The smartest publicity decision Apple TV+ has ever made was releasing a two minute long clip from Foundation Season 2 days before the episode would premiere. Simply titled, “The Fight,” the scene shows a totally naked Lee Pace forced to battle a handful of assassins. EW.com‘s Nick Romano got Pace to describe how he was indeed “pretty naked” throughout the scene and the actor’s fans were obviously buzzing on social media.
Once you watch the Lee Pace’s naked fight within the context of Foundation Season 2, however, it takes on new poetic meaning. Pace plays Brother Day in the Apple TV+ sci-fi series, the arrogant and powerful clone of the original galactic emperor Cleon I. The first Cleon was so obsessed with maintaining his version of control over his empire, he concocted a plan to rule forever via dynastic clones. At any time there are three Cleon clones functioning in the real world: young Brother Dawn (Cassian Bilton) learning the ways of his past selves, the current ruler Brother Day, and the reflective elder Brother Dusk (Terrence Mann). When Foundation Season 2 begins, Pace is Cleon XVII, who is all too keenly aware that there was a fatal flaw in the original Cleon’s plan and each subsequent clone is a bit more off the original mark.
By introducing Foundation fans to this new version of Cleon who is caught off guard in bed with none other than his loyal android Demerzel (Laura Birn), the Apple TV+ series isn’t just trading in eye candy. It’s telling us through physical storytelling just how much Empire has declined since the end of Season 1.
In Foundation Season 1, a brilliant mathematician named Hari Seldon (Jared Harris) shook the confidence of then Emperor Cleon XII by predicting that the Empire would fall and humanity was destined to plunge into darkness. The only way to staunch this wound would be to start Seldon’s “Foundation,” an outpost designed to keep humanity’s achievements alive.
By the time Cleon XIII takes the throne, Seldon and his Foundation are presumed dead, while weaknesses in the Empire’s power begin to assert themselves. Namely, it is discovered that the DNA pattern that binds the Cleon clones together has begun to fray. As discrepancies present themselves, the clones start to develop not only physical differences, but different personalities. Thus eliminating the streamlined vision of a never-ending cycle of Cleon I ruling forever.
We see just how much these clones have already begun to “falter” in Foundation Season 2 Episode 1 “In Seldon’s Shadow,” now streaming on Apple TV+. When we first meet the new Brother Day, Cleon XVII, he is having sex with Demerzel, who had hitherto been the Cleons’ mother figure. If this extra emotional need wasn’t enough of a variance, Day’s struggle to survive the onslaught of the assassins also hints at the decay destroying the Empire from within. The Cleons are no longer as strong as they were, emotionally or physically.
We soon learn in Foundation that Brother Day’s solution to this problem is novel for the Cleon dynasty: he will take a wife. Queen Sareth of Cloud Dominion (Ella-Rae Smith) is soon introduced as a power player who could be the Empire’s salvation or doom. Time will tell which.
But rather than simply tell us that Cleon XVII isn’t as powerful as his predecessors through dialogue, the episode’s writers David S. Goyer and Jane Espenson*, flex their genre credentials by showing us in a truly fabulous way. By giving us a naked Lee Pace moving from sleeping with his mother figure to cockily fighting off attackers to panicking when he realizes he’s far from the strong man he thought he was…or at least a former version of himself was.