- Recurring characters.
Movies in general get away with this better than multi season shows with actors contracts and killing off a character early.
Sean Bean humourously being killed off in LOTR and Game of Thrones. This also ties into later seasons when the writers were afraid to kill lead characters. Jack Reacher does well not bringing back 2 of the leads from season 1.
Foundation is deathly afraid of this, having 6 characters that carry over season to season where in the books there are none.
- Faithfulness to source material.
For people who have not read the books, Dune part 2 does end with a white saviour story and includes holy war, religious imagery. The distance from 9/11 helps though the middle eastern conflicts don’t. A few actions scenes and techy stuff is added and some ideas and scenes are moved around. The daringness to commit to the source material is amazing, weird worm bile, talking babies, drugs and hallucinations
Foundation ignores this, having pacifist characters shoot at each other, adding pointless sex and action scenes that have no impact on the plot. The core premise abandoned very early on. It’s like they wanted to make their own sci fi show but just slapped the name on it
Sean Bean humourously being killed off in LOTR
But… that’s literally the story. The events around his death are absolutely critical in setting up the events in the next book/movie.
It’s the same thing in Game of Thrones. It’s almost identical to the books.
I really don’t see your point with these examples.
Also literally the point in the Reacher books. He never stays the same place for too long, and almost no other characters are recurring.
OP is comparing apples to oranges 🙂
It’s like they wanted to make their own sci fi show but just slapped the name on it
Just like the Halo TV show
- So people love the source material?
- Yes
- So you are going to stick to that?
- No, we think our own stories are better.
- So much better that they’d stand on their own without this franchise name?
- No, obviously.
Asimov was rarely faithful to his own work. He frequently wrote sequels where it seemed like he hadn’t even read the previous book he wrote decades ago.
The show isn’t been faithful to the book, but it’s been good and parts of it are better than the books while other parts are obviously worse.
I remember Asimov’s books in the Robots/Foundation universe to be fairly coherent. Newer books revealed new things that weren’t alluded to in previous books, but they didn’t break continuity.
The only inconsistency I can think of is how the pre-Foundation’s Edge books didn’t feature the computers we then saw starting with that book, but it’s not like the older books specifically stated they weren’t there.
And if all else fails, you can always explain anything by bringing The End of Eternity into the canon 😛
I remember some really jarring inconsistencies between the robots of dawn and the previous two Elija Bailey books. It really seemed like Asimov didn’t even bother to read his previous books before writing The Robots of Dawn. There were several inconsistencies.
One big one that I remember is that in The Robots of Dawn City residents have salaries and money! Previous books were explicit that there wasn’t money and instead people were given allotments of things based on their position in society. This is a huge change and it’s not acknowledge at all. It’s treated like it’s totally normal to have money in The Robots of Dawn.
Some other differences were smaller, but still made it obvious that Asimov hadn’t read his previous books before writing new ones. For example, Bailey is comforted by the night sky in The Robots of Dawn where in previous books, the night sky made him more disoriented and made him pass out because he could see out into space. It wasn’t meant to show that Bailey had progressed. It was presented as an obvious fact that people of earth would feel more comforted by night skies. There were a lot of small things like this.
I think it was key to the show, to stray from the books. I hadn’t been interested in watching Foundation since I didn’t see how they could translate the books into video. However someone here said they weren’t faithful to the books, in a good way, and the show was good as long as you thought of it as something different.
Sure enough. I really like the Foundation series and think it was well done for a TV show. It also has me interested in reading the books again for a different story where some things are similar
The show isn’t been faithful to the book, but it’s been good and parts of it are better than the books while other parts are obviously worse.
This is the thing that annoys me about these complaints.
It’s a good show. Not a great one but it’s also definitely not a bad show.
It takes some of the essence, through the concepts, characters, and events of Foundation and makes something pretty solid using it. It is a derivative work.
I don’t think Foundation will last much longer on AppleTV. They had to shut down production and switch show runners during filming of season three.
Part two doesnt apply to the new Dune movies. I mean giant spider mutants are not in the books. Feyd is vastly different in the books, as is Rabban. Liet Kynes is an amalgamation of 3 or 4 different people and the wrong sex for all. The Guild are not nearly as mutated enough… I mean the actual text is unfilmable so its understandable.
It would be hard for a show to constantly have to change show runners every season, it ruins the flow, it’s hard to build back up the cohesiveness between the actors etc.
