Even though nearly 300 years have passed in the sprawling science fiction series Foundation, several characters have figured out how to stick around for all three seasons. For the Emperors named Cleon, Brother Dawn (Cassian Bilton), Brother Day (Lee Pace), and Brother Dusk (Terrence Mann), it’s all about showing up as a clone of themselves over the centuries. For Gaal Dornick (Lou Llobell) and Hari Seldon (Jared Harris), they glide through the centuries thanks to cryo-sleep, or by becoming an immortal AI.
But the most tragic and compelling character who keeps reappearing is likely the robot known as Demerzel (Laura Birn). She’s been running the Cleon dynasty for several centuries now, but her existence predates the clone emperors. And now, in Foundation Season 3, Episode 3, Demerzel’s back story gets a very big twist, which puts the pre-Foundation timeline in a new light. Spoilers ahead.
In “When a Book Finds You,” we follow various story threads, including what the Mule (Pilou Asbæk) is up to on Kalgan and how Gaal recruited Brother Dawn into the cause of the Second Foundation. But the episode’s biggest twist is connected to Brother Day’s attempt to flee the palace with his lover, Song (Yootha Wong-Loi-Sing). Because when he tells Song the forbidden detail that Demerzel is a robot, everything changes. Suddenly, Song doesn’t want to leave, instead making it clear that she might feel safer with Demerzel.
Brother Day tells Song the secret of his robot master.
Why? The twist isn’t something we could have seen coming, because this is the first time Foundation has revealed that some humans want the forbidden robots to return. When Song makes a simple hand gesture to Demerzel, the secret robot recognizes that some survivors of an illegal religion are still thriving on the planet Trantor. As Demerzel later explains, this religion is known as “the Inheritance,” a cult of humans who pray for the day that robots rule society again.
In Demerzel, Foundation not only honors Isaac Asimov’s later Foundation novels, but also the robot books that connect to his larger literary canon. In the TV version of Foundation, as in Asimov’s novels, the world of robots governed by the famous “Three Laws of Robotics” predates the Empire we see on TV, but had a rich history before robots were outlawed.
By introducing the Inheritance, Foundation is gesturing at the final story of I, Robot, “The Evitable Conflict.” In it, robots rule human society, but that’s not considered bad. Protagonist Susan Calvin argues that humanity losing a degree of independence was a worthy trade-off, because robots are generally better at overseeing our affairs.
Foundation’s latest twist isn’t making the same argument, but it is depicting a group of humans who are praying for the robots to return to power. In this episode, Demerzel says she’s erased Song’s memory of ever meeting Brother Day. But did she erase Song’s memory of the Inheritance? If you were the last living robot, and you found out some humans wanted you to rule the galaxy, would you be happy? By the end of Season 3, Foundation will almost certainly reveal the answer to this question, and the final fate of all robot kind.
