Is Dune: Prophecy Destined For Greatness?

It's too early to draw lines in the sand just yet.

Prahlad+Srihari

Nov 19, 2024

Poster detail. Dune: Prophecy. HBO

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IN THE SEASON PREMIERE OF Dune: Prophecy a royal engagement reception is disrupted by an unwelcome guest: a pocket-sized robotic lizard. There is shock. There is screaming. There is panic. All over what, to the nine-year-old groom Pruwet Richese (Charlie Hodson-Prior), is nothing but a cute toy. But the alarmist reactions of the adults in the court stem from a blanket ban on thinking machines in the Dune universe. “Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind.” So says the chief commandment in the Orange Catholic Bible. Artificial Intelligence has been deemed taboo in the aftermath of the Butlerian Jihad, a war waged by humanity against technology they created. The show opens with a glimpse of the cataclysmic event, the pain of which is still raw in the memories of those living roughly 100 years later — and 10,000 years before Paul Atreides will begin a Holy War.

Computers and sentient tech, so elemental to sci-fi, from the works of Isaac Asimov to Ann Leckie, made for a conspicuous absence in Frank Herbert’s Dune. Paul and his contemporaries had no Siri, no ChatGPT, no R2D2. In their post-AI universe, a mystical sisterhood of clairvoyants and connivers had taken it upon themselves to engineer the fate of the galaxy — through a combination of scheming, matchmaking and eugenics. At the centre of Dune: Prophecy is this sisterhood that will one day become the fabled Bene Gesserit. There is no denying the Bene Gesserit come out looking like an order of evil witches in the Denis Villeneuve films. The show, developed by Diane Ademu-John and Alison Schapker, aims to give more depth, more ambiguity as befits an antihero treatment.

Herbert wrote six Dune novels, the first of which was turned into a two-part blockbuster event by Villeneuve. Following the author’s death in 1987, his son Brian Herbert and collaborator Kevin J Anderson fleshed out the Dune lore with 15 prequels. The Sisterhood of Dune from their Great Schools of Dune trilogy, acts as a springboard for Ademu-John and Schapker’s show. The season premiere, however, ends up packing too much plot in its table-setting mission. Listening to the exposition delivered via voiceover, the dialogue spoken in maxims and metaphors, and all the whispers of prophecy feels like we are watching “Horrible Histories: Dune edition.” The show may be set 10,000 years before Paul sets foot on Arrakis. But finding the same noble houses, same family names in play somehow makes the universe feel smaller.

From the opening barrage of exposition, we learn the origin of the bad blood between House Atreides and House Harkonnen. The Atreides, branded as heroes in the war against machines, had the Harkonnens exiled as traitors to an icy planet. To escape the bum rap given to them by history, Harkonnen sisters Valya (Jessica Barden as the younger; Emily Watson as the older) and Tula (Emma Canning as the younger; Olivia Williams as the older) turn to a new family: the Sisterhood. War hero Raquella Berto-Anirul (Cathy Tyson) established the Sisterhood on the planet Wallach IX as a sanctuary for young women of all stripes to train in the mystical ways. Her dream? To cultivate rulers who can be controlled so as to better guide the future of humanity. When Raquella dies, Valya takes over as Mother Superior. Valya oversees the organisation like a convent school while her sister Tula instructs the next generation of recruits into becoming human lie detectors. The young acolytes who master the art of “truthsaying” go on to join the Noble Houses as chief advisors.

Joining the Sisterhood soon is Princess Ynez (Sarah-Sofie Boussnina), the strong-willed daughter of Emperor Javicco Corrino (Mark Strong). But not before the matrimonial deal is sealed between her and nine-year-old Pruwet Richese, a political marriage to fortify the Emperor’s control over spice production in Arrakis. Meanwhile, fresh out of Arrakis arrives Desmond Hart (Travis Fimmel), a sole survivor from an attack on the desert planet. From the looks of it, he seems like trouble for everyone involved, seeing as he has picked up some mysterious powers. Fimmel seems to be playing the same born-again believer with villainous designs as he did in the unceremoniously cancelled Raised by Wolves.

Where the films made a world of the future feel real, the show makes the same world feel anything but. Gone is the sublime spectacle that was Villeneuve’s vision of Arrakis. Instead, the action shifts between aseptic rooms and an imperial court. “If you like barren landscapes and minimalism, you’ll be very happy,” a character jokes. Save for JioCinema’s smoking warning during a nightclub scene where characters smoke space hookah, that’s about the extent of comedy here.

To be fair, it is too early to be drawing lines in the sand. The chess pieces so far present a rich tapestry for the show to build on its ideas about truth and trust, power and control, fate and free will in more sharply defined detail. It will be interesting to see not only how the season explores the ways prophecy shapes cultures but also how it imagines our descendants might adapt and evolve in a world without computers, given the growing sophistication of our own thinking machines and their increasing autonomy.

Conflicting agendas and political machinations no doubt lie in store. Ominous visions point to a precarious future. But how do you stop a prophecy from becoming self-fulfilling? Can generations of selective breeding produce a deus ex machina capable of saving mankind from itself? Or, as Tula asks Valya, “What if this plan of yours causes the very thing we seek to prevent?”

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