Foundation Trilogy

I signed up for Apple TV for this. Also Ted Lasso, not gonna lie.

I read the Trilogy in a college comparative political science systems class. It is a future of galactic expansion, across 1,000 light years. The central planet, Tranto is so deep with buildings, many people don’t ever see the sky. I don’t think there are aliens, lots of robots.

I’ve forgotten most of the story, but it’s coming back. Just watched episode 1 tonight. A guy, and this unlikely genius girl, have figured out how to predict human events, and they are saying the central government will collapse, but they can mitigate the length of the coming Dark Ages but creating a … Foundation.

So, cool philosophy setup here, the question of what if all the knowledge we have disappeared? And if you knew it was coming, what would do? Also, some discussion about the meaning of living at all, for further understanding of life, or just pleasure, for the future or yourself?

Foundation Trilogy ?

Isaac Asimov?

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I signed up for an Apple TV show and that’s all I wanted to see. I cancelled after I finished watching it. Then I saw another I wanted to see, then resubscribed. Then unsubscribed again. That’s the problem with Apple TV- they get you with one show and there isn’t much else to see, unless you subscribe to another channel through them, even though you already subscribed outside of the Apple TV app. It’s crazy.

I can’t believe they don’t give you a search button. I’ve searched from outside the website (I’m coming in through PC Windows). They don’t you want to go in there and get what you want. There are several discussion forums where people say this is the craziest thing on the internet.

I agree. I don’t like how it’s set up and as I said, when you find something, you click on it, and it gives you a menu “how to watch” and if it’s on say Paramount Plus, then they expect you to subscribe through them to watch it. Sorry, but I’ll just close the app and go to our Paramount Plus app we already pay for. A search button would be nice and giving us only what they do have on their app and not someone else’s. I keep cancelling it after I see what I wanted because it’s so messed up that it’s not worth paying for it.

[quote=“lausten, post:4, topic:8601, full:true”]

I can’t believe they don’t give you a search button. I’ve searched from outside the website (I’m coming in through PC Windows). They don’t you want to go in there and get what you want. There are several discussion forums where people say this is the craziest thing on the internet.

I guess it is an apple app. I found several reviews on YouTube

I read the Foundation Trilogy sometime back in HS for pleasure. So I didn’t have to do any deep thinking about it.

I remember the concept, but forget the details.

Not sure if we have Apple TV at the moment.

If I (we) knew all the knowledge would disappear…
Plenty of parameters to go into that statement, but:
Devise a progression of steps that a future civilization might be able to decode and unlock.
Not too different from the messages and info on the Voyager.

A message in a bottle, so to speak.

The next couple of episodes jump all over the timeline and send characters in different directions. I didn’t expect so much focus on the emperors. They are clones of an original from 400 years ago, with three of them living at one time, one young, one old, one in the middle who does most of the ruling. It’s weird that would result in such a corrupt and despotic ruler though. Okay, it’s fiction, but they are holding together thousands of planets in a centralized system, I don’t think you could do that with just good storm troopers and spaceships with big bombs.

So far, the military has no face, the guards are armored head to toe and there has been no discussion with any generals.

Getting a little more focused, spending some time on the planet where they set up the Foundation and the collapse is starting to unfold, well, maybe. The ability of math to predict the future is kind of the main thread of conflict. And the math can only predict populations, not individuals, so they have to keep asking if their next decision is a rogue operating outside the math or if it’s part of the plan.

At the higher level, the current leadership doesn’t want to think they are mere placeholders, and the ones with the knowledge want to stick to what the data says.

One weird scene was the emperor screaming at his scientists/mathematicians because they couldn’t explain what was wrong with the predictions, but they agreed with the emperor that they were wrong. So, sort of sucking up, because the emperor is known to kill people that disagree with him, but he yells at them anyway because they won’t give him the facts. This is often a problem I have with Sci-Fi, leadership like that wouldn’t last past a generation or two, but these cloned emperors are in their 13th iteration.

Someone finally stood up to the Emperor. This is not much of a spoiler, since it was said by Hari Seldon in an early episode, the guy who created the psycho-history. His predictions are general though, he said, the beginning of trouble would probably be one of the major religions starting a movement against the centrally controlled dynasty.

The crisis point was a spiritual leader dying, and there are two competitors for the position, one who is sucking up to the Empire, and the other wants change.

I’m not sure what the plan is for more episodes, 10 have been released for this first season. Seems like they are going pretty slow through the original story.

End of season 1. Lots of twists and espionage. Not sure it really matters though. Intriguing I guess, but still wouldn’t give it five stars.