How will Foundation’s devastating Season 3 deaths shape Season 4? Details explored

Apple TV+’s Foundation went off the rails with the Season 3 finale. The episode titled The Darkness aired on September 12, 2025, and involved multiple plot twists.

To call them “subverting expectations” would be an understatement, as they flipped the whole script. All major players are gone, including Day (Lee Pace), the Prime Emperor, and Demerzel (Laura Birn).

And now, with Season 4 in the pipeline, fans are wondering if the writers will blow up the bedrock of their own story? What is even left to build on after all that?

Foundation has always been about sweeping ideas such as collapsing empires and rebirths. Usually, it’s centuries-long prophecies, empires collapsing, and the balance between free will and destiny. However, instead of skipping ahead to another round of the same thing, the Season 3 finale torches the whole setup. The Galactic Empire is down for the count. Cleon’s precious dynasty is smashed to pieces. The show has reset its basics and thrown the galaxy into pure chaos.

Now that we await Season 4, the old rulebook no longer exists, and that means viewers are headed to uncharted territory. With the Empire destroyed, it is just a pile of broken leftovers, desperate folks scrambling, and who-knows-what creeping out of the shadows to snatch control. Everything is up for grabs, and you can bet nothing is ever going back to the way it was.

The legacy of Foundation Season 3 deaths: Why everything is different now

The conclusion of Foundation Season 3 is nothing less than a paradigm shift. For three seasons, the show relied on resets, time leaps, clones, AI resurrections, and nearly invincible antiheroes to keep its chessboard in play. But the Season 3 finale shattered that formula entirely.

With the eradication of the Cleonic Dynasty and the death of Demerzel, the show has lost its most secure safeties. This time around, the losses appear final, and the path to Season 4 is unknown.

The elimination of the Cleons is most shocking. Brother Dusk is driven mad with desperation and disables the clone tanks upon which the Empire had based the centuries-long reign of identical leaders. In the process, he kills both Day (Lee Pace) and Demerzel (Laura Birn) and removes the option for their line to be revived with fresh clones.

Speaking with TheWrap, showrunner David S. Goyer stated:

"Audiences are sophisticated these days, and you have to tell a good story — you don’t do this merely to surprise the audience — but one of the reasons why “Breaking Bad” or “Game of Thrones” is so exciting is they broke some of the conventions of storytelling by killing off lead characters. So I said, “What would be the most exciting thing?” And the most exciting thing would be if we end the season at a place where you think, “How can the show even survive after this? How can the Foundation prevail? [...] I don’t know how else to tell you that the Empire is done now."

Day’s death lands with surprising weight. Once ruthless and arrogant, he dies in an act of rare selflessness. Demerzel’s end is even crueler: freed from her programming at last, she gains true autonomy only in the moment she is destroyed.

In an interview with /Film, Goyer described this as “tragic irony,” and it makes Demerzel’s arc one of the most heartbreaking in the series.

“I just like that tragic irony of Day changing as a character and becoming selfless and Demerzel being free, but the moment she’s free is also the moment that she dies.”

Dusk, in contrast, becomes Brother Darkness: a paranoid, unstable ruler whose destructive choice has left him utterly alone.

The fallout doesn’t stop with the Empire. The other leads of the show are also shaken. Gaal Dornick manages to live, but she comes out battered, deprived of her Mentalic allies, severed from the Prime Radiant, and perhaps even robbed of her dearest friend in Hari Seldon.

All the while, danger is breeding. An underground robot society is hiding in the shadows, and the Mule (with Bayta Mallow as his instrument) is shaping up as a mounting threat.

The result is a galaxy without anchors. For years, the Cleonic Dynasty provided stability, if not peace, and the Foundation itself offered a fragile sense of order. Now, both are destabilized. Unless Season 4 chooses to roll back these deaths, the story has no choice but to move forward into more dangerous and unpredictable territory than ever before.

Foundation Season 4 is confirmed and will reportedly premiere between early and mid-2027. Filming is set to begin in early 2026, with principal cast including Jared Harris (Hari Seldon), Lou Llobell (Gaal Dornick), Lee Pace (Day/Brother Darkness), Terrence Mann (Brother Dusk), Laura Birn (Demerzel), Cassian Bilton (Brother Dawn), and Synnøve Karlsen (Bayta/Mule).

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Also Read: Foundation Season 3 ending explained: Did Demerzel really die in the finale?

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