A Thousand Years

Foundation stretches the timeline of its action over a thousand years. Yet it must be contracted. There’s a push-pull between this unwieldy sprawl, versus the containment; big sweeping themes and set pieces versus small, tiny, intimate moments. “The show is as expansive as the galaxy and as narrow as the human soul,” contends Goyer.

“Do we really need these giant scope shots of the galaxy or the planets? Do we really need all this space born? Yes, we do. But at the same time, I like to really narrow down the focus and slow things down to get really granular and have scenes between Gaal (Lou Llobell) and Salvor (Leah Harvey) where she’s feeling rejected by her birth mother, or spends a bunch of time with Hari Selden (Jared Harris) trapped in the prime radiant where he’s slowly going mad and only has himself to talk to.”

Gaal Dornick (Lou Llobell). Photo courtesy of Apple TV+

Grand Themes

The rich thematic tapestry of Foundation explores birth, death, destruction, rebuilding. The show even touches on themes of salvation, faith, and false prophets. It examines on the intersection (and polarization) of religion and mathematics, and faith versus fact. But David S. Goyer doesn’t see them as separate entities.

“I think they’re two sides of the same coin,” asserts Goyer. “There’s a wonderful book called The Dancing Wu Li Masters by Gary Zukav that basically says if you look at a circle you’ve got Newtonian physics here and traditional Judeo-Christianity over there. When you start going around the dial, on the science side, you start going into quantum mechanics and all of these things. And on the other side of the wheel, you go from traditional Judeo-Christian religions to Taoism or something like that. And they start to meet and start to become indistinguishable from one another.” They are all part of the same dial.

Format And Genre

“When I pitched the show, I said it’s a combination of an anthology and a serialized show. If you take something like Fargo, which is largely an anthology where each season is its own complete story and we introduce you to a whole bunch of new characters. Part of our show is that, and then we’ve got six or seven characters that continue on from that. I can’t really think of many other shows, if any, that follow that format.”

“These serialized characters travel from season to season and century to century. I think part of the fun and the opportunity is that it allows for a kind of a galactic reset in between each season, but you’ve got these characters that we met in the previous seasons that are our guides into it, who were there in the previous age and can reflect back on it. And so, they function as the audience’s proxy.”

Although David S. Goyer stays true to the show’s science-fiction DNA, he describes its genre as a “religious allegory. I hope that some people might also consider it to be a crazy drama.”

“We lean on a lot of science fiction tropes, but when we’re breaking down each individual story line, what I throw back to my fellow writers is, ‘If we removed all of the science fiction elements would this story still work? Are there real world antecedents or analogs for the storyline that we can relate to. If we remove the science fiction elements and the story still doesn’t work, then we’re telling the wrong story.”

Foundation also inserts short films into its television storytelling. “We did it twice in season one,” declares Goyer. They’re almost tone poems. We just slow everything down and we forget about the big drama happening during the rest of the season. We just narrowed them down in this season to Hari’s backstory and what brought him to Trantor. We’re trying to do at least two of them per season. If we could do four, we would.”

“They’re beautiful. Everyone was very nervous when we did the first one about the last day of Dusk/Darkness’s Life in season one. It was this 17-minute short film in the middle of the episode. We really broke format in order to do it. And that, is the purest expression that I could use to explain my philosophy of how we make the TV show.”

Hari Seldon (Jared Harris) Photo courtesy of Apple TV+

“I would say allegory is a much more ambitious way of storytelling. It’s a much more holistic way of storytelling. Metaphor can be used for specific moments, specific events, or a specific character interaction. But allegory is of employing that process writ large across an entire storyline. We’re going to use a fable to tell this story. So I think Foundation itself is an allegory.”

Inside The Writers’ Room

“Everyone tells me, particularly my staff on Foundation, that the way we run the room is very unusual, particularly for a drama. So the first thing that I say is I encourage people to have a healthy debate. I encourage people to challenge me. I encourage people to convince me that I’m wrong. I will say we break all the episodes together as a group. We write the outlines together as a group. We’ll assign scripts,” says Goyer.

“In season two, I decided that no one would write individually and I paired people off. I tried to assign the scripts based on what I felt were people’s strengths. We had the good fortune in season two of working with a lot of the same writers who worked on season one. They write a draft, I give notes to the writer/ writers, and they do a second draft. Occasionally I might do a little polish.”

“Then we room the scripts. We sit around a table, or a virtual table, and we go through the scripts line by line and people make pitches. What do we think of this scene? What do we think of this line? Does anyone have a pitch for this line? That’s something that typically happens in the comedy room. If someone has a really interesting observation about a whole storyline or a whole scene, I might say, ‘Why don’t you take a pass at that?’ Even if it’s a script I wrote.”

“We take a mid-season writing break for two weeks after we’ve written five scripts. We just read those five scripts and we see where we’re at in the process. Do we need to change course? Is this storyline still working? Do we need to go back, and sometimes we do, and replumb some of the storylines? Then we do an end of the season break where we put pencils down again for two weeks. And then, we resume writing again for another month after that. The final pass is what I call the “Lice Comb” pass. And we go through it with all the writers with a fine tooth comb.”

“And we say, ‘Can we make this line or this allegory that we introduced in episode two? Can we move that moment in episode nine? Can we repeat this line or call back that line? And that’s just a free-for-all where everyone comes in and pitches in. And so I love the lice comb pass because that’s where a lot of the detailed magic happens.”

In conclusion, we asked Steven S. Goyer which character in Foundation he most identifies with. “If I’m being honest, Salver. She always felt a little misplaced and always felt she had a duty to other people. She’s very stubborn.“