Apple’s Most Ambitious Sci-Fi Epic Is Better Than Ever

If a journalist writing for Starlog in 1978 were put into suspended animation, woken up, and shown the TV series Foundation, that person would have a hard time believing it exists. With Season 3 of the Apple TV+ series, there will be 30 hours devoted to adapting Isaac Asimov’s first Foundation novel and now, half of the second book, and a bit of the third one, too. While it’s mercifully not a slavishly faithful adaptation to the books, the fact that there is this much time and effort spent on such famous novels is truly remarkable. Our hypothetical out-of-time sci-fi journalist from 1978 would also probably ask the following question: “Okay, so this is the most popular sci-fi series on TV now, right?”

The fact that Foundation is not more popular among sci-fi diehards than, say, Black Mirror or Apple’s runaway hit Severance only speaks to the quality of Foundation. The show isn’t challenging for a casual viewer by accident. The difficulty is the point. But with Season 3, Foundation has, perhaps, crafted its most urgent and breezy set of episodes yet. If there are any holdouts on whether or not Foundation is the true Game of Thrones in space, Season 3 will convince you that this epic show deserves an audience bigger than just people clutching their Isaac Asimov paperbacks to their chests.

Part of the reason that Foundation Season 3 is a bit tighter, and, yes, more conventional than the previous two seasons, is because the show has finally revealed its big bad, the telepathic mutant known as the Mule. Asimov dropped the Mule into the second half of the stories that comprise the second book, Foundation and Empire, and the effect was immediately apparent: A series that had been about building and planning suddenly became a larger story about preservation and survival.

Game of Thrones alum Pilou Asbæk plays the Mule with the perfect amount of cruelty, menace, and intrigue. This isn’t really Asimov’s Mule, but rather a version of the character more in your face and genuinely frightening. The show has been building up the arrival of the Mule for a while, and if you wanted to call Season 3 the payoff for all of that foreshadowing, that would be very, very true. As with previous seasons, showrunner David S. Goyer, as well as writers like Jane Espenson, Caitlin Parrish, and Eric Carrasco, manage to remix and contemporize events from the Asimov books in ways that feel both faithful and fresh. One particularly clear stand-out here is how the writers reimagine the vacationing couple Toran and Bayta, played with the perfect amount of realism by Cody Fern and Synnøve Karlsen. Foundation’s approach to these somewhat stale characters from the novel is to smartly update them — now they’re a kind of far-future set of social media influencers, who get wrapped up in events of galactic importance.

This season also gives us the original Han Solo, Asimov’s Captain Han Pritcher, a Foundation intelligence operative, who, as embodied by Brandon Bell, gives the series a new kind of swagger.

The returning cast from previous seasons is stronger than ever, too. Lou Llobell’s Gaal Dornick essentially becomes the main character this season, wresting the spotlight slightly from Jared Harris’s Hari Seldon. But, it’s the wonderful palace intrigue of the cloned emperors of the Cleon dynasty that deserves special praise this time.

Each season, Cassian Bilton, Lee Pace, and Terrence Mann have had to reinvent their respective characters; each a clone of the same emperor Cleon, at different stages in his life. Their secret immortal robot handler, Demerzel (Laura Birn), is back with even more secrets and schemes this season. But the machinations of Bilton, Pace, and Mann’s brothers Cleon are still, perhaps, the best reason to watch the show. With three seasons of this, you’d think the actors and writers wouldn’t have found something new to do with these three facets of the same man, and yet, Foundation gives us surprising new versions of these men.

While Pace’s Cleon in Season 2 was a bloodthirsty tyrant, in Season 3, he’s like an outer space Big Lebowski. The Empire, after all, is in decline, just as Seldon predicted, and so, these despotic cloned emperors find themselves humbled and involved in plot twists more shocking than anything from the original novels.

It’s a testament to both the writing and the performances from the actors that this concept is still so compelling. Even if the series didn’t have all the other elements, and even if a massive outer space battle wasn’t looming, the deeply strange relationship of these three clone brothers is enough to keep you invested week after week.

Foundation Season 3 raises the stakes for all of these characters in massive ways, but unlike something like Game of Thrones or The Expanse, the themes are never too dark. Despite all the cynicism and political corruption, and backstabbing, Foundation Season 3 has an incredible and almost unlikely amount of warmth. Hopefully, the show will continue for several more seasons, but science fiction fans of all stripes should agree: We hardly deserve all the greatness Foundation has already given us.

Foundation Season 3 debuts on Apple TV+ on July 11, 2025.