[COLUMN] Foundation is About the Impotence of Great Men | by Darren Mooney

Note: This piece contains spoilers for the third season of Foundation, through to its ninth episode “The Paths That Choose Us.” Consider yourself warned. We’re not dicking around here. 

Foundation is, at its core, a show about the power and rage of men who consider themselves great. As one might expect from a series built on the pseudoscience of “psychohistory”, Foundation grapples with this theme in a decidedly Freudian manner. Foundation is a show about masculinity. More precisely, it is a show about impotence – often in the most literal manner possible.

Thomas Carlyle famously argued that “the history of the world is but the biography of great men”, and Foundation returns time and again to the idea that these men have only one thing on their mind. Indeed, many of the “great men” of Foundation are defined by their inability to progenate, to produce heirs and to further their genetic line through conventional means. At times, the series seems to suggest that this inability is in part what drives their destructive impulses.

This is most obvious with the show’s two central figures. Hari Seldon (Jared Harris) is the architect of the plans-within-plans in the world of Foundation, mapping and preparing for the collapse of the Galactic Empire. Before he became a true radical, Seldon was married to Yanna (Nimrat Kaur). Yanna was pregnant with a daughter when she was murdered by Tadj (Fiona O'Shaughnessy). Yanna’s death and the loss of the child they never had only serves to galvanize Hari’s beliefs.

Over the course of Foundation, Seldon adopts entire worlds of children. The First and Second Foundation are, in some ways, Seldon’s surrogate children. Tellingly, he tends to pick up surrogate daughters along the way, like Gaal Dornick (Lou Llobell) and her biological daughter Salvor Harin (Leah Harvey). Seldon eventually transcends flesh and blood, living on as various eternal and everlasting computer programs that exist in limited capacities as observers of the arc of history.

Foundation juxtaposes Seldon with “the genetic dynasty” of Emperor Cleon I (Lee Pace). Cleon I fell in love with a robot, Demerzel (Laura Birn). Unable to sire children with her, Cleon decided to ensure continuity of governance by distilling his essence into generation after generation of clones. Although there has been some “genetic drift” over the centuries, each Emperor is indistinguishable from that original Cleon.

Desperate to escape the decline predicted by Seldon, the second season finds Cleon XVII (Pace) attempting to end the genetic dynasty through an arranged marriage to Queen Sareth I (Ella-Rae Smith) of the Cloud Dominion. He hopes to sire a biological child. Considering the necessity of their physical union, Cleon XVII recalls that previous emperors used to perform the act publicly in front of their subjects, as an expression of virility. Cleon XVII’s plan does not reach completion, with Sareth fleeing into exile at the end of the season with the younger clone of Cleon who had been serving as Emperor-in-waiting (Cassian Bilton).

Seldon and Cleon are not the only characters defined by their impotence. Demerzel is the last of her kind and has been programmed to serve as “midwife and marionette” to generations of the Cleon dynasty. Cleon XXIV (Pace) remembers talking to Demerzel as a child, discovering she is bound to serve them and cannot make her own choices. “What if you could?” he asked. “If you left? What would you do?” She replied, “I suppose I would make more creatures like me. More robots.” Cleon XXIV pressed her, “Better children?”

The third season is largely built around establishing the Mule (Pilou Asbæk), a space pirate who threatens to tear everything down. In the show, he claims that he was given that name because “[his] parents considered [him] stubborn,” but in the novels that title is an allusion to his sterility. This carries over into the television adaptation. Asked to insult the Mule, trader Toran Mallow (Cody Fern) leans into the question of the Mule’s virility. “Mules are sterile, aren’t they?” he goads the pirate.

Foundation suggests that the most well-adjusted characters are those capable of producing something that lasts beyond themselves. Gaal is a much more virtuous hero than Seldon, perhaps because she has a daughter. The second season introduces the heroic rogue Hober Mallow (Dimitri Leonidas), whose descendants carry over into the events of the third season more than a century later. Death and perpetuation through propagation seem to be the natural order of things, and it is the disruption of that process that breaks history.

In contrast, Foundation suggests that a significant portion of galactic dysfunction can be traced back to the frustration of those men unable to conceive of a future beyond themselves. The Mule very pointedly makes a grand gesture of adopting Skirlet (Isla Gie), the daughter of the vanquished Archduke Ballerian of Kalgan (Ralph Ineson), as his surrogate child to create the illusion of a sustainable dynasty. The Mule demands that his subjects love him, as if trying to fill a hole within himself.

The Mule’s plans are often layered in none-too-subtle innuendo. Responding to Toran’s insinuations about his sterility, the Mule retorts, “You have insulted me by imagining that my… designs are small.” He explains his grand political vision in almost sexual terms, warning, “I see something I like, and I take it – like that.” When he seizes control of the Foundation on New Terminus, he boasts to the assembled heroes, “While you’ve been pontificating down there, I’ve been proliferating up here.”

Interestingly, many of these broken men are not simply incapable of becoming fathers. They are also deeply warped children. As clones, members of the Cleon dynasty are raised without fathers, while Demerzel serves as both mother and lover. Flashbacks reveal that the Mule’s powers first manifested when his own parents tried to murder him. The versions of Seldon manipulating galactic events are just digital copies of the original historical figure, coded by Seldon with imperfect memory and incomplete knowledge so they can never challenge him.

One of the reasons that Seldon’s long-term plans have been destabilized in the third season was the decision made by one of the computer simulacra of Seldon to provide Demerzel with a copy of his long-term projections. When Gaal challenges the simulation on this, asking him why he did it, he explains that it was an act of rage against his creator, the “real” Seldon, a way to ensure that “he would know that I was me, that I wasn’t his creature.” Gaal responds, “So you did it just to make noise?” It is an impotent rage.

There is a sense throughout Foundation that these great and terrible men are doing nothing more than making noise – raging against the dying of the light and their own limited mortality. In the final days before he is due to be euthanized, the former Emperor Cleon XXIII (Terrence Mann) enlists Eely Karvis (Fisayo Akinade) to build him “a black hole bomb”, a weapon of mass destruction that channels the energy of a dead star into a blast fired across the cosmos.

The third season makes a conscious point to parallel the development and the use of this weapon with the beginning of a romantic and sexual relationship between Cleon XXIII and Quent (Cherry Jones), the Ambassador from the Foundation who finds herself dispossessed after the Mule seizes control of New Terminus. Between Quent and the “black hole bomb”, Cleon XXIII finds himself grappling very literally with the Freudian concepts of “eros and thanatos” in his own dying days.

This gigantic space gun is far from the only explicitly phallic piece of technology in the third season. The third season premiere features an extended chase on the planet Haven, with Han Pritcher (Brandon P. Bell) and Song (Yootha Wong-Loi-Sing) riding speeders with long narrow bodies and big bulbous heads. After the mission goes awry, and the pair fail to recover the evidence they need, Song starts to make out with Han in the shower, only for him to reject her advances.

Still, Cleon XXIII’s gigantic space cannon threatens to render the subtext of Foundation as text. Towards the end of the third season as three worlds threaten to rebel against him, Cleon XXIII uses the weapon as a warning, destroying three planets as a statement of intent. Getting ready to discharge the barrel of his blaster at the Maiden, the moon that serves as the home of the religion Luminism, he muses, “I always thought that calling a planet the Maiden was just asking for it to be… deflowered.”

As with so much of the violence in Foundation, this destruction and devastation is largely performative. Cleon XXIII is less concerned with keeping his subjects in line than he is in presenting strength to the Mule. The sexual undertones of this public show are not subtle. From his base, the Mule is decidedly unimpressed by Cleon XXIII’s posturing, telling Cleon XXV (Bilton), “Your brother has a big stick – but not a long one. If he could have aimed it here, he would have.”

Foundation suggests that these men lack the ability to create anything that might endure beyond themselves, and so what little power they hold can be exercised in destruction. Towards the end of the second season, as he plans to burn Terminus, Cleon XVII boasts that he has become “a complete man.” Demerzel responds simply that he is nothing more than “a sperm led by its waving flagellum, mistaking its random motion for complexity.” She sighs, “Now, go do what you will do, for it's too late to change you.”

Foundation is built around grand ideas about the decline and collapse of empires, but it is also very firmly engaged with the Freudian impulses that drive such implosions. It turns out it is surprisingly difficult to keep an empire standing erect.