Foundation Season 2: Is Hari Seldon Still Alive? Yes And No ...
Contains spoilers for "Foundation" Season 2, Episode 3
We're three episodes into "Foundation" Season 2, and things are getting weird fast. The latest twist in the fortunes of humanity's galactic attempt to reset civilization is the unexpected physical resurrection of Hari Seldon. Episode 3 ends with the eminent mathematician showing up in a physical form once again, well over a century after his original demise. The question is, is Hari Seldon actually alive? The answer is a complicated "Yes and no." But before we get to that, though, let's quickly recap how we got here.
In the second episode of "Foundation" Season 2, the wayward Gaal Dornick (Lou Llobell), Salvor Hardin (Leah Harvey), and Hari Seldon (Jared Harris) decide they're going to take a new path to help reset civilization. This involves heading for a habitable planet where they can explore the potential of a Second Foundation to help the original Foundation succeed. In the early moments of Episode 3, the trio arrives on a barren desert rock in the middle of nowhere, only to find that Hari has reprogrammed the trip to make a quick pitstop on an old, abandoned Imperial mining planet.
The digital projection of the founder of psychohistory claims he needs to visit a specific location before they move on. By the end of the episode, Gaal and Salvor pick up a very much alive and biologically ticking Hari, who has somehow been transferred back into a physical body. As the episode ends, Gaal says, "You have a body. How is this possible?" to which Hari replies, "I don't know."
Hari Seldon's complicated survival in Foundation so far
Apple TV+'s sci-fi series has opted to overcome the unadaptable nature of Isaac Asimov's original story by honing in on a few main characters. By creating recognizable faces, the show is stringing together a few key narrative threads that can help audiences stay on track in what is proving to be a very dense (though fascinating) sci-fi experience.
One of these character-driven narrative threads is Hari Seldon. Seldon is the founder of psychohistory — a mathematically-driven approach to predicting future events. He's the central engine for the entire story and the main guy who spearheads the establishment of a Foundation on the edge of the galaxy to "reset" civilization.
The only problem is that, as part of his prophetic plan to save humanity, Hari is killed in Season 1. Rather than shuffle him out of the deck, the writers opted to resurrect the mathematician in a digital form both in the Vault and the Prime Radiant (two key devices that help guide the Foundation through history). In essence, this allows them to keep Jared Harris' character on the show, even if he's just a very well-informed AI projection. It's a twist from the books (more on that in a minute), but overall, a fairly straightforward solution.
Hari's digital presence helped explain a lot of things in the first two episodes of Season 2, but now, in Episode 3, things are getting complicated again. Seldon has been told that the Prime Radiant is becoming sentient, and now he's apparently been given a second body, Jean-Luc Picard style, almost a century and a half after his previous demise.
What happens to Hari Seldon in the books?
In Isaac Asimov's original writings, Hari Seldon takes on a cult-like — one could almost say a god-like — status. But that doesn't mean he's overly involved in the plot. On the contrary, the part he plays in the original "Foundation" trilogy of books is extremely small. He's around for the first 50 pages or so.
The reader is initially introduced to the plot through Gaal's brief interactions with Hari. That's it. After that, there's a time jump, and Hari doesn't go with it — nor do any clones or sentient digital copies. The only signs we see of Hari after the beginning of the story are in the Vault itself. These are pre-recorded holographic appearances where the founder of psychohistory shares an important piece of information about a Seldon crisis. Seldon even says in his second appearance, "Of course, I don't know if any of you were here the first time. In fact, I have no way of telling, by sense perception, that there is anyone here at all, but that doesn't matter."
While Hari only appears sporadically in the primary trilogy, there is one chunk of text where we do get to know the man in the flesh. Asimov wrote two sequel novels called "Prelude to Foundation" and "Forward the Foundation." These intimately trace Hari's development of his mathematical theories, complete with plenty of escapades along the way. Together, they're perfect inspiration for the character that Apple TV+'s team is building on screen. But this doesn't change the fact that they've kept Hari alive for much longer than Asimov ever intended. It will be interesting to see where they take things next now that the man is living and breathing again, decades after he died.