Why Foundation Season 3 Changed Its Biggest Villain, According To The Showrunner [Exclusive]

The following contains heavy spoilers for the season 3 finale of "Foundation," titled "The Darkness."

"Foundation" fans are no strangers to big adaptation choices. The Apple TV+ sci-fi epic frequently deviates from Isaac Asimov's seminal sci-fi series of books and short stories. There's a bigger emphasis on romance, big action spectacle worthy of a blockbuster movie, and even a planet-killing Death Star that puts at least one "Star Wars" film to shame. We've seen several core characters get entirely different portrayals, new characters rise up to become fan-favorites (Brother Dude, we salute you), and several other changes that give the show its own identity.

All this is to say, fans were trained to anticipate the TV version of the Mule storyline from the books could be different than how Asimov first wrote it. The Mule is a warlord, a conqueror, and a dictator with strong psychic powers who manages to go undetected by the psychohistory that dictates the events of the show — a series of mathematical equations that predict the future based on the movement of masses. In the season 3 finale, we learned that the man we thought was the Mule (Pilou Asbæk) was actually just a random pirate, a figurehead used by the real Mule to go unnoticed. In reality, it was the seemingly kindhearted rich influencer, Bayta (Synnøve Karlsen), who was the powerful psychic and conqueror all along.

This was an important change for creator and showrunner David S. Goyer, who talked in an exclusive interview with /Film about the season 3 finale of "Foundation" and explained the adaptation choices around the Mule. Though the book's reveal of the Mule's identity is considered to be a massive surprise and one of the book series' biggest twists, Goyer didn't find it that surprising as a reader, simply because there weren't any other characters as red herrings to distract the reader with. To him, it wasn't really a mystery. 

"With a show like 'Foundation,' where our audience has been trained to look for little clues or twists and turns, I knew that if we didn't create a real, viable red herring — in this case with the pirate of Kalgan, the warlord — that people would guess the reveal almost immediately," Goyer said. "Even though the people that have read the books is a much smaller contingent of the audience [than non-book readers], they're very vocal. So I started to worry about that leaking out and ruining the surprise for the people that hadn't read the books, and then I started to think about, 'Well, is there anyone else in the orbit of our show that could be the Mule?' And I started to think about Bayta."

The changes started early this season (technically last season, even) when we got to see the Mule in Gaal's (Lou Llobell) visions of the future, then in person as played by Pilou Asbæk. Where the books wait until the last minute to actually tell us who the Mule is and what he looks like, "Foundation" shows him to us quite early, while still dropping hints that there is more to him than initially meets the eye. In the books, we just get characters describing this imposing and intimidating warlord pirate, and it isn't until late in the story that the character Magnifico Giganticus, a meek circus musician we've been following for a while, is revealed to actually be the Mule.

It makes sense that Goyer would want to create some mystery by showing the audience a character calling himself the Mule from the get-go, then casting doubts on whether there was more going on. Additionally, as Goyer explained in our conversation, Bayta was one of the first female characters introduced in the Foundation book series, and she was written as very canny, compared to her husband Toran (played by Cody Fern in the show). "Even though we've come a long way since the 1950s, I still think audiences tend to underestimate female characters," the showrunner said, explaining that bad guys are often expected to be a Thanos-like hulking villain. "It can't be this sort of unassuming, seemingly shallow social media influencer."

Separating the character of the pirate warlord and that of the Mule adds something to the latter that's missing from the source material, because the Mule doesn't just use their power to create an image of themselves in the minds of their conquered victims as a distraction. Instead, Bayta is smart enough to build up this pirate, which Goyer calls "a clichéd villain character," not only to distract everyone away from her, but also to avoid having to cover her hands with blood. When we spoke with actor Synnøve Karlsen in an exclusive interview ahead of the season finale, she said Bayta "sincerely cares for people and doesn't want people to be in pain," and she uses the pirate to be the one to inflict that pain.

As Goyer puts it, the pirate misdirection helps make the eventual twist actually surprising, no matter your level of familiarity with the source material. "I would contend that if Asimov were alive today, he would have been quite tickled with that reveal."

"Foundation" season 3 is streaming now on Apple TV+, and season 4 is officially in the works.