Greetings miss Dornick my name is Hari Seldon. I am a professor at Streeling
University on Trantor... Hey guys, Pete here. Today we've got a breakdown of Foundation Episode
5. "Upon Awakening" takes us back in time and it's the first episode where we don't see anything
involving the Cleons. We also start to get answers about what happened with Gaal and Raych
and watch as things continue to develop on Terminus. I'm going to recap everything we
saw and then i'll give you my thoughts on what happened, what i think it means going forward and
before we get into that i just have to give you a spoiler warning. if you haven't watched episode 5
yet then this video isn't for you with that out of the way let's get into it.
Season 1 episode 5 opens with Gaal telling us about the stories that scared her the most as
a child they were about black holes it was the idea of an event horizon venture into that and
the gravitational pull prevents you from turning back escape becomes impossible and you can see the
parallel of what's going on with her after she made the decision to try to solve the Abraxas
Conjecture in flashback we go back to see how that played out at one point Gaal was involved
with the Seer church she was an acolyte and this seems to be a point of pride for her parents
as her community has turned to their faith in light of this climate catastrophe that's going
on on their planet the sea level's rising that's threatening their way of life and we hear how it's
getting more and more difficult for her family to make their living through the farming of algae
we already understood this from the first episode so the main thing here is this connection she has
with an old family friend who's been labeled as a heretic she finds him one night after going to
the university which is supposed to be abandoned he's there looking through the books and when she
tells him that he needs to leave because the seers have condemned the building he says that
the books are heretical right that all analytical learning goes against the faith of the awakening
he says the line here that we heard her say to rach that when a planet wants you dead you die
she tries to get him to leave without the books and he offers her the writing from Kalle which is
what she'll end up using to solve the problem that gets her to Trantor the last thing he tells her is
the cleanse will pass all things have a cycle the knowledge helps to survive the destruction
until the rebirth arrives and you see Gaal try to reframe his statements to fit the church's ideas
that the floods are a challenge from the sleeper that they just have to endure and then eventually
it'll all get better he counters that people did this we did this not the slumbering god so this
guy is the localized version of Hari Seldon right he sees this collapse is coming that can't be
stopped by putting your faith into this church's system later we see him being executed for being
a heretic as an acolyte Gaal is there she has to help prepare him for the ceremony and the
books are submerged with him his final statement is that this will not stop the seas from rising
and there's a seed planted there so gail goes back alone later she swims down and recovers Kalle's
writing and even though she's starting to rise up in the ranks of the church she starts reading
about math she uses her new knowledge to solve the Abraxas Conjecture and eventually she enters the
competition and gets the message that she solved it and that Hari will validate her proof he tells
her that the empire will be reaching out but that he hopes that she'll come to Streeling University
on Trantor to meet him which of course we've already seen her do that we get a little bit
more of her parents being pissed her father tells her he'd rather his daughter die than go to the
machine world of trantor but at this point knowing there's nothing left on Synnax but destruction
she's past the point of no return and decides to choose science over faith hoping that she
can find a way to save her people through getting off the planet and going to work with Hari Seldon
it cuts back to the present timeline and we see her escape pod being brought inside this ship
where she wakes up she remembers Hari's death and notices that she has Raych's knife inside the pod
that comes in handy when she can't open the door the knife is pulled into this slot and
is basically the key and as she goes inside we realize that the ship's ai thinks that she's rach
as it's initiating things for his arrival she finds out she's alone there and that the ship
won't give her access to some functions because again she's not race she's not the person the ship
was expecting she finds out that she was asleep for nearly 35 years so what's happening here is
happening at the same time as what's going on with Salvor and the encyclopedist on Terminus
we see them and it picks up right where they left off Salvor's looking at the large weapon just
outside the fence and the fact that the Anacreons are using a cloaking device they're hiding it from
someone other than the people on Terminus confirms that their motive goes beyond Terminus itself
and right at that moment the imperial jump ship arrives and now we know what's going on back at
Terminus city you see that the encyclopedists are thrilled that they actually came that the
empire is backing them up but also that this is exactly what Phara was hoping would happen
the ship the aegis makes contact and essentially learn that they don't have any military they talk
to Salvor who's the warden and she explains that they confess to destroying the communications buoy
and so he wants to talk to Phara directly to see what she has to say about that Salvor thinks this
is a mistake but her communications are jammed before she can really say her piece and then
Lewis goes to get Phara and bring her into the tower this sets off red flags with the troops
surrounding the fence Salvor doesn't want Phara to go anywhere near the tower and so she races to the
city there she realizes she's too late lewis is already taking Phara over to the tower and there
she pulls out a field disrupter that she hid in her fake eyeball and when she detonates that that
shuts down the fence the Anacreon warriors are then able to charge into the city and you see
that they are killing some of the colonists the imperial ship sees what's happening on the ground
and starts to land while Salvor is looking for Phara who has taken her mother hostage when she
finds her there's an intense standoff where salvo won't drop her gun to save her mother and after
that works out they have a crazy one-on-one fight where Salvor eventually gets the upper hand but
farrah's men are there they have her mother again so it's essentially a standoff later when they're
looking over the destruction Phara points out that Terminus isn't innocent she says that Seldon's
predictions are what inflamed the empire in the first place because of what their prophet said
her whole world burned and there is some truth to that i guess from her perspective although there
is this ongoing mystery of who actually blew up the star bridge the fighting continues on the
ground people are definitely dying we see hugo get shot and then as the imperial ship approaches we
see that the anacrions were assembling that weapon in order to take out the ship and we see it come
down to the ground so we see what their larger plan was although it's not clear to me what the
motivation behind it is we're gonna have to wait and see because they're not actually in a position
to be able to fight back if a full-blown battle breaks out with the empire it feels like it has
to be more specific to that ship or this location but we don't find out before the episode ends
back on the ship Gaal can't get authorized to do anything important like send a message or guide
the ship somewhere different she is able to do a search of the imperial database though and she
learns that the slow ship did make it to Terminus she looks into Hari's death she finds out the
official story is that he was murdered by Raych and she's listed as an accomplice and per his own
directive Hari was ejected in a casket he designed himself and we do see his body being sent out into
space she searches for rach and finds footage of him being questioned by the encyclopedist Lewis
Pirenne is now in charge after harry's death Raych admits that he murdered Hari and won't say much
about it other than implying that he understands more about why things happen the way they did than
lewis does for his crime he is executed and we see him get space they throw him outside in the
vacuum without a suit before that happens we see his final words he says i know it's hard i know
what i've done seems incomprehensible but you can never lose faith in the plan ever you can still
solve a puzzle even with a piece missing and it almost feels like he's talking directly to gail
here knowing that he put her on the escape pod in his place of course she breaks down after watching
this and there's a point where she briefly contemplates suicide she brings a scalpel into the
shower thinking about her time with raych and then before she can go through with it the ship changes
its course and that flips her around it gives her a chance to think and she decides to try to
figure out what's going on there's a somewhat long sequence where she can't find out where they're
going the ship won't tell her where they're going so she uses the information she can get in math to
figure out what direction they're going in then she can't see outside because there's a view
screen so she goes and she finds a suit tethers herself does a space walk she can't see anything
at first with the naked eye but once she looks in infrared she realizes they're heading towards
a dark star with that information gail realizes that their destination is Helicon Hari's homeworld
which we don't have a lot of background about in the show and as she's figuring that out she
starts to see some strange things she sees what looks like puddles of blood and then she comes
across a glitched out projection of harry where he looks like he did the last time she saw him and
the episode ends there this is probably related to the device we saw rach remove from behind his ear
harry is dead but now it's apparent there was more to his plan that would happen after that
event this week had a lot of promising signs about how they plan the story out i find myself pretty
invested in what's gonna happen i think the show still has some pacing issues and don't necessarily
love how they structured things jumping around but we are getting answers to questions they
encouraged us to have and we can see that they're pulling on threads that were left dangling in the
early episodes finding out that rage sacrificed himself to get gail out is an interesting twist
kind of sad to see him go and the flashback to cinex does a good job to define her character
but then also makes you wonder how that all came to be considering that's what led her to
where she's at and then on top of that she would have never seen harry's death if she hadn't had a
feeling about that his return was a genuine shock although i wish they hadn't put off the reveal of
what's going on there the way things have been it may be a couple of episodes before we get
back to that but it is still fun to think about how the ship she's on plays a part in his plan
i guess we can say for sure that he planned ahead and recruited rach to help him with his death
but it's hard to say how gayle being there instead will change things going forward hopefully her
seeing harry at the end of his life is evidence that his whole consciousness was downloaded and
she'll be able to interact with him rather than him just being some welcoming hologram
or something like that a lot of this episode is about motivations there's a continuation of the
idea of faith from the last episode and we do see gail pick science over that but more we see that
gayle's motivations are reinforced and acrion's motivations against terminus are starting to take
shape and we know what was behind rach killing harry the ship gail finds herself on looks pretty
great the production is still over the top and the shot of the aegis coming down was amazing looking
once again terminus turns out to be less interesting than the other story which is
disappointing since that is the beginning of the actual foundation even without trantor and the
clones terminus is still coming in second place but we are only halfway there so there's still
plenty of time and i'm still interested to see how things fall into place it's kind of fun that
at this point as a book reader i'm not sure where we're going from here i'm not sure what they mean
here when they say a dark star or why rach would be headed to helicon i'm guessing since they had
that whole sequence to show that gail couldn't see it with her naked eye it has something to do with
its strange properties of course i did look it up but couldn't decide what they were going for
here based on the limited information they gave us in the show and i think that's a good place
to leave things let me know in the comments what you thought about this episode and where you're
hoping they go from here if you want to talk book spoilers i'm all for it just mark those
so you won't spoil things for show only people please like this video if you enjoyed it please
subscribe to my channel if you haven't already and thanks for watching i'll talk to you soon