Foundation is a marvelously rich experience, in which a Crayola 64-pack of SFF character types, visuals, and storylines coexist not only easily but symbiotically. The heady stuff enhances the earthy stuff. The kaleidoscopic spectacles provide contrast for the ghastly gore. Scenery chewing baddies like the Mule and Shakesperean tragedies like Lady Demerzel inhabit the same story.
The Kingdom of Hawai’i, Ka’ū District. The windswept, ocean-darkened beach sands. Keōua, newly crowned King of a divided Hawai’i, kneels before a fire. His mother (Kekuhi Keali’ikanaka’oleohaililani), a formidable singer and one of his chief advisors, brings him his father’s mahiole, the trademark Hawai’ian helm. It was a symbol of his wise father’s rule, but he has no use for it anymore. “I no longer fight to preserve his kingdom,” Keōua says, tossing his father’s legacy on the flames. “I will live to build my own.”
My notes at this point read simply “THAT’S INCREDIBLY BADASS. THIS IS JUST A BADASS SHOW.”
Did I say the last episode was the best Wednesday episode ever? I lied. Boy, did I ever. A body-swap comedy that sees the mind of Wednesday Addams inhabit the body of Enid Sinclair and vice versa, “Woe Thyself” (Season 2, Episode 6) proves that Wednesday, well, knows itself. From the start, leading actors Jenna Ortega and Emma Myers have played their mismatched roommate characters as if they were John Goodman and Jeff Bridges in The Big Lebowski, no matter how far short the material they were given fell of the talent they were giving it back. What this episode, co-written by co-creators Miles Millar and Alfred Gough, does is simple. It takes the best things about the show and gives them even more to do: act like each other.
It wasn’t a fluke. Wednesday Season 2’s mid-season finale was the show’s best episode ever — funny, frightening, and genuinely striking to look, all in ways the show had so often struggled to achieve. That struggle seems to be over. The fifth episode of the series’ bifurcated second season is even neater and nastier.
To accurately describe the world is to sound insane. That’s the dilemma facing observers of America’s collapsing empire today. The corruption is so naked, the incompetence so comical, the sheer evil so gleeful and unrepentant, that describing the situation to others makes you come across as badly undermedicated. There’s an old saw that goes around lefty political spaces saying that when you explain Republican policies in black and white for people, they simply won’t believe you. Surely, no one could be that psychopathically cruel for so long and just get away with it.
Postumus Agrippa (John Castle) lives in a world that’s similarly askew. The dark secret at its center is right there in his own name: He’s the son who was born to the legendary war hero Marcus Agrippa posthumously. Why did Marcus Agrippa die, and his rival Marcellus before him? What of Postumus’ late brothers, Gaius and Lucius? Did the solitary exile of his mother Julia have a reason behind it beyond her infidelities? And what of Drusus, ally to the Republic, son of Empress Livia, and father of Postumus’ best friend, the twitching, limping, stuttering Claudius?
The answer has been obvious to us in the audience all along: Livia Drusilla is behind it all. She’s behind the deaths of Marcus, Marcellus, Gaius, Lucius, and Drusus, plus the exile of Livia, and as of now the exile of Postumus for attempting to rape Claudius’ married sister, the gorgeous Livilla (Patricia Quinn, aka Magenta from The Rocky Horror Picture Show). In this very episode we see Livia confront Livilla about the affair, then half-cajole, half-blackmail the younger woman into keeping it up long enough to frame Postumus. She’ll do anything, stop at nothing, to ensure her son Tiberius is next on the throne.
Photo: Acorn
But try telling this to Augustus, the greatest man in the history of the known world. He’s not such a bad guy, as far as it goes, but he’s not a person accustomed to being told he’s wrong. (By anyone but Livia, that is.) Now he’s been told that his beloved wife is responsible for the death or disappearance of half a dozen people he adored, including no fewer than five planned successors to the throne, plus the mother of three of them.
“For years, everyone around you has either died or disappeared. Do you think it was all an accident?” Well, you’d want to, wouldn’t you? Would you choose to accept the horrible truth? Or would you go on clinging to the world as you knew it, believing in your heart that it could never really change? We know how our own elites have reacted; Augustus reacts little differently.
It’s a brilliant narrative maneuver by screenwriter Jack Pulman, working off the novels by Robert Graves. Here we have the moment we’ve all been waiting for: Finally, someone exposes Livia as the serial killer she is to the only man who can do anything about it. But even as it’s happening, we know nothing will come of it, because unless you’ve been watching through the BBC’s cameras, there’s no way you’d accept Postumus’ word for it, not when he’s trying to save his own skin in the process.
This episode offers us a brief history lesson of the “Alien” world, courtesy of Joe, the still-human brother of the show’s lead “hybrid,” Wendy. (Joe insists sentimentally on using her human name, Marcy.) Joe explains to the childlike hybrids that once upon a time there existed things called governments, in which people voted for how they wanted their world to be run. “It didn’t work,” Joe says simply. So the corporations stepped in, and “apparently, they solved all the problems.” That “apparently” sure feels pointed.
It’s a chilling scene for several reasons. First, every single thing we’ve seen about Boy Kavalier would indicate that this man should be nowhere near the levers of power. The default assumption that the ability to succeed in business or technology makes one a natural leader is one of the fundamentally delusional capitalist beliefs that the “Alien” franchise exists to skewer, ever since the Weyland-Yutani Corporation sent a bunch of long-haul truckers to recover a lethal species of giant parasitical space piranhas in the 1979 film that started it all.
But beyond that, the scene shows how corporate control of education and media eliminates the ability of Joe and the hybrids to understand and articulate the problems facing the world they live in. Democracy “didn’t work”? OK … says who? The five corporations who replaced it? They hardly seem an unbiased source of information. “Apparently, they solved all the problems?” What problems did they solve? And why are there still so many problems now?
Since the sets and set-ups are so limited on this show, it falls to blocking and camera placement and movement to create a sense of space, pacing, and momentum. Good Lord, does it ever do so in this episode. From the long take that sees Augustus stalk up and down a line of Julia’s accused lovers like a wolf selecting his prey, to the way the camera wheels around from a triumphant Livia to an enraged Augustus when the power shifts between them following Julia’s exile, these shots and staging decisions use physical space to convey the political and psychological hierarchy of the royal family — who’s on top and who’s beneath them, who’s the public face and who’s the force in the background. As a visual text, I, Claudius one of the most watchable shows I’ve ever seen, no frills required.
We live in a time when the most powerful, most wealthy, most seemingly unstoppable people in the world are telling you and me and our children on a daily basis that no one else matters, no one else is real, the only thing that counts is getting what you want, preferably at the expense of others. There are certainly characters on Chief of War who’d fit right in in that world; give King Kahekili a tactical vest and a neck gaiter and he could be out there threatening Democratic politicians at gunpoint even now. What a boon to see a story in which the willingness to be open, to listen, to understand, to be honest, to be friends and family and lovers, to be a community, a people, is seen as the ultimate virtue. Other people aren’t our enemies, they’re our brothers, our sisters, our siblings. When we betray them, we betray ourselves.
It’s almost boring to say at this point, but Foundation’s astonishing hot streak continues. For the second season in a row, the show balances a seemingly impossible-to-reconcile number of characters, storylines, tones, and visual palettes in episode after episode. The Demerzel hallucination is an all-timer image for this show, which is saying something, and both the flashbacks and the Foundation’s horrifying massacre by the Mule’s mind-controlled forces recall the most unpleasant moments of Andor’s masterful second season. Writers Jane Espenson and Greg Goetz and director Christopher J. Byrne also prove adept chroniclers of the Mule’s sadism, with Indbur’s bloodless but brutal demise ranking way up there on this series’ history of violence. Again, this is really saying something.
My beautiful and talented wife Julia Gfrörer has been nominated for an Ignatz Award for World Within the World, her magnificent career-spanning collection of short stories. (I wrote four of them, which means I’m like 1/60th an Ignatz Award nominee myself!) Please submit an awards ballot request and vote for her here, as she is very dear to me and the book is brilliant. Thank you!
The “Alien” franchise explores two overlapping nightmares. The first is the Alien, a cold and implacable force against which humanity is defenseless. The second is humanity itself, which through technological hubris and old-fashioned greed might well invite its own destruction. Against the first we are helpless; with the second, we are all too eager to help.
Drusus himself now occupies the command of the German legions Tiberius once oversaw. He’s a fine and honorable soldier as best we can tell, and a friend to Augustus as well. But while he serves the Empire, he’s no fan of it, nor of the all-powerful position it’s built around. In a letter to his brother after he returns to the front, Drusus writes of his worries:
A period of enforced rest due to a slight head wound has given me much time to ponder and reflect on the state of our beloved Rome. Such was the extent of the corruption and petty place-seeking that I found in Rome, that I have come to the conclusion that it is the inevitable consequence of the continued exercise of supreme power by Augustus.
The problem with building an enormous, largely unaccountable apparatus of power around one person, however good a guy he is, that power will eventually be inherited by someone who’s not such a good guy. Okay, so today we’re legalizing same sex marriage and talking about how the moral arc of the universe bends towards justice. That’s nice. We’ll get Shep Fairey to make a poster.
But what happens tomorrow? Perhaps the council of black-robed wizards who decide whether laws are legal or not will one day be dominated by right-wing lunatics. Perhaps the person placed at the apex of the richest and mightiest nation in human history will one day be a senile Nazi with an axe to grind against anyone who’s ever wronged him. Every opportunity we had to undermine the power of these institutions and didn’t take it was a waste of good fortune and a crime against the future.
Drusus already senses these problems arising, even with Augustus still on the throne. In argument with his mother, who resents both Drusus and her first husband for harboring hopes for the return of the Republic, Drusus asks her if she wants Rome to be reduced to the open corruption of “the Eastern potentates,” upon which their civilization had always looked down. He sees how quickly these things fall apart, even with someone decent at the top.
This is a plot-focused episode compared to its predecessors, relatively light on the sci-fi spectacle that’s Foundation’s hallmark. That’s fine — it’s good to bring things back down to earth a bit in order to advance the story.
But this is not to say it’s devoid of fascinating space-opera visuals. Demerzel pulling the Prime Radiant out of herself from between her robotic cleavage is an image that probably shouldn’t be as disconcertingly strange and sexy as it is. The coldwave psychedelia of their journey into the black hole is a bravura effect, reminiscent of Hari’s strange fractal freakouts while trapped within the Prime Radiant last season. And I love the design of Mycogen, which blends the familiar Blade Runner vibe of a decrepit futuristic city with the art nouveau beauty of a Peter Jackson Elf kingdom for its wealthier districts. I’m perpetually amazed by just how smart the design of this show is.
I keep coming back to poor oblivious Brother Day, though. His is the shock of any rich and powerful person when confronted with how normal people really think about them. Don’t you love me? I love me! I know it’s fake with all the others, but it’s real with me, right? Right? The belief of the mighty in their own irresistibility is a gap in their armor as clear and as vulnerable as the missing scale on the belly of Smaug the Golden. Great and terrible things can be done when it’s exploited.
Hawley is no stranger to playing with other people’s toys. He is also the creator of “Fargo,” the acclaimed crime anthology series based on the film by Joel and Ethan Coen, and “Legion,” an ambitious take on the Marvel Comics mutant character from the writer Chris Claremont and the artist Bill Sienkiewicz. But both of those shows draw from a wider set of influences than simply the work they’re named after; Hawley’s “Fargo,” for example, is a sort of “Songs in the Key of Coen” riff on the brothers’ entire oeuvre rather than just their snowy Minnesotan black comedy.
“Alien: Earth” casts a similarly wide net. In the closing credits, we read that the show is “based on elements created by Dan O’Bannon and Ronald Shusett,” who developed the first film’s original story (O’Bannon also wrote the screenplay). But obviously, the contributions of Giger, Scott, Cameron and Fincher are all in play as well.
Scott’s “Blade Runner” is referenced in the sprawling cityscape Prodigy City; in the models strutting and posing on oversized video screens; and in Olyphant’s strikingly coifed synthetic, who feels like a tip of the cap to Rutger Hauer’s character, Roy Batty. The creatures are reminiscent of similar beasts from Stephen King’s “It” and “The Mist.” Wendy’s plight bears the marks of the sci-fi anime classics “Akira” and “Battle Angel Alita.” Even the high-rise setting falls squarely in the action-movie lineage of “Die Hard,” “The Raid” and “Dredd.”
None of this is to say the show feels derivative. A product of its influences? Of course — this is franchise filmmaking. But Hawley’s homages are laser-precise. And they make use of techniques rarely seen on big-budget TV, like the leisurely zooms of 1970s cinema. Hawley brings his own penchant for dreamy montage to the proceedings as well, adding an aesthetic ingredient that is new to the setting.
I, Claudius feels weighty. A cast consisting almost solely of British acting royalty. A story about the mighty Roman Empire and the legendary (or infamous) men and women whose strength and cunning held it together (or tore it apart). Dialogue with a knack for sounding both casually naturalistic and as precisely calibrated as the finest poetry. A profound influence on such New Golden Age/Peak TV giants as David Chase and George R.R. Martin. Its legacy as a staple of the highfalutin line-up of PBS, back when our own empire believed in improving its subjects’ lives somewhat. How do you wrap your mind around a show with a reputation this sterling and imposing? How do you wrestle this masterpiece to the ground?
You do it in a pit of mud, that’s how. Sexy, sudsy, sinister, spearheaded by a cast that makes an absolute feast out of every betrayal and bon mot, I, Claudius is aimed at the gut and the groin as much as it’s aimed at the noggin.
Telling you that any given episode of Foundation kicks ass in five or six different ways seems to be the Prime Radiant’s prediction of my destiny, and far be it from me to deny the math: This episode of Foundation kicks ass in five or six different ways. Caitlin Parrish and Leigh Dana Jackson’s script is merciless, sullying a babyface character perhaps beyond salvation. It’s also dependent on not one but two characters, Gaal and the Mule, remaining several steps ahead of the audience, which in my case at least they certainly did. I always enjoy it when shows are smarter than I am.
As outer space spectacle, this remains a magnificent show. From Toran’s wounded ship skipping across space and down to the surface of their planet half destroyed, to the imposing enclosure of Kalgan by Empire’s ships, to the “cobalt spike” that burns the planet, even down to the red and green lighting of Dusk aboard his “black hole gun” weapon as he hears the news from Dawn, to the gravity-defying ways of the tubular planet where the Council meets, there’s virtually always something to feast on.
This show is full of surprises. With a one-year time jump, the relocation of a major character into a whole other world, and the introduction of perhaps the most major character of all, Chief of War has once again shaken itself up from one episode to the next. What impresses me most isn’t that it keeps introducing new wrinkles to what is at heart the simple story of a noble exile and an evil king, but how artfully it’s done.
In terms of sheer imagemaking, this is Tim Burton’s best work on the show. In terms of overall quality across the board, this is the show’s best episode. It’s scary, it’s actually funny, it’s relatable (knock before you enter the room when your roommate’s in there, god!), it’s got that awesome orc-troll-Gollum-Large Marge monster design for Tyler, it’s got goth Patsy from AbFab, and it ends with the possibility of Wednesday Addams journeying to the realm of the dead for real. It makes me want to tune in next time, even if that’s a month away. That’s exactly what you want a midseason finale to do.
So yeah, random animated sequences? Jenna Ortega and Catherine Zeta-Jones doing their best Uma Thurman/Lucy Liu impression? Horror comedy centered on a Luis Guzmán shower scene? Christina Ricci getting dragged before Thandiwe Newton in chains? It would be churlish to deny the show’s pleasures. But it would be foolish to deny the many ways it hobbled itself right out of the gate.
