In the Flesh: Foundation

You’d think Western cinema would be out of things to say about intelligent machines struggling with the idea of their own humanity. Roy Batty, Priss, AM, WestWorld’s sad sack torture dolls, the self-loathing fundamentalist replicants of Battlestar Galactica, HAL 9000’s frantic attempt to exterminate his human handlers, the megalomaniacal psychosexual menace of System Shock’s SHODAN — it’s all been done, both well and poorly, a dozen times over. Yet here’s Laura Birn, in the middle of an adaptation of one of the oldest and fustiest pieces of Golden Age American science fiction imaginable, proving the well still isn’t dry. As the ageless robot Demerzel she projects a sense of incredible intellect and empathy constrained by blinkered human programming, an angel forced rather than tempted to act with cruelty, hatred, and paranoid defensiveness. Fascinating enough on its own, but beneath this contradiction is another, that she both genuinely loves her imperial charges — the cloned replicas of emperor Cleon I (Lee Pace, Cassian Bilton, Terrence Mann) who rule eternally in his place — and is forced to love them by dint of the original’s decision not to trust her upon releasing her from millennia-long imprisonment. It’s a poignant metaphor for motherhood, intense emotion mingled with the weight of society’s brutal expectations and judgments.

Birn’s performance eschews easy choices — coldness, inhuman menace, calculating intent — and instead adopts a sort of uncanny gentleness, an impression which remains even as Demerzel punches through rib cages, snaps necks, and essays the continued oppression of virtually all human life. She is peerless, perfect, and fundamentally at odds with herself. She is empire without end with no wish to exist, a perfect mirror to the Cleons intended to serve as an immortal extension of their clone progenitor and in reality functioning as an endless, looping memento mori. The climactic scene in season one’s finale in which Demerzel tears the synthetic skin from her face and screams in anguish after executing a genetically imperfect clone renders her internal tension literal while visually deepening it, showing us the fearful specter beneath the dual masks of flesh and programming. She looks flayed, almost, like a medieval medical illustration. Her false humanity conceals a very real personhood from which she’s barred by ancient prejudice and Cleon I’s cowardly possessiveness.

Imagine spending eternity soothing and protecting your rapist, the man who crushed your free will, who consigned you to an endless prison sentence because it flattered his ego and freed him from the anxiety of human connection outside his strict control. Imagine inviting him into your bed in the hopes that a quasi-incestuous liaison will curb his most destructive and impulsive tendencies, playing mommy, whore, and majordomo to an eternal toddler with the face of the man who destroyed your life. Imagine not knowing for four hundred years whether your real love for a long-ago boy, alone and terrified, has endured, or if only programming has kept you shackled to it. She could have been anything. Everything. Instead she’s a combination nanny-dictator enabling a tedious little tyrant. Forever. Birn’s trembling chin, her cut-glass aristocratic good looks, her sinuous speed and halting, shuddering grief tell all these stories so easily and clearly that her incredible diction, lilting and oddly stilted with just a trace of a child’s lisp, is hardly needed. You don’t get something this good more than once or twice a decade.

This piece was written during the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. Without the labor of the writers and actors currently on strike, the show being covered here wouldn't exist.