“Foundation” fans shocked by the sheer number of twists and turns in the Apple TV+ show’s explosive Season 2 finale can thank David S. Goyer’s eagerness to surprise. After an entire planet had been destroyed and multiple characters had shockingly died, the final moments of the Season 2 finale revealed yet another major character death to really twist the knife.
“In the wake of ‘Game of Thrones,’ I feel like audiences have come to watch shows in a certain kind of way,” Goyer told TheWrap during an interview coordinated through his personal publicist. “So there’s an expectation that Episode 9 on these big shows, just a ton of stuff will happen, and then Episode 10 will be a coda. So I’m cognizant of that as a viewer and what you don’t expect is that 10 minutes before the end of Episode 10, this other massive thing happens.”
That massive thing is, of course, the death of Salvor Hardin (Leah Harvey), who dies at the hands of a mentallic still under the spell of Tellem (Rachel House). Her death rattles Gaal (Lou Llobell), but also instills the notion that the future is not set in stone since Gaal’s premonition had Salvor dying at the hands of The Mule. Which, according to Goyer, was the original plan.
“Originally we planned for Salvor to die in Season 3 at the hands of The Mule. And in the middle of the season, I had this notion and I proposed it to the other writers and everyone was violently opposed to it,” he said. “I said well let me write it, let me try. So I wrote it and I said we’ll take a vote, and everyone said it works.”
Goyer felt that killing off Salvor in Season 2 served dual purposes.
“It works on a character reason because it lets Gaal know that the future is not written in stone, and that’s going to be really important as we introduce The Mule, who is this horrible existential threat, because it’s not just written in stone for her, but it’s not written in stone for humanity,” he continued. “I thought it’s also heartbreaking that they’re distant at the beginning of the season and they build this bridge and then she dies. But sometimes that’s life.”
The showrunner also addressed the big Demerzel (Laura Birn) reveal in Season 2, with flashbacks making clear that she’s been running Empire ever since Cleon the First let her out of her prison and programmed her to love him. But that’s not the end of Demerzel’s backstory. Goyer said there are “at least three big flashbacks” planned as the series continues, each one taking place successively earlier in the timeline until we get all the way back to Earth.
While Apple has not yet officially renewed “Foundation” for Season 3, Goyer says he’s optimistic about the show’s chances and has grand plans for the next installment should it move forward.
“I think it’s our best season yet. If people think Episode 9 and Episode 10 this season were crazy, you haven’t seen anything yet,” he said of plans for the third season. “It’s bonkers what happens in Season 3.”
Read on for our full “Foundation” Season 2 finale interview with Goyer in which the showrunner also discusses the two Hari Seldons, Hari’s big flashback episode, those other big deaths and his overall plan for the series.
Demerzel really took a leading role this season. Can you talk about crafting her storyline and plotting out this reveal that she’s kind of been behind Empire this whole time?
Well, we knew we were writing towards that even from the beginning of Season 1. I love these big novelistic shows that take their time, that are slow burns that pay off all of these little things. So I’ve been showrunning the kind of show that I like to watch, and you hope that you have the runway to do that. So we planted all these little seeds all along, and I told Laura Byrne her character is a slow burn and she’s going to be very inscrutable in Season 1. I was very cognizant that people would be puzzled by a lot of her actions this season, and a lot of people would come to hate her or view her as a threat, but then I knew we had Episode 9 in our back pocket and my hope was that when we got to 209, it would flip the script on her character, and people would feel incredibly sympathetic towards her, which most seem to have.
If you were to go back and rewatch the third episode of Season 1 in which we also saw Cleon the First and think about what happens in 209, I think it puts everything in a very different light. It puts a lot of her actions in Season 1 in a different light. So I’m running the kind of show that I want to watch, the kind of show that I hope people can watch more than once and pick up all these little nuances and go, “Oh, my God, they really had planned that out from the beginning,” and that it’s more rewarding.
My only problem with 209 is that it wasn’t four hours long.
The first cut of 209 was 78 minutes.
I would love to see that. Do you have more in your back pocket with her backstory?
Yeah there’s definitely more story to be told. If the show goes on long enough, there are at least three more big flashbacks we have planned, and each one goes successively further back in time until we get all the way back to Earth.
Another burning question I had about that. We never actually see Demerzel kill Dusk and Enjoiner Rue. Are they really dead?
They’re dead. She snapped their necks. If we ever go back in that room, you’re gonna see some desiccated skeletons.
Speaking of skeletons, there are so many surprising deaths, not the least of which Terminus gets blown up. Can you tell me a bit about that decision and what discussions took place? Because that’s huge.
I’ve worked with James Cameron a lot, and he always used to say if you have a big idea, even if you are not sure how to get there, if it’s really cool we should write towards that. So I remember suggesting to my fellow writers, what’s something that we could do that would just seemingly break the show? Oh, what if we just destroyed Terminus? And everyone’s like, “Well, we can’t do that,” and I said, “Wait, what if it’s part of Hari’s plan? What if it’s part of his endgame?” So I feel like we played fair.
It’s interesting because I’ve seen reactions online, I’ve seen people say, “Oh, no, they’re all dead, and they’re not coming back” and I’ve seen people say “Oh it’s a big mentallic illusion” and it’s actually neither of those. And I think we played fair because we already showed that the vault was quite large on the inside, and we’ve already shown that the vault has been able to sustain all these incredible things. I haven’t really seen anyone suggest, “Well, what if they’re all inside the vault,” which is kind of cool. You never know what people are gonna think.
Hari was playing the long game, and the cool thing about sacrificing Terminus and establishing the Foundation now on another world is that it buys the Foundation a lot more time with Empire. It buys them 50 years, it buys them 100 years. But the flipside of that is everybody on the Invictus died, so it wasn’t without sacrifice. I think Dr. Seldon had every reason to believe Poly and Constant would be killed. He didn’t know that Hober was going to save them. So his hands aren’t completely clean as well. He’s a complicated figure.
I wanted to ask you about Hari, and finding new ways to not only keep him about but make him a compelling and plot-driving force throughout the series, long after his death. Has that been an exciting challenge for you?
Yeah, that was a big thing. In the books. Seldon is just a taped recording, he’s not even interactive. He’s not even like a ChatGPT – although I firmly believe is Asimov had been writing it now that Hari would be an interactive AI. So that was a no brainer, making him interactive. But fairly early on, when we realized there was the consciousness in the Raven with Gaal in Season 1 and there was the one in the vault, I realized, “Oh there’s two Haris.” That’s really exciting and something that doesn’t exist in the books at all, and those guys are really smart guys. I don’t think either of those guys are the kind of guy that likes to take a backseat to anyone. One of my favorite scenes in Season 2 is when Dr. Seldon figures out that there’s another Foundation and he’s the left hand, which I think is a testament to my writers who wrote that particular scene. I kept saying, “It’s not smart enough” and kicking it back, and we got there. But what’s so cool about that moment is it’s something that the audience already knows, and yet his thought process is delightful. But it’s also kind of thrilling, not just because he realized that’s where he got the name Hober Mallow, but if you really think it through, and you realize what he’s done with Hober Mallow, he’s done exactly what the other Hari said the first Foundation should not be doing. And so now that there are two Haris and two Foundations, it’s reasonable to assume that those are going to come into conflict with one another, which is exciting for me as a showrunner.
I know you write the season before filming begins, but once you saw what Dimitri Leonidas brought to the role of Hober Mallow, did you have second thoughts about killing him off?
I did. I love Dimitri, but I think if you’re doing your job right as a showrunner, you also have to kill off characters that you love. It just felt like you introduced this character in Episode 3 as this guy who doesn’t take anything seriously — and a few people were critical of how comedic that was, but it was by design. I think if you have a character that doesn’t take the stakes seriously and then progressively gets more sober over the course of the story, and then reaches a place where he sacrifices himself in an incredibly noble way, I think it’s almost more satisfying if he was sort of a jackass at the beginning. I love the character, I love the actor, same as Bel Riose, but it just felt appropriate that that was the way their short story would end. I always knew they would open the wine, and that the wine would be s–t as well.
The visual effects and framing of that scene is beautiful too.
As important as it is to capture the big moments and do a visual effect, I have a tight fist on the reins in terms of picking up tiny little detail shots of things, these little push-ins like when Demerzel has her hand on the small of Cleon’s back in Episode 3 and on the small of Dawn’s back in Episode 10. All of these tiny moments are as important as the big moments. And you know, production is always annoyed with me at the end of the season because I’ve got this huge list of these little inserts, and they have to be shots, we need a dolly in, we need it beautifully lit, they can’t just be some crappy little insert that we toss off. So I think all of those tiny little moments are just as important as the big moments.
Salvor’s death is really shocking and of course it underlines that the future is not set, but it’s also heartbreaking. What was the decision process behind that and what led you to that story point? Because it comes at a moment where you think we’re finally done, and the audience feels like it can breathe.
Well I’ll be honest, originally we planned for Salvor to die in Season 3 at the hands of The Mule. And in the middle of the season, I had this notion and I proposed it to the other writers and everyone was violently opposed to it. I said well let me write it, let me try. So I wrote it and I said we’ll take a vote, and everyone said, no, it works.
I think it works for two reasons. It works on a character reason because it lets Gaal know that the future is not written in stone, and that’s going to be really important as we introduce The Mule, who is this horrible existential threat, because it’s not just written in stone for her, but it’s not written in stone for humanity. I thought it’s also heartbreaking that they’re distant at the beginning of the season and they build this bridge and then she dies. But sometimes that’s life.
We were also very deliberate, in the wake of “Game of Thrones,” I feel like audiences have come to watch shows in a certain kind of way. So there’s an expectation that Episode 9 on these big shows, just a ton of stuff will happen, and then Episode 10 will be a coda. So I’m cognizant of that as a viewer and what you don’t expect is that 10 minutes before the end of Episode 10, this other massive thing happens. It doesn’t fall in the cadence of where modern TV viewers would expect it to fall. That was also exciting to me. So once we had decided that we were going to do it, I looked at the structure and just said, well, where’s a place where people really won’t see it coming and I felt that was the right place to have land.
At the very end we see Hari and Gaal make this decision together where, is the plan that once a year they kind of teach the mentallics and then go back into cryosleep for another year until they’ve hit that point in the future?
Yeah, that’s the plan right now (smiles). But also one of the things that I wanted to do with Gaal and Hari was they start the season completely at odds with one another, and I wanted them progressively to build this bridge with one another. And I wanted to humanize Hari and have Gaal see Hari as a man and as a former husband and a potential father, and not just as this larger-than-life inscrutable character. So she really does, for all her annoyances with him and his annoyances with her, they really are the only family that they have now between one another, and so that was the objective of their sort of twin character arcs.
There’s a specific couple of shots of a young blonde girl among the mentallics potentially looking menacing. What’s up with that?
Thalis. You’ll see her again (laughs).
I was also really blown away by Hari’s episode this season that reveals all this backstory. Can you talk about getting that foundational piece of Hari Seldon right and fitting it into a single episode?
That’s one of my favorite episodes as well. We probably labored over that backstory more than any other piece of writing over the course of the season. The fact that he’s harbored this tremendous tragedy, and that, yes, he has these altruistic motives for saving humanity, but there’s an element of it that also wants to stick it to Empire. He’s a more complicated character then we come to believe, and sort of my rule of thumb when we do a flashback is that we should be filling in details that we hadn’t seen before, but also hopefully it recontextualizes how you view the character. I think that was the case with Hari’s flashback this season and I think that was the case with Demerzel’s flashback this season. If you were to go back and watch Season 1 again, it makes you think about their scenes in a different way.
Immediately after those episodes, I was eager to watch Season 1 again.
I will say this, if you watch Season 1, there are definitely some nuances and easter eggs planted there that I think were not apparent to people when they saw the first season.
So how far out have you plotted the entire series arc of “Foundation?”
We have through Season 4 fairly rigorously plotted out, and then if we can get beyond Season 4, we’ve got some big tentpoles that we know we’re riding towards and kind of 5, 6, 7 and 8 I know where most of the characters end and whether that be in Season 4 or Season 6, we’ll move it down or up the scale depending on how many seasons we get. It’s possible we could be surprised but all the major characters, I pretty much know what their fate is.
What can you say about Season 3 in contrast to the first two seasons?
I think it’s our best season yet. If people think Episode 9 and Episode 10 this season were crazy, you haven’t seen anything yet. It’s bonkers what happens in Season 3. I remember reading online last week people’s reactions to 209 going, “Oh my God, how can they show survive” and then thinking oh there are so many more things that happen in the next episode, and then there’s even crazier things that happen in Season 3. I’m really excited. I hope to get the word on Season 3 as soon as the strike is over. I will also do a little plug which is on my website, I’ve been releasing show notes and behind-the-scenes pics, and then I’ve reluctantly joined Instagram and hopefully as we wait for a Season 3 pickup I’ll be trickling out various behind the scenes videos and stills.
So you don’t have the official renewal yet?
You know, Apple and Skydance are extremely happy with our Season 2 performance that the audience has unquestionably built. I just think the feeling is that in deference to the twin strikes that are happening now, it would be bad form to do something like that. But I’m very optimistic.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
“Foundation” is currently streaming on Apple TV+.