Note: The following contains spoilers from the “Foundation” Season 3 finale.
Fans of “Foundation” should know by now to expect a twist or two in every season finale, but the Season 3 finale – titled “The Darkness” – included several shocking plot developments that left viewers wondering how this show could possibly continue.
Instead of dying like he was supposed to, Brother Dusk (Terrence Mann) went on a rampage. He killed all the Empire clones, then he killed Demerzel (Laura Birn) who was finally within reach of being free, and he then killed Brother Day (Lee Pace). The last image we saw of Dusk was him sitting on a throne, alone, as Empire is at long last falling like Hari Seldon (Jared Harris) predicted.
And that Mule twist — the show’s Season 3 antagonist The Mule was not Pilou Asbaek’s character, as we’d been led to believe. Instead, Bayta (Synnøve Karlsen) is revealed to be the real Mule pulling the strings. It turns out she’s been using her powers to make Asbaek’s character think he’s the Mule, all while hiding behind her straw man.
Then in the final moments of the episode, the robot skull that Day brought back to Trantor connected with a robot elsewhere — on the Moon, near Earth. Whoa.
“We know that Earth is something that exists, but for whatever reason, people don’t know where it is anymore, which is not by happenstance, that information has been redacted. I think a lot of people were wondering, what is the deal with Earth? How did this all start?” David S. Goyer explained to TheWrap. “I always intended to bring things back there and in the books, the robots are hiding in the moon, there’s a group of them that haven’t been destroyed, and they’ve been on the moon ever since the Robot Wars. They’ve just been silently watching and waiting and deciding when to make their presence known again.”
Goyer said he initially planned on making the Moon reveal at the end of Season 5, but pulled the story point up to coincide with the fall of Empire. Although, while “Foundation” has been renewed for Season 4, Goyer will not be continuing on with the show — Season 3 marks his last as showrunner.
Speaking with TheWrap about the Season 3 finale, Goyer explained his decision to step away was twofold: the budget for “Foundation” was going to be reduced going forward, and the distance between production in Prague and his home in Los Angeles grew challenging for his family.
“They wanted to lower the budget, which is totally their prerogative. I just was worried that, having done three seasons of it, I was having a hard time figuring out how to keep doing my vision of the show on a smaller budget,” Goyer told TheWrap. “It was a hard decision to make because I love the show, and I’m super proud of it. I’ve had some things that I’m somewhat proud of and not completely proud of. This one really reflects my intention and my vision. But also, it was killing me.”
Goyer said the new showrunners, Ian Goldberg and David Kob, have his outlined plans for Season 4 and beyond, and stressed that he built off-ramps for the series in his design where it could potentially conclude after Season 4, after Season 6 or after Season 8.
But what of that Season 3 finale? That big Mule twist. Demerzel’s death. And is Lee Pace coming back? Goyer talks all in the interview below.
How did you set about arcing out the story of this season? What were the big touchstones?
The way each season works is, before we assemble the writers room, I will sit down for a few days and I’ll write up a season document based on my current thinking of what the big events will be, and I would say, largely with these three seasons, they’ve adhered to that original document 80% or so. Then I’ll open it up to the writers, and I’ll say, ‘What do people think?’ But I knew from the outset that we were going to break the pattern and not jump forward like 100 or 150 years, and that Season 4 would be a direct continuation of Season 3, and that in the same way that the original trilogy ends on a cliffhanger with the reveal of the Mule and then that story continues, it made sense to do the same thing here.
Audiences are sophisticated these days, and you have to tell a good story — you don’t do this merely to surprise the audience — but one of the reasons why “Breaking Bad” or “Game of Thrones” is so exciting is they broke some of the conventions of storytelling by killing off lead characters. So I said, “What would be the most exciting thing?” And the most exciting thing would be if we end the season at a place where you think, “How can the show even survive after this? How can the Foundation prevail?”
I knew that we couldn’t keep the fall of the Empire beyond Season 3. The audience would probably be too frustrated with that. So then when I started to think about what would be the biggest hallmarks of the fall of the Empire, I thought, there’s an assumption that that Brother Day, Lee Pace, has plot armor. So I thought, “OK, can we tell a story in which that’s not true?” And there’s also an assumption that with Demerzel being a robot, that that character also has plot armor. When we’re breaking a season and we come up with an idea that makes me uncomfortable, then I think maybe we’re onto something. I love the character of Demerzel, but what would make me uncomfortable is the tragic irony of Demerzel almost being free and then getting killed. And the same with Day, the tragedy of Day turning from this really selfish oaf of a character to being someone selfless and then getting killed before he could do this final act of contrition. I just think it would be too easy if Day had come in and saved the day and killed Dusk. I don’t know how else to tell you that the Empire is done now. I wanted to leave the audience saying, “What now?”
So is Demerzel dead and gone?
[Smiles] Looks that way.
Is Lee Pace off the show? Is he coming back?
I’m not going to say.
Alright well tell me about putting together Demerzel’s arc this season then and revealing more of the robots backstory.
I like shows that have characters that are shades of grey. I just think messy is more interesting and it’s a better reflection of life, so I was really interested in challenging the audience’s assumption continually as to whether or not this character was a good character or a bad character, and how, arguably, even some of the worst characters in the show have these incredibly tragic backstories that have made them the monsters that they are. In the case of Demerzel, she was this sort of very cold, calculating character in Season 1 and then in Season 2, I really wanted to give people a gut punch with her backstory and portray that she doesn’t have a choice. Then in this season, I was really interested in showing her do some really awful things, like even destroying the planet of her own religion, because she has no choice, and having people be challenged by that. I just find it interesting that you’re gonna have characters behave so monstrously, and then you’re constantly deciding, “I don’t want this character to die” or “I want this character to get what they want.”
Then you have Dusk – or Darkness – who is behaving entirely out of spite.
I don’t think he has any clue or even interest in solving the problem or being a good steward of the galaxy. I think it’s truly a guy who, the center obviously cannot hold and he knows he can’t fix things, but he can burn everything down. And I would argue that there are people like that operating in power on Earth today that have personality disorders, and Dusk clearly has a personality disorder – it’s all personal for him. A switch has been flipped, and that’s a bad person to have in charge of a weapon like that.
So heading into Season 4 he’s all alone with what little power Empire has left.
He doesn’t have a Day or a Dawn or a Demerzel to counsel him. He just has yes men and yes women who are all terrified of him, and no one to give him any sort of counterbalancing advice.
I’m sure that’ll end well.
Even as I say that I’m like, “Huh, is there anyone else like that right now in today’s society that’s operating like that?”
I want to talk about the Mule twist. I think readers of the book were expecting a twist, but maybe not the exact twist that you gave them. Tell me about crafting that through the season.
When the books were written and there was that twist in 1951 and 1952, people were very surprised. I think I was in high school in the ‘80s, and I wasn’t that surprised by the twist, only because they talked about this pirate character, but there just weren’t a lot of viable suspects for who the Mule would be and Magnifico is the most unlikely one. I think it was a great, sophisticated twist in terms of these preconceptions of who these big warlords are.
So we’ve got book readers who watch our show, and we’ve got non-book readers, and one thing that I started to think about was, well, if we do the twist exactly as the book, how much of a twist is that going to be, even for non book readers. Then I also started to think about, hypothetically, if it weren’t Magnifico, I think I have an idea to make it Bayta because of all the other potential characters out there, I thought that she would be the least likely for the audience to suspect. Even though we’ve come a long way from the 1950s in terms of equality for women, I think people still tend to underestimate women. It was interesting to read some of the online reactions to Bayta and Toran in Episode 2, and they’re like, “I don’t like them. They’re too vapid.” It was very gratifying to see the audience’s assessment of them change, and to see them fall in love with them. I knew that was the story that we were always telling. And Apple, for that matter, was kind of uncomfortable with them at the beginning as well. But I knew where we were going and and I knew that the more vapid or shallow I made Bayta — which she was doing intentionally — the more of a rug pull it would be.
Bayta was smart enough to know that she needed a big, hulking villain to be her red herring, to be her straw man. We even treated the pirate a little bit like a cliche villain, and that was all by design because he’s just a big, sadistic pirate. The characters in the show are thinking that, and the audience is thinking that, and hopefully people are like, “Holy crap, I didn’t see that coming.” It’s hard to surprise audiences these days.
So how does this work? Is he under her mental control?
That’s the beauty of it, he thinks he’s The Mule. He’s been conditioned, and she’s sort of given him a little of her power, and he thinks that backstory is his. He’s gotten fleeting glimpses, he mentions it two or three times in the season, where it’s like, “Do you ever get the sense that you’re having someone else’s dream?” He almost sees behind that veil but he has no idea Bayta is really the power. In Episode 8, when she says, “Maybe you should leave,” he leaves but he doesn’t leave because he’s scared of her. I would argue he’s not even sure exactly why he leaves.
Can her mental abilities reach across planets or is she always in close proximity to him?
She can’t reach across planets. She’s within a couple of miles or so. She also doesn’t need to convert everyone. She only needs to convert a few people.
Another interesting aspect of this season is we see that Hari’s hologram is kind of restless and selfish. He’s not this benevolent god.
There’s a limit to the math and the plans and the whole point of the first Foundation and the vault is that they do not know about the second foundation, and that they be in the dark about the sort of broader plans. And so because of Salvor’s actions in Season 2, that started pulling this thread for Vault Hari. He doesn’t know even Gail is still alive. So that starts to unravel for him as well, because I think that Hari Seldon had good intentions when he started all of this, but he’s a human like anyone else, and he’s got a subconscious, and I think that he programmed Vault Hari to have similar intentions. If you’ve got an AI that if it gains new input — in this case the fact that he’s the second hand and there’s another foundation — that might make Vault Hari real pissed off.
I think the whole act of Vault Hari giving the Prime Radiant to Empire at the end of Season 2 wasn’t as calculated a plan as he’s saying. A bit of it was he was like a kid acting out, and he just wanted to do something that would fuck with the math because he was starting to feel irrelevant. I think he justified it. Some of that’s true — like oh, it’s a logic bomb for Demerzel, and it is a logic bomb for Demerzel — but I think the root cause of it is he’s just pissed off that he is a tool, and he wants to do something big so that he’ll be the authorship of events now, as opposed to the other Hari.
Alright let’s talk about the final shot, we see Kalle and another robot on the Moon and we see Earth. It seems like we’re heading towards an endgame.
It depends on how many seasons there are. It could definitely be an endgame at the end of Season 4, or they could be part of the larger plan. But look, we’ve mentioned Earth before, we’ve shown Earth on the mural and on Demerzel’s tool box. We know that Earth is something that exists, but for whatever reason, people don’t know where it is anymore, which is not by happenstance, that information has been redacted. I think a lot of people were wondering, what is the deal with Earth? How did this all start? I always intended to bring things back there and in the books, the robots are hiding in the Moon, there’s a group of them that haven’t been destroyed, and they’ve been on the moon ever since the Robot Wars. They’ve just been silently watching and waiting and deciding when to make their presence known again.
Originally, that was a card that I was planning on turning over at the end of Season 4. But one of the things that happens as you’re doing a show like this is in between seasons you think about how the story is landing with people, and how some of the larger meta mysteries are landing with people, and you think about whether they’ll have the patience for four or five seasons for this to happen or should we pull events forward? I decided that with the robots, it was time to pull events forward, and the fall of Empire felt like a good reason to pull them forward. So in a way, I liken myself in the writers room to being sort of like the second Foundation, which is like there’s a plan and we’re largely adhering to it, but then in between seasons, we kind of put our thumb on the scale a little bit and sort of adjust.
You told me last season that you have plotted out potentially eight seasons. Is that still the intention?
Yeah, but who knows. When we started this show six years ago, I think “Game of Thrones” was still on and it runs eight seasons, and everyone was like, “Wow, we want a show that’s really going to run a long time.” Now the appetite has changed, and it seems more like four seasons is a good stopping point. Or shows get so expensive that they can’t justify going that far. So once we got to Season 2, I started to think, “OK, there’s an off ramp I can think of at the end of Season 4, there’s an off ramp I can think of at the end of Season 6, and there’s one at the end of Season 8.” It just depends. But I think that there’s definitely a satisfying end of the story that can be had at the end of Season 4 and then one again at 6 and one at 8. If we end at Season 4, we definitely won’t get to the planned sort of end to end reveal, which we had hinted at in Season 1 with that Invictus ship and that word EXO that was scrawled in blood, we won’t get to that. But it doesn’t mean it won’t be satisfying.
You mentioned expensive. Obviously, the whole industry is dealing with contraction. There were reports about this show and issues with budgets this season, and your role on the show changing. What’s your role right now?
I’m not going to run Season 4. I hadn’t contemplated stepping back before Season 4, but between the strikes and COVID we extended. I started working on the show six years ago, and without those two events, I would be four and a half years in. Then the other issue is that the show films in Europe. I’ve got three kids and a wife, and during COVID, they were with me. But when COVID kind of ended and everyone went back to school, they weren’t with me. I just underestimated the toll it would take on me and my family. Our production home base is in Prague, and there aren’t not even any direct flights to Prague, so doorway to doorway, it’s like 18 to 20 hours. So if this show were in Toronto or in Vancouver, and I had a three day weekend, I could come home. But from Prague, I could only come home if I had a good nine days off.
It was a hard decision to make because I love the show, and I’m super proud of it. I’ve had some things that I’m somewhat proud of and not completely proud of. This one, I think, really reflects my intention and my vision. But also, it was killing me.
So do you hope to come back to the show at some point? What is your involvement right now?
I’m an EP. They have my plan for Season 4, but I’m the kind of person that I can either be all the way in or I can be more out. It doesn’t work — and I don’t think it works for them — to be halfway in. So I’m not saying I wouldn’t potentially come back, but the other issue is this show is very expensive, and they lost a lot of money during the strike and justifiably wanted to recover some of that money. So they wanted to lower the budget, which is totally their prerogative. I just was worried that, having done three seasons of it, I was having a hard time figuring out how to keep doing my vision of the show on a smaller budget.
Look, it could be fine. It’s just once you’ve already done something one way for six years, it’s really hard to then say let’s just completely rethink about how to do it. I think if either one of those two things — the location or the budget — had been different I would have remained showrunning. But there were three seasons I’m incredibly proud of. They’ve got the plan. It’s OK. You can’t have everything.
So what’s next for you?
This is going to be really annoying. I have like three projects that we’re in the midst of negotiating deals for — two features and one new TV show. I took some time off, but I’m back at it. I’m doing a TV show. It’s also sci-fi, but it’s extremely different from “Foundation” and I’m really excited about it. It’s based on a book and boy it’s a brain melter.
This interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.
“Foundation” Seasons 1-3 are now streaming on Apple TV+.
