Foundation Showrunner On Those Finale Twists And A Lesson Learned From The Dark Knight Films [Exclusive Interview]

I absolutely love the Demerzel story, and I know there were some rights issues at the very start about how much you guys could adapt. What was the original approach to the character before you got that sorted, and how did you start weaving in more of the Daneel storyline and more of the “Robot” stories as you could? How did that plan change into what we are seeing now?

Well, the approach didn’t really change. Originally, it was Josh Friedman who started developing the show with me. When we were first approached to do “Foundation,” we were given a document that outlined the characters that we had exclusive rights to, and it turned out — because later on in his career, Asimov took the “Foundation” stories and the “I, Robot” stories and sort of retroactively combined them into the same universe. They were in separate universes to begin with, and then he sort of mixed them up and had one of the characters from “I, Robot” appear in the later “Foundation” books. So we were given a document that said, “These characters, you can exploit exclusively. These are characters that appear in both universes that, in this case, Fox had the rights to the ‘I, Robot’ books, and these are characters that you cannot use at all, because they are exclusive to the ‘I, Robot’ books.”

So they said that we could reference Demerzel’s backstory as a generalization, but we couldn’t use the character Daneel and we couldn’t name some of the characters from “I, Robot” by name. And so, I said, “That’s fine. We’ll be a little coy with some of these references to her in the past.” But then what happened was I was producing a movie for Fox, “The First Omen,” which is a prequel to “The Omen,” and the head of Fox, Steve Asbell, is a big science fiction fan and specifically a big Asimov fan, and he was a big fan of the show.

So we were at a sound mix of the movie, and he was talking about the show and how much he liked the show, and asking me questions about it on opportunity, and I said, “You know, you could help me out here. You could give us a one-time allowance to mention the character of Daneel in season 3 and, for the fans, to tie that officially back in.”

So he had the business affairs department at Fox do just that and give us permission to do it. But it was a lucky happenstance, because I literally happened to be in a room with the head of Fox, and he was a fan of the show, and sometimes that synchronicity in Hollywood works to your benefit.

So did that happen before you started working on season 3?

We were writing season 3 at the time. We were in the middle of writing it.

Right. So you didn’t have an alternate plan how to … because that’s a very big aspect of both Demerzel’s and Brother Day’s storyline this season.

Yeah. That plan was still in existence, but we couldn’t mention Daneel by name. We could be vague about it, but we couldn’t mention Daneel by name.

With or without the specificity of the names, how was it to explore that in this season and not just give us as much of the complete story of Demerzel as you possibly could, but also tied in specifically to Day’s story this season, which I think is one of the best things about the season as a whole?

Well, I knew that when we start each season, typically before the writers’ room assembles, I write up a document, a five- or six-page document, which is just sort of an info dump of everything I’m thinking about for the season, about all the big, large plotlines. Over the course of the first three seasons, the final version of the season ended up relatively close [to that]. 80%.

And then once the writers’ room would convene, I would say to the other writers, “Do you have any thoughts on this? Should we change this? Should we change that?” And sometimes one of my fellow writers will come up with a better idea or a better way to do it so we’ll change that. But the broad strokes, I knew that I wanted the season to be, from the Emperor’s storyline, I wanted it to be about the actual fall of Empire and Demerzel’s freedom, and I also wanted it to be about Day’s redemption.

The irony is, he does go from being a truly selfish person to being a much more selfless person, into having empathy for Demerzel, which is a character that he had grown to hate, because he had felt that she was, in a way, their warden, and they were all prisoners of her. But what he comes to realize is the emperors themselves, Cleon I, was the one that made her a prisoner, and thus imprisoned all of them. So, it wasn’t by choice.

And the irony is that even though Day comes to that realization and Day has the opportunity to free her by bringing the robot skull and escaping from Mycogen, that’s taken away from both of them, because Dusk intercedes and kills her so that the act that actually frees her is Dusk destroying the clone tanks. Because once the clone tanks and that baby are dead, there’s no genetic dynasty anymore. There’s nothing to protect.

So the irony is she would also have been free there, but Dusk doesn’t believe, once she’s free, that she would be on his side, necessarily. So he comes up with this idea to both destroy her and the clone tanks. I just like the tragic irony of Day changing as a character and becoming selfless and Demerzel being free, but the moment she’s free is also the moment that she dies.