The Season 3 finale of Foundation has no chill. None. Not a single particle of chill can be detected. Where this episode goes, you couldn’t see the light from chill with the Hubble telescope. Generations of psychohistorians working hand in glove with a secret team of powerful psychics to steer the course of this episode towards chill across a span of centuries would come up short. You’d need the Mule to brainwash you into feeling any chill in this thing whatsoever.

For starters, there’s Olympic-sized swimming pool’s worth of human remains that come falling from the sky to land with a series of wet plops on the floor of the imperial palace’s cloning tower.

Foundation has never shied away from mass death, or from gore, but this is the most spectacular combination of the two I can recall it pulling off. It’s the doing of Brother Dusk, rechristened Brother Darkness on the occasion of his impending “ascension”/execution. He even gets a spiffy new black robe for the occasion. 

Now, if you thought to yourself last week “Hm, someone willing to commit mass murder days before his scheduled departure sure doesn’t seem like someone willing to leave office willingly,” congratulations, you figured out what the institutional Democratic Party and the entire United States government could not. 

Brother Darkness goes stark raving mad and conducts an auto-coup. He blows up every single one of his hundreds of cloned brothers, a supply intended to last into the distant future; first the results of the explosion rain down as a particulate mist, then as great huge globs of human goop.

His task complete, Darkness takes the final Cleonic exponent, a li’l baby, and places it on the execution platform where he himself is to be fried. He lures Lady Demerzel to the scene, knowing she’ll be compelled by her programming to try to protect the baby — a fruitless reflex that leads to the grotesque death by fire of both. 

After Day watches this in horror, then tries and fails to beat the nanite-augmented Darkness to death, he gets shot to death by his older self for his troubles. As the older Cleon puts it, if Hari Seldon’s math says that what follows the Cleonic dynasty is a thousand years of darkness, “If the robe fits….” He aims to rule on his own, no brothers, no successors, no Demerzel, sustained as long as his nanites can handle the job. We last see him seated on the one throne he intends to leave standing, cradling the Prime Radiant that not even the flames that consumed Lady Demerzel could destroy.

At least he’s the only galactic warlord sitting pretty at the end of this episode. Gaal Dornick defeats the Mule, though it doesn’t go the way you’d think. Yes, she outfoxes the guy in a psychic game of chess, then slits his throat on the astral plane, killing him. None of this, it should be noted, takes place in the ruins of the Imperial Library on war-torn Trantor, as it does in the two psychics’ visions, since Gaal went out of her way to stage the confrontation on her own terms.

But just when you’re ready to celebrate Gaal Dornick rewriting the future, we learn that the man played by Pilou Asbæk all season long has not been the Mule at all. Like so many other people on this show, he’s a false front, a catspaw. The real Mule was…Bayta, the adorable socialite?

It explains why the digital Hari Seldon who lives in the Vault didn’t think the Mule’s story added up: It wasn’t “his” story at all, it was Bayta’s.  Fortunately, Gaal had secretly reprogrammed the psychoactive musician Magnifico to play anti-Mule music, allowing her to expel the telepathic tyrant from her brain.

And then…well, that’s not so clear. We see Gaal staggering away as Magnifico’s lights swirl in the background. She makes an absolutely outrageous base jump through the windows of a floating city to planetside, where she maneuvers herself into the cargo hold of a getaway ship mid-flight. Did she kill Bayta? Did she free her other victims, Magnifico and Han Pritcher and Toran Mallow and little Skerlet? Is the First Foundation still under enemy control? Is its capital city still wrapped in the confines of Hari’s vault? Is Brother Dawn, who even now lingers in the satellite’s sick bay?

One person who’s definitely trapped there is the digital Hari, and that’s an asskicker for sure. The digital avatar of Gaal’s beloved mentor finally learns that she’s been lying to him, that he has no way of reuniting with his incarnated self, because that self died years ago. Gaal liked to him — the way she’d liked to Dawn, the way Bayta lied to Toran, the way Darkness lied to everyone. She orders her getaway ship to make a jump, leaving digital Hari trapped behind on New Terminus with the Vault he sees as an airless prison. And we don’t even learn if she defeated the real Mule for all this, either!

But there are reasons to hope for the future of this godforsaken galaxy, and both come courtesy of the character who’s wound up being the terrifying and tragic heart of the show: Demerzel. 

Before I say another word I want to salute actor Laura Birn, whose tremulous composure — she was like a being made entirely of taut piano wire — did so much to convey to human audiences the agonies and ecstasies of a life fully governed by programming of which the living is fully conscious. We humans may or may not be fully governed by programming of a biological rather than technological variety, but if we are, we have no idea. Demerzel is not granted that uncertainty, and it forces her to question whether even her most passionate, deeply felt emotions are real or an artifact of zeros and ones. Birn actually looks like she’s experiencing this specific internal turmoil, one which requires her to conceive of a mind fundamentally unknowable by human beings. That is, frankly, wild.

Before she dies, Demerzel does two crucially important things. She gives the Foundation’s last woman standing, Ambassador Quent, the password to the Second Foundation’s hideout in the Imperial Library, thus ensuring a continuity between versions 1.0 and 2.0. It’s funny: In all of those visions of their final battle, the Mule grabbed a defenseless Gaal in the middle of the Imperial Library and yelled “WHERE IS THE SECOND FOUNDATION?”Turns out he’d already answered his own question just by being there.

Prior to encountering Quent, though, Demerzel tests the absolute limits of her programming imperatives with the help of Brother Day, who reunites her with the severed robot skull he retrieved from the lower levels. True, she’s not allowed to help him link it to her, because doing so would free her of her slavery to the Cleonic dynasty, and her current Cleonic programming can’t permit her to set that in motion. But surely if she were to just help him check if the old machine even still lived, surely if she were to simply guide him as he tried to switch it on — well, that wouldn’t be making a decision against her programming at all, would it?

All along, of course, both of them know that the second the robot skull is switched on, the issue will become moot, as Demerzel would be freed instantaneously the moment the robot activates and automatically merges its consciousness with hers. But using whatever the robot equivalent of sheer dogged force of will is, she overcomes doubts that clearly cause her some kind of actual agony to allow Day to proceed. She’s interrupted only when Dusk begins blowing up the bodies in the cloning tower, which overrides all other imperatives.

But whatever Day did under her brief tutelage, it was enough. The robot head eventually switches on and near-instantaneously “clasps” with the nearest robots…including Hari’s wife Kalle? On the Moon? Orbiting a low-sea-level future version of the dang Earth? And they’re prepared to get “involved in the conflict”?

Well, now we’re talking! If there are still robots way way out there near the long-forgotten roots of humanity, they’re not even the first alternate form of sentience the show has introduced: the genetically modified Spacers are still floating around out there, don’t forget. If you’re into big classic sci-fi stuff, a clash of civilizations like that is catnip.

But additionally, it’s unclear if a fourth season (Cleon willing!) would launch after a gap of centuries, as did the previous two outings, or pick up right where this one left off. After all, Gaal, Darkness, Dawn, and arguably Bayta/the Mule are all left standing — to say nothing of First Foundation Ambassador Quent, Second Foundation Speaker Preem Palver, Trader faction leader Toran Mallow, Kalgan heir Skerlet, Captain Han Pritcher, leading psychohistorian Dr. Ebling Mis, and probably others I’m forgetting. That’s an unusually high survival rate for this show from season to season, if I’m not mistaken. If the robots return, we might wind up right back here again next time.

Given how good this season was, I’d be crazy to object. But I’d be crazy to object to the previous approach too, which twice over hit a hard reset on the show and reaped incredible creative benefits as a result. But I trust the makers of Foundation, particularly the Espenson/Goyer/Dawson A-team behind this episode. They’ve made one of the best science fiction shows of all time.

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.