Foundation Season 2: What Is The Prime Radiant?
Contains spoilers for Foundation Season 2, Episode 1
Apple TV+'s "Foundation" series has hit the ground running in Season 2. After spending the first season mostly introducing characters, setting the stakes, and dabbling in a little local action on the edge of the galaxy, the first episode of the new season adapting Isaac Asimov's classic work leaped headlong into the dramatic events of the crumbling Galactic Empire and its burgeoning replacement of the Foundation.
Both seasons have heavily featured Hari Seldon (Jared Harris) and his Plan to use the mathematical field of "psychohistory" to prevent humanity from slipping into a 30,000 Dark Age before civilization can reset. Along with setting up the Foundation colony as the genesis of this faster reset, Seldon, with the help of others, also creates the Prime Radiant. This is a powerful little trinket that contains all of the mathematical formulas that are critical to Seldon's plan. It shows the predicted future (nothing is set in stone, as the Plan only works with probabilities) and helps guide Seldon and his associates toward the end goal of a quick reset of civilization.
The radiant in the show is clearly a critical piece of the narrative. But the way it works is a bit confusing. Heck, when Season 2 starts, Hari Seldon (or, rather, his digital copy) is literally trapped inside of the device and is losing his synthetic mind in extended isolation. So ...what's going on here? Let's dig into what the Radiant is, its function in the story, and how it is starting to differ dramatically from Asimov's original version of the psychohistoric tool in his books.
What is Foundation's Prime Radiant?
In AppleTV+'s "Foundation," the Radiant primarily functions as a way to store incredible quantities of data. It houses the mathematical formulas of Hari Seldon's prophetic plan and represents a lifetime of preparatory work from himself and others. In Episode 1 of Season 2, the Radiant unexpectedly takes on a humanoid form (within itself), where it confronts Seldon's digital replica.
Seldon slowly realizes it's the Radiant he's talking to and, in the process, drops a couple of key names. He mentions his life mate, Yanna (Nimrat Kaur), and a mathematician named Kalle (Rowena King), both of whom worked on the Radiant (and are altered versions of book characters who went by different names). We also discover that the Radiant consists of folded, four-dimensional space stuffed into a three-dimensional object. Seldon describes it as "an adaptive, predictive four-dimensional model that takes in new data. It learns, but that's different from having self-awareness or an inherited memory..." At that point, the Radiant explains that it's developed purpose-driven behavior and even acquired agency with the help of other designers besides Seldon. This clearly sets the Radiant up to play a more significant role in the show moving forward. But how close is this to the concept of the Prime Radiant in Asimov's source material?
What does the Prime Radiant look like in the books?
In Isaac Asimov's novels, the Prime Radiant is described as an unimpressive object, one the characters don't even get a glimpse of until the third book in the series ... set four centuries after the story starts. The key to understanding the function of the Radiant's original purpose is to remember that Asimov's story centers on two Foundations, each with its own important role.
The First Foundation is designed to be a technological powerhouse. Its science is sophisticated from the beginning. In the first Seldon Crisis, the Foundation uses its knowledge of nuclear power to overcome its nearest enemies. It then builds a false religion based on that very same nuclear power, and uses its scientific acumen to cow its area of the galaxy into a network of cooperative and even subservient client states.
The goal of the First Foundation is to provide not only the science but also the muscle. However, it knows that it is just one piece of a two-part plan to reset the Galactic Empire without the need to slip into a nasty, protracted Dark Age. They know that there is also a "Second Foundation" hidden at the other end of the galaxy ... but they don't know what it is or what its purpose might be. As Asimov writes in the "Foundation" trilogy's third book, "Second Foundation," we finally get a more detailed glimpse not only of this critical group but of the device that guides them: the Prime Radiant.
The Prime Radiant guides the Second Foundation
The Second Foundation's job is to use "Mentalics" — that is, the ability of a person to both understand and shape the minds of other human beings. This elite group of individuals is tasked with the responsibility of guiding the trajectory of the original Foundation from afar. The comparatively tiny organization uses its members' honed telepathic powers to make very small tweaks and adjustments in the mindsets and decisions of Foundation leaders from time to time. This ensures everything stays on track according to "the Plan" ... and that the plan is contained within the Prime Radiant.
At one point in the book trilogy, a lower member of the Second Foundation is allowed access to see the Radiant, and they're shocked by its small, unimportant appearance. The text explains that its technical workings are so complex, no one in the Second Foundation can even understand how it works. Remember, their strength is mentalics, not science. The device exists, and they don't know how it functions, but they do know that it gives them the plan and helps guide their covert actions.
In the books, it's a stationary device stored in a room where it's activated by a lever rather than the show's fancy, hand-swinging gesture and finger tap. In the show, this darkens the room before mysteriously projecting countless codes of tiny mathematical text onto two long walls, one of which is thirty feet long and ten feet high. So, we're talking about a lot of numbers. A Second Foundation leader explains that "This is not the whole Plan. To get it all upon both walls, the individual equations would have to be reduced to microscopic size — but that is not necessary. What you now see represents the main portions of the Plan till now."
Adapting the Prime Radiant for television
The Prime Radiant of the novels is similar in certain ways to the iteration of the Prime Radiant in Apple TV+'s series. For instance, at one point, Asimov explains that the Radiant can attune to a trained person's mind. On the show, the equations projected on the wall are described as "veering" and adjusting when a person points to different spots, a visual take on Asimov's original description.
Even so, the Prime Radiant doesn't contain a digital copy of a person, nor does it exist in folded space (or, at least, that's never explicitly stated). Others can adjust it to a certain person's mind, and it's described as having a limited amount of agency, but it doesn't have a clear sentient personality or take a humanoid form, even as a projection.
Ultimately, the Prime Radiant is merely the universe's most sophisticated, number-driven map. It contains the future course of humanity within its hallowed algorithmic lines. With Apple TV+ taking the concept of the Prime Radiant so much further than Asimov did, it will be interesting to see how it factors into humanity's pre-ordained history as the series marches on, the Empire begins to crumble, and the Foundation rises to its inevitable triumph.