The Mule, as played by Pilou Asbæk, has brought both menace and mystery to Foundation‘s third season. He’s more than made good on the terrifying visions that prefaced his arrival—we know he’s destined for a vicious battle against Foundation heroine Gaal Dornick (Lou Llobell)—with his cruel, crafty plan to take over the galaxy. He uses his amplified psychic powers to manipulate people to commit horrors, all while claiming he merely desires to be loved.

Such complexity has to come from somewhere, and “Foundation’s End,” the seventh episode of Foundation season three, gives us a peek into the Mule’s shocking backstory. Or… does it?

“Foundation’s End” begins on a planet we’ve never seen before. We’ve been hearing about how the Foundation controls important “breadbasket” worlds, and this is one of them: Rossem, “on the edges of the outer reach.” The time frame is “years before,” an imprecise figure on a show that usually likes to be very exact with its numbers.

Amid a field of crops, a woman holding a baby watches a large vehicle drive by. She remarks to her other son—who looks around 12 or so—that the neighbors, the Bartons, don’t like seeing her with the infant. At first, it’s not clear why. “They’re good folk,” she insists to the boy when he suggests the Bartons wish they could take the baby. Maybe, the viewer thinks, they’ve been trying to have children and have been unsuccessful.

That thought gets pushed aside when, as the kid and his mom are gently arguing about his sweet tooth, giant machines arrive. The mom calls them “pullers,” and they’re clearly there for harvesting, but they’ve arrived a week early. The machines aren’t what makes the family run home, though. We see a Foundation whisper-ship land in their yard, carrying “assessors” who’ve come to check up on them.

We get an idea of what’s happening as the mom pauses, mid-sprint, to yank baby clothes off the outside line. Inside the house, it’s frantic. Mom raids her older son’s secret candy stash and gives it to the baby as she’s hiding it in a secret cabinet. “That’s mine,” the kid whines, though it’s certain he knows what’s about to happen.

The Foundation’s pompous assessors stride in, talking about “allocations” of supplies. The family is clearly stretched thin, though the father nervously blames pirates for people not sharing as they once did. It’s tense, but the visitors are wrapping up their visit when everyone hears it: the baby cries.

Mom and Dad try to claim it’s “the Barton’s baby, from next door.” They were just watching it, you see, and tucked it away so the assessors wouldn’t think they were violating the Foundation’s strict one-child policy.

The assessor is no fool and reminds them the Foundation “trusts in the mass deleter solution.” They have two children. They’re only allowed to have one. So when he returns in 30 days, he says, “You’ll have one child.” He swans out with a leering grin as the devastated parents hold each other and sob, and the boy looks very worried. “See you next month!”

Though we’ve seen how the Foundation’s leadership has evolved—there’s barely any trace of Hari Seldon’s original group of brave, intellectually adventurous settlers left—we haven’t seen the toll its expansion has taken on ordinary people generations later. Now, we realize that the Foundation’s great success hasn’t come without a price.

The episode then jumps to “now,” as we see Trantor reacting to the Mule’s invasion of New Terminus, then the chaos on New Terminus itself. The Mule smoothly converts the feckless Mayor Indbur and his Warden to his cause; in a later scene, he has his little-girl sidekick tell Indbur the Mule wants him to drown himself, which the man does “with pleasure.” It’s ghastly.

“Drowning… bad way to go,” the Mule muses. We return to the flashback on Rossem, and it’s now clear this is the Mule in his youth. The family goes to the edge of a reservoir, which the dad calls “pretty,” though it’s a grim, smoky landscape. “Here is a good place,” he tells the mother, and marches toward the boy, holding a rope behind his back.

This is already horrifying enough, but the boy knows what’s coming and yells in protest. Can’t the Bartons take the baby? No, they can’t; they’re only assessed for two family members. And they surely wouldn’t want to take in an older child either. As the boy screams (“But you love me!”), his eyes get that silver look we’ve seen the Mule’s take on when he’s activating his powers. First his dad goes into a trance and plunges under the water, then his mom, after carefully setting the baby on the shore, does the same.

“You want to be there … “You like to make me happy,” the Mule’s young voice echoes through their dying minds. “You love me more than anything,” he says aloud. He leaves then and there, then places his baby brother on the Barton’s porch and scampers off.

As Foundation cuts back to New Terminus, we see that the Mule has been standing next to the Vault, sharing his story aloud for the benefit of one Hari Seldon. (We can’t see him, but Mule is counting on him to be listening to every word.) While we’re digesting this gruesome tale—while thinking back to an odd moment in episode three, in which the Muse paused mid-massacre to say, enigmatically, that sometimes his life doesn’t feel like his own—he finishes up by saying he escaped his home world by joining up with the pirates. The pirates were thought to be bad guys, he notes, but they “never took as much as you.”

When there’s no response, the Mule mutters “coward” and turns to leave—but grins big when he hears Seldon’s voice. “That’s a very tragic story… I wonder how much of it is true.”

The Mule replies with a wide, toothy smile: “Oh, the truth comes banging on your door, Hari Seldon.”

Do you think the Mule was telling the truth about his childhood? (If so, what happened to his brother?) Or do you think he’s an unreliable narrator at the peak of his powers, spinning a tale carefully calibrated for his intended audience? Why would he want to share the story with Hari Seldon in the first place?

We’ll find out more, but there are just three episodes of Foundation left to puzzle through the Mule’s scheme and get to that deadly face-off with Gaal. (Also, we didn’t discuss it here, but what’s going to happen to Brother Day now that he’s in the clutches of the robot cult?)

New episodes of Foundation arrive Fridays on Apple TV+.

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