Dune: Prophecy Series-Premiere Recap: The Space Witch Project

Until Denis Villeneuve came along, adapting Frank Herbert’s novel Dune into a workable movie seemed like an impossible dream, nobly attempted once by David Lynch under the supervision of producers Dino and Raffaella De Laurentiis but to little critical or commercial success. If anything, the idea of adapting Dune was always more compelling than actually doing it, which is why Alejandro Jodorowsky’s extraordinary vision for the film, preserved in the documentary Jodorowsky’s Dune, stands as its greatest incarnation, a theoretical mind trip with music by Pink Floyd, visual effects by Dan O’Bannon and H.R. Giger, and a proposed cast that included Salvador Dalí, Orson Welles, Mick Jagger, and Udo Kier in major roles. (Jodorowsky was set to cast his own son as Paul Atreides, which is just one of the thousand hubristic reasons that funding was pulled.)

The trouble with Dune as a movie is that Herbert’s book is both a thrilling space adventure, full of palace intrigue and giant sandworms, and a hallucinatory freakout on a galactic scale, and it’s rare for any one director to have the capacity to do both at once. (Lynch wasn’t a bad choice, honestly. With greater resources and control, his Dune might have been a masterpiece.) Villeneuve solved the Dune problem by mastering the “space adventure” side of the equation and replacing the book’s more mystical aspects with an imposing, thunderous world-building that overwhelmed you with scale. To some extent, you don’t love the Villeneuve movies so much as feel defeated by them, like the freaks from House Harkonnen had landed their ship in your backyard.

Inspired by Herbert’s book and Sisterhood of Dune, a prequel novel by Herbert’s eldest son Brian and Kevin J. Anderson, Dune: Prophecy burned through multiple creative teams — that drama is detailed crisply in Noel Murray’s curtain-raiser in the New York Times — before settling with showrunner Alison Schapker. Despite the many hands involved, this first episode of Dune: Prophecy makes the conservative choice to follow the Villeneuve visual template (if not the audio one) and build it out into a Game of Thrones–style series of warring houses and interstellar political intrigue. That’s creeping awfully far from the soul of Dune — having not read any of Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson’s prequel novels, perhaps the creeping starts there — and it’s hard to see evidence so far of the allegorical weight of Herbert’s original novel, with its veiled references to the fight over oil and jihadists in the Middle East. Maybe some notable themes will surface as the show unfolds, but it’s such a heavy lift to get it off the ground that some patience may be necessary.

At the same time, mission drift is baked into Dune: Prophecy, which is about the best-laid plans of the Bene Gesserit Sisterhood 10,000 years before they engineered the birth of Paul Atreides. (It’s basically like the Charlie Day Conspiracy meme from It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia if the bulletin board were the size of the Green Monster at Fenway Park.) In the context of Herbert’s Dune, the multi-millennia-long conspiracy in human engineering necessary to yield a messianic hero of startling apocalyptic power sounds supercool, giving Paul a Chosen One stature of virtually unparalleled magnitude. But Dune: Prophecy reveals the obvious, which is that humans are imperfect and often at cross-purposes and it’s a miracle we can come together to make a club sandwich, much less create the defining force of the universe.

To her credit, however, Valya Harkonnen (Emily Watson) has a strong, clear vision, and she refuses to let anyone shake her from it — which, given her family’s reputation, casts the Bene Gesserit plot in a dark shadow. In her opening narration, Valya seethes at the historical accounts of recent history, where House Atreides was credited with leading humankind’s successful rebellion against the “thinking machines” that enslaved them while her great-grandfather reputedly abandoned the fight. Valya sees the Bene Gesserit’s mission as a means to redeem the Harkonnen name — spoiler alert: It doesn’t — but the whole idea of the Sisterhood is that its members have no greater allegiance to any group outside of their own. The relationships they foster and the alliances they form are always in line with the overarching plan.

In “The Hidden Hand,” that plan is to have a genetic stake in a royal bloodline, specifically that of Princess Ynez (Sarah-Sofie Boussnina), heir to the Golden Lion throne currently occupied by Emperor Javicco Corrino (Mark Strong), who’s in charge of managing the spice harvest on the planet Arrakis. Against his own best judgment, Corrino has made an arrangement with House Richese to marry off Ynez to the very young prince Pruwet, which would help secure a fleet of fighters to hold off the attacks that have stalled the harvesters on Arrakis. Though Ynez goes through with the exceedingly awkward ceremony, it will take a while for Purwet to grow into the marriage itself and in the meantime, she intends to join the Bene Gesserit as an acolyte, adding its mystical and philosophical teachings to the combat skills she’s been honing on her own. Valya and her sister Tula (Olivia Williams) have high hopes for their new recruit, who Valya is convinced is part of the prophecy, but Sister Kasha, who’s mentored Ynez under Corrino, has been gripped by disturbing portents of things to come.

The episode sets the table for a lot of drama to come, including the introduction of Desmond Hart (Travis Fimmel), the unlikely survivor of a devastating attack on Corrino’s soldiers on Arrakis. Desmond comes back from the desert planet, insisting that the ambush was not from the native Fremon but from insurgents from allied houses. (For what it’s worth, Kasha, a trained TruthSayer for Emperor Corrino, feels that Desmond isn’t lying.) In the most dramatic moment of the hour — a sequence that echoes the middle-of-the-night attack that wipes out House Atreides in Dune: Part One — Desmond breaks up the new marriage by scorching young Purwet to death with his mind, with Kasha suffering a similar fate simultaneously.

“There’s a war hiding in plain sight,” he tells the poor boy before killing him. “Winning a war requires a great sacrifice. And yours won’t be in vain.” With this, Desmond would seem to put himself in opposition to the Sisterhood, and his psychic powers, affirmed in footage Corrino sees of him summoning a sandworm, makes him formidable. Yet even as Kasha dies right in front of her, Valya seems more enlightened than discouraged, as if the path that the Bene Gesserit’s founder put her on had been clarified rather than laid to waste. Such is the power of faith, which Valya has in abundance — nearly as much as her ruthlessness.

It remains to be seen whether Dune: Prophecy will gather momentum from the shocking deaths that close this debut episode, which often labors under the weight of all its character introductions and reams of exposition. That’s part of the Dune trap — moviegoers for the 1984 version were greeted with a glossary of terminology — but so far, the show doesn’t have the magisterial wonder of the Villeneuve films to give it a boost. Much like Desmond Hart, it’ll have to crawl its ways out of the sand.

Kwisatz Haderachs

• Mirroring the jihadist bloodbath that haunts Paul Atreides, the series is offering the threat of “Tiran-Arafel,” a destructive force that gives some urgency to the engineering that the Bene Gesserit are working on. Ten thousand years is a bit too long a wait for a payoff.

• “Humility is the foundation of our virtues. The mind of man is holy. Thou shalt not disfigure the soul.” Those are the words of Dorotea, who doesn’t share Valya’s interpretation of Bene Gesserit founder Raquella Berto-Anirul’s wishes and, let’s say, loses out in this vigorous exchange of ideals. Young Valya’s use of the Voice to get Dorotea to stick a dagger in her own throat signals that violence and megalomania have more of a role than humility in the group going forward.

• The acolytes who will welcome Ynez into the fold all get a brief introduction here, but of the group, only Sister Jen (Faoileann Cunningham), who tells a wild story about killing a captor and both of her parents as a child, stands out. A love triangle between Ynez and two handsome young men is also touched on too lightly to make much of an impression.

• “May the Richese seed find purchase in royal wombs.” As wedding toasts go, this gets a zero out of ten.

•  “I see, Mother. I see.” It’s the mark of a true cult that when reality doesn’t conform to the vision they offer, they just shift to another vision.