Ah right, yea I’m with you. The general idea seems that it will be part of the story of the second foundation, so yea, it’d definitely be disappointing if it ended up as a “well that sucked” story.

That being said, the revelation that Tallem (leader of the mentalics) is old and has been manipulating things from afar for a while was interesting and cool and maybe, along with establishing the whole mentalics thing instead of having them come out of nowhere, worth the visit.

Broadly speaking, the challenge of adapting the books into a TV show was how do you handle the time jumps and new characters as well as the complexity of what’s happening. The show’s obviously worked hard to get characters to persist over time, and largely, I’d say, done a better job than I ever thought it would. But, to my surprise, they’ve found a way to get the stories of these characters to create a pretty good sense of the complexities of the state and evolution of the galactic civilisation.

Empire, Gaal/Salvor, Hari-vault and Hari-main(?) along with the Mentalics and Demerzel on the side, are all trying to act with some sort of long time-scale perspective (maybe not Salvor so much, but it’s probably not a coincidence that she’s the most likeable character). At the moment, it’s working as the core of a show in a post-game-of-thrones world, and, nicely, puts the show in a place to explore what psychohistory is and how it works in ways the books (well the original trilogy, I never read any of the others) never really gave themselves a chance to.