You killed all of the luminists! Well, they claim they reincarnate.

Starting my trip up Empire's top 20 TV shows of 2025

#20 :  Foundation

It’s important to have at leat one show in your life that’s an undemanding, easy watch. A show that you can lie back and sink into while letting your brain switch off. Foundation is not that show. The third tranche of this ambitious adaptation of the Isaac Asimov series might have seen showrunner David S. Goyer take a step back from the helm, but its quality remains undimmed. The Cleonic triumvirate begins to crumble (Lee Pace’s Brother Day going full Lebowski), Harry Seldon’s (Jared Harris) plan shows signs of fraying at the edges, and all-powerful antagonist The Mule (a delightfully maniacal Pilou Asbæk) takes centre stage. There’s even a pair of space Influencers (Cody Fern and Synnøve Karlsen) thrown in for the Gen Z crowd. This is cerebral television at its most ambitious and a mind-bogglingly complex (and compelling) work of sci-fi that deserves to be seen by everyone. Come for talk about four-dimensional objects imposing themselves on three-dimensional space, stay for Lee Pace ripped to the tits on mushrooms and kissing a ferret.

The first three sentences of Empire's review above are just perfect because, let me assure you, "Foundation is not that show". Although, in some ways, this season was actually less hard to follow than previous seasons (the first season made the '23 list, but the second season missed out) because it had more going on in it. But...

...and it's a big butt, this season is utterly, utterly bonkers. And I say this as someone who was quite a fan of the first two seasons - if a somewhat reluctant one because they really made it quite hard to love. But I stuck with it because I thought they'd get things into gear at some point and there's a good argument they did that here, although I can also understand that some people probably didn't like the progression. Personally, I liked the effort but not necessarily the execution - I've not read the books so I can't say how accurate they are, but I have a sneaking suspicion that those who've read the books aren't entirely sure either.  

It's all well acted by the usual suspects - Pilou Asbæk gets the only specific shout-out because he has a lot more to do in this season than previously, although I can't say I was a huge fan of the amount of power his character had.

It also looks absolutely gorgeous - they've spent a lot of money on this and it doesn't feel like it's been wasted. To me, at least - there will be a large percentage of people that would have absolutely no interest in watching this. And I can't say I completely blame them - if you think you're not going to like this then you can rest easy knowing you are 100% correct. The only people I might try to give this season a go is those who gave up on seasons 1 or 2 for being too slow because that's certainly not an accusation you'd level at this season - if anything, I'd suggest there's some overcompensating going on. I'm going to watch the next season though, so I guess it's done its job.


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