If you’re a sci-fi fan, you really must check out Apple TV+—streaming home of so many of the best genre shows right now. Two standouts happen to have the same executive producer among their credits: David S. Goyer, who’s part of team Murderbot as well as team Foundation. Murderbot‘s first season wraps up July 11, the same day Foundation returns for its third season. Neither show has been renewed beyond that, but to hear Goyer tell it, the future is looking bright.
“I don’t want to give away too much, but I will say that moving from season season to season four is the first time we do not jump forward centuries,” Goyer said of Foundation. (The show’s third season does indeed pick up 152 years after season two, as the season two finale had promised.) “So in a way, one might think of season three and season four as one sort of 20-episode season.”
That’s exciting for fans of the Asimov adaptation to contemplate, as is his tease of season three, which builds out what fans have seen in the teaser and trailer so far: the story’s big bad, the Mule (played by Game of Thrones‘ Pilou Asbæk), will play a major part this time around.
“I had always said, ‘The Mule is season three. We have to earn the Mule,’” Goyer said. “The reason why the Mule is so effective in the books is because it comes midway through the second novel, and you have to sort of set up the Foundation and set up the ways that its psychohistory seems to be kind of infallible and then the Mule is something that turns everything—the Mule doesn’t work unless you’ve seen the Foundation succeed a number of times.”
As for the future of Murderbot—which is based on Martha Wells’ Murderbot Diaries book series—Goyer is similarly optimistic, echoing what series creators Chris and Paul Weitz told io9 ahead of the season premiere about its potential longevity, while pointing out the show has a surprisingly broad appeal.
“We’ve hit our Byzantine-metric threshold and I think it has performed well enough that there will be another season. It’s not guaranteed, but I believe that to be the case,” Goyer said. “And the response, critically, I think, could not have gone better. And what we’re really interested in is, we knew we would get the sci-fi people in and the fans of the books, but we’re just interested in sort of branching out beyond people that typically don’t consider themselves fans of science fiction. Like my wife loves it, and she’s not a science fiction fan. And so that’s the audience that we’re going for and we’re hoping that that will continue.”
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