Foundation Season 3's Biggest Twist Is The Exact Opposite Of The Asimov Book

Spoilers ahead for "Foundation" season 3, episode 10, "The Darkness."

In the finale for "Foundation" season 3, we discovered that Bayta (Synnøve Karlsen) was The Mule in disguise the whole time. After weeks of compelling but predictable "big bad" villain action from Pilou Asbæk's red herring character (who just ended up being a space pirate caught up in the real Mule's plans), we found out that the sweet and innocent Bayta was actually the mentalic pulling the strings behind the scenes the whole time.

It was a stunning reveal — particularly because it runs polar opposite to Asimov's books. In the original version there is still a mislead, but it isn't Bayta who ends up being the Mule: it's the musically-minded jester Magnifico Giganticus. Magnifico is born on a planet called Gaia, which will be very important later in the show. He rebels against his people and runs off to pursue his own galaxy-conquering goals. (If that sounds odd, it's because the show has also changed the Mule's backstory.)

Bayta is still intimately involved in the Mule narrative in the books, though. She's the key character who bonds with Magnifico/The Mule, who loves her and doesn't want to mess with her mind. This "untampered with" mental condition ends up allowing Bayta to become the only chance of stopping the conqueror from discovering where the Second Foundation is hiding. Eventually, the First Speaker of the Second Foundation gets involved and defeats the Mule, but Bayta remains a good guy throughout the story, begging the question: why did she become the primary antagonist in the show?

Right before the season 3 finale aired, /Film correspondent Rafael Motmayor caught up with "Foundation" showrunner David S. Goyer and asked him about the decision to turn the sweet Bayta into the villain of the season. Goyer began by pointing out that in an on-screen adaptation, they needed a villain who was on-screen and identifiable. (He's not physically present for most of the books.) He added that if they went the predictable Magnifico Giganticus cover-up route, all of the book readers would know the reveal and likely spoil it for others well before the finale. He added:

"Now, when Asimov was writing, there weren't even any female characters in the first book. So Bayta was one of the first female characters introduced, and she was very likable. And even in his book, she was perhaps a bit more canny than Toran was, but I started to wonder, 'Well, what if she were the Mule?' And even though we've come a long way since the 1950s, I still think audiences tend to underestimate female characters, and when we think of who the big bad guy is, we think, 'Oh, it's got to be a Thanos-like character. It's got to be Doctor Doom. It can't be this sort of unassuming, seemingly shallow social media influencer.'"

Goyer said that if Asimov were alive today, he thinks the sci-fi master "would have been quite tickled" with the deliberate mislead from the obvious macho villain persona. He concluded:

"So that's something that I just thought was perhaps, with the distance of time, possibly a more sophisticated reveal for the Mule than what Asimov had written back in '51."

All of "Foundation" season 3 is streaming on Apple TV+ — and the show has already been renewed for season 4.