Oh yes, sci-fi TV show writers sure love their "ta da!" finale money shots where the fade-to-black image of the episode, capping off the season or even the whole series if need be, ends up being the ultimate twist reveal.
In the case of tonight's Foundation, Season Three close, they used the ol' Battlestar Galactica playbook by finishing the episode off with a glorious slow zoom, rolling above the base-strewn surface of the moon no-less, of good ol' planet Earth as seen in the first pic above.
For the second, similarly, the Battlestar Galactica (2004) Sci-Fi Channel series ended its Season Three with a Western Hemisphere oriented Earth zooming into focus as Starbuck, amazingly alive though assumed dead, proclaims she's found Earth and will lead the fleet there.
And, lastly, going way back, the Battlestar Galactica (1978) OG series ended its "awesome" (in the humble opinion of my then 15-year-old self) run with the stunning grainy transmission which only resolves fully once our Cylon-pestered Colonials call it a night and it turns out it's a TV broadcast of the Apollo 11 moon landing indicating they were in Earth's backyard.
Yes, when I was 15, this was great shit! Give me that unexpected reveal, baby! And bringing it home makes it all feel more -- personal. But at my current age, eh, I just see it for what it is -- manipulation for the sake of manipulation. It comes off a bit cheap.
BSG aside here since I was only using that show as a comparison of the Earth reveal shots, Foundation should have, and has, pretty much to now, maintained a more nuanced finesse with its plot reveals.
Asimov's writing was not at all above containing dramatic and mind-blowing reveals and twists. I mean, they're all over the source material, but in a novel, and especially with his certain, shall we say, loquacious and bombastic prose, he was able to pry open that hiding place a little fraction at a time as you fervently flipped page after page frantically wanting to see what happened next.
Last night's dazzle-a-thon for the masses was anything but a slow-burn, it was all flash and sizzle -- like the titanium skeleton of Demerzel as she melted under the beam of the Disruptor Ray Thingy.
Her "death" was not the only quicky, less-than-fitting, scene of the hour. Where shall I begin? Let's just jump all over, like the show kinda did with its jerky-narrative, intersecting shuffled-scene direction...
💥Filthy and dressed like a bum, Brother Dude limps on past all the security of the Imperial Palace and just waltzes, unseen, into Demerzel's bedroom with a wrapped up "thing."
💥Brother Dusk is now dressed as Brother Darkness, his protective shield bracelet removed and next he gets to walk alone to get his remaining nanites removed from his system...despite history of previous Darkenesses trying to avoid their fate in the past. So of course he walks right past the doctor...no death for him today.
💥Gaal gets the jump on The Mule (Oooh!) and kills him (Whoa!) but then she feels The Mule still in her head (Yea, we book-readers knew "The Mule" wasn't who you thought) but it's not Magnifico (Well it was in the books) it's Bayta! (Whaaaat! But how does that even make sense?)
💥Vault Hari is pissed that he's been lied to and is stuck in the vault to "live" forever in his "four walls." He may be developing a resentful case of pent up revenge lust? Hari? Going cuckoo? That'd be putting the "psycho" into "Psychohistory" then, eh?
💥And speaking of psycho...Brother Darkness is living totally up to his name now. Blowing up all the clones, making them a pile of bloody flesh and bone chunks, the last baby one to get dusted under the molten metal frame of Robo-Momma Demmi, then just shooting BroDooDoo (since that's what it looked like he was covered in) right there in the tri-throne, soon-to-be-single-throne, room. I suspect he'll soon start wearing a black hoodie and adopt a pronounced cackle as he refines his Sith skills in the Dark Force.
💥And then the metal skull, stolen from the Mycogen robot-worshipping cult, signals its "peeps" back on its "home world?" And who picks up the phone? Kalle and a more robotic-looking and electro-speaking dude, apparently voice acted by Lee Pace but to me sounding very much like a Cylon Centurion not going so far to actually say "By your command." And they're chillin' in their moon base, where? You got it, Earth's moon. In orbit around a very global-warming-baked Earth which kinda makes sense since, after all, if my math is somewhat accurate, we are waaaaay in the future here.*
Let's just hope when we come back to the show for Season Four, we don't find out, like we did in Galactica 1980, that robots on Earth look like this. 😕
The show deviates quite a bit (obviously) from the books but in the book Foundation and Empire, The Mule sacks Kalgan in the year 294 F.E. In the show, he's (she's) done so in Episode One of this season and this whole ten-episode season has taken place in a timeline spanning less than a mere few days.
Oh, and by the way, while we're on the subject of time, guess when we'll be getting back to the show with Season Four?
2027!
These fucking shows and their gigantic gaps! Showrunner change-ups, budget challenges, the vagaries of streaming services and the pablum they feed us, writers' strikes, blah, blah, blah... I've bitched about this before so I'll just leave it at that, but man, they gotta know this really kills a vibe...
Going back now to the Battlestar Galactica comparison, one of the biggest enemies of keeping a fanbase happy and content throughout the whole run of an IP is, you got it, time. BSG started gaining its initial fans back in the late 70s (including a teenaged me), then damaged it with the atrocious Galactica 1980 farce, and tried to resurrect it in the early new Millennium with the Sci-Fi Channel series which I thought was a success but many fans balked at since it deviated too much from its source material and lore. Time...
Now, with Foundation, you have even greater timespans to consider. Source material written for pulp magazines in the 1940s, then compiled into novels in the 1950s, resurrected by Asimov himself in the early 1980s with a couple more novels due to fan badgering and, as yet more time went on and more, and newer fans jumped onboard, new novelizations appeared in the 1990s after Asimov's death written by capable writers in the same vein. All well and good until the buzz began in the 2000s about a proposed film project (which prompted my "glorious" fake trailer) and now the subsequent Apple TV+ series which, like BSG, is experiencing fan schism, mainly due to, yup, time.
Too much time.
All this time-shit makes me think of another BSG analogy regarding the whole Watchtower song so, let's bow out with that, shall we? Featuring, of course, at the very-fade-to-black-end, the good ol' Earth Shot!