Foundation Returns, and Finds Humanity on a Collision Course With Disaster

Speaking of Hari, he’s still trying to figure out who his mysterious companion might be. Her poetic rhythm of speaking gives her away: it’s Kalle, whose uniquely crafted mathematical proof helped Gaal (“my tormentor,” Hari mutters) solve the Abraxas Conjecture, the feat that brought her to Hari’s attention in season one. The woman adjusts her appearance accordingly, and he realizes what we’ve already suspected: he’s indeed inside the Prime Radiant.

As their conversation continues, he works out that she’s neither his wife nor Kalle, really—she’s got parts of both of them in her, but she’s something else entirely,“something new.” She is the Prime Radiant, and she has a “vested interest in humanity’s destiny.” Not survival, Hari notes with some concern—but destiny.

Cut to Gaal holding up the Prime Radiant and telling Salvor, “I’ve trapped Hari Seldon inside,” and Salvor revealing that Hari also left a digital copy back on Terminus. Gaal had been keeping Hari #1’s consciousness on a data storage device, but recently transferred it into the Prime Radiant, which explains why his surroundings went from “blank room” to “geometric fantasia.” Salvor is confused—Hari is the hero of the Foundation, after all!—but Gaal has a differing point of view: “Hari sacrifices everyone for the plan. You don’t know him like I do, he’s always holding something back!” She doesn’t trust him. Salvor wonders if maybe Gaal is more afraid of the plan to save the human race than Hari himself. She also wonders if, in the 138 years they spent in cryosleep, maybe Empire’s already fallen? They’re not exactly up on current events, and at the moment—from their perch atop the roof of a nearly submerged house on Synnax—they have no way of getting up to speed.

So Gaal activates the Prime Radiant to check up on Hari’s plan… and realizes that things have gone alarmingly off the rails. The Second Crisis is indeed almost here, and since the trajectory Hari had previously accounted for is now skewed, they’re at a turning point. There are many, many more crises to come unless someone (ahem, Gaal and Salvor) can nudge things back on track. “If we don’t start preparing for it now, the Age of Darkness that Hari predicted gets much longer,” Gaal says. “So long that it might never end.”