Demerzel, the show’s secret robot, revealed something in episode four she’s been keeping quiet for 300 years.
Foundation is currently rolling out a third season stuffed full of dramatic resonance. We’ve always been fans of Demerzel, the ancient android played by the excellent Laura Birn, but season three has really elevated the character—even beyond that big season-two reveal that she’s been moving the chess pieces on behalf of the galaxy-ruling Empire for generations.
That was a monumental bit of information. But this week’s episode, “The Stress of Her Regard,” dropped a bombshell that’s even more startling in the moment, and just gets more jaw-dropping as it sinks in.
It’s a callback to Foundation season one. But it also dovetails perfectly with Demerzel’s season three arc, which has explored her increasing unease about the very near future. After Hari Seldon gave her the Prime Radiant in season two, Demerzel has been able to tap into his predictive “psychohistory.” Over the past 150 years, she’s consulted it so frequently she keeps it tucked inside her chest for easy accessibility.
The Second Foundation and Empire both have use of a Prime Radiant, which means the two groups—who are ostensibly at odds—have the same means to glimpse the road ahead. As season three began, both realized there’d been a sudden, potentially cataclysmic shift in the timeline. Though they’ve long been preparing for an extended dark age that will kick off with the fall of Empire, Seldon’s math now suggests the possible end of humankind itself. Soon! If the math holds, it’ll happen in just a few months.
Humans who are privy to this information deal with the impending doom in varying ways. But it’s different for Demerzel. As we’ve seen in earlier episodes, she’s facing a dilemma so grave she’s sought out a confidante—a religious leader named Zephyr Vorellis—who agrees to have her memory wiped after each meeting, then restored when it’s time to talk again. Demerzel’s secrets are so intense she actually, for once, needs a sounding board to help her muddle through them.
The big one is, of course, that she’s a robot. She was a fierce general in the long-ago Robot Wars, then captured and held in stasis for centuries as the last of her kind.
