Foundation - Ep.3 Review - Ghost Of The Mathematician

Welcome back to the channel. I hope you all are having a great day, and today we're going to review Foundation episode 3, I believe entitled The Ghost of the Mathematician. And what I have been saying about Foundation is that, um, um, It felt like to me, coming in without reading the Isaac Asimov novels, it felt like a good science fiction show, had a great budget, um, had the legacy of, uh, having one of the biggest science fiction stories of all time. To tell a story about. But I also said that it, for me, felt like it was good science fiction but not great science fiction. And I think my perspective is a little bit more clean and pure in that— is that it has a big expectation. That is because Foundation is written by Isaac Asimov, and it is the inspiration for many of the greatest works of science fiction out there right now. And you can see all these elements in Foundation. It's about this great lineage of science fiction novel writers, the Philip K. Dicks, Right? The Frank Herberts. You can see the great inspiration they got by reading novels like Foundation to create their great works. Right? And so a lot of people came into Foundation, my understanding is, expecting to be blown away. And a lot of the criticism is that they're not getting that. Now, you know, again, it's going to be very difficult to have these untellable stories or stories that many don't believe can be brought to the screen as a weekly serial. And that's very difficult. You know, that lightning, it's like lightning in a bottle, right? It only strikes so often. Even Game of Thrones couldn't hold it on a Slunk of Ice and fire couldn't hold it off forever. The first few seasons, even up to about the first 4 seasons, Game of Thrones did very well as long as it was still connected to the, to the books. But it got ahead of the books, right? And then we can see how quickly it went downhill. What I, what I keep coming back to week after week with this show is that it is a good science fiction show. But it's not a great show. And it's probably what I'm finding out is not going to meet neither the expectation of the, uh, of what many of the book readers feel, and I don't even know if it's going to meet the expectation of what, uh, every week of what just people find to be good science fiction. And I'm going to explain a little bit about that in a review, but I want to say just going into this that to just speak a little bit more about the adaptation of sci-fi novels to television and to the screen, that when you're writing a novel, you gotta keep a certain thing, a few things in mind. When you're writing a novel, there is no limit to your budget because there is no limit to your imagination. So You can think of the perfect settings and backdrops. And even when we're reading novels, we can put in place the perfect perception from the character, right? So in our mind, we can hear that character speaking. Through the novel, and we could put any voice in there we want. We put any demeanors in there we want to a great degree because our mind is able to be flexible with that. But when you try to adapt this to the screen, what happens, right? You got to find the right actors. You got to find the right set locations. You got to take, you know, many— there's got to be many compromises on what can happen from week to week because you're constrained by the budget. Right? And so, uh, many of the things that happens to tell a great story in a novel, you're not going to be able to do that because you're limited by time, budget, and the range of the act— the actor, right? And so I, I touched on a little bit last week because I spoke about how in many of these books the characters are generally— there are a lot of main characters that are young people. And much of what Hollywood does and many television productions is they get more mature actors to play the roles of main characters, or they have to end up swapping characters gender-wise. And there's a lot of different things that go on. But when that happens, that's going to change a lot of the feel of that novel, and it's going to change a lot of what people, you know what I mean, might be looking for. I always said with many of these novels, we want to take Dune again, inspired a great deal by this. The main character, Paul Atreides, And many of the productions we've seen has, they have aged the character up, right? So Paul Atreides, Muad'Dib, has been seen as an adult, while much of the story takes place and he's a teenager, he's a, you know, a kid. Now in this latest remake of Dune, there seems to be a lot more faithfulness to the books. But then what you're going to see is— sorry for that interruption. I always forget to turn off my notifications. Hopefully it won't happen again. But you get to see these characters aged up. But in this sense, they're not doing that. So what you get is a more accurate Paul Atreides, right? And when that happens, You know, I've always understood why they did that. They even did that in Game of Thrones because for many reasons, right? The range of actors, you know, can actors of our day grasp what would be, you know, whether it be a middle-aged person or maybe some, you know, modern-day type character, you know, would they be able to, in a sense, grasp the scope, you know, acting-wise of what needs to be delivered. And sometimes they're fortunate to find these very skillful young people who can do it, but oftentimes they just age the character up. It seems like in Foundation there are a lot of young actors they're dealing with in the main roles, right? You know, and, you know, I I, you know, there seems to be something missing there, uh, as I was saying, as I was just trying to figure out what is it that, you know, I want to see with this production, or, you know, what makes much watch TV for me, because I don't seem to be getting this with this, even though this is, uh, something, um, that, uh, you know, I would normally be very excited about tuning in every week. But I, I really feel like with Foundation It's going to become a show where, uh, many weeks are going to be— it can be missed from this show, and I'm not going to feel like I'm missing anything. And a lot of that has to do with, um, uh, I think some of the general problems that can happen in productions. That's when you get a lot of filler, right? When they don't want to move the story along. And we kind of understand why they're doing that, but at the same time, it— how it's done, it sometimes doesn't work well. And I think that's what's happening in the case of Foundation. Like, you know, we, we— and I'll give you a chief example as we're looking at this picture of this fresco, uh, that the emperors are working on all through the course of their lives. Um, you know, we, um, you know, this was— or the opening of the, of the, this week's episode The Ghost in the Map decision. This was one of the good points about the show I like, and that's dealing with the bureaucracy and the business of the Empire. They keep taking us on Terminus, and they're trying to deal with the mystery of the vault, which we got to find some very interesting details about this week. But, you know, that part was the less interesting of it, and Like about the first 20 minutes of Foundation dealing with how the Emperors, uh, their cloning program works, going back to how it was started with the first Klingon Emperor, Klingon I, and Demerzel, which is the robot who has been through all these ages of these clone Emperors, right? And just the process of how they go from the beginning of the Emperor's life throughout his clones, dawn, day, dusk, and then they had night, right? Which was the, or I believe, yeah, I believe they would call them brother night, right? Which is the end of the Emperor's life and how that worked in order to allow the succession of this kind of triune of the Emperor stages of life. Right? And I was very intrigued by that, and I very much enjoyed that. If it would have just stayed there, it would have been fine. Right? But then, of course, after those first 20 minutes, it has to take us back to Terminus. And they're trying to steal what I'm assuming we're going to get to see what the vault's all about. Um, at the end of the season, right? We're going into the final episodes, but it does give us a great deal of, uh, information about the Vault and that the Vault is alien in nature, uh, that is created by aliens. Now, in the books, as I'm getting bits and pieces of stuff, I'm not— that I'm not trying to pick up, but some things just can't be helped on the internet. If I'm not mistaken, I thought it was Harry Sheldon that was building this, what was going to be the vault to preserve the knowledge, right, of the Empire so they could rebuild it. But they're going a different direction with this. And of course we got more of Salvo, you know, which seems is going to play out to be the child, even though they're not saying it yet. But I think we can kind of put together. It looks like this is going to be Gal's child and Rach's child, right? Now, um, you know, of course Gal and, and Rach weren't present in this week's episode, but you know, many of us know it was this big cliffhanger left with them, uh, in the first two episodes. And, uh, that was also very interesting to me. I wanted to see that move along, then how they skipped off to take us back on Terminus. Uh, you know, when there are great things about a show now, and I get they got to have the fillers in there because you got to have enough material to stretch it out and move it on and keep it an interesting story, but, um, uh, it seems like it's so many interesting things going on, plots and, uh, stories about certain characters that it just seems like there is enough characters in this world, in this series, uh, with interesting things going on with them to keep them moving along. Because there's so many characters in this that I think they got enough, uh, um, storylines to take time to get us to the focus on, uh, you know, many of the, the interesting parts of the show so we don't keep rolling into these fillers week after week, because I think they're going to lose a lot of viewers doing that. Um, but, um, you know, we got to learn that Salvo is not affected by the vault, right? She can move into the vault. And of course, um, you know, I think the story is going to move towards she's going to go in the vault eventually. Now, I don't know why she hasn't went in it yet, knowing her— what she can do, but it seems to be a fear of finding out she has this immunity to the vault so she doesn't become a lab experiment, right? And then you get these Arkadians, right? This race of, um, uh, they're part of the Empire, but they're another civilization, uh, or, or planet that's, um, under the Empire. But they are headed to Terminus, and it's a big mystery about why they're doing that and defying the Empire. And what they're expecting to find there themselves, and so on and so forth. So the ghost of the mathematician seems to be a lot dealing with, you know, what many of us would have thought would have been Harry Sheldon, but all we got was Harry Sheldon's statue in the episode. It seems to be more related to a young version of Rach, which I'm thinking is going to be Salvo's father running around with the blade he killed Harry Sheldon with. I want to touch on that as well a little bit because that was very important, that why did he kill Harry Sheldon. So my understanding of how psychohistory works, right, in this show is that Harry Sheldon's ability to use psychohistory is all based on what would be, um, the ability to kind of predict a series of events to tell you what the future is going to be, but it can't trace down to the individual actions of people, right? I didn't think it could, but something goes on with Rach when he stabs and kills Harry to the point of where, uh, my guess is it was necessary to be done to not cause problems in the timeline. That's what I— that's the only thing I could think of. Is it something more nefarious, like Harry Shodan turns out to be some type of liar, you know what I mean, or something like that? He just created this entire thing for whatever reason. Maybe he just wants to revolt against the Empire or something, right? And is it that Reach finds that out and you've put, you know, Um, so many people at risk. You've put now his love interest that Harry doesn't know about, or maybe Harry did know about it and maybe they just didn't want to get out of nobody. But there's a lot of mysteries going on, and that's smart to keep interest in the show going forward into the future. Uh, and I'm certainly gonna continue to watch it. I think to continue doing reviews on this though, I would want it to get a lot more fascinating and interesting. And right now I just think it's a good science fiction show. But remember, we only take time to do this on great science fiction shows, right? Great television, great cinema, uh, you know, something. And although I can see that Foundation is trying, I don't think they're trying hard enough. David Goyer is really good about, um, being behind creating what are some pretty darn good shows. And I could tell that he's trying to tell a really great story. But what happens is, uh, maybe the idea of it's just so great and with there's so much expectations that you can't do this like a regular TV show. Maybe these all need to be movies, right? Maybe they need to be, instead of trying to be a series, maybe they need to be like a science fiction movie. And I think that's what David Goyer does. I don't think David Goyer really expects these things to last very many seasons. I think for him they're like more like miniseries. Like even he was behind Krypton, and a lot of us thought the first 2 seasons of Krypton, it wasn't, it wasn't a great show, but it was pretty darn good for the other type. But it was definitely better than the other shows in the lineup. Same thing like Foundation in comparison. Foundation is much better than what you're going to find in your average science fiction show on television these days. But I think David Gore is just trying to make many movies, right? He's just trying to— and so I don't think he's really interested in trying to make these long-lasting television productions that's going to run close to 10 seasons like Game of Thrones. I don't think that's his way. But anyway, oh, I'm glad. I thought I stopped recording. I'm going to cut the review short there. I want you guys to tell me what you thought about it this week. Also, let me just say this really quick, that the youngest of the Cleon emperors, Don, in the fresco, which is why I had it up here. This is very important to the show as they're kind of creating this artwork and kind of reminds you of the hieroglyphics of ancient Egypt where they're, uh, telling their story. Uh, but all of the emperors are trying to complete this fresco, and they're all cycling in around in the same thing. They're doing the same thing. Uh, with Brother Don here, uh, he's the only one who decides to, to break the cycle. And so, uh, my thoughts are maybe that's symbolic of end of the Kleon Emperor, something that has to end for the world to work out to be better, for their culture to be in civilization to advance for. Because this is basically the story, the telling of the story of the Epic of Gilgamesh in a way. These are all about powerful, wealthy, or powerful rulers that haven't accepted their mortality, and so they're out there going, trying to, uh, defy death. And, uh, um, so it's the same thing here with the Klingon Emperors, that the, the, uh, progression, you know, the, the, uh, of, of them as a person. Because as the first Klingon Emperor, he kind of, you know, goes on about how he wants to see the construction of the Star Bridge and how that the clones won't really be him in a sense. But Demerzel, his first minister, lets them know that they will all be him and they are him, right? And so this is a lot of story. In fact, this is what, if you even go from this to the Dune series, even Star Wars, it's always about these empires and these rulers. Think about the common threads here. That are trying to defy death, right? They do not want to die. Cleon I, he's fighting death. The Dune Emperors are fighting death, right? They're living for thousands of years. In Star Wars, Darth Plagueis and the Emperor Sidious, right, or Darth Sidious and Darth Vader, you know, after the death of his mother, they aren't able to accept death and they want to end death. That is the common theme with all these connected stories, uh, that have influenced ones like Foundation, that have influenced these, these great stories. But, uh, um, tell me what you all think about Foundation. Uh, I, I think I'm leaning more to the, uh, novel readers now. I believe I'm, I'm gonna really enjoy and get a lot more out of this reading the novels. Um, you know, and many times that is the case. But there have been in some cases where television shows have done many things that novels can't do. You know, even with George R.R. Martin, Game of Thrones, how he spoke about— there were just things in the first several seasons of Game of Thrones that he couldn't do in his writing. Certain gestures, facial expressions, how people moved and talked. There are things that you can do bringing something to the screen that can't be done on a book, right? So everything has its pros and cons. I don't want to just say the books are always 100% better. There are those rare occasions where the adaptation to television or cinema or the silver screen has been better than the books in certain ways. So It does happen, just not that often, right? But that's all I want to say in this week's episode, The Ghost of the Mathematician. Tell me what you all thought about Foundation. Do you like it? Do you think the episodes are going to get much better? I think they are going to get better, but I hope they stop doing this filler stuff. And just, it's a lot of story to tell from my understanding. There are many plots with many different characters. They could focus on solving one plot week after week unless they're interwoven, which oftentimes they are, to advance it along. And I think that they'll do a lot better in viewership and people really being a support of them. But that's all I want to say. If you like content like this, don't forget to like, subscribe, And until next time, as always, take care of yourselves and each other.