Foundation, the TV series. A rant.

by w3woody

So for something very different, but something which ties back into the things I’m personally interested in.

A rant about Foundation, the TV series on Apple TV.

This contain spoilers, so beware.

First, the good part. Visually spectacular. The acting by Lee Pace (“Empire”) was fantastic. It’s a fun show and worth watching for the visuals.

But this was not Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series. It’s like we took many of the names in the book, some of the notions described in the book, and created a new story that utterly missed the point. Then we threw in a story about the Empire itself which, again, utterly missed the point.

I knew that the authors who created the TV series missed the point on the first scene when we see Empire wearing a personal force shield.

That’s because in the books, scientific curiosity had been stifled, as we see repeatedly by aristocrats talking about performing a scientific investigation by searching the vast books already written on a topic and trying to draw your own conclusions. The very idea one would travel to a location to see for yourself, or otherwise perform actual experimentation or try to create something new, was unthought of:

Hardin continued: “It isn’t just you. It’s the whole Galaxy. Pirenne heard Lord Dorwin’s idea of scientific research. Lord Dorwin thought the way to be a good archaeologist was to read all the books on the subject—written by men who were dead for centuries. He thought that the way to solve archaeological puzzles was to weigh the opposing authorities. And Pirenne listened and made no objections. Don’t you see that there’s something wrong with that?”

And the Empire built big. It never built small.

It’s out of fashion in these decaying times to be a scholar. Events race and flash past and who cannot fight the tide with nuclearblast in hand is swept away, as I was. But I was a scholar, and I know that in all the history of nucleics, no portable force-shield was ever invented. We have force-shields—huge, lumbering powerhouses that will protect a city, or even a ship, but not one, single man.

One of the themes in Asimov’s books is that the Empire represents the big, lumbering, the old, the disinterest in science. The empire thought in terms of spreading across galaxies and using all the resources available to power large ships–but those ships had become so reliable, that engineers became a hereditary caste.

And the Foundation, out of necessity based on its location and the forces of history, had to think small. They had to create new things, had to do research, had to, out of necessity, produce a nuclear power plant the size of a walnut capable of powering a personal force shield.

So when in the TV series “Empire” walks out wearing a personal force shield, it told me the producers of the TV series utterly missed the point.

In the books, the Empire was decaying for several reasons, all enumerated early on in the books:

The fall of Empire, gentlemen, is a massive thing, however, and not easily fought. It is dictated by a rising bureaucracy, a receding initiative, a freezing of caste, a damming of curiosity—a hundred other factors.

We also learn that the fall of Trantor–the imperial capital at the center of the galaxy–will be driven by the various internecine wars motivated by various aristocratic powers seeking (and, sometimes successfully) capturing the throne:

As Trantor becomes more specialized, it becomes more vulnerable, less able to defend itself. Further, as it becomes more and more the administrative center of Empire, it becomes a greater prize. As the Imperial succession becomes more and more uncertain, and the feuds among the great families more rampant, social responsibility disappears.

And while many of the changes made by the TV series was justified by the producer as the idea that Psychohistory cannot translate to the big screen because the point of Psychohistory is that individuals cannot change the flow of history, while TV and movies deal with the idea of a single savior saving the universe as its stock in trade–sure, fine. I understand that.

But this was never a justification to toss out all the rest.

Look: the fall of the Empire in Asimov’s books is the fall of the Roman Empire. And the fall of the Roman Empire was a period of much action–and much chaos–as different ruling families struggled to take and control the imperial throne. That in and of itself could have created a fantastic story of action as families struggle, as court intrigue takes place in the background, as emperors are overthrown by other aristocrats who could have been portrayed as good guys but turn out to be bad guys themselves.

And we could have done all this with a backdrop of disinterest in innovation. Perhaps even have an Empire story line involving an aristocrat seeking to take control coming up with innovative ways to win the war–but who then gets killed by his subordinates who are afraid that aristocrat’s intelligence may make him too powerful.

It inherently means that the Empire side of the TV series must necessarily be an anthology of sorts: no actor on the stage gets to stick around for more than a few episodes at best before either time or–more likely in the case of the Imperial storyline–war–shuffles them off the stage.

And all this could have been backdrop to a Foundation facing its first “Seldon Crisis” of a Foundation between four warring self-proclaimed kingdoms desperately seeking for help from an Empire who was crumbling into a slow-motion civil war.

Hell, you can even create commentary about today’s world by having refugees flood in from the parts of the Empire that have devolved into civil war–and even a whole story line about how the refugees are turned away at the border.

That is, you could have crafted, into this wide spanning story of Imperial civil war and disinterest in innovation, of monstrous star ships waging war and refugees fleeing the border as local kingdoms fall into barbarism, the idea that a single individual can thoughtfully navigate the situation and save the Foundation.

Hell, you could have even crafted statesmen who speak truths about accepting others–as in the case of a refugee crisis–while other individuals engage in action to run blockades or blast enemies out of the sky.

Keep Hollywood’s need to craft universe-saving heroes and swashbucklers with the idea that the reason why the Sheldon Plan works is not because of sweeping forces of humanity moving inexorably towards a fixed destiny, but because there are always this string of the enlightened who are, because of their skill and cunning and philosophical insights, in the right place at the right time to save the day. (An idea you can then explore in later series by revealing the nature of the Second Foundation.)

There was never a need, even in Asimov’s world of Psychohistory, of the Empire’s inexorably fall to failure, of massive movements of history, to do away with the Hero’s journey or with the idea that one lone man can stand up and fight the forces of darkness and win.

But that is not what we got.

What we got instead was Hari Seldon turned into an immortal AI, “Empire” as a perpetually cloned copy of himself, and Gaal Dornick and Salvor Hardin skipping forward through time with their own story. What should have, in essence, been an anthology series instead turned into a family drama as two immortal beings (one an AI, one a perpetual clone) do a battle of whits.

Yes, the individual saving the world is the coin of the realm of Hollywood. But it doesn’t mean missing the entire God-damned point of the series.

It’s this failure to understand the underlying philosophical ideas–and writing to those philosophical ideas in a way which expresses the sadness of systemic failure and the hope of individuals fighting against this decay for a better future–which is not just the failure of Apple TV’s “Foundation” series. It’s endemic to the rest of Hollywood itself.

We saw this in the Star Trek Franchise, as pointed out in the essay The Politics of Star Trek in the Claremont Review of Books, and that failure to understand the underlying philosophical ideas shows up in spades in J.J. Abrams’ movie adaptation:

This creates a paradox when the crew encounters Khan in Into Darkness. Dispatched to arrest the perpetrator of a terrorist attack, Kirk learns it is Khan—“genetically engineered to be superior so as to lead others to peace in a world at war,” Khan explains—and that earth’s current military leadership were secretly employing him as a military strategist. “I am better,” Khan says, at “everything.” But this is how Kirk, too, is depicted—as destined to command just because he is “better.” “[I]f Khan and Kirk have the same motivation,” asked critic Abigail Nussbaum, “why is one of them the bad guy and the other the hero?”

Of course the question is never answered except by appealing to an older Spock, whose justification is… wanting. But then:

In 2009, Abrams admitted to an interviewer that he “didn’t get” Star Trek. “There was a captain, there was this first officer, they were talking a lot about adventures and not having them as much as I would’ve liked. Maybe I wasn’t smart enough.”

No, you weren’t.

Which is okay: as a space adventure the new Star Trek movies are fantastic.

As thoughtful science fiction, your movies sucked.

I once read an essay that I can’t seem to find now.

In it, the author defended “Star Trek: The Motion Picture”‘s slow pacing by observing that there are two forms of science fiction: “slow” science fiction, and “action” science fiction. And the problem is not the stuff with the slow pacing; the problem is the stuff in the middle. The stuff that can’t make up its mind if it wants to expound principles or show action.

Back in the 1960’s when a lot of science fiction was essentially “pulp” fiction: fiction printed in cheap “pulp” magazines–a lot of science fiction was actually coded discussions of social issues and deeper philosophical notions. Thus, “slow” science fiction: science fiction that is as interested in expressing an idea or painting a backdrop or coloring a scene about fundamental philosophical principles as it is in telling a story of invading troops or swashbuckling heroes.

And Asimov’s Foundation series, rooted as it was in the “pulp” fiction world when it was originally published (the first four chapters of the first Foundation book were originally published as a series of short stories in the 1940’s) is deeply entrenched in the “slow” science fiction category: science fiction of ideas rather than of action.

But as the Claremont Review of Books points out for Star Trek–an idea we see with today’s modern story tellers across all genres–there is little interest in thoughtful ideas:

[J.J. Abrams’] films accordingly eschew the series’ trademark dialogues about moral and political principles, and portray the young Kirk and crew as motivated largely by a maelstrom of lusts, fears, and resentments.

The Claremont essay concludes:

Over nearly 50 years, Star Trek tracked the devolution of liberalism from the philosophy of the New Frontier into a preference for non-judgmental diversity and reactionary hostility to innovation, and finally into an almost nihilistic collection of divergent urges. At its best, Star Trek talked about big ideas, in a big way. Its decline reflects a culture-wide change in how Americans have thought about the biggest idea of all: mankind’s place in the universe.

This saddens me because there has always been room in classical liberalism–that is, in the notions originally expressed by folks like John Locke, David Hume and Adam Smith as well as others, to portray a philosophy of acceptance but exploring the limits of what is acceptable in the battles as elbows rub against each other. The values of the Federation were that of accepting all races and creeds and ways of life, and the benefits of this acceptance means a dynamic growth of ideas that lead to wealth and prosperity–but the price of entrance was being willing to accept others yourself. And failure in that acceptance leads inherently to distrust and disruption.

And these values can even be explored in the backdrop of the fall of Rome represented as a Galactic Empire, with individuals preserving the values of individuality and acceptance, as well as the other values of curiosity and investigation and Enlightenment-era rationality in a universe where reactionary hostility to innovation, scientific stagnation and cultural nihilism leading to civil strife.

But that’s not what we got with Foundation, the TV series.

In no small part because, in a real way, Hollywood itself represents the Empire–and the Empire never tells bad stories about itself, especially when it is in slow philosophical decay. The Empire can never tell bad stories about itself, because the Empire never values those cultural or philosophical ideas that would lead Imperial subjects to be able to speak Truth to Power, or to Question Authority.

These values of radical individualism that were ascendant in the 1960’s are now values which are highly distrusted by the supposed intellectual descendants of those 1960’s radicals. And this idea that we could build a better world based on rational thought and acceptance of others–they’ve been replaced by the emotional grunt and the wailing about the unfairness of the world and the need to burn it all to the ground.

And in a way, those 1960’s radicals–the ones who saw Enlightenment-era ideas of individualism as a path forward, and who proposed a better world of thoughtful acceptance, where the cost of admission was being accepting yourself–they lost.

Substituted in Hollywood by the mindless slashing of a light saber, the mindless shooting up of an imperial base from laser turrets, the mindless storming of the castle by hundreds of armed men, as people who are supposedly superior with no given justification are seen as good guys or villains only by virtue of how they dress or which strand of music plays in the background or how they are framed by the camera.

Don’t get me wrong. I love a good action movie. I really do. Which is why despite utterly missing the point I recommend Foundation the TV series for its visuals and its action. The Empire story line, again, while utterly missing the point, is intriguing.

But do not make slow science fiction if you can’t be thoughtful and if you have nothing philosophically coherent to say.