Foundation Executive Producer David S. Goyer On Season 2, The Powers Of The Mind, And The Futur...

Foundation Executive Producer David S. Goyer On Season 2, The Powers Of The Mind, And The Future Of Superhero Media

Sometime in the far future, a scientist discovers the inevitable collapse of a galactic human empire and devises a way to reduce a subsequent 30,000-year dark age into just a millennium of horror and despair. But to do it, he must commit to some despicable things. To make matters more difficult, his predictive program cannot account for individual actions in its calculations, which introduces X-factors into his plan. Of course, that’s only a secondary concern for Gaal Dornick (Lou Llobel), the intern left to deal with his scheme following his death.
That’s the basic premise of AppleTV+’s Foundation , which...

Sometime in the far future, a scientist discovers the inevitable collapse of a galactic human empire and devises a way to reduce a subsequent 30,000-year dark age into just a millennium of horror and despair. But to do it, he must commit to some despicable things. To make matters more difficult, his predictive program cannot account for individual actions in its calculations, which introduces X-factors into his plan. Of course, that’s only a secondary concern for Gaal Dornick (Lou Llobel), the intern left to deal with his scheme following his death.
That’s the basic premise of AppleTV+’s Foundation , which returns this Friday for another year of mind-bending, time-traveling, human-exploring science fiction. But the basics of Foundation, based on the novel series by Isaac Asimov, only scratches the surface of what the program does on a weekly basis. Shifting between very human stories – like that of Gaal and Salvor Hardin (Leah Harvey), the child she never knew about when she went into cryogenic sleep 150 years before they meet, and the grand design of Dr. Hari Seldon (Jared Harris) – offers the rare sort of prestige series that contains both an ongoing plot and the opportunity to tell short stories. (Photo by David M. Benett/Getty Images)
When Rotten Tomatoes caught up with Foundation executive producer David S. Goyer , he said being able to shift into both modes of storytelling was also part of the design.
“I always pitched the show is a bit of a hybrid,” he explained. “Each season’s going to be a contained story, and in that way, it’s an anthology.” Taking its cues from Asmiov’s novels and short stories, each tale more or less contains the expected crises Hari’s accounted for in his psychohistory program. But unlike the novels, Gaal, Salvor, and a few other characters carry on via various science fiction means (cryosleep, cloning, etc.) into the distant future even as new characters, like Brother Constant (Isabella Laughland), and Hober Mallow (Dimitri Leonidas), are introduced.
“We probably can’t pull off that trick every season, but yeah, part of the fun, I think, baked into the concept is this inherent refresh,” he said.
Another baked-in aspect is the way episodes can become more laser-focused on one topic, like Cleon XI’s (Terrence Mann) last day in season 1 or, as Goyer teased, a few episodes in the upcoming season. “Everyone was very nervous when we did that initially because we broke the format so much, but then they loved it and they said, ‘Oh, can we do more of that in season 2?'” he said. Referring to the episodes as “short films,” he added they are “well-placed [at] strategic points along the journey.” (Photo by Apple TV+)
“I like that sometimes the show is very fast-paced, but other times, I like that we just really slowed down and kind of zoom in on this little microcosmic story and do a little beautiful tone poem,” he continued.
Of course, the show cannot sustain itself on tone poems, big ideas, and the macrocosm of Harry’s psychohistoric predictions, hence the continued presence of Gaal and Salvor, two women who bring the galactic scope back down into the human element – even if they face coping with the ultimate familial estrangement. Through various complications, the two do not meet until roughly 150 years after Salvor was conceived and removed from Gaal’s womb to delay gestation until their colony ship made planetfall.
“Most of us are familiar with family dysfunction, and most of us have parents that we wish we had a closer relationship with,” Goyer said. “And so — pun intended — the whole foundation of Salvor’s journey at the end of the first season was, ‘I’m going to journey across the galaxy and I’m going to meet my birth mother, and I’m going to feel accepted, and I’m...