Some of Foundation season 3’s most powerful scenes come not from action set pieces, unexpected twists or mass planetary destruction, but from the dramas of everyday people living in the sci-fi world.
Already in this season of the Apple TV Plus sci-fi epic we’ve witnessed the predicament of Zephyr Vorellis, Demerzel’s confidant whose mind gets wiped repeatedly preventing her from being able to do anything about the heinous acts she’s told about, and Song, Brother Day’s partner who we learn had a whole life and partner on Mycogen before she was taken to Trantor.
Another of these impactful moments comes in episode 9, "The Paths That Choose Us", between Ambassador Quent and Brother Dusk. Despite their growing attraction, the latter has spent the season trying to avoid his own inevitable demise, eventually destroying several planets with his super weapon and taking billions of lives in the process.
On the eve of his scheduled "retirement" date, Quent, Foundation’s ambassador on Trantor, comes to see him; their conversation is part confrontation, part confession, and part search for answers.
To unpack this scene, What to Watch spoke with its star: Cherry Jones, whose credits also include Signs, The Village and The Handmaid’s Tale. Our conversation touched on Empire, Foundation and the aforementioned scene (which happens roughly 32 minutes into Foundation season 3 episode 9).
New face in Empire
Most of the Foundation characters who represent Empire are either immortal, like Laura Birn's Demerzel, or endlessly reiterated through cloning like Brother Dusk as well as Dawn and Day (Cassian Bilton and Lee Pace). With those actors now clocking in 30 episodes in the season, I asked Jones what it was like entering this group.
"For me it was a little daunting, because it's such a vocabulary that I had to to go to the Foundation glossary, to figure out what the syntax was, and all these different worlds. And the vastness, the scale of the thing — I kept writing back home and saying 'it's like being in the biggest movie that's ever been made' because there's so many different worlds going on at the same time."
"It was also daunting to catch up to 35,000 years of history, of the empire, and trying to figure out Quent's modest place in it all." That character through-line, by the sounds of it, was the guiding light through this complicated sci-fi world:
"It was fun to try and figure out what was going on, It was trying to figure out the line of Quent's life for me that was interesting. And the bottom line is that she's a true believer in the Seldon mission and that's never in question... even though she's a little infatuated with Dusk."
Quent's ongoing predicament is that she represents Foundation without being part of that faction, but Jones found real-life examples to draw from: "But I have always been interested in people who work for government, and leave their country, and remain gone for basically all of their lives - and yet are still loyal to their original mission."
In fact, when we asked Jones who she drew on to portray Quent, a real-life example emerged: "I did think when I saw my costume that Hilary Clinton would have killed for it. I kept saying to my friends: 'I'm wearing a Hilary Clinton suit 35,000 years from now!'.
The confrontation
Quent plays both a love interest and an emotional foil to Brother Dusk, but the first thing we had to ask was whether Jones as an actor knew about Dusk's actions through the season: "I think I actually got those [scripts] later, I didn't get them all at once."
And this led to the aforementioned scene: "when I got to the scene where I actually have to walk into the throne room and say 'you have killed billions of people' that was a line I never thought I would say as an actor."
When we asked Jones her favorite scene to film, she reiterated "I do remember going into that vast hall, the throne room, when I go to confront Dusk after his horrors". And it was meaningful as an actor too:
"The wonderful Roxanne Dawson, who directed those episodes, was really helpful to me as an actor. Because [the script] had me marching in and shouting at Dusk, but instead she said 'you are so white-hot, and so destroyed by this man that you love's actions', that she had me rein it in a great deal and be like the core of a nuclear reactor."
Jones, like many other Foundation actors I've spoken to, waxed lyrical about the design of the show, saying of this scene: "I'm as bowled over as the art direction on this show as I am the acting. Maybe even more so, because I cannot imagine producing a show of this size and how they make it work. The scale of everything is so vast, and the number of extras who were all dressed so magnificently in all the costumes of all the planets. I'm like a fan who wandered into this world!"
Sci-fi in Prague
Having cornered such a storied sci-fi actress, I couldn't help but ask how Foundation compared to other shows and movies Jones has starred in, specifically The Handmaid's Tale:
"I guess I don't think of Handmaid's Tale as sci-fi. But the thing about sci-fi is that it's all about humanity, you think of it as being something more about — when I was growing up sci fi was outer space — but it's really just about the way that we humans don't seem to change a bit. And there are the optimists who will give their lives to make things better for the world, and that's certainly the Foundation."
I also asked about Jones' most prominent scene partner, Terrence Mann, who plays Brother Dusk: "He's a delightful gentleman; he's from musical theatre, Broadway, and I'm from straight theater, so we've never really worked together. But we're the same age and come from the same world so that was a great deal of fun".
Mann also guided Jones through Prague, the filming location for Foundation which, judging by my interviews, is now a favored haunt of most of the cast: "He was already telling me all of the restaurants I had to eat in before we ever went to Prague, and then just saying 'we've got you, don't worry about a thing' so it was like coming into a group of buddies."
That group also includes "Lee Pace who was a neighbor of mine in New York City, and Laura who became a great favorite of mine, and Cassian, and I would say we worked hard and played hard together. It was a great deal of fun."
Foundation season 3 ends with its tenth episode on Friday, September 12
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