Summary: Season finale. Gaal, Salvor, and Hari chart a new path forward on Ignis. Demerzel heads to Trantor, taking actions that will change Empire forever.
Air Date: September 15, 2023
Ok, after a great finale, I can say that season 2 was definitely a step-up from season 1. Basically the Empire thread continued to be great and the Foundation thread finally became much more interesting and more interweaved with the Empire story line. I even stopped caring that it barely follows the books.
Hober Mallow / Bel Riose death scene was masterfully done.
That can’t be said about Salvor’s death however. I replayed the scene about 5 times and I can’t wrap my head around it, am I the only one? Shouldn’t have Gaal be the one who got blasted? I think they must have broken the 180-degree rule or something because I was sure the whole time Salvor was opposite to Gaal with Josiah being between them but that can’t logically be true. Such a badly filmed/edited scene, though a complete outlier compared to the rest of the show.
And so much for my theory that Josiah would become the Mule, with the neck scar being the distinguishing mark, lol.
Funny enough, I personally think the previous episode was more impactful for ending this season.
We gain little with having Day pushing himself out of an airlock. Losing the fleet was huge for sure, but taking Hober Mallow’s words to heart means that the fleet was already lost since the Spacers and the General had already planned on parting ways with Empire.
Tellem’s story didn’t need to progress. We lose Salvor, my choice for best character in the season…
Everybody on Terminus lives on in some form. Their loss had an awesome (in the truest sense of the word) effect on the universe. Perhaps they are just data like Seldon is/was, but either way, we lose any impact that planet-wide genocide had.
I’m not sure how runaway Dawn’s story will go but I had higher hopes for some sort of plan or action. I suppose this sets up a Spiderman pointing scenario in a future season with betrayed Day and Demerzel’s Day confusing everybody and each other. Or instead we have an estranged king seeking his place as Empire, causing a third crisis.
Lastly, Demerzel is obviously capable of talking about her past, her imprisonment, and her programming by Cleon I. Has she attempted to bring this up with the clones in the past? If not, why start now? If so, has she had this conversation before to torture the Cleons before ending them? Has the Prime Radiant allowed her to reason around her directives in some fashion? More questions.
Agreed the previous episode was deeper. This was more wobbly.
I’ll give terminus a miss, but this is just more ass-pulling powers of “the vault”/“prime radiant”/“mentalics”. That’s probably my biggest gripe, they have teleportation technology, they should be able to just replace day or others and take over the empire that way, they have super-magic and can predict the future, but they act like they’re the underdogs.
Gaal is slightly less annoying now, but still the most obnoxious character, it’s probably good that salvor died, her character barely fit under gaal, it was awkward, she kept looking to Gaal for guidance when she had more and better experience.
What was most creepy was the undertones of demerzel and her exponents, they really were both trapped in this, and her loyalty wasn’t to any of the living but to the continuation, so imagine how many cleons must have been inconvenient and were removed. Empire is a damaged airliner with no-one at the stick.
Saw something like that coming in the scene with the spacer mother and daughter talking, it looked like she knew she was sacrificing herself and was dealing with it. Still don’t get why hober needed that implant, the spacer in command literally synced with her mom directly, and can apparently do that from anywhere too, just seemed like a completely meaningless macguffin.
Edit: Why would the spacers go ahead with the deal with their ally’s main planet was just vaporized? Where is the ophelium going to come from? Doesn’t that make Empire’s wrath more terrifying?
Because Harry gave them the power to manufacture their own spice - I really think that he actually gave them the information rather than merely dangling it like a carrot.
At the same time they cut the legs out from under Empire, which means they have no reason to fear its wrath. Empire is crippled without them.
That’s not how deals work, and his offer was for ophallum, not the recipe, though you’re right that actually would be better overall.
But I think they always can fear empires wrath, the … stupid bicycle wheel jumped without spacers, they’re not required.
I think having episode 9 being the one when the shit really happens started with game of Thrones and I think it works well. It give time for the last episode to wrap up everything better.
For brother Down story, pretty sure we are going to have a divided empire on s3, where the clone dynasty is fighting against the descendants of the brother down who run away.
And saving the people of Terminus makes Harry not look like a complete monster for sacrificing it to Empire. It actually makes his plan make sense, which it didn’t really if he was willing to let the heart of Foundation be ripped out like that. This way, he has a shadow Foundation that Empire doesn’t even know exists. As far as they know, they were dealt a serious defeat with the loss of their fleet, but they believed that they had also at least crippled their adversary.
I think the performances in this episode were broadly outstanding.
Day’s manic fight scene.
Demerzel’s pained futility stuck in her own paperclip problem.
I really hope this second season gets some Emmy nods, as it was much more than I expected from the show previously.
In general, I felt like the last 3 episodes of this second season had been some of the best TV I’ve seen in a while.
Apple is doing an excellent job with their productions, and I’ve been really impressed by this one in particular.
I think was a great ending to a great season. I’m sad about Hobor and Salvor, because I really liked them. In fact, I like all characters this season, they all played their rolls nicely.
Thou, the Tellem story ark could have been a single episode. I don’t think we needed it to last half the season.
