Foundation Season 3 Production Halts, Problems With The Best Sci-Fi Show Revealed

Foundation Season 3 has been put on hold this time due to issues with budgeting and physical production. Filming in Prague and Poland was scheduled to take place throughout February. Instead, the cast and crew of the show were told to go back home for a bit while production worked to sort out their budgeting issues. 

All in all, sources say that only about a third of Foundation Season 3 has been filmed. Though production on the show has faced some significant setbacks, it was nearly two years between the premiere of the first and second seasons of the series. Even a 2025 premiere of the third season wouldn’t be out of the established norm for production. 

For those unfamiliar with the show, get to know a little about its roots before watching Foundation Season 3. Foundation is based on Isaac Asimov’s iconic sci-fi book trilogy, including Foundation, Foundation and Empire, and Second Foundation. The trilogy won a Hugo Award for “Best All-Time Series” in 1966, and later on, Asimov added four more books to the series: Foundation’s Edge, Foundation and Earth (both are sequels), Prelude to Foundation, and Forward the Foundation (two added prequels). 

The premise of the story of Foundation (and for Season 3) is that the mighty Galactic Empire, which has been the ruling power over thousands of different planets for many thousands of years, is going to collapse. Only they don’t know it. 

One man, Dr. Hari Seldon (Jared Harris), who developed a practice called psychohistory (math that can foretell the future), knows destruction is coming, and he puts together a team that has one goal: to preserve enough of the crucial pieces of civilization to shorten the dark ages on the horizon. 

Seldon tried to tell the Empire about the downfall that was to come, but they would not hear him. However, one of Seldon’s loyal disciples, Gaal Dornick (Lou Llobell), gets his plan started by “founding” the first “Foundation,” Terminus. The “Foundation” is basically a collection or library of knowledge/technology meant to help the Empire restart its world after things go bad. 

Alongside Jared Harris and Lou Llobell, Foundation stars Lee Pace as Emperor Brother Day, Leah Harvey as Salvor Hardin (Mayor of Terminus), and Laura Birn as Demerzel (First Minister to the Emperor), who are all set to return for Season 3 of the show. David S. Goyer (who worked on Batman Begins and The Dark Knight) is a writer and showrunner for the series.

Foundation has already won two awards for its visual effects, and Season 2 has a 100 percent positive rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Foundation, Season 3 is set to be pretty excellent if they can get things together and finish filming. 

Not to drop spoilers for those who haven’t seen the show’s first two seasons, but the second season’s finale ended with a time jump of 152 years. Foundation Season 3 will see that time jump connect the story of the Mule (a character initially destined to kill Salvor Hardin). Ironically, it may be simple mathematics that has unexpectedly doomed Foundation.

Source: Deadline