David S. Goyer Reveals The Foundation Moment That's Like Game Of Thrones' Red Wedding [Exclusive]
You've got to love it when a pop culture moment actually earns "iconic" status. Perhaps the most abused and overused word in modern film and TV writing, "iconic" should be reserved for the characters and scenes and ideas that actually send an entire medium in a new direction. The stuff that shifts the ground beneath our feet.
And you know that a TV moment is iconic when show creators use it as a shorthand to discuss their work, tossing it around casually and assuming, rightfully, that everyone will understand exactly what they're talking about, even if it's not a perfectly aligned comparison. In this particular case, it's "Foundation" showrunner David S. Goyer referencing the infamous Red Wedding sequence from "Game of Thrones" season 3 to discuss why he's intentionally leaving out one of the most famous elements of his series' source material and hoarding it for a later season.
When a showrunner says "Red Wedding," you know they mean serious business. And in this case, it's Goyer's way of explaining why one of the most memorable characters from Isaac Asimov's classic sci-fi novel series has yet to make an appearance.
The Mule
Speaking with /Film's Vanessa Armstrong about the second season of his Apple TV+ science fiction series, Goyer teased a potential season 3, and the debut of a character who will be very familiar to readers of Asimov's novels:
"Well, season 3, I can only say things that are hypothetical. I mean, by the time we would get to season 3, we would start to be exploring the story of the Mule in earnest. Previous attempts to adapt 'Foundation' have always started with the Mule, but the Mule doesn't appear until halfway through Asimov's second book. And one of the things that I said to Apple TV+ was, 'We can't start with the Mule. We have to earn the Mule.' And I think one of the reasons why the Mule is so effective in the books is because it takes a while to get to the Mule. And I said, 'We have to do the same thing.'"
In the books, the Mule is one of the biggest hurdles the characters face across thousands of years of fictional history, a psychic warlord with the power to manipulate emotions. In a series that, by design, doesn't always have a clear-cut villain, it's easy to see why so many potential adaptations would gravitate toward him. He's the closest thing the books have to a proper Big Bad.
The Red Wedding of it all
But Goyer argues that the Mule is effective because readers didn't meet him immediately — he arrives at just the right moment to throw the entire universe, and its characters, out of whack. And this is where Goyer breaks out the big guns and makes the Red Wedding comparison:
"In the same way that when people watch 'Game of Thrones,' everyone wanted to start off with the Red Wedding and have the Red Wedding be the end of the first season. But I think I would argue that that's so much more effective because they took the time to get there. And hopefully the same will be true if and when we get to the Mule."
After the Red Wedding, a brutal sequence that killed numerous "Game of Thrones" characters and fundamentally shifted the power balance of the show, the series simply couldn't be the same ever again. Goyer recognizes that bringing in a villain as inherently powerful and world-altering as the Mule would have a similar effect — introducing him too early would remove that sense of utter cataclysm, and neuter the concept of a well-laid plan meeting an obstacle that it could never foresee.
In short, you can't make a Red Wedding without building a world people care about first. All Red Weddings only matter if they tear apart something that has been meticulously and carefully built.
"Foundation" season 2 premieres on July 14, 2023 on Apple TV+.