Foundation S3E9 Recap and Analysis: The Empire Strikes Back

The following recap contains spoilers for Foundation S3E9, “The Paths That Choose Us” (written by Jane Espenson & Eric Carrasco and directed by Roxann Dawson). 

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Welcome, dear reader, as we continue our review of the third season of the Apple TV+ series Foundation with Season 3 Episode 9: “The Paths That Choose Us.” The penultimate episode, and yet not really. It should be crystal clear to everyone by now that we are not going to resolve much of anything this season. We are merely approaching the midpoint of this two-season arc.

That said, this episode gave us one of the more jaw-dropping moments of the series. I speculated last week Empire would have to make an example of some planet to strike a little fear in their friends and foes alike, but I did not see this coming. It remains to be seen whether Brother Dusk’s actions will be “consequential” or merely bring about “consequences.” As Demerzel told a young Brother Dawn way back in S1E2, they always choose this.

The Gruesome Death of Warden Greer

No flashback this week. We start with Warden Greer commanding her troops to hunt down Gaal’s Second Foundation crew in the forest. She thinks she’s got the drop on Gaal, but it turns out she was the one being hunted. While interrogating the Warden, Gaal tries to emulate her daughter playing bad cop, but it falls pretty flat coming from her.

No matter. She goes into Greer’s mind to pry out of her what The Mule’s next step is. Greer shifts from “I won’t tell you” to “I can’t tell you,” and suddenly The Mule reaches up from the depths and drags her under. In the real world, she’s in pain, bleeding out of every orifice, and babbling “I’ve never known such love” repeatedly. And then—skrit—her eyeball goes sideways in a disturbing little bit of body horror, and she is dead.

Well, that didn’t go well.

Backed into a Corner

It’s visiting hours in the infirmary again, and The Mule is checking in on his favorite baby Cleon. He’s in a giddy mood, expecting a call from the Galactic Council to hand over Trantor. On Trantor, the three representatives plus Ambassador Quent are wondering where their Cleon is. Vorellis has a bad feeling after her meeting with Demerzel last episode, and Quent is warning them not to back Empire into a corner like this. The old man finally appears on the holo-sand jumbotron, looming above them, and orders Demerzel dial up The Mule on a 3-way call.

The Mule supposes he’ll accept the offer, including the free gift with purchase, but Dusk tells him oh, sorry, that offer expired. Trantor is staying where it belongs, with him. Dusk unveils the Novacula and proceeds to give a demonstration. Three demonstrations, to be precise. His gift for the two shifty politicians and the religious lass. The Mule is visibly shaken with the warning received loud and clear: don’t f*** with Empire.

Insurrection

On New Terminus, Pritcher continues to demonstrate what an unsneaky spy he is, leading Gaal and her crew right out in the open on a tour of the battle wreckage. They finally get under cover at a safe house where they meet up with Ebling Mis, Toran Mallow and Magnifico. Here is the team up we were expecting last week. After introductions and a little bit of fanboying from Dr. Mis, Gaal scans everyone to see who they love the most and make sure it isn’t The Mule.

They almost forget to scan Magnifico, and sure enough, he’s “never known such love.” Toran won’t let them just kill Magnifico, though, because he’s a victim, and Gaal agrees. She claims that having read his mind, if he tries to betray them, she’ll know before he does. Famous last words, methinks.

First stop on their mission to kill The Mule is to visit the one mind on New Terminus who can’t be converted. Gaal goes into the Vault alone initially. Hari confesses that, yes, he gave the Prime Radiant to Demerzel as a paradox bomb, but the real fringe benefit to him was to announce to the other Hari that he wasn’t just the left hand.

He agrees to help her now, using his four-dimensional spoon to sneak her onto the station, but he wants what his counterpart has: a body. Gaal lies to his face and agrees to ask her Hari how he got that body. Vault Hari is so sharp though. When she unvoices a warning to Pritcher, Hari looks at her with just a hint of suspicion.

The Profane Man

Things are looking pretty grim for Brother Day in the Mycogen cesspool. The saprophytes are already starting to feed on him, and he can’t manage to climb out. Then the water starts pulling him under and he literally gets flushed into another chamber below.

Unexpectedly, Songbird and Oceanglass have rescued him. Song decided she believes him, and they wanted to give him a chance to run. But he’s not leaving without that robot head to take back to Demerzel. He’s betting his life on it being the key to freeing her.

In the Sacratorium, Sunmaster has redirected the conversation to start planning for The Mule’s takeover of Trantor, when Day shows up, shoving the Inheritors aside to make a beeline straight for him. He runs, but Day catches up many levels above. They fight over the staff and Day ends up stabbing Sunmaster with it and flinging him onto the dais below. In the penultimate montage, Day emerges with his prize back on the surface of Trantor, headed towards the palace.

Last Meal of a Condemned Man

Demerzel finds Brother Dusk in the Hall of the Cleons, contemplating a new sobriquet for his plinth. He’s feeling philosophical and offers himself as a sounding board for her distress. She explains how she felt like her mind was a unicursal maze, with only one correct path to be taken every time. Lately, however, she’s come to realize that she has more choices available to her than she thought possible. A multicursal maze, with an array of possible paths she might be required to discover and evaluate. Dusk basically gives her a “that’s nice” and asks her to get someone to change the name on his plinth. Not exactly the clasp she was hoping for.

He continues being utterly tone deaf to the women in his life when Quent comes to visit him. Dusk is hoping she can get over being upset and share his last meal with him. He had Day’s pet lamb slaughtered; it’s going to be great.

That’s not going to happen, though. He blew up planets, and killed billions of people. He thinks it was justifiable, but she thinks he’s a small, petty man, screaming and pissing with fear as he faces his death. More to the point, though, on a personal level, she needs a way forward and he has taken hope away from her. He ends up dining alone and doesn’t seem to find the experience satisfying.

The Multicursal Path

Demerzel goes to the library and asks for Kalle’s Ninth Proof of Folding, following in Brother Dawn’s footsteps. She uses the principles to put herself inside the Prime Radiant. She recognizes that her memories were used to build this place, and another mother (Hari’s wife Yanna) built the walls, but there is a third mother in the equations: Kalle.

Kalle appears to her. While she’s not the robot companion Demerzel hopes for and requires, she understands her functioning and can provide a better sounding board than the departing Cleon. Demerzel confesses that she believes Gaal Dornick’s vision of the future, and figures that if Gaal ends up at the Galactic Library, it’s because she will offer the location as a last refuge to the Second Foundation. As it was used by the last of her kind thousands of years ago at the end of the Robotic Wars.

What troubles her though is that she doesn’t know what her motivation will be. To help the Second Foundation because she believes their mission is vital, or to serve them up to The Mule as an enemy of Empire. Kalle encourages her that since this is in the future, both motives are open to her. She can offer them a haven and defer any decision to betray them. It helps to have someone to think with. Robots were not designed to stand alone.

Quick Takes

A couple of quick takes on the rest of the episode:

• Zera, one of the three Second Foundationers assigned to go with Gaal, is the same one who helped Gaal and Brother Dawn sneak into Clarion Station in Episode 5.
• Magnifico says The Mule saved him a long time ago. One theory about how The Mule’s backstory doesn’t check out is that it’s not his story, but rather it is Magnifico’s. Which would place The Mule in the position of the space pirate who was harassing Rossem and helped him escape his home world.
• They are really hammering home that it was the Foundation leadership who were converted, more so than just the population at large. All of the same folks who the late Mayor Indbur gathered at Foundation Station to hear Magnifico play.
• The writers have pretty well beaten me down by this point on trying to hold them to any semblance of science in their science fiction. The Novacula shoots out a beam, and that beam instantaneously and precisely hits a target half a galaxy away? Sigh. Yeah, OK, sure, why not?
• It was pretty amusing during the fight scene between Day and Sunmaster when Sunmaster bites him and Day looks down in disbelief that he just did that. Definitely gonna want to get that wound cleaned with antiseptic, though, I’m thinking.
• It’s interesting to note that the plinth name of the two Cleons who came before Brother Dusk, the ones under whose tutelage he would have been raised, were “The Dauntless” and “The Brute.” So, it seems his initial reaction was a rejection of those paths to become “The Conciliator.” But in the end, he chose what they always choose.
• Twice in this episode Demerzel says “I am Empire” and it really stands out. When Dusk is gone, she will have a moment where this is true, because Brother Dusk talked her out of decanting any new Cleons (except perhaps a newborn baby Dawn). We know Dawn and Day are actually still alive, but she does not and seems to be preparing for that imminent future.
• Empire was not meant to act alone any more than robots were.
• We’ve switched from the Dude abides at the beginning of the season to Daneel abides at the end of the season. I wonder if the writers knew what they were doing when they wrote that into the scripts.
• When Vault Hari let him go, he said The Mule may be of use to him. Now it’s revealed that Hari has something he wants, a real body. So, is that what he meant? That The Mule could somehow be useful in helping him achieve that goal? Could Hari even turn against everyone and team up with The Mule to achieve his own personal end?
• I mentioned that Hari gave a suspicious look to Gaal when she unvoiced a warning to Pritcher outside the Vault. Another possibility could be that he was picking up on the transmission between them. In the books, robots are able to develop mentalic powers, so it is not out of the question. This could be another way in which The Mule could be of use to him. Maybe Hari even learned something when The Mule tried to probe his thoughts.
• I’d put it at 50-50 whether Brother Dusk goes through with his Ascension. Brother Day arriving with the Brazen Head is just the distraction he’d need to slip out the backdoor and hold up in the Novacula, for example.
• Kalle has apparently confirmed that she is not a robot. At least not one like Demerzel.
• Reactor Magazine has an interview with Jared Harris (Hari Seldon) where he gives some insight into the brewing resentment between Vault Hari and his humanized counterpart.
• Supposedly professional journalist Brittany Frederick has an interview with Cody Fern (Toran Mallow) about his character Toron, or is it Turin, or maybe it’s actually Torren. Oof, it’s kind of unbelievable how many ways she misspells his character’s name. That said though, if you can tolerate the egregious typos, it is actually a good interview.

Best lines of the episode:

• “Live in suspense.”
• “In my last hours, I will not bow to a usurper named after a farm animal.”
• “History tells us that you were one of the conspirators who killed Seldon. […] Those of us who make a study of it know the truth. You didn’t, did you?”
• “I’m loyal as an ink stain, true as a scar.”
• “You’re doing a great thing for humanity.” “I would settle for doing a great thing for her.”
• “I’m taking that head, or yours.”
• “Are we supposed to take pride in the sameness or the difference?”
• “She would not hear me with composure.”
• “I would like to see ‘The Consequential’ before I am three kilograms of ash.”
• “I knew you would react like this.”
• “I need a way forward! But the Foundation has fallen, and you have s** all over Empire.”
• “Are you saying you’d like the use of my spoon?”

Conclusion

Another great episode with a lot of setup going into the final episode of this season. Ascension day will happen, with or without Brother Dusk in attendance. Brother Day will return with an unexpected gift for Demerzel that her programming may or may not allow her to accept. Gaal and The Mule will have an initial confrontation that will likely force one or both to retreat and go lick their wounds. The only thing we know for sure is that the darkness is coming.

That’s all for this week. Please let us know your thoughts and feelings about this week’s episode, and any theories you have on what’s to come, in the comments below. Remember that TV Obsessive will provide continuing coverage of Foundation throughout Season 3 and beyond.

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All images courtesy of Apple TV+