Are you watching the brand new season of the Apple TV+ collection Foundation and considering, “Wow, space looks cool. I wish it really was like that”? You’re in luck—it very effectively may very well be.

Foundation showrunner David S. Goyer says his adaptation of Isaac Asimov’s science fiction collection honed its cosmic particulars with Kevin Hand, a scientist who works at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and who’s at present exhausting at work determining the logistics of landing a rover on Europa, one in all Jupiter’s 95 identified moons. The present additionally discovered inspiration for its spacey visuals in current pictures despatched down from the James Webb Space Telescope, which Goyer calls “a treasure trove of material.”

When the present can’t straight pull from a Webb picture—say, when it’s crafting one thing that, so far as anybody is aware of, doesn’t exist already someplace on the market—it opts to extrapolate or pull from non-space-related science. “My visual effects and production design crews, we’re all geeks,” says Goyer. “We read all the science magazines and the various articles that come out, and we were very excited, for instance, to see that there’s a scientific basis for a triangular singularity.” How excited? Well, when Goyer’s crew was engaged on the second season’s faster-than-the-speed-of-light “whisper ships,” they opted to have them create a triangular singularity reasonably than a hoop one. “So that’s how geeky we are,” Goyer says.

That geekery is critical. Asimov’s long-beloved sci-fi collection is deliciously dense, encompassing not solely large swaths of time and area, but additionally doing it in a nonlinear means, leaving viewers (and actors) left questioning the place precisely the story stands at any given level. Different planets and landscapes additionally concerned completely different capturing areas and schedules, which means that Goyer and his crew needed to keep sharp.

“Making the show is staggeringly complex and sometimes overwhelming, particularly because we have to shoot country by country by country,” he explains. “Actors and directors can get confused in terms of where we are in the storyline, and so people are constantly calling me or texting me and saying, ‘Wait a minute, What’s happening? What’s going on here?’ Fortunately I’ve got most of it in my head.”

For season 2, these calls meant a whole lot of speak about conflict, notably between the Galactic Empire and the Foundation, in addition to the intersection of science and religion. In a spot the place each psychohistory and predestination exist, how a lot does private alternative matter? Does anybody actually have company if it’s all only a means to an finish anyway?

That’s a query of explicit curiosity for Lee Pace’s character, Brother Day. One of three clone emperors, Brother Day has lately found that his supposedly good DNA—a replica of onetime emperor Cleon—was way back compromised by rebels, leaving his proper to rule in query. While he heads into each difficult state of affairs with confidence and energy, even taking down a potential assailant while in the buff in the season premiere, Brother Day remains to be involved with shoring up his energy, notably as soon as he realizes that the Foundation he thought he vanquished nonetheless thrives on the outskirts of the galaxy.

“This season,” Pace says, “Day is fully aware that he is a human inhabiting this impossible role. He’s interested in ending turmoil by creating a marriage, and as the season progresses and the tensions with Foundation start to rise, he sees that as his moment of greatness. He’s not able to see the real sources of the pressure he is under, thinking that he’s responsible for the galaxy, and he’s no longer able to be sensible and responsible for his own physical body.”

That would possibly sound ominous, however don’t rely Brother Day and the remainder of the Cleon clones out. “What I like most about the Cleons is that they’re two-strike hitters,” Pace says. “They perform with their backs against the wall.”