The upshot of this afternoon's urgent care is that I don't have pneumonia even though my lungs sound like it and the topical antifungal to which I will be quadridiurnally subjecting my mouth for the next week tastes awful. I came home with the desire to prostrate myself on the couch and stare at a movie and the upstairs people partied so hard until after midnight that it was impossible. I have set the problem of figuring out how to sleep on the schedule of this medication for tomorrow.
Chances are good that my favorite character from the second season of Apple TV+'s Foundation (2021–) would always have been Oliver Chris' Sef Sermak because he's a disapproving heron of a career bureaucrat with a core of pure marshmallow fluff where his daughter is concerned, but it doesn't hurt that his relationship with his religion reminds me more of cultural Judaism than anything I can remember seeing on science fiction TV. By the time of his tenure as Director, the Foundation has moved into what its creator will recognize as its religious phase, wherein the red-robed mendicants of the Church of the Galactic Spirit use sleights of science to build their following throughout the Empire-abandoned worlds of the Outer Reach. It is not merely a shell game; in the hundred and thirty-eight years since the digital ghost of Hari Seldon emerged from the vacuum-black mystery of his Vault to reveal the true purpose of the Foundation, the children's flags that once marked the extent of its protective null field have been augmented by cairns of pilgrimage and handmade rag trees clinking with charms and bells in the cold dust-drifting winds of Terminus. Not just his priests when they preach, but ordinary citizens speak casually, seriously of the Prophet and his Plan. It isn't a faith that Sef shares. He believes in Hari Seldon as the founder of psychohistory, the architect of the slow sculpture by which the chaos of Empire's inevitable fall may be amended from thirty thousand years to a mere millennium and the intelligence which has presided over the Vault since the settlement of Terminus, but he doesn't believe—even after he's seen a man incinerated for zealous presumption, stood at his daughter's side within the tesseract of the Vault—in a god in the mainframe, or outside of it. He acknowledges the political usefulness of the Church and dismisses it spiritually as salvation for sale. And when his daughter may have died in the service of her vocation, those true-hearted trickster's red robes he wanted so desperately for her to choose anything but, he goes alone and shitfaced to the edge of the null field to have it out with the next best thing to God, from whom he is not expecting a response. Quite honestly, this quality of not needing to believe in God in order to yell at them would have sufficed for me, but as![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
sholio has been listening to me explain, it matters so much to me that Sef never becomes a believer. He is not in a conversion narrative. If anything, he has the opposite of a theophany: he met his daughter's god and it had no answers for him, even whether the sparrow that fell in its name was caught or not. It consoles her other father to think of her in the hands of the Prophet, but Sef can't offer a faith he doesn't feel. And none of it means he doesn't know the words to the prayer of the dying or a congregation's call-and-response or even how to play the ringer for a cleric working an impossible crowd; he chants guide me through the darkness like it means something to him because it does. It isn't his faith, but it is his culture. I was not then surprised to discover that the showrunner of Foundation is Jewish, even when so much of the rest of the Church of the Galactic Spirit runs on various models of Christianity. When I hear a sermon concluded by the person who should know, "The Galactic Spirit isn't supernatural, it's just progress," he might have to cut Mordecai Kaplan in for royalties.
I do not think of myself as normally resonant to representation in media as often discussed; I don't operate in narratives by seeing myself in characters, even the ones I like best. But I don't expect to see the kind of angular relationship to an ethnoreligion that I grew up with just cropping up in multi-million sf prestige drama as opposed to the novels of Phyllis Gotlieb or R.B. Lemberg. I certainly didn't expect it as the grace note on a cross-purposes functionary with the natural charisma of a lemon, which is another way of saying that I was absolutely glued to him. His daughter, incidentally, is as just awesome as he thinks she is, if not more so. I should very much like a third season of this show; it is an astonishing example of an adaptation that changes almost every detail of its source material while maintaining the essential concepts so centrally, I consider it a valid version. I should also like my mouth to stop hurting.
Chances are good that my favorite character from the second season of Apple TV+'s Foundation (2021–) would always have been Oliver Chris' Sef Sermak because he's a disapproving heron of a career bureaucrat with a core of pure marshmallow fluff where his daughter is concerned, but it doesn't hurt that his relationship with his religion reminds me more of cultural Judaism than anything I can remember seeing on science fiction TV. By the time of his tenure as Director, the Foundation has moved into what its creator will recognize as its religious phase, wherein the red-robed mendicants of the Church of the Galactic Spirit use sleights of science to build their following throughout the Empire-abandoned worlds of the Outer Reach. It is not merely a shell game; in the hundred and thirty-eight years since the digital ghost of Hari Seldon emerged from the vacuum-black mystery of his Vault to reveal the true purpose of the Foundation, the children's flags that once marked the extent of its protective null field have been augmented by cairns of pilgrimage and handmade rag trees clinking with charms and bells in the cold dust-drifting winds of Terminus. Not just his priests when they preach, but ordinary citizens speak casually, seriously of the Prophet and his Plan. It isn't a faith that Sef shares. He believes in Hari Seldon as the founder of psychohistory, the architect of the slow sculpture by which the chaos of Empire's inevitable fall may be amended from thirty thousand years to a mere millennium and the intelligence which has presided over the Vault since the settlement of Terminus, but he doesn't believe—even after he's seen a man incinerated for zealous presumption, stood at his daughter's side within the tesseract of the Vault—in a god in the mainframe, or outside of it. He acknowledges the political usefulness of the Church and dismisses it spiritually as salvation for sale. And when his daughter may have died in the service of her vocation, those true-hearted trickster's red robes he wanted so desperately for her to choose anything but, he goes alone and shitfaced to the edge of the null field to have it out with the next best thing to God, from whom he is not expecting a response. Quite honestly, this quality of not needing to believe in God in order to yell at them would have sufficed for me, but as
sholio has been listening to me explain, it matters so much to me that Sef never becomes a believer. He is not in a conversion narrative. If anything, he has the opposite of a theophany: he met his daughter's god and it had no answers for him, even whether the sparrow that fell in its name was caught or not. It consoles her other father to think of her in the hands of the Prophet, but Sef can't offer a faith he doesn't feel. And none of it means he doesn't know the words to the prayer of the dying or a congregation's call-and-response or even how to play the ringer for a cleric working an impossible crowd; he chants guide me through the darkness like it means something to him because it does. It isn't his faith, but it is his culture. I was not then surprised to discover that the showrunner of Foundation is Jewish, even when so much of the rest of the Church of the Galactic Spirit runs on various models of Christianity. When I hear a sermon concluded by the person who should know, "The Galactic Spirit isn't supernatural, it's just progress," he might have to cut Mordecai Kaplan in for royalties.I do not think of myself as normally resonant to representation in media as often discussed; I don't operate in narratives by seeing myself in characters, even the ones I like best. But I don't expect to see the kind of angular relationship to an ethnoreligion that I grew up with just cropping up in multi-million sf prestige drama as opposed to the novels of Phyllis Gotlieb or R.B. Lemberg. I certainly didn't expect it as the grace note on a cross-purposes functionary with the natural charisma of a lemon, which is another way of saying that I was absolutely glued to him. His daughter, incidentally, is as just awesome as he thinks she is, if not more so. I should very much like a third season of this show; it is an astonishing example of an adaptation that changes almost every detail of its source material while maintaining the essential concepts so centrally, I consider it a valid version. I should also like my mouth to stop hurting.
