Spoiler warning! This article has spoilers for Season 3, Episode 4 of the Foundation. Continue with caution!

In the fourth episode of Season 3 of the Foundation, Brother Day (Lee Pace) is really raging against the machine - no, I think literally. He is fevering in a children's planting anger against Lady Demerzel (Laura Byrne) - again, literally iron. (The couple of imperial characters have a complicated relationship.) At one point, the disgruntled emperor faces Demerzel right in her private quarters in the Royal Palace while holding robots on herself. (Remember, she is survived by the violent history of her race.) She is headless when she enters, and as she examines her upper piece to the neck, the day complains of complications of being human - to cut her nails, to go to the toilet - compared to the flawless and purely maintenance of the robot.

It is clear that the conversation has an impetus for tension, and as it takes place, it is easy to miss a short phrase that Clion uses at one point. After saying that Demerchel must think that people are dirty, she replies: "I was made to look like a man. Your shape was ideal," the clone clone responds:

"The ideal. Do the robots dream of deleting their donkeys then? What a thought."

Did you notice that, yet? While the conversation is about power politics and tensions between biological and synthetic sensitive life, writers have been able to use it in a small phrase that returns immediately to Asimov's own writings: The concept of dream robots.

Here's something you need to know if you want to understand the bigger picture of the story "Foundation": it takes place in the same world as Isaac Asimov's robots. The same books that inspire Will Smith Sky-Fi 2004 "I, Robot" adaptation Connect directly to the Apple TV+Foundation series much better. The leader of the book in that seminal scientific library is "I, the Robot"-but it's not the only story (like Smith's film). It's a series of stories. There are other books like him. One is called a "complete robot", the other is called "robots visions", and the one that came out in 1986 is called "robotic dreams". See where we go here?

Along with these collections of short stories, Asimov wrote robots novels. All of these include a character called R. Danel olivic, clever, iousubopite and competent vibration robot like Brent Spinner's data from Star Trek. Over time, the desired positive little boy collects several different pseudonyms. One of them? Demerchel. Yes, that Demermel.

Asimov's early robots constantly include a character who is still present in his novels "Foundation" nearly 20,000 years later. The connection is not accidental, nor is it just in the show. The inclusion of Demerzel in both the book and the screen is crucial to the larger story of the "Foundation" and will eventually lead to one of the biggest discoveries of the whole story. But we have a long way to go before we get there. For the time being, it's just fun to see writers drawing those subtle links between the expansive source of material, as they increase to the magnus opus of their galaxy story.

The Foundation is an Apple TV+streaming.