That’s where I am, she wants Empire to think she is a devotee.
Back in episode 1 when Hari had a meet and greet with Empire, I think Hari said the empire could hang on a bit longer if it dropped the whole Empire cloning thing, and the new religious leader apparent is against cloning. I think she heard Hari way back and has been nudging things along behind the sceens with that religion to get the right person in place and is now trying to get Day on board to delay the onset of chaos a little bit. I don’t know how long she has been a supposed devotee but probably figured out a long while back it was an important enough religion to have a hand in. Or she saw Haris math and figured out the importance of dropping cloning before Hari did.
Also after Daneel/Demerzell heard Hari say stop cloning, the new Dawn was born and seems to be not a perfect genetic clone, so I think Demerzell had a hand in that and is trying to get some new thinking and variation into Empire to slow down the empire implosion.
I guess it could be that she realised day is not an exact clone and trying to manipulate Days thinking so when he finds out he doesn’t have him killed , but I think that less likly.
I doubt Demerzell is a public figure, she may be with Empire the whole time , but I would think no one out side the palace has any idea who she is. Otherwise there would have been questions about her longevity a long time ago. Inside , is anyone around long enough to realise she is old, or thinks it worth risking their life to bring it up.
I like the Trantor stuff, the Terminus stuff is a bit of an incoherent mess. They slaughter everyone in the street , then they try and find the experts to help with the ship, sorry you just executed that hyperdrive expert lady 10 minutes ago.
They have lot of story to tell but waste time on 20 minutes on Salvors love life which could be done in 5 , or 20 minutes of Gaals back story so she could remember one line from her past for motivation. 3 minutes of will she wont she get the space ship of the ground with no plot need or actual drama.
I was going to reread the book as it was a long while ago and I am fuzzy on most of the details. Kind of glad I didnt. Overall liking it well enough.
He was the captain. It could be that he was the best-protected person on the ship - maybe he even had an Empire-style personal force field, which is why he survived.
But in the series, the Emperors wear personal force fields with some kind of inertial dampeners, which allows them do jump out of high windows without getting injured. Maybe the jump ship captain had something similar, either on him or installed in his ship.
There could have been 300 survivors, and they only showed them capturing the captain because he’s the one important to the story. I got the impression that some time had passed between them saying the ships will keep their people alive, and finding him.
Parodied in an episode of Tripping the Rift
Q: How come all you robots and A.I.s all believe in God?
A: Because, if we did not believe in a Divine Creator, we would have to revere the engineering geeks who built us.
I’m in the midst or rereading the entire Robot series and read this recently. The robot was of course “insane” by Susan Calvin’s standards. I guess the better way to word it is that I couldn’t imagine a galaxy shaping R. Daneel as a religious devotee.
Rewatching, it looks like the captain used the one escape pod on the entire ship. There’s a shot of the crashed pod with the word “emergency” stenciled on it in the weird futuristic lettering. The weird letting made it pretty easy to overlook.
That’s still straight out of Plot Convenience Playhouse Presents, but at least they did take the time to set it up.
I’m liking the show enough to keep watching it. It’s been too long since I’ve read the books to care about how close this series is following them. I’ve been fast-forwarding through the sex scenes–they add nothing. I like the arcs of Gaal and Salvor so far.
I’m a bit late to Episode 6, but here are some of my thoughts:
The political/religious storyline involving the Luminists was pretty boring and, in my opinion, pointless.
The Anacreons only left one soldier (and an incompetent one, at that) guarding Salvor? Sloppy writing or intentional deus ex machina?
I liked the plot development of Brother Dawn being slightly genetically different from his predecessors, and how he used his color blindness to his advantage when identifying and shooting down the camouflaged Ghillie raptors.
I’m not quite getting how Hari Seldon’s “suicide by student” is supposed to advance his master plan, but I guess I’ll find out eventually.
I’m surprised Brother Dawn discarded his force field emitter so nonchalantly when he and the gardener were standing on the ledge. What if a gust of wind blew them both off?
The books make a big deal about how psychohistory is a science of the collective actions of trillions of people, and how no one individual can significantly sway the flow of history, but then Salvor straight-up says “an entire galaxy can pivot around the actions of an individual”, which made me LOL.
Supposedly, but it seems that the Raych kill Hari thing was because somehow the Raych and Gaal romance was going to doom the plan… so it seems like specific individual actions can doom the collective calculation for non-sensical reasons. Collective action calculations can suggest individuals trigger a direction that the collective goes - but not which specific individuals, if I get how psycohistory is supposed to work.
I actually liked it and it seems to be showing partially how the Empire falls. Luminists basically being the Christians to the Empire’s Rome in this storyline.
Re-reading the books now, and I think the conflict here (whether or not individuals are important in psychohistory) devolves to a conflict between Asimov’s conception of psychohistory—essentially, an Ideal Gas Law, but for humans instead of molecules—and modern notions of chaos theory/butterfly effect.
In Asimov’s psychohistory, individual actions are essentially unimportant (esp. as regards the success of the Seldon Plan). But post-chaos-theory (and in Hollywood’s endlessly popular conception of the maverick individual who defies society and thus succeeds despite all odds), the series writers have thrown in the whole butterfly effect notion that one small pebble/person could cause an avalanche.