[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for Foundation Season 3 Episode 9, “The Paths that Chose Us.”]
Brother Day (Lee Pace) was dead-set on leaving the Empire and Demerzel (Laura Birn) behind — but now he’s headed right back into the belly of the beast.
Foundation Season 3’s penultimate episode is a surprisingly heroic turning point for Day, who’s spent most of Season 3 detesting the Cleonic Dynasty and its robotic puppet master. Pace sat down with TV Insider to break down Day’s change of heart, and what it means ahead of the finale.
“I think [Day] has a healthy disdain of the power he holds and the power that his brothers hold and the power that the robot holds,” Pace says of his character’s initial mindset. “I think he finds it annoying and distasteful and kind of irrelevant in a galaxy that is probably operating fine without them.”
That changes when Day figures out that Demerzel could be the key to saving humanity from total eradication. However, Pace explains that Day’s feelings toward his “complicated soulmate” started shifting even before that. In Episode 7, when Day falls into a hallucinogenic vision, he starts to view her as an “angel.”
“[He realizes] that he’s not the only one imprisoned in that palace, that she too is imprisoned and that she is the only one that ever loved him and has ever really cared for him despite the fact that she’s mechanical,” the actor says, adding that it’s “confusing but undeniable” to Day at that point.
After following his lover (Yootha Wong-Loi-Sing) to Mycogen, Day finds himself literally at rock bottom in the Inheritance’s death pit. Convinced that Day was honest about Demerzel’s real identity — she’s the cult’s messiah — Song rescues him. Day refuses to run and fights Sun Master (Blake Ritson) for the robot skull.
“Will this free her?” Song asks, to which Day responds, “I’m betting my life on it.” It’s a moment of selflessness for Day, which Song points out, telling her former lover that he’s doing a great thing for humanity. “I would settle for doing a great thing for [Demerzel],” he says.
“I think it’s very interesting that that enlightenment hits that character the way that it does and what he does with it, which is where we see Cleon’s Cleon-ness in that he’s gonna fight his way out of trouble,” Pace tells TV Insider. “He’s gonna get there. He’s gonna survive. He’s gonna do what he needs to do.”
And what exactly is Day’s new state of mind as he heads back home? “Yes, he was used by her,” Pace acknowledges. “Yes, he was made by her, but he was made by a goddess to serve this very, very small function. And she is the only hope that humans have of surviving the chaos that is about to destroy the civilization that’s keeping them alive.”
Will the robot head actually break Demerzel out of her programming to only serve the Genetic Dynasty, rather than humanity as a whole? We’ll have to wait another week until her and Day’s fates are revealed, but Pace teases that fans are in store for a “bonkers” Season 3 finale.
“The story gets huge at that point,” he says. “It completely opens up into a… You understand just how big Foundation is gonna be.”
Foundation, Season 3, New Episodes, Fridays, Apple TV+
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