'Foundation' Season 2: Showrunner strives to 'subvert expectation at every turn'

For the return of the sci-fi epic Foundation on Apple TV+, starring Lee Pace, Lou Llobell, Jared Harris, and Leah Harvey, showrunner David S. Goyer wanted to shock the audience in unexpected ways.

“Never go the way the audience thinks it's going to go, subvert expectation at every turn,” Goyer told Yahoo Canada in June. “I'm always saying to my fellow writers, ‘OK I know the audience thinks we might go in this direction, but would it be interesting if we went in the exact opposite direction.’”

Foundation closed out its first season with a massive cliffhanger, when Salvor (Harvey) tells Gaal (Llobell) that she's her daughter, with fans anxiously anticipating how that interaction was going to play out in Season 2.

“Salvor travels across the galaxy, feeling like she's going to meet her people and she's going to be accepted by her mother," Goyer explained. "Her mother doesn't know who she is, her mother doesn't even like her, and that creates conflict."

"It would be boring if Gaal just accepted Salvor. So now you've got conflict between these two women and how can they resolve it? And it's uncomfortable, but discomfort is what makes for good television, in my opinion."

For Season 2, Harvey was excited to be able to explore the character of Salvor in a different way, now that the character isn't necessarily searching for her purpose.

“Season 1, she's dealing with stuff that's happening right in the moment, she's just got to react, and a bit later on in Season 1 we see her try and work out who she is, and try and search for this thing," Harvey said to Yahoo Canada during a press junket in June.

“But in Season 2 we see her with the thing and she's going to experience new things, and we're going to see her discover stuff. It's really exciting to know that she's going to be just going on that journey. Acting it was fun as well, because it meant that I got to do a lot of internal stuff and bring it out. It was a challenge and it was also really fun.”

While the connection between Gaal and Salvor is likely how many fans anticipated Season 2 would begin, Goyer keeps us on our toes, actually beginning with a uniquely unsettling moment of Hari (Harris) trapped his Prime Radiant. It's a very jolting and exciting way to introduce us to the new season of the show.

“I wanted to shock the audience,” Goyer explained. “I wanted to present the audience with a sort of polar opposite take on Hari Seldon.”

“In Season 1, he's this very professorial, aloof character that keeps his emotional cards close to his vest. I wanted to strip him down. I wanted it to be in black and white. I wanted people to be surprised when they started watching the episode and say, ‘Whoa, what's going on here?' ... I wanted to destabilize people and I didn't want to just go by the same playbook that we'd played by in Season 1. I wanted to show people that the palette of the show has expanded, not just in terms of the worlds and characters, but in terms of the kind of scenes that we could do.”

Lee Pace as Brother Day wants to 'write his own destiny'

In terms of elements of the story that shift for Season 2 of Foundation, that's particularly evident with fan-favourite Pace and his character Brother Day. In this evolution of the character, Brother Day is exploring the concept of individuality.

"It's deeply important to him to be able to write his own destiny," Pace told Yahoo Canada in a June interview. "All of the other Cleons had to follow a program and he thinks that he's greater than them."

"That seed that was planted in the first season, that awakening of 'Oh actually, I am not just a continuation of someone else. I am my own person, I walked that spiral myself, no one did that but me. I experienced that vision alone.' ... It introduced a concept that they do have individuality, they do have sentience, and then the question, what are you going to do with it? If you are an individual, what does that mean to you?"

Pace stressed that for Brother Day that means, "he's going to tell the robot what to do" and "he's going to make a plan for the future," writing his own path.

"I mean, it's doomed," Pace admitted. "I think one of the pleasures of watching Foundation is watching these Cleons suffer, as they should."

As the series progresses, a character viewers should really take note of is Demerzel, played by Laura Birn, as the show starts to reveal her backstory, one layer at a time.

"She has a lot of control over the empire and we see her kind of actually guiding the empire where she wants to," Birn explained to Yahoo Canada last month. "But then again, the Cleons control her."

"It's kind of like a family drama of this dysfunctional small family and the way they don't have anyone else. They are a very tight family and it's not a very healthy relationship always, when it comes to the Cleons and her."

Birn stressed that in learning where Demerzel came from, we understand that "she's seen everything."

"She's seen the humankind go through the most horrible things, beautiful things, and she doesn't forget anything, so she has all the wisdom in her," the actor said. "She's like a treasure that they could, if they wanted or knew how to use, she would have all the knowledge."

"I think maybe there's a moment she trusts Cleon the First a bit too much and she loses that freedom. It's heartbreaking, painful, a beautiful, weird love story that then carries throughout the whole season."

'That's just not the way that I like to make films'

One of the most spectacular things about Foundation is this impressively stunning world that's been built, with intricate set design utilized as Goyer strives to film the show on location as much as possible, supported by production designer Rory Cheyne and supervising art director Nigel Churcher.

“I am contrary by nature, and I know that for a lot of fantasy and science fiction shows, that kind of go-to for these shows is to do it ... in one of these large LED stages,” Goyer said. “That's just not the way that I like to make films, and I do refer to this as film, even though it's a serialized television show, or cinema."

"We try to do as much in camera as possible, we film at least half the show on location, on distant locations. ... I just think that you get a better product if you build as much of it as possible, if people aren't acting against a green screen or aren't acting in just a completely void environment, where they don't see what it's supposed to look like. There's no replication for it being raining, or for there being real snow or real wind. ... It feels more real."

Cassian Bilton, who plays Brother Dawn in Foundation, applauded how amazing it is to work on such an immersive set.

"When I got cast in Foundation, I thought it was green screen for the next few years and that would be my life," Bilton recalled to Yahoo Canada in June. "I turned up on the set and I was like, 'This is crazy. I can't believe they've built this.'"

"It just makes our job so much easier. ... You honestly feel like a kid in a sweets shop. ... Particularly with the throne room scenes and all the stuff in the palace, just the sheer scale of it makes you feel, in some ways, empowered when you're in a good place as a character. Or when you're in a more interior bad way, it makes you feel very dwarfed by it. I think if we were up against green screen, you wouldn't have that relationship with the environment that we definitely get as actors on Foundation."