Foundation season 2: release date, trailer and where to stream it

Everything you need to know about the Apple TV+ sci-fi smash

Foundation Season 2 promotional image
(Image credit: Apple)

Foundation, the sci-fi smash hit based on the series by Isaac Asimov, is back and coming to Apple TV+. You can find the trailer below, and as you can see it's looking pretty spectacular.

If you haven't already enjoyed the show, Season 1 is also available to stream. It's been a bit divisive – the Rotten Tomatoes rating is 72% – because there's quite a lot of world building going on here, so while what's on screen is often eye-poppingly gorgeous it does sometimes take a while to get there.

However,  you could probably say the same for Asimov's stories, which tended to be heavy on exposition: there's a great deal of telling, not showing, in the Foundation Trilogy's pages.

So now we have high hopes for the second season thanks to the groundwork already being done.

So when can you watch it, what's the story, and where does it go in Season 2?

Foundation season 2 release date

Foundation season 2 will start on Friday, 14 July 2023. It'll then hit TV+ each subsequent Friday until its finale on 22 September.

Where can I watch Foundation season 2?

As mentioned above, the second season of Foundation (much like the first) will be exclusive to Apple TV+.

What's Foundation about, and what happens in season 2?

I'm simplifying quite a lot here – this is a Lord of the Rings-scale epic – but at its heart Foundation is about a far-future human empire that straddles many worlds and has incredibly advanced technology. When a brilliant mathematician (Jared Harris) develops a way to predict the future, the news for the empire isn't good. Foundation is about how Harris and fellow exiles band together to try to save humanity. So no pressure there. 

The second season kicks off a century after the first season's end, and this time around there's a vengeful queen who intends to destroy the empire from within.

According to Apple, "Hari, Gaal, and Salvor discover a colony of Mentalics with psionic abilities that threaten to alter psychohistory itself. The Foundation has entered its religious phase, promulgating the Church of Seldon throughout the Outer Reach and inciting the Second Crisis: war with Empire."

If you're familiar with the books, that doesn't necessarily mean you know what's coming: the first season started to diverge from the source novels, and it looks like that's happening with season 2 as well. The cast will include not just characters from the books, but new characters specific to the TV show.

Carrie Marshall

Writer, musician and broadcaster Carrie Marshall has been covering technology since 1998 and is particularly interested in how tech can help us live our best lives. Her CV is a who’s who of magazines, newspapers, websites and radio programmes ranging from T3, Techradar and MacFormat to the BBC, Sunday Post and People’s Friend. Carrie has written more than a dozen books, ghost-wrote two more and co-wrote seven more books and a Radio 2 documentary series. When she’s not scribbling, she’s the singer in Glaswegian rock band HAVR (havrmusic.com).