Foundation season 3 episode 2 recap: 3 revelations which could change the direction of the series

You've had to wait two years for Foundation season 3, so the seven days of waiting for episode 2 can't have been too bad. 'Shadows in the Math', as S3E2 is called, hit Apple TV Plus on Friday, July 18.

In the first episode of this newest season, we caught up with the state of the galaxy 150 years on from season 2: we met new antagonist The Mule, saw how the Empire was losing more and more ground with new Cleons who were unruly than the last, and learnt how Foundation re-established itself after being routed in the last season.

Foundation season 3 episode 2 comes with some big twists and turns though including not one, not two but three revelations which could change the direction of the series. Plus it catches us up with returning characters absent from the first episode and introduces us to new ones who book readers will understand to be pivotal to the future of the series.

So here's our recap of 'A Shadow in the Math'. This article will contain plenty of spoilers, not just for this episode but for past seasons, so you've been warned. No spoilers for future episodes though!

Future calamities and unseen powers

We begin on Ignis. As a comet passes overhead, a ritual is carried out which ends with the reawakening from cryosleep of Gaal Dornick (Lou Llobell) and Hari Seldon (Jared Harris), and they're welcomed into the Second Foundation. Then we learn that this was actually 151 years ago.

We're told that over the years the duo were woken up for a few weeks every year, for Seldon to educate the Second Foundation on psychohistory and Dornick to help them understand their psychic powers. However Seldon is worried that they're not progressing fast enough to beat The Mule or deal with whatever's set to happen afterwards, so he stays awake, and Dornick is put under for many years.

When she awakens she meets a very-old Seldon, on the verge of death. He's made a new version of the Prime Radiant which contains all the information he knows about eight crises, including the third which is coming soon, as well as "where everything is headed" after The Mule (which implies a bigger calamity in the future, the first of the big revelations I mentioned before).

That evening Seldon is visited by a representation of Kalle (a mathematician, whom we met another version of on Oona's World in season 2 and who gave Seldon his corporeal body there). She creates a portal to take him somewhere, and admits that she needs Hari to have skin in the game because "we can't". This implies an extra hitherto-unseen power of which she's a part, the second big revelation of the episode).

Dornick returns to her sleep-wake cycle for a few more years but gets dreams of The Mule, and wakes up in time to deal with the Third Crisis. However the First Speaker (ie, leader) of the Second Foundation shows Gaal what Demerzel showed the Cleons at the end of the last episode: The Mule's conquest of Kalgan has abruptly frayed the trajectory of psychohistory.

Forces are moving on Trantor and Kalgan

Talking of that prior scene, psychohistory acts as our segue to it: Demerzel (Laura Birn) is still showing Brother Dawn (Cassian Bilton), Brother Dusk (Terrence Mann) and Brother Day (Lee Pace) the issue. The former two want to find a way to deal with it but Day seems to think that Demerzel and her reliance on the Prime Radiant is the reason for the decline of Empire in the first place.

Dusk also asks Demerzel if he can be spared the fate of all Dusks in being vaporized in 10 days when Dawn ascends to be Day and Day to Dusk, in order to help deal with the impending crisis. However she denies him.

Over on the planet of Kalgan, The Mule (Pilou Asbæk) meets his new subjects. He tells them about his ability to manipulate emotions, calling people who've been tampered with Converted. He demonstrates this by bringing out the granddaughter of the former Archduke of Kalgan and getting her to shoot herself in front of the audience (luckily for her, the gun isn't loaded). We learn that manipulating many minds is tricky for him, but by sowing fear with stunts like this it makes his job easier.

Back on Trantor, Day is gambling with soldiers at a barracks, and is particularly friendly with one man whose child is very unwell. Day complains about the imminent ascendency and how he'll have to look after a new child when it happens (who would be, of course, the new Brother Dawn).

We return to Kalgan, and to meet two new faces: Bayta and Toran Mallow (Synnøve Karlsen and Cody Fern), two rich traders who've just completed an antiquated tradition called 'marriage' and are on their honeymoon. They're annoyed when The Mule flies his ship in the way of the sun and return to their ship.

There, they're visited by Han Pritcher (Brandon P. Bell), who maligns how the rich like them don't see what The Mule's coup is doing to the lower classes of the planet. He wants them to help him meet the new warlord by bringing him as +1 to a party that the new ruler is hosting soon.

Brother Dusk's hidden power

We return to Day, who's now hanging out with his girlfriend. He muses that he'd like to leave Trantor before the Empire falls, after which Dusk visits and apologizes for not believing Day's skepticism about Demerzel and the Prime Radiant.

We learn that following on from the genetic drift (established in season 1), Cleons suffer cognitive decline quicker (ie, they're younger when they start to lose their mental faculties), and so to compensate, at some point in the past a Brother Day changed the timing of ascendency so that each Cleon was alive for less time. Dusk asks the current Day to revert this, just for a few months so he can help deal with the impending crisis (and put off his own death) but Day refuses.

Next Dusk goes to the robing ceremony, where Dawn is being fitted for his robes for his ascendence, and asks Dawn to come to dinner with the ambassador for Foundation later. He also implies he has another gift for Dawn that even Demerzel doesn't know about, and we quickly find out what it his when Dusk visits a space station.

It emerges that Dusk has created a Dyson Sphere (not a Foundation concept but a real hypothetical idea, more on Wikipedia here) around a Black Hole. It can harness the power of this subject to create a strong beam which can completely vaporize a planet, in the third big revelation of the series which gives scary amounts of power to whoever holds the weapon.

At the dinner with Dusk and the Foundation ambassador, Dawn admits that he has worries about the Mule. Afterward he goes to his quarters to retrieve a hidden communication device, and begins to speak to someone... who turns out to be Gaal Dornick, who tells Dawn that it's time to act.