Bigger spoiler} Or so it initially appears, as it turns out this was actually done at Seldon's own instigation, and he's Not Quite Dead.
  • In the source material, there is no greater justification for the "Barbarian Kingdoms" to break from the Empire other than local elites seizing the power when they spot the opportunity. In the series, their peoples are summarily held responsible for a terrorist attack and subjected to genocidal bombing and subsequent blockade.
• Adaptation Expansion: The journey of the Foundation and its early days on Terminus get much more spotlight than in the books. Also, the different cultures existing within the Empire are presented in greater detail, most notably Anacreon and Synnax.
• Adaptational Early Appearance:
  • The show adapts using the internal story order, not the written order, so a number of elements are introduced early based on their appears in the prequel which are not as well known.
  • "Eto Demerzel", a.k.a. R. Daneel Olivaw
  • The existence of psychic abilities and the Second Foundation that is based on them.
  • "The Mule" first shows up in one of Gaal's visions of the future, long before he's set to actually become a threat to the Foundation.
• Adaptational Villainy: Anacreon is not particularly malicious in the book, just trying to survive and prevail in the overall tumult. In the series, it is Driven to Villainy by the Empire's brutal handling and plots a scheme to obliterate Trantor and kill billions in the process in revenge.
• Altar Diplomacy: In Season 2, Brother Day (Cleon XVII) seeks to arrange a marriage with Queen Sareth of Cloud Dominion in order to shore up the Empire's slow decay.
• Alien Sky
  • Terminus has two moons.
  • Synnax has a ring system.
  • Zig-zagged with Trantor which has an imitation of its own sky on the inner surface of its outermost shell, covering the entire planet. Then, the Star Bridge crashes through that shell, creating a visible rift in the "sky" with pieces of it falling down.
• Alternative Number System: When the Foundation is discussing what knowledge to preserve for the coming dark ages, it is mentioned that not every human civilization uses 10 as their base. Some use 12 or 27 (the latter is "based on counting body parts").
• Anachronic Order: "The Last Empress" reveals that the events of season 2 are not taking place in the order that has been presented to the audience — Gaal and Salvor's storyline takes place sometime before the Terminus/Trantor storyline. Gaal tells her vision of the future to Salvor, who passes on the name "Hober Mallow" to the Hari Seldon in the Vault in this episode. This is what causes Hari to call for Hober several episodes prior.
• Anyone Can Die: Given that the series spans over several hundred years, it's only natural that not all key characters will survive until the end of the series. Even so, the death of Salvor Hardin at the hands of Tellem Bond also shows that even visions and prophecies of future deaths won't guarantee that they'll survive until that point in time.
• And I Must Scream:
  • Demerzel literally cannot act against her programming, even if she wants to — her body will act against her will if necessary. This is best exemplified in the first season finale by her killing Cleon XIV to uphold the purity of the genetic dynasty, despite her genuine love for him. At that time she was cool and unemotional, noting her loyalty was absolute and to the Empire, but later that night and in private she rips off her synthetic face and screams in anguish. And it gets worse in Season 2, where we learn that she's forced by her programming to love the memory of Cleon I and preserve his vision, even if it means having to kill any of his successors, whom she genuinely cares for.
  • Azura's ultimate fate. For her role in the rebel plot that sabotaged the original Cleon's DNA and indirectly led to the death of Cleon XIV, Cleon XIII kills her entire extended family and everyone she's ever known and condemns her to life in a sensory deprivation chamber, effectively un-personing her and subjecting her to a Fate Worse than Death in one go.
  • As shown in the Season 2 premiere, the copy of Seldon's mind inside the Prime Radiant spent the 138 years in-between seasons trapped completely self-aware in darkness and cramped spaces.
• Apocalypse How:
  • 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. The actual cause of the fall is due to subtle, centuries-long macro-level factors varying from one region to the next, but the short version is that the Galactic Empire has stagnated (politically, technologically, economically, and culturally).
• The Ark: In the Season 2 finale, the Vault turns out to have acted as this for Terminus, transporting the whole population inside in order to save them while the Empire destroyed the planet.
• Artistic Licence – Biology:
  • When Cleon XII shows Cleon XIV the mural he has painted of the raptor birds, he has painted three of them in red because he suspects Cleon XIV cannot see red due to red-green colour blindness. However, this isn't how color blindness works. He would still be able to see the shapes and outlines of the birds against the background in the same way that a person with normal vision would still see them if the painting were turned into grayscale. Actual color blindness tests are designed so that the only way you can distinguish shapes is through pigmentation.
  • The Cleons are all exact genetic clones of the original, and they're all played by the same actors, looking completely identical. In real life, clones, much like identical twins, still have a lot of variation in their appearance. Presumably there's some sort of Applied Phlebotinum that makes them all look exactly the same.
• Artistic License – Space: Seldon's homeworld, Helicon, and its moon (which dominates the sky) are apparently so close together that they share an atmosphere; the native Moonshrikes can fly between the two freely. If two large planetary bodies were really that close together, the resultant tidal forces would have torn the moon apart long ago, and Helicon itself would be far too geologically active to be habitable.
• Assassination Attempt: In the Season 2 premiere, a group of assassins break into Cleon XVII's bedroom and attempt to kill him, although he and Demerzel manage to make short work of them.
• Asteroid Thicket: Anthor Belt is a straight example.
• Atomic Hate: The bombardment of Anacreon and Thespis, being nuclear in nature, wasn't just a one-and-done event. If Salvor's math is correct, over 70% of people on both worlds died of explosions, radiation poisoning, and cancer after all was said and done. The Anacreon raiders of Terminus were children when the Empire scorched their worlds.
• Batman Gambit: Played with. Seldon's mathematics can accurately predict how large groups of people will react, but can't account for the actions of single individuals. So he can be fairly sure how the Empire and its vast bureaucracy will react to him and his movement, but can only make educated guesses on how Brother Day (Cleon XII) will personally react. Seldon correctly manipulates the big picture so his Foundation is exiled to Terminus, but is surprised when Brother Day (Cleon XII) does not have Seldon executed.
• Belief Makes You Stupid: Played with.
  • On the one hand, in the first episode, the Synnaxians don't believe Gaal Dornick, whom they consider a heretic, when she predicts the planet is going to be further flooded. She's eventually proven right when she arrives Late to the Tragedy.
  • However, by episode 1x10, Cleon XIII's has taken to heart the Luminists preaching that cloning leads to a souls stagnation and decay. He says that the teachings of Luminism, and Seldon's psychohistory, have both arrived at the same conclusion: the Cleon Dynasty's practice of cloning, and their overall obsession with maintaining the status quo, is bringing about collapse, both for the Cleons personally, and for humanity as a whole.
  • By Season 2, the Foundation's evangelizing the "Galactic Spirit" to the periphery systems appears less about spreading scientific survival skills as shown in Season 1 and more like circus parlor tricks to encourage belief in Hari as a Prophet.
  • Overall, the theme of the show seams to be that inflexible adherence to any ideology, whether religious or secular, leads to ruin.
• Big Bad Ensemble: In season 2, there are multiple antagonists who are largely unconnected to each other and have differing goals. Brother Day (Cleon XVII) is the villain of the Foundation invasion storyline with Bel Riose serving as his unwilling Heavy and engineered the death of Queen Sareth's family with Demerzel to force her into a politically advantageous marriage to strengthen the flagging Empire's waning power. Tellem Bond is the villain of Hari, Gaal, and Salvor's storyline, a powerful Mentalic who views herself as superior to normal humans and wants to steal Gaal's body and psychic power to continue extending her own life. The Mule is the Greater-Scope Villain, a Mentalic warlord even stronger than Tellem who will threaten the galaxy 158 years into the future, and whose coming must be prepared for by creating the Second Foundation to safeguard the Plan. Finally, Eto Demerzel is revealed as the "forever Empress" of the Empire in the final episodes, Cleon I's true heir and successor, who grooms and moulds the clones as the public rulers, and is forced by the reprogramming Cleon gave her to safeguard the continuation of the Genetic Dynasty at all costs, despite not actually wanting to, and who ends up with one of the Prime Radiants at the end of the season and is determined to learn its secrets.
• Bittersweet Ending: Season 2 in a nutshell. Terminus is destroyed, and Hober dies, but the Foundation survives in the Vault-ship, Brother Day is killed, and the Empire crippled by the loss of its fleet and the Spacer rebellion, closer to complete collapse than it has ever been. Dusk and Rue are killed by Demerzel, but Dawn and Sareth escape Trantor to raise their child together, who as a full-blooded biological heir of Cleon's line would have a claim to the throne far stronger than the clones of the Genetic Dynasty. Meanwhile, Tellem Bond is killed for good, and the Mentalics she claimed to be shepherding are freed from her influence, but not before taking the young boy Josiah as her final host and Salvor sacrificing herself to save Gaal from her. However, even Salvor's death provides some hope, as it means she cannot now be killed in the future by The Mule, meaning despite Gaal's vision the future is not set in stone, and things can still be changed. Gaal and Hari repair their relationship with each other after a season of distrust and teach the Mentalics psychohistory in order to forge them into the Second Foundation that will be needed to challenge The Mule when he arrives, and then go into suspended animation so they will be there to face him as well.
• Black-and-Gray Morality: Sure, the Empire is a tyranny that holds the galaxy together with an iron fist, and may your gods help you if you draw its ire. But the chaos and strife that are predicted to replace it are much worse, leading to even more death and suffering. The Foundation is created to eventually spawn a Second Empire, not to reform the first one into something more humane; such a possibility likely doesn't exist.
• Blind Jump: The Ghost Ship Invictus suffered a major jump drive malfunction seven hundred years ago, causing it to jump to random locations in the galaxy beyond the crew's ability to control. As of the present day it's still jumping every few weeks, even though the crew is long dead.
• Book Burning:
  • The Seers on Synnax don't actually burn books on science, but (since the planet is covered in water) ceremonially sinks them in the ocean, along with the "heretics" reading them. Gaal participates in the ceremony where her old teacher is executed, but then covertly retrieves the math book he wanted her to read.
  • The "local constabulary" on Siwenna are seen at one point burning books on science and religion that contradict their lighting god religion.
• Brain Uploading:
  • Hari has his consciousness digitized and uploaded to the backup ship that Gaal ends up on, allowing him to continue working even after his body dies, specifically to build a Second Foundation. It later turns out that a second copy exists inside the Vault, which was formed from his coffin, in order to guide the Foundation through its crises.
  • The brains of the backup Cleon clones are being perpetually synchronized with the respective active ones, in order to provide immediate replacement if anything happens to them.
  • A copy of Cleon I's mind is kept stored with his preserved body, in case his successors are ever desperate enough to ask him for advice.
• Brown Note: The Vault emits a field that frightens away animals, and will render any being that comes too close unconscious. It's not lethal directly, but if left unattended too long the victims might die to dehydration over time.
• Bungled Suicide: Cleon XIV jumps out of his bedroom window but is saved by his personal force deflector breaking his fall.
• But for Me, It Was Tuesday: Invoked by Brother Day (Cleon XII); he tells Brother Dawn (Cleon XIII) that the Anacreon-Thespis negotiations aren't even the most important thing they'll do this week, while it will be the most important thing the delegates do in their entire lives. Played with, however, as he's saying that Dawn should not treat the negotiations as unimportant, as the trope usually implies.
• Call-Forward: Gaal's opening narration mentions several names who will be important to the story. The final name that she mentions is The Mule.
• Cargo Cult: The Foundation during Salvor's era starts to show signs of this, focusing more on waiting for Hari's theory to become reality than on taking individual action to make sure it does.
  Lewis: You have a connection with the Vault that could not possibly have been predicted. You are not baked into the model!
  Salvor: You're saying I'm not part of God's plan?
• The Chains of Commanding: General Bel Riose is summoned from his life on a prison colony and given all the power and troops personally loyal to him that he would need to overthrow Brother Day. He chooses to dutifully follow his orders instead, out of a desire to protect the citizens of the Empire.
• Chekhov's Gun:
  • Early in the series, Gaal struggles with a training simulation of drilling near unstable lava vents. Thirty years later, those same unstable lava vents are used to blow up the Anacreon corvettes.
  • In "The Sighted and the Seen", Brother Dusk (Cleon XVI) explains to Brother Dawn (Cleon XVIII) how on the historical murals, green marks are put on people's necks to identify them as traitors. In "Creation Myths", before Demerzel kills him for learning the truth of her and the Genetic Dynasty, Dusk manages to mark her neck, which Dawn later sees and gets the warning.
  • When introduced in "King and Commoner", Hober demonstrates a piece of teleportation tech that can make two people of similar body mass switch places. Riose confiscates this from him upon his arrest in "Long Ago, Not Far Away", and in "Creation Myths", uses it to swap places with Brother Day when Day tries to throw him out an airlock.
• The Chessmaster: Seldon, of a lighter variety. To execute his Plan to save the Galaxy, he must account for quite a bit of hardship and suffering on the part of his followers. Everything that threatens the Plan gets mercilessly thrown out of the airlock, as poor Gaal and Raych have to learn when Seldon calculates that their being together poses a danger to the Plan. Granted, Seldon is visibly saddened by the sacrifices he needs to demand, and he is just as merciless to himself.
• City Planet: Trantor, the capital of the Galactic Empire.
• Clock King: Seldon insists Psychohistory fails at predicting individual actions, but personally seems to favor manipulating people based on their routines. When attempting to stage his death as a murder, he mentions that he'd been counting on Gaal swimming exactly 40 laps in the ship's pool at her usual time, counting primes. When she gets a sudden hunch that something is wrong, it completely throws a wrench in his plans.
• Clone Degeneration:
  • Brother Dawn (Cleon XIV) turns out to differ from the standard template, both for better and worse (he's a better shot than his brothers, for instance, but he's also colorblind). He lives in terror of what will happen if they find out. It turns out he was sabotaged by a rebel group so that his fear would drive him into their Honey Trap.
  • In the first season finale, it is revealed that the original Cleon's body, the source of the genetic material to make all successive Cleons, has been tampered with at some point, which means all current Cleons are deviating slightly from the original template...and the deviation is going to get worse.
• Clone Angst: A major theme in the first season. Most of the emperors are privately insecure about their nature as clones of Cleon I, which manifests in various ways.
  • Cleon XI (Brother Dusk in the first two episodes) is nearing the end of his life, and agonizes over whether his has been a worthy contribution to the legacy of his bloodline. He also quietly despairs over the looming collapse of the Empire as predicted by Seldon, which will make his bloodline obsolete.
  • Cleon XIII (Brother Day from episode 3 onward) is haunted by Seldon's criticism of the Genetic Dynasty, specifically his claim that the former would prove to be "just another grape, destined for the same bottle". It's clear that his Vision Quest in episode 8 isn't just about refuting Halima — he wants to prove to himself that he does possess a soul. When he completes the quest but fails to receive a vision anyway, he doesn't take it well.
  • Cleon XIV (Brother Dawn from episode 3 onward) has it the worst, being not only a clone but a defective clone who's left-handed and colorblind. He's spent his whole life carefully aping his brothers, knowing that they'll have him killed and replaced if they realize he's different.
  • And then it's revealed in the first season's finale that the entire Genetic Dynasty of Cleons is fundamentally flawed, as the original Cleon's body, used as the template for all later Cleons, has been corrupted at some point in the past few centuries, meaning all successive Cleons are imperfect duplicates of the first... and the entire concept of the Genetic Dynasty is that they're supposed to be perfect copies.
  • This continues into Season 2, as Cleon XVII (the current Brother Day) feels his mortality creeping in due to the corruption of the imperial genome, and is desperate to compensate by having children to procreate like a normal person and cement himself in history as the final Cleon and founding father of a new dynasty. His Villainous Breakdown is triggered when Vault Hari bluntly informs that despite everything he's done to try and individualise himself, he's still not considered an outlier in Seldon's plans.
  • 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.
  • Cleon XVIII (the Brother Dawn of Season 2) also finds himself heavily affected by Day's actions, as discontinuing the Genetic Dynasty in favor of normal procreation not just robs him of his status as heir, but renders him outright obsolete, and leaves him so morose that Sareth is able to emotionally manipulate him into agreeing to her plan to cuckold Day, as being the true father of her child will give him the purpose and legacy he's desperate for.
• Cloning Gambit:
  • Every Cleon clone has a backup that would step up to replace him in case the active clone is killed or incapacitated.
  • Azura's rebel group also have their own Cleon who was raised to hate the Empire, who is prepared to take Cleon XIV's place to sabotage things from within for them. Unfortunately for them, Cleon XII learns of their plans and wipes them out, clone included.
• Colony Drop:
  • In the pilot, a terrorist attack severs the tether of Trantor's Space Elevator from the orbiting space station, causing the cable to fall and, in Day's words, "wrap itself around the planet like a garrote". It leaves a scar 50 levels deep on the City Planet and kills 100 million people.
  • This turns out to be Phara's plan for the Invictus. Rather than using its on-board weapons, she intends to slam the ship itself into Trantor and wipe out the population, decapitating the Empire as revenge for their bombing of Anacreon. Salvor points out that using it as a warship would be more sensible, but is rebuffed.
  • In "Long Ago, Not Far Away", Cleon XVII orders Bel Riose to bring the Invictus down upon Terminus, presumably destroying it and sacrificing Glawen Curr.
• Colorblind Confusion: Brother Dawn (Cleon XIV) is hiding his colorblindness out of (well-founded, it turns out) fear of being considered defective. When Brother Dusk (Cleon XII) has reason to suspect, he has a new section of the palace mural painted where only 3 birds are visible to the colorblind, and 6 to those without it. When Dawn realizes he's been found out, he panics.
• Coming of Age Story: A Brother Dawn who is about to become Brother Day must both show his prowess as a hunter and sleep with a woman.
• Composite Character: Hardin is the daughter of Raych and a powerful psychic, merging Hardin with Wanda Seldon.
• Conflicting Loyalty: Demerzel is utterly loyal to the Empire due to her programming, and is also a devout follower of Luminism. When the religion starts leaning towards radical beliefs that put it in opposition to the genetic dynasty, she finds herself torn.
• Cool Starship: Imperial warships have a very distinctive design◊, consisting of a vertical blade-like hull with a large ring structure at the top, which doubles as a weapons mount and jumpdrive. The Invictus doesn't have the blade, and instead consists entirely of the rings, albeit scaled up significantly.
• Corrupt the Cutie: Essentially what happens to the "Dawn" clone of the Emperor. Every generation for hundreds of years until he's just as brutal as the last Emperor. Slightly subverted, as Cleon XIII, the Brother Dawn when Seldon made his proclamations, is frustrated that, in the 30 years since Seldon's exile, things HAVE gotten worse, and now, as Brother Day, the reigning Emperor, he is trying to hold the Empire together. He even admits during the first season finale that he wanted to be a better Cleon than his predecessor at some point.
• Crystal Spires and Togas: The Empire seems to be in transition to this, as the Emperors wear robes, technology is becoming more miniaturized and thus less visible, and the high society is focused more on arts and rituals than tech.
• Cutting the Knot: How Gaal won the contest to meet and work with Hari. She applied a long-disused mathematical principle to a complex problem that Hari used to find his next protégé.
• Cyborg Helmsman: Older jump ships required a cyborg navigator with their brain wired into the navigation computer to calculate a jump course, it's possible for an unmodified human to plug themselves in, but the jump will kill them.
• Dark Action Girl: Phara, the Grand Huntress of Anacreon, is Salvor's equal in combat and an Omnicidal Maniac who wants the Empire to burn and the galaxy with it.
• Dawn of an Era: The Foundation side of the story. Seldon's followers are exiled to Terminus where they establish a new colony that will over centuries restore the Galactic Empire.
• Death World: Terminus. It's an inhospitable world with little water or food and many deadly predators.
• Death Seeker: Salvor notes that she sees an empty, consuming darkness inside of Phara, and that she wants not just to cause death but die herself. This is borne out when Phara explains her plot to use the Invictus to ram into Trantor, and she has no hesitation from the fact that even if successful the Empire would finish the job of destroying Anacreon and hunt down all its people.
• Dies Differently in Adaptation: In the books, Seldon passed away peacefully in his office from old age. Here, he's stabbed to death by Raych in the second episode. Or so it seems...
• Dire Beast: Gaal encounters an enormous eight-eyed cat beast called a Bishop's Claw deep in a cave while drilling for geothermal power. The cat makes mince meat of the colonists. Thankfully it was all a simulation.
• Disaster Dominoes:
  • The attack on the Space Elevator in the first episode initially looks like a problem limited to space. Until the gravity of the planet begins pulling the elevator back to Trantor. The elevator line impacts the surface— then goes down fifty levels, leaving a canyon of destruction across the City Planet, killing 100 million Imperial citizens.
  • The dominos are STILL falling 30 years later during Salvor's era. Above Trantor, the Empire still hasn't begun to rebuild the Star Bridge. Meanwhile on the ground, the Sinkers, a Torches and Pitchforks group from the lower levels that were devastated by the Star Bridge's fall, regularly clash with imperial security forces.
• Disintegration Chamber: The eldest clone Emperor undergoes "ascension" upon the arrival of a new baby clone, stepping into a beam of light which reduces him to a few ashes in an instant.
• Distress Call: Hugo fakes a suit malfunction to reach an old Thespin mining station, and sends one to the Thespin government to get help against Phara's plan.
• Do Well, But Not Perfect: Cleon XIV is considerably better at hunting than Cleon XII, who himself holds the record of three bird kills on a hunt. Cleon XIV deliberately orders an assistant to dispose of three of his six kills so as not to arouse suspicion. Not that this saves him in the end.
• Earth That Used to Be Better: 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. Given that the series is set roughly 18 to 20 thousand years in the future (give or take), little of Earth's cultural heritage survives because societies kept evolving, i.e. none of the major religions from contemporary Earth seem to be actively practiced anymore, as other faiths rose, fell, changed and split over the millennia. Another little hint that the story is set in our galaxy, just in the very far future, came in Season 2 when Ducem Barr - a collector of archaic books - gave Bel Riose a hardcover copy of an old story about a prince and his charioteer on the eve of a great battle discussing the rationale for war.
• The Emperor: The Emperor is in fact three Emperors — clones of the original Emperor Cleon I at different life stages.
• The Empire: The Galactic Empire which governs every single human being in the galaxy. For now...
• End of an Age: The Empire side of the story shows the decline of the Galactic Empire.
  • 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 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 an 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).
  • In season 2, well over a century later, the Empire's decline has hastened and people openly discuss how it has lost substantial outlying territories, and how Cleon XVII is considering a political marriage to the Queen of the Cloud Dominion to join their two realms together in a bid to arrest the Empire's contracture. Trantor has also manifested a dramatic change: a trio of massive, ostentatious rings circle Trantor to replace the Star Bridge. However, it is pointed out that not only are the rings a highly inefficient means of ferrying goods and people to and from Trantor's surface, but they can also be interpreted as a symbol of the Empire's increasing inward focus and defensiveness as its borders and influence wane.
  • In the original stories, the Empire's decline was manifest to individuals in the form of limited job opportunities, etc.
• Everyone Has Standards: Cleon XVI, the Brother Dusk at the start of Season 2, is disgusted by Cleon XVII (the current Brother Day) having a sexual affair with Demerzel, not just because she raised him but viewing it as an abuse of authority.
• Evil Old Folks: Cleon XII, who becomes Brother Dusk in episode 3 and remains so for the rest of the first season, is the most ruthless of the emperors, the most devoted to the genetic dynasty and enforcing its purity, and the one who shows the least regard for the well-being of Imperial citizens. Accordingly, he's the antagonist of Cleon XIV's arc and ultimately the only one who doesn't mourn the younger clone's death.
• Exotic Eye Designs: Thespins have purple irises, though the hue varies from person to person.
• Expendable Clone: The Genetic Dynasty combines this and Clones Are People, Too. The different Cleons have different personalities and are treated as real, non-expendable people by both the narration and most of the characters. However, if one of them is killed (including by Demerzel herself if her programming judges that clone a threat to the Genetic Dynasty as a whole), or deserts the Empire, Demerzel will decant a tank-grown clone of the same biological age, preloaded with memories that will allow him to immediately assume his duties as emperor. This happens offscreen between seasons 1 and 2 to replace Cleon XIV, whom Demerzel killed against her own will, and again at the end of season 2, when, for the first time in the Genetic Dynasty's history, Demerzel is forced to replace all three Cleons at once after two of them die and the third defects and escapes Trantor.
• Extra-Dimensional Shortcut: The Empire's jumpships plot a course through the fourth dimension to jump from one end of the galaxy to another almost instantaneously.
• Eye Colour Change: Hugo is introduced with blue-green eyes and later reveals he was originally from Thespis but is "blood neutral", which allows him to travel many ports and avoid the anti-Thespin persecution. In "The Missing Piece" he radios the remaining Thespian authorities about Phara's plan, notably reverting to his native Thespin and original name. In the next episode, his eyes are now the more common Thespin indigo purple, making both a visual and practical cue of him returning to his roots.
• Face Death with Dignity: When it's clear that Shining Destiny is going to explode, everyone on the ship, including the imperial soldiers aboard, face their impending doom with either stoicism or good humor.
• Faceless Goons:
  • Imperial soldiers and security personnel are shown wearing black and gold armor with dark visors obscuring their faces. On the rare occasions when one of them removes his helm, it always comes across as slightly surprising that he's just a regular person under there.
  • Anacreon soldiers also qualify, their faces hidden by intricate metal visors.
• Faking the Dead: In the first season finale, the entire Foundation does this, using the Invictus to fake a mega solar flare destroying Terminus, counting on the Empire not bothering to check what they believe is a dead planet, allowing the Foundation and its new Anacreon and Thespian allies time to start building a new nation.
• False Flag Operation:
  • One of these was responsible for the centuries-long conflict between Anacreon and Thespis. Specifically, Cleon II had the Anacreon Grand Huntress murdered on the night of her wedding to the Thespian king and framed him for it, because a union between the two planets would threaten the Empire's power.
  • In the Season 2 finale, it's revealed that Demerzel was the one who sent the Blind Angel assassins after Brother Day (Cleon XVII), never intending them to succeed and leaving a trail that points to Sareth, in order to sabotage her and Day's marriage, which would end the Genetic Dynasty that Demerzel is programmed to protect at all costs.
• False Reassurance: A tragic example. When Day and Dusk are fighting over the fate of Cleon XIV, he begs Demerzel "don't let them kill me." Demerzel promises that she won't and then proceeds to kill him herself.
• Fantasy Counterpart Culture: The people of Anacreon have Middle-Eastern looks, speak a Semitic-sounding language, are a Proud Warrior Race, and an Anacreon is one of two terrorists in a major terrorist attack.
• Fantastic Honorifics: Each of the Emperor clones that comprise the ruling Genetic Dynasty is addressed as Empire, with failure to address them as such considered immensely disrespectful.
• Faster-Than-Light Travel: The show features three separate forms of FTL interstellar travel:
  • The Jump Drive allows ships to travel almost anywhere in the galaxy almost instantaneously. The Galactic Empire has a monopoly on it.
  • The "Slow Ships" use an undetermined FTL drive which is much slower, but can still cover 50,000 light-years in 878 days.
  • Season 2 introduces "gates", one of which is used by the Queen of the Cloud Dominion and her retinue to visit Trantor. Gates appear to be a means of FTL travel for ships that lack their own jump drives, but obviously you can only use them travel to locations where other gates have been built.
• Fate Worse than Death: Azura is ultimately condemned to one of these, courtesy of a furious Cleon XIII. First, he kills literally everyone who ever knew of her in one fell swoop, rendering her an Un-person. Then he sentences her to life in a sensory deprivation chamber, during which she'll be fed through an IV and kept alive as long as possible to prolong the torture.
• Faux Affably Evil: Tellem Bond behaves like an irreverent, grandmotherly figure who is nonetheless willing to make hard decisions to protect her flock. It eventually becomes clear that this is all an act, and she's actually a murderous, body-hopping tyrant interested only in her own survival. After she's killed, it's revealed that even her own followers were being dominated by her mental abilities to follow her against their will.
• The Fettered: Demerzel, by virtue of being a gynoid that has been programmed to serve the Empire, with complete loyalty to the Genetic Dynasty. She laments that she has no choice in her actions to Halima, who at first can't fathom why, since free will is inherent to sentient beings until Demerzel explains the situation. She can, however, place her faith first when it doesn't conflict with her duty, which Cleon finds very upsetting and incomprehensible.
• Fling a Light into the Future: The ultimate mission of the Foundation. To give future generations the ability to end the Galactic Dark Age just as it begins, and save the human race from extinguishing itself.
• Forced to Watch: The heads of the delegations from Anacreon and Thespis are forced to watch, simultaneously, the execution of their own delegations and the holo-transmission of their home worlds being bombed at the hands of the Empire.
• Full-Frontal Assault: The Assassination Attempt on Cleon XVII in the Season 2 premiere happens while he's in the middle of sex, so he fights off his assailants nude.
• Gender Flip: Due to the Foundation Series having an almost all-male cast, Apple TV+ chose to expand the casting options for their Live-Action Adaptation by changing some of the characters. Gaal Dornick, Salvor Hardin, and Lars Avakim are cast as women instead of men. Demerzel's casting is a more interesting situation, as the original character is simply a humaniform robot that pretended to be a male human named Eto Demerzel, but had no actual gender, while its counterpart in the show presents as female.
• Genocide Backfire: The Empire massacres the Anacreon homeworld for their supposed role in the Star Bridge bombing. Thirty years later, the survivors have settled on Then Let Me Be Evil and are out to destroy Trantor in revenge.
• Ghost Ship: The Imperial warship Invictus has become one. Over 700 years, it appears all across the galaxy, refusing hails, only to appear months or years later elsewhere.
• A God Am I:
  • Tellem Bond was worshipped as a god in her younger days and tells Gaal that it wasn't healthy for her. She wasn't kidding, because Bond later reveals that she clearly hasn't shed the impression.
  • The Foundation goes through a religious phase in Season 2 in which Hari is worshipped as a god. Cleon XVII tells him that, for all their flaws, the Genetic Dynasty never presented themselves as gods, though Hari counters that the assertion is debatable.
• Gravity Is Only a Theory: Gaal interprets Seldon's study of psychohistory as a theory. Seldon quickly moves her to understand that it's not a theory, and is proven right.
  Gaal: They're worried you can predict the future.
  Hari: They're worried people believe I can. And they don't like the future I predict.
• The Great Flood: The reason why Gaal's homeworld of Synnax is a water world that abhors mathematicians and scientists. They predicted the rise of the planet's seas and were branded heretics by the world's church. Even after the seas rose and proved them right, the planet's rulers hate and oppress any learned people.
• Heads I Win, Tails You Lose: Brother Day (Cleon XII) thinks his decision to exile Seldon and the Foundation to Terminus is this outcome. If Seldon is wrong, then he'll be no threat to the Empire. If Seldon is right, then the Emperors, either Cleon XII himself or a later Emperor, can use his research to stop the fall and claim credit if the Foundation saves the Galaxy.
• The Hecate Sisters: The Church of Luminism worships a Crone, Mother, and Maiden goddess that split from a single goddess in their myths. This reflects the configuration of a gas giant's moons.
• The Heretic: The reason why Gaal was given such a cold farewell from her homeworld. Mathematicians and scientists are considered wicked in the eyes of her people.
  Hari: This isn't Synnax, Gaal. Curiosity isn't a crime here.
• Holographic Terminal: During Seldon's trial, his testimony is broadcast to the Emperors and the public via a holographic witness stand.
• Hope Spot: A twofold one in the penultimate episode of the second season. Glawen Curr ends up surviving a devastating shot from the Invictus that crashes him onto Terminus. However, his husband Bel Riose has strict orders to crash the Invictus into Terminus, threatening to kill everything on the planet, which just so also happens to involve Glawen. Bel's refusal to follow said order would not only save the life of his husband, but also the lives of countless civilians on Terminus, and the Foundation itself. However, knowing the price of disobedience to the Emperor again, Bel still ends up following said order despite the grief it will cause him, ultimately sealing the fate of Terminus.
• Hotter and Sexier: Isaac Asimov never portrayed any sort of fanservice or sexual scene in his saga (though he was not above writing his characters making sexual jokes, like Bliss' fundament), but in the show, the characters have intimate relationships on screen, and Lee Pace can barely go an episode without at least taking his shirt off.
• Human Popsicle: Escape pods are equipped with these, as a necessity considering interstellar distances even with their slow FTL. Hugo uses this while trading between planets and appears in his 30s but is actually 70 years old.
• Human Subspecies: The Spacers, who are genetically engineered to be able to withstand the transition of FTL jumps, have abnormally long limbs and necks. Cleon XIII specifically states that he barely considers them human.
• Hyperspace Is a Scary Place: The reason people have to be in stasis when a jump drive is in effect is because the experience is too much for a human brain to handle. As one man puts it, "your body and your mind take two different trips." It is survivable, but has some nasty affects on your mental health that may or may not clear up over time.
• Idiot Ball: For no reason beyond plot expediency, no one in the Foundation feels the need to warn the incoming Imperial ship that the Anacreons have set up a massive, cloaked cannon capable of shooting it down.
• Ignored Expert: The Synnaxians don't believe Gaal, whom they consider a heretic, when she predicts the planet is going to be further flooded. She's eventually proven right when she arrives Late to the Tragedy. And then, of course, there's the catalyst of the entire story, with Seldon predicting the decline and fall of the Empire and almost nobody believing him.
• I Have Boobs, You Must Obey!: Used by one of the kids in the first episode. How do you get a boy to walk into a mental repulsion field put out by a supposedly haunted rock floating in the sky? By promising to show him your boobs if he succeeds.
• Immortality Begins at Twenty: Eto Demerzel. Justified, since she is a humanoid robot.
  • There is also the shadowmaster in the service of the Cleons, as after the time skip, he seems no different in age with no explanation given.
• Imperial Stormtrooper Marksmanship Academy: It seems like Anacreon soldiers can only ever score a hit at point-blank range.
• Insistent Terminology:
  Lewis: Let me be clear, Huntress Kaean...
  Phara: Grand Huntress.
• Instant A.I.: Just Add Water!: Downplayed. The Prime Radiant originates as a narrow AI for psychohistorical predictions (similar to real-life neural networks, so not possessing any real consciousness or will), but throughout some unexpected modifications performed by Yanna, develops into a general AI, a full-fledged individual on the level of Demerzel, and potentially greater.
• Kansas City Shuffle: The Anacreons' plan depended on the colonists and imperials to actively try to thwart the Anacreon incursion and thus walk into a trap. The captured Anacreon leader has a shield disruptor on her and is walked right into the building with the shield generator. The Imperial ship attacks straight into the path of a large cannon. Hardin is Properly Paranoid enough to know that they are being played, but figures out the real scheme too late to stop it.
• King Bob the Nth: Ever since Cleon I, all the emperors of the Genetic Dynasty have been called Cleon, even though there are always three of them in the office at once. Officially, they can be distinguished by their ordinal numbers (at the start of the series they are Cleon XI, XII, and XIII; by the start of Season 2, they're up to XVI, XVII, and XVIII). Within the court they avoid confusion by addressing each other as Dawn, Day and Dusk in seniority order.
• Large and in Charge: When Cleon is in the prime of his reign as Brother Day, he is very tall and quite muscled, making him an imposing physical presence over all of his subjects.
• Large Ham: Every Brother Day of the Empire is this. Since he is the one that has to give speeches to the masses, it has been practically a requirement for them since Cleon I.
• Laser-Guided Amnesia: The genetic dynasty has access to memory editing technology, which they use to preserve their secrets by erasing any memories their servants have that may compromise them.
• Last of His Kind:
  • Demerzel is the last of the robots, after humankind wiped them out, loyally serving the Empire since Cleon I.
  • Season 1 ends with the reveal that following a Time Skip, Gaal and Salvor are the last Synnaxians, the rest having succumbed to the rising seas decades ago.
• Late to the Tragedy: Gaal's cryo-pod arrives on her homeworld, Synnax, only for her to find it completely flooded and all its denizens gone, just like she warned.
• Lingerie Scene: In the second episode, we see Gaal in her underwear when she's undergoing a medical examination to check the fertility of her egg cells.
• Long Game: Seldon's grand scheme to shorten the period of barbarism from 30,000 to 1000 years.
• Look on My Works, Ye Mighty, and Despair: The Star Bridge is a monumental achievement dating back to the final years of Cleon I's reign. The terrorist attack that topples it and cuts through the ecumenopolis that is Trantor signals the beginning of the end for the Empire.
• Lost Technology: It's creeping in on both the Empire and the worlds on the fringe, and Hari Seldon's Foundation has the purpose of preserving as much of this technology as possible to aid in rebuilding civilization when the Empire collapses.
  • The Thespis Asteroid Thicket mining operation stopped after the Empire stopped supplying them with machines.
  • The Empire dragged its feet on rebuilding the Star Bridge that Cleon I had built, and over a century later the Star Bridge was finally replaced with an even more elaborate plant-girding megastructure, the three rings, that is nonetheless regarded as a boondoggle rather than a symbol of imperial resurgence.
  • Anacreon has no people with training in environmental systems and other advanced space faring technology.
  • While its jump drive is not as advanced as new ships, the Invictus is a 700 year old warship that is still the most powerful weapons platform ever built, doubling as a Super Weapon and Planet Killer.
  • The frontier planet Siwenna was abandoned by the Empire in the interval between seasons 1 and 2. The planet's civilization, which was dependent on imperial support, effectively collapsed into a pre-industrial state. The "local constabulary" is a disheveled mob that lynches offworlders and anyone deemed heretical to the planet's lightning god.
  • Another independent outlying planet, Korell, enjoys a much higher technological level than Siwenna, but appears to lack any jump-capable ships of its own and relies on a brutal military dictatorship to maintain public order.
• Ludicrous Gibs: The fate of the imperial mural artist, once Brother Day (Cleon XII) discovers that he has a copy of Seldon's predictions in his quarters. Darkly lampshaded early on in the conversation, when Day asks how hard it is to get crimson out of the walls.
• Lured into a Trap: The Imperial vessel sent to investigate missing reports from Terminus.
• Memory Gambit: Cleon XIV is told that every girl in the royal brothel gets her memory erased after a night spent with the Emperor. He uses this to be able to talk in all honesty to the girl he chooses rather than to sleep with her. Little does he know that before her amnesia treatment, she reports every word to Cleon XII, Brother Dusk.
• Mook–Face Turn: Over the course of three episodes, Salvor talks to Rowan about how Phara has no intention of surviving the attack on Trantor using the Invictus, that their actions will result in Rowan's daughter being killed in revenge, along with every surviving Anacreon. He eventually sides with Salvor when Phara returns and tries to kill Salvor.
• Must Not Die a Virgin: Before saving Poly and possibly engaging the Empire, Constant gets rid of her virginity by shagging with Hober Mallow.
• The Mutiny: Salvor and her companions deduce that this has happened aboard the Invictus. At some point their navigator died and they started jumping blindly. It's unclear what the exact sequence of events was, but it's suggested that because Hyperspace Is a Scary Place and sedatives and food started running low, the crew mutinied. The subsequent internal fighting led to the death of part of the crew. With no predictable way to get to an inhabited system, everyone still alive aboard the Invictus eventually died, the captain by her own hand.
• Nanomachines: The Empire uses these as a combination of Healing Factor, user identification for military ships, and tracking. Interestingly, a person can have their nanomachines removed and stolen.
• Neck Snap: How Demerzel kills Cleon XIV.
• Neutron Bomb: The orbital bombardment of Anacreon and Thespis was carried out with these. Afterwards it is correctly pointed out that the radiation poisoning caused by this type of bomb killed a significant amount of the survivors of the original bombardment.
• Nothing Is Scarier: We still have no idea who keeps setting up these plots against the Empire, or if they are even all connected.
  • The bio-bombs used in the destruction of the Star Bridge couldn't be traced back to their buyer, and Anacreon and Thespis officially denied any involvement in the attack. While Anacreon and Thespis have plenty of reasons to hate the Empire, the attacks came in the middle of peace talks between all three parties, and the ambassadors seemed as shocked as the Cleons that the Star Bridge collapsed. Furthermore, both bombers used ancient war chants from their respective cultures that would cement them as clearly Anacreon and Thespin to an outsider, but those cultures themselves haven't used in decades.
  • The plot to replace Cleon XIV also couldn't be traced back to its source, with Azura and her co-conspirators seemingly acting on their own, but with knowledge that even the Cleons didn't have: that their source of genetic material in the body of Cleon I had been tampered with at some point, and no one has any idea how it happened.
• N.G.O. Superpower: The Church of Luminism, one of the major religions of the Empire. Its reach is great enough that a power struggle over its next Proxima (leader) and future doctrine warrants a visit from Brother Day (Cleon XIII) in person.
• Oh, My Gods!:
  • Members of the Foundation and especially of the Church of the Galactic Spirit invoke the name of Seldon like that of a god or prophet (Poly even used the term "Second Coming" when talking about the reappearance of Seldon).
  • Others, such as Gaal, use a more generic "oh, gods" or "oh, my soul".
  • Some use "void" in curses (such as when Poly was talking about how something was too "void-damned" important to be said over sub-ether comms) as if it was a devil figure.
  • Some people on Terminus use the phrase "four moons" that way.
• One Judge to Rule Them All: The Empire is ruled by a triumvirate of Brother Dawn, Brother Day, and Brother Dusk, clones of Cleon I. However, Brother Day is "prime" and has supreme authority. Dusk serves as a mentor to him, and the two of them serve as mentors to Dawn.
• Orbital Bombardment: Anacreon and Thespis are subjected to brutal orbital bombardment at the hands of Imperial fleets hundreds of ships strong, as retaliation for their suspected role in the terrorist attack which cost the lives of a hundred million Trantorians.
• Our Clones Are Different: For centuries, The Empire has been ruled by the so-called "Genetic Dynasty", a series of clones of Emperor Cleon I, who felt that only identical copies of himself could preserve everything he had built. There are always three clones active at any time, all technically named Cleon with a new regnal number, but more usually known by the codenames Brother Dusk (the eldest of the three, now a senior advisor), Brother Day (the reigning Emperor), and Brother Dawn (the youngest of the three, being taught how to rule by the older two); when the current Dusk reaches his final years, he's "promoted" to Brother Darkness and euthanized by disintegration, while a new infant Dawn is decanted and the other two are each moved up a rank. Despite the standard age differences, they all view each other as brothers, though their relationships tend to feel more akin to grandfather-father-son. Also, in addition to being physically identical, their personalities are likewise, with few variations caused by their respective experiences. And each active clone also has backup bodies ready to be activated with full memory downloads in case anything happens to them.
  • A major plot point in Season 1 is that Cleon XIV (the current Brother Dawn) suffers from genetic errors that manifest in psychological and physical differences (such as colorblindness and being left-handed instead of right), which he desperately hides to avoid being terminated and replaced. It eventually turns out that this was caused by tampering by rebels, who wanted to make Dawn vulnerable to emotional manipulation so they could lure him away and replace him with a Cleon clone of their own, who has been raised to hate the Empire. While this plot is stopped, and Dawn killed and replaced in order to preserve the dynasty's integrity, it turns out to be All for Nothing, as the tampering to the clone's base (the original Cleon's preserved body) is irreversible, leaving all future clones imperfect.
  • Season 2 adds a very disturbing layer to the nature of the Genetic Dynasty: they're all puppets of their majordomo Demerzel, who was programmed by Cleon I to enforce his vision of what the dynasty should be, which is carried out by emotional manipulation and editing their memories to keep them on track.
• Our Founder:
  • A statue of Cleon I dominates the Trantorian skyline near the Imperial Library. It's destroyed in the Star Bridge's collapse.
  • A (much smaller) statue of Seldon is erected in the middle of the Terminus settlement.
• Out-Gambitted: Azura, her confederates and the False Dawn seem to have won when they manage to get Dawn strapped into their nanite transfer chair. Unfortunately for them, Dusk knew Dawn was being played the whole time and was just waiting for the right moment to send in the troops.
• The Peeping Tom: Cleon XIII has an unsettling habit of watching Eto Demerzel fix her artificial skin, though she is aware of it. She comments that he has been doing it ever since his childhood, and it appears to be this particular Cleon's kink.
• Pet the Dog: Cleon XIII develops companionship and later friendship with a fellow elderly pilgrim while on a Vision Quest, no doubt helped along thanks to the pilgrim's ignorance of his being Cleon and genuine encouragement and help in avoiding falling to two knees and failing. It visibly upsets Cleon when the pilgrim collapses and refuses to crawl to the side of the path so he could be rescued, instead intending to die on the pilgrimage as a worthy death. Once he faints, Cleon carries the pilgrim to the side of the path so he will be rescued. Though this was going against the pilgrim's wishes, it does show Cleon had a heart and was willing to expend precious energy and water to help him instead of just walking away.
  • It could be that he did it out of cruelty, as the man made it clear he wanted to die on the path and Cleon robbed him of the death he wanted.
• Pimped-Out Dress: The standard attire of Eto Demerzel is a formal dress with a skirt held out to the sides by a rigid structure. It looks a bit like what an 18th-century noblewoman on Earth would have worn.
• Portal Network: In season 2, it is revealed that a network of "gates" exists to allow ships without jump drives to cross vast distances quickly.
• Position of Literal Power: All Cleons are virtually unkillable due to their protective "auras," which are legally restricted only to them. And despite living a pampered and danger-free life, Day is also repeatedly shown to be a supreme badass in a fight even without his defensive technology. It's likely a combination of elite physical training and genetic manipulation to make him somewhat superhuman.
• Powered by a Black Hole: Imperial ships have a large negative space in their hulls, which generate a black hole to power their jumpdrives.
• Properly Paranoid: Imperial security appears to be extremely paranoid and severely limits what its charges can do (especially the young Brother Dawn). However, we are shown just how determined the Empire's enemies are and to what lengths they will go to find a weakness in that security and then exploit it to bring the Empire down.
• Public Execution: Happens not just to the Thespis and Anacreon delegates through a public hanging, but to their whole planets via bombardment as well. All of Trantor gets to watch as whole worlds are devastated as retaliation for the destruction of the Star Bridge.
• Punny Name: Cleon is an anagram of clone, which they all are.
• Reassignment Backfire: Hari and Gaal's fate is not death but exile to Terminus without access to jumpdrives. It's a backwater rock at the edge of the Galaxy, beyond even the barbarian kingdoms that the Empire does not control. It turns out that Hari was hoping that this would be their fate the whole time, since it would allow them to work without interruption.
• Really 700 Years Old:
  • Eto Demerzel is a robot who was already the majordomo to Cleon I, 400 years before the story begins.
  • Hugo, Salvor's significant other, appears to be in his 30's but is 70 years old thanks to spending most of his cargo runs in cryosleep.
  • Cryosleep leads to Gaal and Salvor becoming this.
• Religious Robot: Demerzel is both a robot and a devout practitioner of Luminism. This creates a conflict for her when her hardwired loyalty to the Empire and her faith clash with each other.
• Ring World Planet: By season 2, a series of these have been built in orbit of Trantor to replicate the Star Bridge's Space Elevator capabilities.
• Robo Sexual: Cleon XVII is engaged in a sexual affair with Demerzel, who is a robot. According to him, Cleon I did likewise.
• Robot War: Several of these took place centuries ago, with the robots and their sympathizers being wiped out save for one: Demerzel. Cleon I alludes to this as well in a flashback, noting that androids haven't been treated very well, historically.
• Rugged Scar: Phara's face is covered in scars from being caught in a blast during the bombardment of Anacreon by the Empire.
• Rule of Symbolism: When the Space Elevator falls, there is a prominent shot of it crushing a statue of Cleon I.
• Sadistic Choice: Cleon XVII orders Bel Riose to strike him as part of a test of character. Riose can't strike the emperor, but he also can't refuse a direct order from the emperor. Cleon taunts him to wonder which choice Cleon wants him to make: show his complete obedience by following the order or show his complete loyalty by refusing to do Cleon harm.
• The Scapegoat: The only evidence of Thespis and Anacreon being involved in the suicide bombing is the timing of the attack and recordings of the suicide bombers singing songs and reciting prayers from those worlds. It could be a Frame-Up, and the two planets seem to hate each other too much to ever cooperate. However, the Empire needs to find and punish the culprit. Thespis and Anacreon are officially blamed for the attack and subjected to a merciless Orbital Bombardment.
• Scare Dare: How the children of the Foundation interact with the Vault. It emits a field that repels any living thing — humans, animals, and insects — forcing them to pass out. The kids make bets that they can get closer and plant small flags in the dirt than their friends can.
• Sci-Fi Writers Have No Sense of Scale:
  • Gaal's travels in her Escape Pod in cryosleep are an example. While her first encounter was probably scripted by the Plan, she leaves to Synnax after that, where she would arrive 138 years later. It is not implied that escape pods have any FTL capabilities, and even if they travel close to the speed of light, that means that Synnax just happens to be ridiculously close to the path from Trantor to Terminus.
  • It's mentioned in passing that Gaal's escape from the slow ship headed for Terminus was at a distance of 40 light years from Terminus, but we know that it happened one year into their 3.5 years trip, and that Terminus is on the galactic periphery. For scale, the disc of our galaxy is about 185,000 light years across.
• Shout-Out:
  • The Imperial jump ships bear a striking resemblance to Mass Relays.
  • The Invictus Imperial war ship bears some resemblance to the spaceship from Event Horizon, namely the prow has same cross-shaped window, and its three rings shape is similar to the Gravity Drive of the titular spaceship, with both being capable of generating a black hole core for travel.
• Siblings Share the Throne: A variant. The Empire is ruled by three clones of Emperor Cleon I, referred to as Brother Dawn, Brother Day, and Brother Dusk in ascending order of age. A new Brother Dawn is decanted when the current Brother Dusk dies. They usually refer to one another as "brothers", but Cleon XIII confesses that he thinks of Cleon XIV as more of a son due to their significant age gap.
• Slogans: "Respect and enjoy the peace" for the Empire.
• Soiled City on a Hill: Trantor's future according to Hari. And very nearly happens early after the space elevator is destroyed by two terrorist bombers.
• Soldier vs. Warrior: The Anacreons are a Proud Warrior Race fond of hand-to-hand combat, who use Boring, but Practical ships and weapons. The Thespins, by contrast, are professional soldiers with flashier tech and more sophisticated tactics.
• Some Kind of Force Field: All the Cleons have a personal forcefield, when touched it creates golden geometric patterns, Beehive Barrier shapes, and Golden Ratios. Similar to shields in Dune they can be passed if the force is slow. It makes intimate encounters slightly complicated.
• The Soulless: What Halima indirectly (and then directly) accuses the Empire's Genetic Dynasty of being. Since Luminism believes in Reincarnation, the idea of a single soul repeatedly reincarnating in the same shell is thus spiritually corrupting to the soul since it's trapped in one body, and therefore the entire Empire is hostage to a being that cannot recognize it has no soul. Cleon XIII sets out to prove her wrong by completing a physically dangerous pilgrimage to receive a divine vision. He succeeds, telling of a vision of a triskelion flower, only it was all a lie; he received no vision, and made up a story combining elements of one from another pilgrim and a flower he saw on Demerzel's vanity.
• Space Elevator: Trantor has one called the Star Bridge, which is presumably how the City Planet manages the immense cargo and passenger loads required to be the capital of the Galactic Empire. Also one of many technical ideas that did not exist when Asimov wrote Foundation, but incorporated by the showrunners. Deconstructed near the end of the pilot: when it's destroyed by suicide bombers, the elevator falls to the surface and cuts a swathe of destruction along the planet's equator, killing a hundred million people.
• Space People: The Empire uses genetically engineered "Spacers" to crew their jump ships, in addition to looking creepily tall and thin from so much time in microgravity they can handle the mental strain of jump without sedatives or stasis.
• Spanner in the Works: The one thing that Hari's psychohistory models couldn't predict and account for was Gaal's apparent prescience causing her to act on things that haven't happened yet, like sensing that Raych is about to kill Hari and showing up in the middle of it, leading to Raych banishing her from the colony ship for her own protection instead of Hari's plan of leaving her behind to take over from the two of them.
• Spare a Messenger: Brother Day (Cleon XII) orders a bombardment of both Anacreon and Thespis and executes most of the delegations, but the actual emissaries are spared to report their failure.
• Standard Human Spaceship: Zigzagged depending on the technology level. Imperial ships avert this trope, having vertically-arranged hulls built around the ring-shaped jumpdrive in their core. The Foundation's Colony Ship in the second episode plays it straight, being a less-advanced vessel with many hard edges and grey in color.
• Star-Crossed Lovers: Several.
  • Raych and Gaal: Hari's projections with psychohistory reveal that them being together would put his plans at risk. This, paired with his plans being strengthened if he himself became a martyr, led him to convince Raych to murder him and flee to Hari's home planet.
  • The Anacreon Grand Huntress and King of Thespis of 800 years ago. Fearing what them uniting their planets would cause, Cleon II (the first clone) had one of his spies seduce the Grand Huntress, kill her, and then frame the king for her murder. This kickstarted the centuries-long enmity between both planets. At the least, it becomes a case of karma as two of their subjects in the distant future cause the Star Bridge bombing.
  • Salvor and Hugo: they are almost literally star crossed at the beginning of the series because Hugo makes a living trading between planets. Reinforced in the end of "The Leap" when Salvor makes a 138 year journey to find her mother. It's unknown if Hugo would go into cryo-sleep to wait for her return, but if not he died waiting for her to return.
• Stop, or I Shoot Myself!: Gaal refuses to accompany Hari to Helicon, but he won't let her leave the ship. Her solution? Destroy the ship's life support systems, meaning that her remaining onboard will be a swift death sentence. Hari finally relents and lets her go.
• The Straight and Arrow Path: The Grand Huntress of Anacreon wields a bow, although she also has a contemporary sidearm.
• Sudden Downer Ending: Both seasons have arcs that end this way.
  • In season 1, it originally looks like Brother Day (Cleon XIII), changed by his experience with the Luminists, is going to spare Brother Dawn (Cleon XIV) despite the latter being an altered clone. Dawn is put in Demerzel's care while Day and Dusk argue over his fate. Then, suddenly, Demerzel's programming, compelling her to eliminate threats to the Genetic Dynasty, forces her to snap Dawn's neck despite her genuinely caring for him.
  • In season 2, the Mentalist arc ends with Tellem dead, the Mentalists freed from her mind control, and Gaal, Salvor, and Raven Hari assuming leadership over them. But then, the last vestiges of Tellem's mind compel a little boy to shoot at Gaal, making Salvor sacrifice herself by jumping in the bullet's way.
• Suspiciously Small Army: Despite ruling an empire consisting of hundreds of planets, the court of Cleon is quite modest, rarely featuring more than a few dozen courtiers and soldiers at a time.
• Thanatos Gambit: Seldon's predictions show his own death as a likely outcome of his actions, but he continues hoping that his sacrifice will help save human civilization. He is rather surprised that he survives his arrest and trial. So, he later arranges to have Raych kill him, in order to create a martyr for the Foundation to rally around.
• Teleportation with Drawbacks: Teleportation technology was developed sometime in the galaxy's past, but was ultimately abandoned as a dead end since scientists could not figure out how to teleport living beings intact. Hober Mallow somehow solved this problem, but his teleportation method requires two beings of similar size wearing paired sending/receiving devices and exchanging places with each other. The teleported matter is defined by the wearers' natural bioelectric fields; anything inside those fields (a human and anything within his body) swaps places, while anything outside (such as clothing) stays behind.
• The Theocracy: Multiple examples:
  • Synnax seems to be one, with a planetary pogrom against scientists being declared when they started raising warnings about flooding from the ice caps being melted.
  • The desert moon named The Maiden at the center of the Luminist faith is ruled directly by Luminism's leadership.
  • Siwenna appears to exist in a state of anarchy, but armed mobs ruthlessly persecute anyone who is perceived to be undermining the planet's unnamed god of lightning.
  • The Foundation itself is perceived as one by some outsiders in season 2 due to the rise of the Church of the Galactic Spirit, which espouses Hari Seldon to be a prophet with psychohistory as his prophecy. In truth, while the Church is officially endorsed by the Foundation's government, its leaders are secular and see the religion and its adherents as just another tool to spread the Foundation's influence.
• The Three Faces of Adam: The triumvirate of Emperor Cleon clones who rule over the Empire: Brother Dawn, a young boy who is mentored by the others, Brother Day, the mature Emperor who makes most of the decisions, and Brother Dusk, an old man who advises but defers to Brother Day.
• Thrown Out the Airlock:
  • Raych is executed in this manner after murdering Seldon.
  • Brother Day (Cleon XVII) attempts to do this to a mutinous Riose in the Season 2 finale, only for the latter to use Hober's teleportation tech to switch their places at the last second, leaving Day in space.
• Time Skip: The centuries-long nature of the story requires many skips to the future.
  • Episode 2 skips to a few months after Seldon's trial, as the Foundation makes its way to Terminus.
  • Episode 3 skips first 13 years to Cleon XI's death and then 19 more years.
  • The first season finale skips 138 years to its final scene.
• Three Laws-Compliant: A variation, Demerzel is compliant not to humans as individuals, but the Empire as a political entity and the Genetic Dynasty more specifically as individuals and collectively. She states she is unable to take action against the Empire, her body would literally rebel. When Cleon XIV is revealed to be a defective clone, she snapped his neck to avoid both intra-family strife and wider political turmoil (and possibly to save him from being killed in a painful fashion by Cleon XII or XIII). Her anguished scream after the fact shows she didn't want to, but had no choice out of it.
• Toplessness from the Back:
  • In episode 3, Salvor is shown from behind as she gets out of bed wearing only panties, walks across the room, and starts getting dressed.
  • When Azura is seducing Brother Dawn she takes off her top and her bra and embraces him. The scene is shot so we only see her bare back.
• Trojan Horse: Anacreon and Thespis both present gifts to the Emperors as the negotiations over the border dispute begin. The Thespis delegation's gift is a veiled bribe/promise of increased tribute, in hopes of swaying the Emperors to their side. It doesn't work, with both sides dismissed after the space elevator is destroyed.
• Truth in Television: Cleon XIV is colour-blind, and is also a crack shot, able to down six birds to Cleon XII's record of three. Colour-blind snipers are preferred in real life, as camouflage doesn't work as well against them.
• Unequal Pairing: Cleon XIV and Azura, the palace gardener.
• Unwinnable Training Simulation: The Bishop's Claw simulation for the Foundation colonists is this. Defending themselves from the Claw causes an explosion from the mining gases. Doing nothing means they are killed by the Claw.
• Uterine Replicator: The Foundation's colony ship uses one for any members that get pregnant, like Gaal, though the machine only keeps the zygotes protected from radiation while on the journey to Terminus. The plan is to remove the zygotes and reimplant them after making planetfall when it's safe to carry them to birth.
• Vengeance Feels Empty: Discussed and defied. During the Anacreonian raid on the Foundation, Grand Huntress Phara says she thought getting her revenge would feel empty, but it actually feels pretty great.
• Verbal Tic: Gaal counts prime numbers as a way to deal with her anxiety.
• Villain-by-Proxy Fallacy: Phara holds the Foundation partly responsible for the Imperial bombing of Anacreon because, in her mind, Seldon's predictions scared the Empire into acting with a heavier hand than it otherwise would've.
• Was It All a Lie?: Dawn when he wakes up to find that Azura, and her confederates, played him. In this case, it was all a lie.
• We Will Have Euthanasia in the Future: The ruling dynasty of clones of the Empire. Once every few decades, a new Brother Dawn is created, which is when the old Brother Dusk is proclaimed Brother Darkness and is immediately euthanized.
• Wetware CPU: Older jump ships like the Invictus required a human Cyborg pilot (or at least, one with implants to allow interfacing) with an aptitude for multidimensional thinking or navigation. It's possible for unmodified humans to pilot them, but the process is fatal. Lewis Pirenne chooses to plug himself in after being fatally shot in order to take the Invictus to Terminus and save Salvor from being stranded forever jumping blindly through space.
• Wham Episode: The penultimate episode of Season 2 has Terminus itself destroyed in an Imperial attack. However, the following episode reveals that this was (of course) part of Seldon's plan, and that the population are actually still alive inside the Vault, ensuring that the Foundation itself will continue.
• Wham Line: Kicking off the reveal at the end of season 2, episode 8:
  Sareth: But who programmed Demerzel?
• Xanatos Speed Chess: Hari always planned to die, becoming a martyr for the Foundation's cause, and have Gaal succeed him as the leader. At first he counted on the Emperors executing him, only to have them spare him instead. He then plans to commit suicide, but when Gaal and Raych fall in love, it goes against his plans for the Foundation, so he asks Raych to kill him and leave in an escape pod so they will be separated. But then that plan also goes off the rails when Gaal becomes a witness to the act, forcing Raych to send her away in the escape pod instead for her own protection.
• Yank the Dog's Chain: When Brother Day (Cleon XII) and Demerzel fail to find the mastermind behind the Star Bridge bombings, Brother Dusk (Cleon XI) tries the more diplomatic route of interrogating the Anacreon and Thespis delegates over dinner. Even after sympathizing with both sides and showing real compassion, he makes it clear that there's nothing that will stop their deaths. Both delegations are hung from Trantor's ruins and both worlds are heavily bombarded. The emissaries themselves are spared to clarify the situation to the survivors.
• Year Inside, Hour Outside: Time flows differently inside the Vault. When Poly and Constant 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. 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.
• You Are Already Dead:
  Halima: Now, how will it happen?
  Demerzel: It has already been done. A poison was secreted when our skin touched. You will feel no pain.
• You Have Outlived Your Usefulness: Phara kills the Imperial commander after he's served his purpose of getting the Anacreons aboard the Invictus.

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