The The Paths That Choose Us

Obscenity is a form of violation. That’s the idea behind it, anyway. When you say a movie or a painting or a book is obscene — okay, not you, dear reader, but the kind of people who do say movies and paintings and books are obscene — you mean they violate the dignity of the reader or viewer. If performers are involved, you might say it violates their dignity too, or that of their whole gender. You could say the same about the use of the word to refer to, say, income — “So-and-so makes an obscene amount of money,” violating the social compact that no one person should command that kind of wealth when others do not — but of course it’s the purportedly degrading sexual and scatalogical stuff that gets people really riled up. The human body is sacred, and this is how you treat it? Shame on you, and may the full force of capital and the state be wielded against you.

There’s a line about obscenity I return to over and over, from the film Apocalypse Now. Ranting and raving as per usual, Marlon Brando’s mad Colonel Kurtz speaks of the hypocrisy of the United States military, from which he has defected to create a society more honest about its brutality:

“We train young men to drop fire on people, but their commanders won’t allow them to write FUCK on their airplanes, because it’s obscene!”

Kurtz knew that the most vile imaginings of the most uptight general or admiral in the armed forces could not imagine a more unspeakable violation of the human body associated with the word FUCK than the actual, physical, cataclysmically violent violation of the human body associated with napalm. There’s no question what’s more obscene, no question where our ire should be aimed, no question what we should be trying to stop at all costs. Instead, we’re banning cusswords while we rain death upon all of Indochina. Translated into modern terms, it’s expelling student protestors of genocide in Gaza rather than lifting a finger to do anything to stop that genocide.

Brother Dusk commits genocide in this episode of Foundation, three times over. Appearing as a Wizard of Oz–sized hologram before the galactic council as they prepare to hand the Mule not only Trantor but him, too, the last Cleon standing decides to make a counteroffer. With sadistic mirth in his voice and that unmistakable Dusk twinkle in his eyes, he uses the Novacula, his black-hole bomb, to wipe out the homeworld of the Council, the sacred planet of the Luminists, and the entire cluster of worlds called Cloud Dominion. He does it in seconds, with the push of a button. A blast, a brief detonation, and then poof — billions of lives reduced to floating ash as instantly as a dandelion blown apart by a child. And it’s all done with about that level of consideration.

Foundation is no stranger to planet-destroying weaponry. But it’s the anticlimactic nature of these planetary blasts that turns your stomach. There’s no suitably huge explosion of flame, like the mushroom cloud after a nuclear detonation, or planets and Death Stars bursting apart in Star Wars. It’s like I said: a blast, a rumble, a conflagration that lasts about two seconds, and then nothing. If the body is sacred, then the sacred was just profaned in the most grievous way imaginable, billions upon billions of times over. They weren’t even afforded the dubious dignity of going out in a way that suited the immensity of the loss. Their funeral pyre was denied them.

“Don’t fuck with Empire,” Dusk says before signing off.

It’s one of the most shocking, disgusting, horrifying acts in the history of this show, and that’s saying something. 

It’s especially bad because Dusk really, truly does not give even hafl a shit. Within the hour he’s asking Ambassador Quent, who believed him to be as kind and just and wise as his nickname “The Conciliator” would indicate, to join him for his last dinner before “ascending” the next day. After watching Empire commit a war atrocity, she’s somehow not in the mood for lamb’s brain. She’s not in the mood to see this repulsive criminal ever again. So, on his last night alive — Demerzel’s programming does not permit her to deviate on this — he eats, or fails to eat, alone.

Even as I recoiled from the screen and wrote JESUS CHRIST, HOLY CHRIST, GOD IN HEAVENin my notes, though, I wondered something. The three factions undermining his control of Trantor are a problem, sure, but none of this would be happening if it weren’t for the real enemy, the Mule. Why not fire your weapon at New Terminus and take out both him and the remnants of Foundation forever? In speaking with his captives Brother Dawn and Bayta Mallow, the Mule has a hypothesis: If Empire could have destroyed him just now, he would have. There’s a limit to the weapon’s range, which suggests that as long as he stays out of it, or on a planet Dusk would hesitate to destroy, he’s safe.

But even now there’s a crack squad of…well, there’s a squad of would-be heroes on their way to defeat the psychic warlord. There’s Gaal Dornick, of course, his fated nemesis, and her telepathic boyfriend Captain Han Pritcher. There’s Toran Mallow and his new friend Magnifico, whom Toran insists they keep alive even after Gaal discovers he’s still loyal to the Mule. There’s Zera (Victoria Wyant) and Leyda (Mark Ebulue), Second Foundation soldiers who I assume are just there to keep quiet and provide cannon fodder. There’s Dr. Ebling Mis, Hari’s now somewhat jaded superfan after the genius’ digital avatar failed to protect the Foundation.

Along the way they try and fail to deprogram Foundation’s warden (Fallon Greer), who become free enough from the Mule’s grasp to reveal that his form of control hurts before sinking back into the lethal abyss of his control. “I’ve never felt such love,” she says, disappearing into the psychic murk with a corpse’s grin on her face.

And there’s Hari himself — only he’s not Hari, and he knows it. This copy of the psychohistorian resents that another was somehow given a body and allowed to live and learn new things again, and he wants the same deal for himself if he’s to help Gaal’s assassination squad get to the Mule using the Vault’s powers. Gaal, not for the first time this season, lies to someone she cares about and acts as though the other Hari were still alive and making this arrangement is possible. 

Maybe it is, though? Using her own copy of the Prime Radiant, Lady Demerzel — who went along with Dusk’s genocide but is no longer certain where her path will, or should, lead her in the uncertain near future — enters its kaleidoscopic matrix. There she communes with the entity called Kalle (Rowena King). Though she looks, sounds, and in some ways acts like Hari Seldon’s slain wife of the same name, she’s something else entirely, perhaps the embodiment of the Prime Radiant herself. It’s this Kalle, or something like her, that granted Hari his body in Season 2; earlier in the season, she helped that living Hari ascend to some higher plane of consciousness, or something. 

Could Kalle conceivably grant the other Hari a body? Could she introduce him to his other self, who I presume is floating around in the ether somewhere? Does she have the same kind of communally oriented machine-mind Demerzel has, as their tender digital embrace appears to indicate? Does that make her a robot, now or at some point in the past? Is she some other form of intelligence entirely? By leaving the decision of whether to use Trantor’s library to hide or entrap Second Foundation up to Demerzel, does that make her angel or devil? These are big mystery-box android-show questions, and Foundation may be the only series I trust to answer them interestingly.

Why? Because even amid the horror of mass death, the desperation of the struggle against fascism, and the perplexity of artificial intelligence, Foundation makes room for Brother Day to kill that evil goldbricking religious cult leader Sunmaster with his own scepter.

“Profane man,” Sunmaster spits at Empire with his dying breath. “Half man.”

“Dead man,” Day quips like he’s Schwarzenegger, tossing the guy over the side to his death.

Yes, Day gets in Running Man–style joke after killing a bad guy, after first escaping from a cesspool filled with slimy parasites like the garbage chute in Star Wars, in the same episode that conveys the visceral revulsion provoked by mass murder and ecocide as well as anything this side of Andor, using sci-fi imagery all its own. What a show. What a show.

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.