Another "teaser" to me since it focused on showing off visuals (space battles??!), not on certain plot elements. Foundation, as hard sci-fi, is heavily inspired by the history of the roman empire and how empires always fall. The sci fi setting is a backdrop for the actual story which is about power, ideology, science, knowledge, intrigues, secrets and fear, not "pew pew" stuff.

I don't have high hopes for this one at all as a die hard Asimov fan since we Asimov fans tend to be very discerning about attempts to bring his universe to the screen, esp. after utter pile of shit that was I, Robot which may have been a mildly entertaining Will Smith flick for the ignorant masses. For us Asimov fans who've read most or all of his vast catalogue of works it was basically pissing on his legacy and taking a stinking dump on the story.

In fact, there are few epic works that have translated well to the small and big screen. Lord of the Rings was a total surprise since it fit quite well with the imagery I had created when I first read the books as a 12-year old. Taking an epic masterpiece as LotR and transforming it into movie format is ridiculously difficult and Philippa Boyens basically had to rewrite the script (either as a whole or parts of it) on a nearly daily basis during the making of all three LotR movies.

To even undertake a project that was considered impossible, condensing the story by picking the key events in the books, trying to infuse detail without narrative or long dialogue.. I didn't mind the various minor changes they did in order to make the movies work better as far as pacing, letting the viewer learn about the world by cleverly picked locations and camera shots, an amazing cast where Peter and his closest team members managed to pick people for the characters that looked similar to the fuzzy images we generated in our heads when we first read it. The whole Tom Bombadil stuff in the first book wasn't used which makes sense since those chapters didn't make any difference to the storyline.

Now we have Foundation which could be viewed as a hard sci-fi epic of the same scale as Tolkiens work (well, except for the invention of new languages and writing down a timeline of Middle Earth which is more like a bookshelf of history books than fiction), spanning thousands of years although the main story takes place during a ~300+ year timeline. The biggest issue is that Asimov put in so many necessary details to build the world and give the reader and understanding of what's going on. Obviously the show makers are basically doing a show "inspired" by Asimov's books, characters, certain events and names but it won't be the Foundation I know after having read all the books (7 books) many times.

I'm wary.

From now on we'll just see some short appearances as he will appear in the recordings he made that were set to be shown to the Foundation people at specific times describing the crisis ahead of them that his psychohistory had predicted.