![[DISCUSSION] Foundation S02E06 - Why the Gods Made Wine (Spoilers)](https://flxt.tmsimg.com/assets/p20232643_b_h8_ac.jpg){kind=link}
Premise:
Day and Queen Sareth make an announcement. Tellem sows seeds of distrust between Gaal and Hari. Hober Mallow reaches his destination.
Directors:
Alex Graves
Writers:
David S. Goyer, Josh Friedman
| EPISODE | RELEASE DATE |
|---|---|
| S02E06 - Why the Gods Made Wine | Aug 18th, 2023 on Apple TV+ |
These last few episodes have really great. Seldon flash back was something I didn’t know I wanted before. That ending left me wanting more!
The surge in quality is massive, the first few episodes were borderline unwatchable but this last one was great, it actually felt like they were trying to move to something.
The first few episodes felt like they’d gotten too many discovery writers.
It’s nice to get that context for Seldon, but the whole ‘life flashing before their eyes, deathbed flashback’ trope took me out of the episode.
I thought it was more alluding to the secret that the Mentallic leader pulled out of his memories. We hear that he’s ashamed of something and not as perfect a man as everyone thinks he is and only find out what happened as his “dying” thought.
Plays well with Salvor theorizing that he was brought back to life to have some flesh in the game and him debating killing himself with the scientist during the stampede but deciding not to. He had a reason to live (and kill) before, so why not now?
And Tellem knows all this now, which she would not have done had he gone there as a hologram.
Which suggests that whoever gave him a body knew this and did so exactly because it was the only way to win over the Mentalics.
Could be and probably is a fakeout. Tellem just wanted to put Seldon through that to wring whatever she could put of his mind. So in that sense the deathbed flashback trope was actually a literal plot point. It wasn’t just us seeing those things, but Tellem. Maybe she’ll learn something that changes her mind about Seldon.
In fact, I think whoever gave him a body again did it for exactly this purpose. A holo-Seldon would not have been vulnerable to Tellem, and thus wouldn’t have succeeded in eventually winning her over. The whole resurrected Hari gambit is a strategy to win over the Mentalics.
Plus if they really were going to kill Seldon (again), they wouldn’t have used it as a cliffhanger. They would’ve just killed him.