Foundation’s Single Best Idea Isn’t In Isaac Asimov’s Books At All
The idea of a cloned series of Emperors is original to the Foundation TV series, but adds needed humanity and depth.
Isaac Asimov is unquestionably one of the greatest and most influential science fiction writers, which makes it weird that the only notable film adaptations of his works are a CGI-heavy Will Smith action movie and a drama about Robin Williams becoming a real boy. Apple TV+’s series adaptation of his sprawling Foundation series finally brought a deserved sense of scale and grandeur to Asimov’s work on-screen, but oddly, the best of it did not come from him at all. The endless series of clones that rule over the known universe as the Genetic Dynasty is an original concept to the show, but remarkably reflect the deepest themes of the books better than anything else.
In the Foundation television series, mankind has spread far across the cosmos and occupied millions of planets under the rule of the Galactic Empire (Star Wars fans can calm down, Asimov thought of it first). For generations, it has been ruled by one man: Emperor Cleon, but there’s a catch. Rather than producing an heir naturally and hoping to sidestep the complications of succession that inevitably emerge in any empire, he had himself repeatedly cloned, so there would always be a single, unchanging ruler of the trillions of humans that exist.
This is a fascinating science fiction concept, but Foundation does not stop there. In the show, the Genetic Dynasty always consists of three co-existing clones of Cleon I; Brother Dawn (Cassian Bilton) is decanted as a youth to learn from the example of his elder “siblings,” Brother Day (Guardians of the Galaxy‘s Lee Pace) who acts as primary ruler of the Empire until he ages into Brother Dusk (Terence Mann), who advises his younger clone from a place of experience and tends to an ongoing mural of the imperial experience.
None of this is from Isaac Asimov’s Foundation books, which were published over the course of over fifty years and are often considered the single greatest sci-fi series of all time (with the one-time-only Hugo Award to prove it). In the books, Cleon I rules over the last days of the Empire, but is depicted as a sheltered, well-meaning, but incompetent man who seems to have barely any concept of the nature of his station. Later, an unrelated Cleon II is essentially a warlord who rules a vastly diminished Empire and is ultimately defeated by his paranoid fear of his own generals.
The Foundation television series makes some pretty big changes to the simple tale of a mathematician thousands of years in the future named Hari Seldon (played by Mad Men‘s Jared Harris) who comes up with a statistical science he inexplicably calls “psychohistory” to predict the future. But none of them are more significant than the introduction of the clones of Cleon, who exist both as individual men with their own experiences and personalities and as living symbols of the unchanging permanence of the Empire.
It is built into the premise of Foundation that the Empire will fall and humanity will enter a new Dark Age, regardless of how strong or endless the Genetic Dynasty appears. But Brother Dawn, Day, and Dusk add an element of humanity to this and expand the idea of Empire from an abstract notion to something carried on by actual people. That those people fruitlessly try to convince themselves that they are beyond human history and the ceaseless pace of time is their bleak and great irony.
By the end of the first season of Foundation, we have seen both the terrifying power and cruelty of the Cleons (at one point, a “terrorist” is sentenced to a horrifying living death while knowing that every single person she has ever met and the people that they met have been executed with a mere gesture), their shocking sympathy and sense of responsibility, and their pathetic, useless fumblings toward eternity. It is not something that Asimov ever thought of, but it adds depth to his future histories that they desperately needed.
