[COLUMN] The Great and Terrible Men Theory of Foundation | by Darren Mooney

Note: This piece includes spoilers for the third season premiere of Foundation, which launched this week on Apple TV+. For those looking for a quick review: I was not hugely fond of the season. As somebody who thought the second season was fine, this is a step down; it feels quite overtly more “Star-Wars-y” in ways that will become more obvious next week, and it doesn’t make as effective use of its two not-so-secret weapons Lee Pace and Jared Harris as the last two seasons did. Still, if you want to watch unspoiled, please feel free to bookmark and come back. 

“There's an old saying,” Gaal Dornick (Lou Llobell) narrates in the opening episode of the second season of Foundation. “Any man can be a success, but it takes a madman to be great.” Over the course of the show, it increasingly seems that to be a great man is almost inevitably to be a terrible one.

There is an interesting – perhaps unresolvable – tension at the heart of Foundation. Hari Seldon (Jared Harris) has pioneered the science of “psychohistory”, that allows him to chart the course of human history across centuries and millennia by extrapolating from larger social trends. It is a progressive version of history, one that understands forces that act at the level of empires and societies rather than on the level of individuals.

Seldon’s philosophy is framed as a rejection of the “Great Man Theory of History” advanced by historian Thomas Carlyle. Carlyle famously argued that “the history of the world is but the biography of great men”, while Seldon is committed to the idea that history movies beyond the will of individual actors. This is what outrages Emperor Cleon XII (Lee Pace), the genetic clone of Emperor Cleon I (Pace), who believes that the entirety of his empire is contained within his own being.

However, while Seldon’s philosophy rejects the idea of the Great Man, Foundation returns to it time and again. Seldon himself is a Great Man, manipulating history from behind the scenes. Newt Gingrich famously recognized Seldon as such. The third season of the show focuses on the character of the Mule (Pilou Asbæk), the pirate lord from Asimov’s stories, who is so singular and distinctive an actor that he threatens to derail Seldon’s entire scheme because he could not be predicted.

Adam Roberts argues that Asimov “posits history as, in effect, the struggle between two powerful men.” These are not the only significant actors within the epic. As Jari Käkelä notes, “a select few, protagonists like Salvor Hardin (Leah Harvey) and Hober Mallow (Dimitri Leonidas), are able to use their intellect to distance themselves from what seems pure magic and predestination to others, in order to go beyond the shock and awe of the sublime vision and start actively forwarding the Foundation’s expansionist mission.”

David S. Goyer’s adaptation of Foundation is rather loose in its approach to Asimov’s source material, in part reflecting the decades that have passed since the original stories were published. In some ways, Apple TV+’s Foundation feels less like an adaptation of Asimov’s source material than a response to it, in much the same way that Asimov’s original epic was in conversation with British historian Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

Gibbon was arguably writing more about the contemporary collapse of the British Empire than he was about the historical collapse of Ancient Rome, to the point that the narrative “became the essential guide for Britons anxious to plot their own imperial trajectory.” Allowing for some late additions and revisions, Asimov wrote the core of Foundation in the rough decade between 1942 and 1953, against the backdrop of the ascent of a new American Empire.

It seems almost poetic that Foundation should receive this expansive big-budget adaptation at the premature end of “the American Century” that began in the midst of the source material’s construction. There is a symmetry to this, a filtering of many of the big themes and ideas of the original source work through a more detached and weary lens, a myth of American ascent repurposed for an era of American decline.

“Foundation is a grand sci-fi adventure, sure, but it’s better understood as a work of political theory—a young American’s dialogue with the Enlightenment historian Edward Gibbon about the promise and peril of empire,” argued Zachary D. Carter. “To its credit, Apple’s new series embraces the philosophical ambition of Asimov’s masterpiece. But in updating Foundation for the 21st century, Goyer has produced a near-comprehensive repudiation of his source material.”

As Alyssa Rosenberg has pointed out, Goyer’s reimagining of Foundation is far from the only major contemporary work preoccupied with imperial decline. It is part of a broader wave of media addressing this anxiety through genre trappings, including House of the Dragon, Denis Villeneuve’s Dune duology, The Rings of Power and even Marvel’s Thunderbolts*. However, Foundation is notable as a piece of futuristic science-fiction explicitly concerned with historical narrative frameworks.

The first three seasons of Foundation unfold across three hundred years. Entire generations rise and fall. However, the show fixates upon individuals who fight against the yoke of history, who strive for immortality or life eternal. Foundation portrays this sort of survival as inherently unnatural or grotesque. The series’ true heroes – Salvor Hardin, Hober Mallow and even Bel Riose (Ben Daniels) – are those who have the dignity to accept their deaths in service of some greater cause.

In contrast, monsters live forever. On Ignis, the telepath Tellem Bond (Rachel House) has survived by parasitically passing her consciousness down to new child hosts across centuries, using their bodies as vessels for her “incarnations.” The royal advisor Demerzel (Laura Birn) is the last surviving artificial intelligence from an ancient robot war, “Cleon’s only true heir, his forever empress” trapped in a pseudo-incestuous relationship where she is mother, sister and lover to the dynasty.

However, at least Tellem and Demerzel are singular and unique. The Great Men of Foundation often multiply. They do not produce heirs or successors, but instead clones and copies. Cleon lives on in clones “decanted” from one generation to the next, three at time: the young Dawn (Cassian Bilton), the sitting Day (Pace) and the ageing Dusk (Terrence Mann), a trinity comprised of one man. Seldon survives in multiple simulated copies of his consciousness beyond his biological death.

For all these Great Men proliferate across history, they exert little control. One copy of Seldon laments he cannot know what the other does. Cleon XVII promises to destroy Seldon’s Foundation, warning the psychohistorian, “You’ve never accounted for me.” Seldon replies, “I’ve met outliers, and you’re not one of them.” A century later, Cleon XXV returns from every meeting asking Demerzel to check her projections. “Any change in the math? Better? Worse?” Her reply: “No change.”

There is a sense in Foundation that these great and exceptional men lack the power to make things better, to stave off the darkness or to push the arc of society in some better direction. However, they cast a shadow across history. The third season of Foundation is preoccupied with ideas of shadows and eclipses. In the third season premiere, a bike chase unfolds in the shadow of an eclipse on Haven. Seldon plans to return to address his followers on “the crossing eclipse” on New Terminus.

The third season of Foundation unfolds in the aftermath of the defeat and humiliation of Cleon XVII at the end of the second season. In the final stretch of the season, Cleon XVII crashed the warship Invictus into the surface of Terminus, setting in motion a chain reaction that destroyed the planet but also led to the complete destruction of his imperial fleet and the collapse of his Empire’s existing faster-than-light travel infrastructure. By the start of the third season, this has diminished the power and influence of the Empire and of the dynasty.

While Foundation has no shortage of flaws – its characters are often thinly drawn, its pacing is haphazard, and its arcs don’t always build organically – it can be a beautiful show. For all the series’ budget and scale, the closing shot of the penultimate episode of the second season, “Long Ago, Not Far Away”, is nothing more than an intense close up on Cleon’s face, lit by the burning remains of Terminus beneath him, twisted in something close to ecstasy at his own terrific and terrifying power. It’s a great performance from Pace, in some ways a funhouse mirror of the closing shot of Oppenheimer.

This moment feels like a thesis statement for Goyer’s reimagining of Foundation and its meditation on “the Great Man” as a concept. It often feels like exceptional individuals have no capacity to materially improve conditions, but they do have the power to make things worse – infinitely, horrifically, nightmarishly worse. The arrival of the Mule does not posit some alternative branching path, but a cataclysmic event that is “perhaps even the extinction of [the] species.”

It is a bleak recontextualization of “the Great Man”, one that feels of a piece with recent meditations on that theory like Ridley Scott’s Napoleon or Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer. It’s an approach to this understanding of history that doesn’t discount the role of powerful individuals in key positions  to shape the world around them, but recognizes that it is a lot easier for those people to break existing structures without any concern or care for the consequences that ensue.

It is not too difficult to understand where this approach is coming from and why it resonates in this specific historical moment. Goyer has acknowledged the show’s contemporary resonance, conceding that the appeal of a science-fiction framework is the opportunity to “talk about things that are happening in our world now, but not in a way that hopefully it seems like you're preaching.” This is the Great Man Theory reconfigured for the era of “disruptors” and “move fast and break things.”

In the context of the reconfiguration of Foundation as a metaphor for American decline rather than ascent, it makes sense that the show would adopt this approach to the Great Man Theory of History. Over the past decade, Donald Trump has done a lot to validate that philosophy while also accelerating American decline. “We are where we are because Trump is who he is,” Yair Rosenberg opined. “It’s sobering to realize that history can turn on the personal quirks of one person.”

Foundation is a show that doesn’t always work on a scene-to-scene or beat-to-beat level, but there is something compelling in the show’s genuine sense of scope and scale. In its grand movements, the show feels aligned with this specific moment. It’s a story of the individuals and power, and how those who lack the gift to truly bend the arc of history to their will are often content to break it beneath them.