Ebling Mis

Who He Is

Ebling Mis is the Foundation's greatest psychologist in "The Mule," the second half of Foundation and Empire (1952). By the time of the Mule, the Foundation has forgotten how to take psychology seriously; its science is physics and engineering. Mis is the exception: the one scholar on Terminus who has actually studied what little is known of Seldon's psychohistory, and one of the few who takes the idea of the Second Foundation seriously.

He is also rude, sloppy, and scornful of authority, including the Foundation's hereditary mayor, Indbur III. Asimov clearly enjoys writing him. He is the kind of academic who is tolerated because he is right.

His Role in the Story

Mis is present at the Time Vault when Seldon's recording appears during the Mule's attack and describes a crisis that is not happening. He understands immediately what it means: the Plan has gone wrong.

After Terminus falls, he joins Toran and Bayta Darell and the clown Magnifico Giganticus on their flight across the galaxy. His goal is to find the Second Foundation, the only force that might stop the Mule, and eventually they reach the ruins of the great Imperial Library on Trantor. There Mis works obsessively, barely eating or sleeping, pushing through the Empire's records at a pace that should be impossible. His health collapses as he gets closer.

At the climax, dying, he announces that he knows where the Second Foundation is. Before he can say it, Bayta shoots him.

Why Bayta Kills Him

Bayta has just realized that Magnifico, who has been with them the whole time, is the Mule. Mis's impossible drive was not his own; the Mule had been pushing his emotions, forcing him to keep working so that the Mule could learn the location of his last enemy. If Mis speaks, the Second Foundation dies. So Bayta kills a friend to save it.

Mis is, in that sense, the story's great victim: a free mind, used without his knowledge as a tool by the one man who could exploit him perfectly.

What He Represents

Mis stands for knowledge pursued without regard for who is listening. He is brilliant and honest, and he comes within a sentence of undoing the Seldon Plan. Asimov's point is uncomfortable: in a world with the Mule in it, the pursuit of truth itself can be weaponized, and sometimes the right thing to do is to stop a truth from being spoken.

He also shows how much the Foundation has lost. Its founders were scholars. By the Mule's time, it has exactly one serious scholar of the science that created it, and he is treated as an eccentric.

In the Apple TV+ Series

Alexander Siddig plays Ebling Mis in Season 3. The show's version is again a scholar consulted by the Foundation's leaders: in one scene he tells Mayor Indbur and Ambassador Quent about his conversations with Hari Seldon and reveals that the original Prime Radiant is held by the Cleon dynasty. Later he is among the survivors sheltering in New Terminus with Toran and Magnifico. Because the show reworks the Mule story, his role and fate differ from the novel's.