Foundation: Apple Tv+ The Strange Episodes 1 & 2 Timeline Explained? The Time Jump To Terminus

Episodes 1 and 2 of Foundation, Apple’s epic adaptation of Isaac Asimov’s acclaimed novels, works to tackle the show’s biggest challenge: showing a massive galactic empire and the trouble it will eventually find itself in. In the show’s opening minutes, writers David S. Goyer and Josh Friedman made an interesting choice for the first scene of the series – it takes place long after the initial events of the story begin, before the series rewinds and forwards. In fact, the first two episodes of Foundation, which premiered together on Friday, jump to four different time periods and as many locations. Keeping everything in order requires an insight into the larger world of Asimov.

If you’ve never read the Asimov Foundation, it is Asimov’s version of the fall of the Roman Empire… in space! Set in the very distant future, humanity has expanded its presence to inhabit much of the galaxy, and for thousands of years and generations, it has been united by the Galactic Empire, which controls more than 25 million planets, ruling over dozens of billions of people. That civilization is in its waning days, and a mathematician named Hari Seldon predicts that it will collapse in a matter of centuries, and that if humanity wants to avoid 30,000 Dark Ages, someone will have to take some drastic measures not to prevent collapse, but to shorten it to just a handful of generations.

That’s a lot of ground to cover, and when Apple’s series opens, we get a quick voiceover from a character named Gaal Dornick as the camera settles into a grim-looking world called Terminus. Gaal notes that he never encountered the world, an unstable planet in the farthest reaches of known space, until many years later, when it became part of his own history.

But this scene is really here to introduce Salvor Hardin, director of Terminus, as he saves some misbehaving children from a mysterious floating structure with some kind of mental distortion field around it. Gaal’s narration says that Salvor will become important in the events that happen, and then we jump 35 years in the past to the actual chronological beginning of the series.

This brings us in line with the beginning of Foundation , the first novel in Asimov’s series: Now we meet Gaal, a young woman who has been summoned to Trantor by Seldon. Their arrival sets in motion a series of events predicted by Seldon, and they are summoned before the rulers of the Empire.

Lee Pace’s Empire Clones And The Time Jump To Terminus

Namely, a trio of clones of the original leader of the Empire, Dawn (the youngest, who will eventually become ruler, played by Cassian Bilton), Day (the current middle-aged ruler, played by Lee Pace), and the elderly Dusk (played by Terrence Mann): all versions of the same person. The conflict between Seldon and Day sets the events of the series in motion: instead of killing and martyring him, Day exiles Seldon’s followers to Terminus, where they can create their galactic encyclopedia.

But Day refuses to let them go on a jump ship, which means we spent a part of episode 2 traveling with them (relatively) slowly through space to the same place we saw at the beginning of episode 1. But we keep checking the Trantor’s past. and “present.”

The origin of the Dawn brothers, Day, and Dusk is shown with a thousand-year flashback to the first emperor, who started the whole tradition of cloning the emperor in the first place. His unchanging “genetic dynasty” is an exteriorization of an empire too inflexible to weather the coming storm and destined to fall.

These leaps in time are an intrinsic part of the Foundation’s original stories. Asimov originally wrote them in the 1940s and 1950s, following Seldon and his efforts to establish the Foundation, and then following his descendants through time as the galaxy crumbles into darkness. The first book consists of five stories, and after the first, “The Psychohistories,” the next story, “The Encyclopedists,” takes place fifty years later. The next (“The mayors”) takes place 30 years later, 80 years after the first story, the fourth (The merchants) is set 135 years after the beginning of the novel and the last (“The merchant princes”) is set 155 years after the beginning of the book. The other novels of Asimov’s initial trilogy, Foundation and Empire , and Second Foundation , also make big jumps between installments.

Presumably, the series will continue these decade-long leaps forward and back in time as the season (and potentially subsequent seasons) charts the fall of the Galactic Empire and the rise of the Foundation and its efforts to rebuild the galaxy civilization. After all, David S. Goyer says he has a plan for 8 seasons and 80 episodes. That will be helped a bit by the fact that Pace, Bilton, and Mann are all clones – it’s a convenient way to keep at least one, or three, familiar faces as the show moves into the future.