“Do you feel it? The air gone stale? The common people holding their breath, watching their neighbors’ door get kicked in?” When Captain Han Pritchard asks this of the wealthy nepo baby Toran Mallow (Cody Fern) and his “wife” — marriage is the latest trend; everything old is new again — Bayta (Synnove Karlsen), he knows what their answer will be. They’re too rich, too callow, too comfortable to hear the sound of the jackboots. When the Black Tongue, the flagship vessel of the telepathic pirate warlord known as the Mule, hovers over their honeymoon spot, their only concern is that its shadow will prevent them from getting a tan. They don’t want something so insignificant as a coup interfering with their comforts.

Not to sound like a broken record in these reviews, but boy, does that feel familiar!

In much the same way that its story exists in the overlapping shadows of the foreseen Third Crisis and the completely unforeseen rise of the godlike “mentallic” the Mule, Foundation Season 3 exists in the shadow of the collapse of American government into the maw of rapacious, extractive fascism. Hey, shit happens! But it gives the show’s portrayal of two rival schools of imperial decadence — the Mule’s gleeful sadism and Empire’s decadent desire to indulge its whims before the end — added resonance. The Trump administration, after all, is simultaneously speed-running both the rise and fall of a dictatorship. We might as well see both happen at once on this show, too.

Civilization’s greatest warriors, of course are the scientists Hari Seldon and Gaal Dornick, the founder of the discipline of psychohistory and his most promising (and psychic) student. Roused from cyrosleep for a few weeks every year by their followers, it’s their job to guide the Second Foundation, a top-secret cult-turned-spy-network of mentallics tasked with telepathically pushing and pulling at the galaxy so that the course of history proceeds according to the Seldon Plan. When it becomes apparent that their time is running out, Hari insists on staying awake to guide Second Foundation while Gaal sleeps. Her job, he insists, will be to confront and defeat the Mule himself, and as such her time is more precious than his.

When Gaal is finally awoken, she encounters not Thalis (Sandra Guldberg Kampp), the priestess-type leader of Second Foundation during all her reawakenings so far, but by the Second Foundation’s current head, a deaf man named Preem (Oscar winner Troy Kotsur). She learns that it’s been many years since her last wake-up, and that Hari’s an old man now. In his desperation to help civilization’s dual threats, he stayed awake for decades, staying up and running to guide the Second Foundation so that Gaal would be more vital when the showdown with the Mule she’s foreseen in her dreams finally comes to pass. 

Hari, however, is concealing his next move. With the help of the mysterious entity that restored his digital mind to his physical body, which takes the form of his wife Kalle (Rowena King), he steps through some kind of miraculous, instantaneous warp zone in the fabric of spacetime, to parts unknown.

But even robbed of Hari, Gaal has an unlikely new ally in her struggle, as we learn in the episode’s final scene. I’m not sure how or when, but at some point she opened a line of communication with Empire himself, Brother Dawn, about to be ascended to the status of Brother Day and official Cleonic power. Like her, he’s fixated on the problem of the Mule, as is his robotic advisor Demerzel. Maybe if they pool their minds and their resources, they can take the psychopathic telepath (telepathic psychopath?) down.

Nothing we learn about the Mule is pretty. In a bravura scene of supervillainy, our mutant monarch makes himself at home in the former residence of Archduke Bellasario and his daughter-heir, Scurlet (Isla Gie). (The tailoring and interior design could not be more Dune-coded if Kyle MacLachlan and/or Timothée Chalamet showed up themselves.) Psychically forcing a servant to psychically force the kid to nearly kill herself, he demonstrates how  he can control huge numbers of people indirectly by controlling only a handful with his powers directly. Against a brutalist backdrop of stone and portraiture, actor Pilou Asbæk chews the scenery like it’s his last meal, and the juxtaposition is a delight.

Back on the imperial capital, Trantor, the Cleons each pursue their own agendas. Dawn has his secret connection to Gaal to safeguard, his concerns about the Mule to advance, and his ascendency to the position of Day, the forward face of Empire, in a matter of days.

Normally, this would mean Brother Dusk would walk, or be shoved, to his death by disintegration according to a schedule set out generations earlier, by a Brother Day who’d taken note of his line’s increasingly early cognitive decline. But Dusk, whether honestly or out of self-interest or both, believes these times aren’t normal. With the Prime Radiant itself showing the future severed off like a beheaded serpent, surely a leader with his expertise shouldn’t be consigned to oblivion in a week and a half.

Right, Demerzel? Well, no. In a quietly terrifying way, she tells him she’s a walking clock that ticks out the lifespan of each Cleon, and she never runs late.

Right, Day? No again. The dissolute, perpetually shirtless nominal leader of the galaxy believes in nossing, Lebowski, nossing. Carving himself open with a knife, he grins and bears it as nanites repair the wound. This reveals that the Cleons have gone from forcefield-enabled Superman-style invulnerability (as they’d had during Season 1) to a much more painful Wolverine-style “healing factor,” a nifty embodiment of how the mighty have fallen.

The self-mutilating Day thinks he and all his brothers throughout time are just “rag dolls.” He tells Dusk he won’t intervene on another misfit toy’s behalf, especially not with the end of their line staring them in their face in a matter of months thanks to the Mule. He would rather gamble his time away with a soldier buddy (Ibraheem Toure) who seems like the one person who both a) understands him and b) isn’t also simultaneously his girlfriend and his concubine and his drug dealer. 

Right, Dawn? Well, here Dusk might get somewhere. Normally, enrobing the new Day would fall to the previous one, but since that bearded son of a bitch is playing hooky, Dusk steps in to fulfill his role in the ritual.

Dusk also taken it upon himself to create maybe the most horrifying thing we’ve seen on this show so far. He’s commissioned a black hole bomb, which is as scary as it sounds. Presided over by a man with the dress and diction of an Andor ISB officer and the vocabulary of a deranged poet (Fisayo Akinade), this godforsaken orbital weapon is capable of imploding planets in seconds from across the void of space. Dusk’s hope is twofold: that Dawn can use it against the Mule, who concerns Dusk as much as he concerns anyone else, and that Dawn will extend Dusk’s lease on life as a result.

While I led this review with the heaviest stuff, god forbid I give the impression that Foundation is a downer to view. I mean, in the abstract, fall-of-civilization, just-trying-to-mitigate-the-destruction sense, yeah, sure. But as a viewing experience? Oh no no no no! It’s all dazzling cityscapes, sumptuous interiors, costuming that makes you laugh at its audacity. (Demerzel’s tearaway chest panel!) It’s the way the script by Leigh Dana Jackson and Caitlin Parrish leans into the cartoon heroism of Pritchard (his first name is Han and he’s a captain, for chrissakes!), or the overheated, nearly erotic praise of the black-hole powered “Beast” squirted all over the thing by its captain, or Cassian Bilton’s hilarious Lee Pace impression as the verge-of-Day Dawn, or the Mule’s grinning, screaming eeeeeevil. 

But there we go again, right back to the start. Haven’t we learned by now that no evil is too cartoonish for people intent on doing evil to embrace?

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.