I'll do my best to keep the episode summaries brief, but I'm afraid this will all be tldr. The show runners apparently decided to just chuck the books. So the only thing that is pretty much the same are character names.

Foundation Ep 03 - The Mathematician's Ghost

The episode starts by spending a big chunk of time with the Cleons. The oldest one (Brother Dusk) is gonna die and everyone is sad. Demerzel is definitely a robot and all the Cleons know. None of this moves the story forward.

Next we jump to Terminus. The settlers arrive and the planet is cold. They find a mysterious "vault" which knocks out any living thing. It's a mystery.

See the Foundation Wiki for more information on the Vault

Flash ahead thirty years they are still living in shipping containers. Their town has not grown much.

We meet Salvor Hardin.

See Foundation Wiki for details on Salvor

She is the Warden (like Sheriff) of Terminus. She has lots of "hunches" and "feelings" about stuff. She has a hunky boyfriend we shall call Hunk.

One night, she has a "feeling" and looks into a magic telescope which can see ships in outer space days away from the planet. (Neat trick.) She warns the colony. They try to phone for help, but their Internet space modem has been destroyed.

The next night she has a feeling and sees a ghost boy she follows to the ruins of their colony ship. She is captured by Anacreon soldiers. On no! Of course, the Anacreons are led by a woman. Salvor is captured!

Quick observations on Ep 03

• Why is Salvor 20? There is not a good reason to deviate from the books on this. A female mayor of the same age and experience would have worked fine. But the show runners clearly think they can write a better story than Isaac Asimov.
• Living in shipping containers after 30 years. Really?!!!?! 30 years!! Hollywood's obsession with dystopian futures continues with this show.
  • With Imperial tech, they could accomplish a lot of building in 30 years.
  • The town looks like they landed last year!
• Where the f*#! do they grow the food? What do they eat?

Differences from the Book Ep 03

There are a LOT of differences. Here is my list:

• Terminus was settled over decades in the book, not with a single ship.
  • Tens of thousands of people were on the planet, not hundreds as shown in the tv show.
  • There is no mention of dangerous life forms or an inhospitable climate. Both made up for the show.
  • Terminus city was very modern and used the latest Imperial tech.
    • Had unlimited power based on nuclear fusion.
    • In the books their improvement on Imperial power systems was one of the main tech advantages of the Foundation.
• The vault was just an auditorium in Terminus. The null field, the mystery, all of that is made up.
  • Seldon broadcast prerecorded messages in the vault based on psychohistory predictions. There was some mechanism that alerted Terminus City to when a broadcast would occur.
• There was no such thing as slow ship. Faster than Light (FTL) travel is common place and used throughout the book series.
  • Hunk mentions he is 70 years old because of time dilated travel. There is no such thing in the Foundation Trilogy. Even after the fall, everyone still has FTL travel.
  • Also no special pods or tech are needed for jumps. You just jump. Also added to the TV show for some dumb reason.
• There were hundreds of mathematicians working on psychohistory. Not 2. All of them understood it.
  • However, in the books, ZERO psychohistorians were on Terminus. Every kind of scientists except for them were there.
  • That is kind of a plot hole in the books. You would think the early settlers would have noticed this and complained.
• Salvor Hardin was a dude in his 30s or 40s and a master politician.
  • He was mayor of Terminus. (Mayor would eventually mean president more or less.)
  • His primary contribution was to wrest control of Terminus from the Encyclopedia scientists and convert the Foundation to a democracy.
  • There is one similarity. Both Hardin's try to convince the Encyclopedia folks that Terminus is on its own. They must provide their own defense.
  • He was never a warden, sheriff, or other type of policeman.
• The folks writing the Encyclopedia Britannica were a big deal early on in the Foundation in the books. They are there in the TV series, but if you had not read the books, you would not understand this. There is no coverage of the Encyclopedia.

tags: #tv #scifi #foundation