If a journalist writing for Starlog in 1978 were put into suspended animation, woken up, and shown the TV series Foundation, that person would have a hard time believing it exists. With Season 3 of the Apple TV+ series, there will be 30 hours devoted to adapting Isaac Asimov’s first Foundation novel and now, half of the second book, and a bit of the third one, too. While it's mercifully not a slavishly faithful adaptation to the books, the fact that there is this much time and effort spent on such famous novels is truly remarkable. Our hypothetical out-of-time sci-fi journalist from 1978 would also probably ask the following question: “Okay, so this is the most popular sci-fi series on TV now, right?”

The fact that Foundation is not more popular among sci-fi diehards than, say, Black Mirror or Apple’s runaway hit Severance only speaks to the quality of Foundation. The show isn’t challenging for a casual viewer by accident. The difficulty is the point. But with Season 3, Foundation has, perhaps, crafted its most urgent and breezy set of episodes yet. If there are any holdouts on whether or not Foundation is the true Game of Thrones in space, Season 3 will convince you that this epic show deserves an audience bigger than just people clutching their Isaac Asimov paperbacks to their chests.

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A destroyed space station. Bloodied corpses littered around the hallways. And a lone survivor plagued by mysterious visions of melting faces and demonic visages. They’re striking images that kick off the intriguing premise of Shudder’s new cosmic horror movie, Ash. And they were images that came fully formed from director Steven Ellison, better known as Flying Lotus, who came to his feature directorial debut with a deck and concept art already ready to show his cast.

“I made a deck really early on and it had little elements of a lot of sci-fi films,” Flying Lotus tells Inverse.

The sci-fi movie inspirations are clear: Ash, which follows astronaut Riya (Eiza González) as she awakens in a space station to find her entire crew murdered by something, is a little bit Alien, and a little Event Horizon. The script, penned by Jonni Remmler, couldn’t help but evoke those sci-fi classics, so Flying Lotus wanted to make sure that he didn’t try to tread on their well-worn territory. “I watched those ones early on just to be like, ‘OK, don't do these,’ because those were done so well and they're so infectious in culture. Maybe try to take the road a little less traveled if you can,” he says.