Contains spoilers for “Foundation” Season 3, Episode 4, and the book series.
“Foundation” Season 3, Episode 4 is appropriately titled “The Stress of Her Regard.” It sheds new light on Lady Demerzel (Laura Birn) and the consequences of decisions that have weighed her down over the centuries. The episode starts with an extended conversation between the positronic robot in disguise and the Zephyr Vorellis (Rebecca Ineson) in the imperial gardens of Trantor. This conversation is where we learn that Demerzel had a dark, calculated role in the terrorist attack that brought down the Star Bridge in Season 1.
Demerzel has played a role in a lot of the show’s happenings, and the more we learn, the more she’s involved. This isn’t a surprise, since her character is a central throughline in most of Isaac Asimov’s books (both in the “Foundation” and “iRobot” series, which share a universe). While Demerzel is important, though, this conversation at the beginning of Episode 4 is the first time we start to see a critical aspect of the robot’s later evolution in the show: her physical and mental rebirth cycle.
Demerzel’s rebirth cycle
Demerzel has been around for a long time. She is a main character in Asimov’s robot novels, set some 18,000 years earlier. (At that point, Birn’s character goes by the name R. Daneel Olivaw and is portrayed in male form.) Over time, she’s had to work to keep her physical appearance up with her positronic interior. This is alluded to in the garden conversation that opens “Foundation” Season 3, Episode 4.
Demerzel and Vorellis discuss things like the potential of violating her programming by helping Foundation vs helping Empire. They talk about trying to find loopholes in her programming, the fascinating fourth Law of Robotics called the Zeroth Law (which Demerzel had a part in coining in the source material). Then, things get really interesting.
The conversation starts to hinge on the concept of Demerzel’s hyper-extended life, the potential of death, and the question of reincarnation. Demerzel talks about how death isn’t an option, and she can’t reincarnate, to which the Zephyr posits that maybe she actually has died throughout her stages as a Three Laws robot, a Zeroth Law robot, and then a slave of Empire. She says:
Maybe you have died. Maybe you’ve died twice over and will die again soon.
That last bit jumps out. Die again soon? Why? Vorellis continues by showing that Demerzel has become a completely different person over the centuries, adding:
When Empire falls, you’ll have a fourth life. A new Demerzel is going to walk out of the palace. She can start clean. Embrace it.
This concept of a robot reincarnating isn’t just fun philosophical wordplay. It comes straight from Asimov’s books.
Demerzel’s new bodies and brains in the books
Toward the end of the “Foundation” story, Demerzel reveals her role in human history. While we won’t go into those details now, suffice it to say that the robot’s involvement has required tens of thousands of years of operability. This comes with your average technological wear and tear. It also means increased memory banks and more computing power, which means bigger, better internal computers over time.
In the book “Foundation and Earth,” the robot explains:
There is no physical part of my body, sir, that has escaped replacement, not only once but many times. Even my positronic brain has been replaced on five different occasions. Each time the contents of my earlier brain were etched into the newer one to the last positron. Each time, the new brain had a greater capacity and complexity than the old, so that there was room for more memories, and for faster decision and action.
This process of upgrading brain capacity and ability continues for millennia until, during the Foundation era, the robot decides that it needs something more than a man-made positronic brain. To continue functioning and helping humanity, it needs a biological one — and a superhuman one, at that. But that is a storyline for later in the show. For now, the foreshadowing is enough to keep Demerzel’s unfolding storyline front and center as Hari Seldon (Jared Harris), Gaal Dornick (Lou Llobell), and the First and Second Foundations hurdle toward the threat of the Mule (Pilou Asbæk) and the unknown Seldon Crises that lie beyond him.
