Foundation Season 3 Finally Explains The Show's Most Ambiguous Mystery

Empires rise and fall ... but spoilers are eternal. This article discusses major plot details from "Foundation" season 3, episode 6, "The Shape of Time."

"Foundation" wouldn't necessarily be considered a mystery box show, in the vein of many J.J. Abrams-inspired productions that have attempted to recreate the magic of "Lost." Throughout its three seasons, the Apple TV+ series has been content to (mostly) keep all of its cards in plain sight, unspooling literally centuries of in-universe history in a straightforward manner as we've watched the galaxy-spanning Empire slowly fall into decay while the Foundation rises to greater heights. Yet every now and then, showrunner David S. Goyer and his writing team remind us that they do have a talent for the dramatic when the moment calls for it. In the latest episode of season 3, one subtle moment between two opposing forces might have just solved a mystery established from the very beginning.

Would it shock you to learn that it all revolves around Gaal Dornick? Portrayed by Lou Llobell, our unassuming protagonist represents the nexus point bridging the two major genre elements at play in "Foundation": sci-fi and fantasy. A brilliant mathematical prodigy and a uniquely gifted Mentallic (the show's nerdy term for people who can read minds, use telepathy, and other fancy psycho-abilities), Gaal continues to play the most integral role in ensuring that Hari Seldon's (Jared Harris) plan to prepare for the inevitable fall of the Cleon clones and their Genetic Dynasty goes off without a hitch. But one particularly helpful quality — her gift of precognition — has always been treated as a given. Of course someone of her high status and narrative importance would be able to sense visions of the future and see the planet-destroying threat of the Mule (Pilou Asbæk) coming from 150 years away ... right?

Well, season 3 finally saw fit to shed a little more light on that and potentially resolve one of the most ambiguous mysteries remaining in all of "Foundation."

Not even the all-seeing Hari Seldon could've possibly anticipated this. Like her daughter Salvor Hardin (Leah Harvey) before her, Gaal Dornick is considered an "outlier" — an individual of such rarified ability that Hari's advanced math simply wasn't designed to account for her whatsoever. Much of that is due to her powers of foresight that she didn't even know she had until the second season of "Foundation," when she finally realized that she's been using her sixth sense to influence her actions in the present. That's how she knew that her lover Raych (Alfred Enoch) was about to assist in Hari's suicide in order to turn him into a martyr early in season 1. (He got better, obviously.) It explains why she felt the destruction of the Sky Bridge over Trantor, secretly ordered by Lady Demerzel (Laura Birn), seconds before it actually happened. And, most importantly of all, it resolves that blink-and-miss-it moment in the first season when she somehow woke up during a faster-than-light jump through hyperspace — something no normal human being should be capable of doing.

That last part is the key, as it turns out. Episode 6, titled "The Shape of Time," picks up immediately after last week's cliffhanger ending. The robot Demerzel has boarded Gaal's ship and the two enemies, representatives of Empire and the Foundation respectively, are all set up for a reckoning. Things quickly turn violent, naturally, but Gaal desperately offers an olive branch when she reveals the existence of the Second Foundation and argues that the two are more aligned in Hari's plan than they may think. One revelation leads to another, and it's only a matter of time before Gaal is admitting that her ability to see the future has helped the Second Foundation influence the state of the galaxy over hundreds of years. When asked how that's even possible, Gaal flashes back to that significant scene and explains how the experience completely altered her conception of time:

"I saw my lifetime as a line, and then as a plane, and then I wrapped that plane around me like a blanket, and it was a shape that I could manipulate. And I recognized I'd been pulling parts of my life toward myself."

Some of us might occasionally have an out-of-body experience, but Gaal's literally rewrote the future.

Leave it to "Foundation" to answer one question while, at the same time, inspiring countless more. The extended sequence between Demerzel and Gaal provides the main backbone for episode 6, a pivotal meeting of two very different minds that undoubtedly affects the course of history — whatever history may remain, that is, with only four months to go before even Hari Seldon's projections predict the extinction of the human species. But while Gaal's premonitions leave Demerzel with plenty of food for thought, don't sleep on yet another major twist that upends everything we thought we knew about this story.

Season 1 is quickly proving to contain far more importance than we may have thought at the time, and this latest episode doubles down on that even further. Throughout the show, we've seen flashbacks to Hari Seldon's first face-to-face meeting with the three Cleon clones, represented by Brother Dawn (Cassian Bilton), Brother Day (Lee Pace), and Brother Dusk (Terrence Mann). On trial (along with his acolyte Gaal) for his heretical and seditious theories that the omnipotent Empire would one day collapse in ruin and spell widespread suffering for the entire universe, Hari's impassioned pleas to simply listen to the math fall on deaf ears ... or so we thought, at least. Here, we find out that all of Hari's speeches were actually meant for Demerzel, the loyal robot programmed to advance the agenda of the Genetic Dynasty. Incredibly, she actually believed Hari's proofs and even helped contribute to the math that developed the long-range forecasting of the Prime Radiant device.

Maybe the whole notion of friend and foe is more complicated than we thought. Little more than halfway through the season, "Foundation" has already upended several of our assumptions about how previous events ultimately went down. Even as the ticking clock winds down on our characters, there's still all sorts of time left to turn things up a notch with future reveals. New episodes of "Foundation" stream on Apple TV+ every Friday.