The problem with prequels, the fashion du jour in Hollywood’s grab-all-the-IP era, is that they make the mistake of thinking that our appreciation for something is the same as curiosity about its origins. In Solo: A Star Wars StoryWhen he learns how the roguish smuggler Han got his last name, he shatters the illusion of his devilish aura, a deflating answer to a question that didn’t need to be asked in the first place. Dune: Prophecy is the latest franchise to prove the error of this approach. When a character laments, “We’re all just pieces on the board,” the realization that all of their moves are predetermined for the entire show. Dune: Prophecy‘s distractibility is both its greatest flaw and its most defining characteristic.
An adaptation of the 2012 novel Sisterhood of Dune by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson, Dune: Prophecy is set more than 10,000 years before the events of Frank Herbert’s science fiction classic Dune. That novel, and the two blockbusters by Denis Villeneuve Dune And Dune: part twofollowed the rise of Paul Atreides, who avenges the destruction of his family by rival House Harkonnen by accepting his role as the maybe-messiah of the Fremen, the indigenous people of the desert planet Arrakis. In doing so, Paul seizes control of the Herb of Arrakis (the most prized resource in the universe) and rejects the influence of the Bene Gesserit space witches. The religious order has spent millennia working on matchmaking to create the Kwisatz Haderach, a figure they want to crown emperor and then control, and with their long black robes and inscrutable plans for Paul, these women serve as secondary villains in the world. Dune movies. In Prophecythey take on the role of antihero-like protagonists, with the series tracing their beginnings and first maneuvers to gain power in the Imperium.
Dune: Prophecy is set at a pivotal moment in the franchise’s history, when humans rebelled against the thinking machines that enslaved them and formed various orders to specialize in the tasks the computers once performed. The Bene Gesserit became essential to the universe in the shadow of that rebellion, but instead of reflecting how profoundly this revolution changed reality for the remaining humans, Dune: Prophecy settles for more Game of Thrones-lite approach, where all the disputes are really about superficial politics (with some supernatural sandworm related stuff as window dressing) and every now and then there’s a sex scene to spice things up. (There is literally a lot of herbal drug use in this series.)
The series is primarily a portrait of Bene Gesserit Reverend Mother Valya Harkonnen (played by Jessica Barden as a teenager and Emily Watson as an adult) as she eliminates competition within the order and rises to rule. Her endgame motivations are shadowy and unclear in the first four episodes of the series, but each episode hints at her reasons for undermining Emperor Corrino (Mark Strong, who mostly just looks confused) through conversations with her biological sister Tula (Olivia Williams), also a reverend mother. who is more directly involved in teaching the Bene Gesserit acolytes than Valya – and also more gentle. Once Desmond Hart (Travis Fimmel), a veteran of twelve “tours” on Arrakis, begins to undermine Valya’s authority with shocking powers of his own, the series divides its attention between Valya’s quest to determine what Desmond is up to and Tula’s mentoring of the Bene . Gesserit sisters in training, teenage girls who begin to exhibit a kind of hysteria reminiscent of the girls in Le Roy.
Watson and Williams are the series’ greatest assets, performers who approach each scene with shadowy nuance and steely gravity (sometimes more than the writing deserves) and who demonstrate a clear bond between the sisters even as they fall into a hierarchy. Tula’s concern for her young charges makes that possible Dune: Prophecy to sprinkle in flashbacks to the Harkonnen sisters’ upbringing and explain how they both ended up in the order (with some Solo-like details about the mysterious ways of the Bene Gesserit, including information about their voting power and their talent for lying that the series didn’t need to explain). Cast away from her family as a teenager, Valya reluctantly found a home in the Sisterhood, where she made enemies with her ambition and insistence that the Imperium was wrong to banish the Harkonnens after the Great Machine Wars. As an adult, Valya has consolidated power to such an extent that she has no qualms about telling Tula that she expects “blind obedience” and not fear when she tells Desmond, “I would advise against playing games with me. I will win.” Through split timelines, this series attempts to do some misunderstood feminism, where Valya and Tula’s childhood is defined by the burden of being a member of the hated House Harkonnen, and their adulthood is spent in an offensive stance towards the people (mainly men) who despise them, but need them.
Like Villeneuve’s Dune adjustments, Prophecy continues to ignore the religious and cultural elements of Herbert’s novel, especially those related to Islam and the Middle East, and so central frictions between characters from different factions are hinted at but never explored. A group of Bene Gesserit sisters are referred to as “zealots,” while Desmond is positioned as a convert whose newfound faith in Shai-Hulud threatens Valya’s worldview. But without the context of how these perspectives contradict or diverge from each other, the characters’ conflicts feel weightless, and the dialogue that drives them to formulate their goals comes across as empty. “The big houses are hoarding spices, forcing people to use violence to get what they need to survive. The only way to stop this is to shed blood, and not doubt for a second my loyalty to the cause,” is poppingly didactic.
That ‘here’s a character, here’s a few lines about their ethos, that’s all the development you get’ approach means Dune: Prophecy often evokes the rhythms of second-rate YA. The Bene Gesserit trainees are defined only by their feuds, and Sarah-Sofie Boussnina, who plays the emperor’s rebellious daughter Princess Ynez, is a particular victim of the series’ simplistic dialogue. When she finds her father with Desmond and snottyly complains, “So we’re having breakfast with murderers now?”, as if her family’s rule over the Imperium hasn’t resulted in the deaths of countless people, it’s impossible to tell whether Ynez is supposed to be out to be seen as someone who dares to speak truth to power or as a delusional hypocrite. She may be having it the hardest, but too much Dune: ProphecyThe series’ characters feel just as thin, their motivations and backstories never fleshed out.
The series is most intriguing when it offers new insights into this world, even if the execution doesn’t always feel right. A shocking double murder at the end of the first episode puts on-screen violence that the series otherwise only gestures toward. There appears to be only one nightclub on House Corrino’s home planet of Kaitain, but the alternately flirty and paranoid scenes in that dimly lit bar offer something other than palace intrigue. Extensive depictions of the “Agony,” the process by which a Bene Gesserit sister becomes a reverend mother by merging her consciousness with that of her ancestors, are visually gruesome and explain the wonderfully eerie sound design of overlapping whispers and murmurs that come in during scenes with the leaders of the order. In those moments, Dune: Prophecy it feels like it’s expanding itself to be something other than what we expect.
But too much different Dune: Prophecy is so closely aligned with Villeneuve’s vision that the series feels like an act of cowardice and abdication of creativity. The ominous quote and opening exposition dump, the costumes of the Bene Gesserit, and technology like vibrating defense shields are all so reminiscent of the films that they seem to desperately promise fans that Dune: Prophecy won’t be that different from those blockbusters. But why should we care about the politics of all the characters, their worries about where their culture will end up, when the world they’re in now is so much like the world 10,000 years from now? By staying so close to his predecessors, Dune: Prophecy undermines its own central tension, implicitly signaling to us that everything in this universe will go well for a very long time. The series’ water-treading quality feels like an omen, one warning us that Hollywood’s prequel formula will never dare change.
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