HBO’s second small-screen spin-off from a Warner Bros film franchise following September’s The Penguin, Dune: Prophecy is an origin story for the Bene Gesserit sect of witches whose supernatural abilities and devious manipulations grant them immense influence over the fate of the universe.
Alison Shapker’s series (co-developed by Diane Ademu-John) is a Dune prequel that in many respects plays like a sci-fi version of Game of Thrones, insofar as its tale revolves around two sorceress siblings’ attempts to control the galaxy’s ruling empires while plotting to fortify their own preeminent standing. At least in its brief first season, it doesn’t live up to either of those prior celebrated works. Nonetheless, Emily Watson’s imposing performance as a vengeful and cunning schemer makes it an engrossing stand-alone saga of loyalty, treachery, ambition, and avarice.
Based on the 2012 novel Sisterhood of Dune by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson, Dune: Prophecy, which premieres Nov. 17, rarely feels like a vital extension of its cinematic brethren. If primarily an addendum, however, it’s an assured one, and its maiden season suggests that it has the potential to establish its own legacy.
As explained in a brief prologue embellished by a collection of stunning out-of-this-world tableaus, in the wake of a catastrophic war between man and sentient machines, Mother Superior Raquella (Cathy Tyson) founded a coven of “truthsayers” dedicated to helping the Great Houses parse truth from lies. Her clandestine project was assembling a genetic archive that allowed her to create ideal royal unions, thereby preserving peace. Alas, on the eve of her demise on her home world of Wallach IX, her dreams are threatened by her daughter Dorotea (Camilla Beeput), a fanatic who doesn’t believe in her mom’s cause.
Before passing away, Raquella has a vision and delivers an ominous warning (“It’s coming! Tiran-Arafel!”) and, in her last act, she leaves the Sisterhood in the hands of young Valya (Jessica Barden), who hails from House Harkonnen. This displeases Dorotea, but she’s little competition for Valya, whose ability to make people do as she commands via use of “the voice” comes in handy in dispatching Dorotea and securing her position as the Sisterhood’s new Mother Superior.
Three decades later—which is 10,148 years before the birth of Dune protagonist Paul Atreides—Valya (Watson) has grown the Sisterhood into a cosmos-spanning network of truthsayers, each one placed in the company of a ruler, the better to guide them with careful advice and cagey whispers. With her sister Tula (Olivia Williams) by her side, Valya appears poised to expand her group’s authority, but their stability is short-lived, thanks to a new threat that materializes in the seat of Imperium power.
To maintain control of the desert planet Arrakis and its valuable spice, Emperor Javicco Corrino (Mark Strong) has, with the aid of his truthsayer Kasha (Jihae), arranged to have his daughter Ynez (Sarah-Sofie Boussnina) married to the nine-year-old son of a duke whose warships Javicco covets. Because her new husband won’t be ready to rule for some time, Ynez intends to follow up her marriage by relocating to Wallach IX to be trained as a truthsayer, which she’s looking forward to despite the hot fling she’s having with her swordmaster Keiran Atreides (Chris Mason).
Everyone’s plans are interrupted, though, by the arrival of Desmond Hart (Travis Fimmel). A soldier in the emperor’s army, Desmond is the lone survivor of an attack on a spice-harvesting operation that he now claims was actually a carefully disguised robbery. Moreover, he asserts that he was spared death by a giant sandworm, and that he’s the sole one who’ll tell Javicco the truth—a direct rebuke to Kasha and her ilk.
Fimmel embodies Desmond with the same zealous stares and quietly malevolent confidence that he brought to his villain on Raised by Wolves, and it takes no time before his character is throwing everyone’s designs into disarray by using his mind to burn an unfortunate soul to death from the inside-out. That Kasha, now millions of miles away, suffers the same fate indicates to Valya that Desmond is a grave problem. Through a raft of subsequent developments—including a ritual that truthsayer-in-training Lila (Chloe Lea) undergoes to commune with her grandmother Raquella—it begins to look like the decorated military man may be the very danger that Valya was warned about years earlier.
Dune: Prophecy lays out its intricate political machinations at the same time that it reveals Valya and Tula’s backstories as young women dealing with a disapproving family and a terrible tragedy. Directors Anna Foerster, John Cameron, and Richard J. Lewis echo the general style of Denis Villeneuve’s blockbusters, putting a premium on monolithic structures, daunting environments, and cold hues. There’s something off about the fact that this intergalactic society looks more or less the same as it does ten thousand years later in Dune; for an advanced civilization like this, it’s impossible to believe that technology barely progressed over the centuries.
Still, aside from that minor continuity quibble, the show boasts the size, weight, and portent of the films, and if Volker Bertelmann’s score closely resembles the one employed by Game of Thrones and House of the Dragon (the latter a kindred spirit in multiple ways), it adds to the material’s sense of world-shifting import.
As the proceedings’ under-siege nucleus, Watson carries Dune: Prophecy through its minor slow stretches, her stern visage made all the scarier by her searching, predatory eyes. She fashions Valya as a conniver worth caring about, especially as Desmond becomes a bigger obstacle in her path, determined to destroy the Sisterhood’s iron grasp on the ruling class.
Comprised of simply six hour-long chapters, the series’ initial run feels unduly truncated, incapable of fleshing out some of its more intriguing supporting players, such as Javicco’s crafty wife Natalya (Jodhi May), who cares more about self-preservation than tradition or honor, and who comes to see the value in Desmond not as a scapegoat for their troubles but as a weapon to be wielded to their advantage. Yet its headliner’s captivating turn compensates for such shortcomings, her poise masking a hunger that can only be quenched by revenge and domination.
Of course, Dune: Prophecy can additionally remedy its relative skimpiness by being popular enough to earn itself future seasons. I’m no fortune-teller, but on that count, the odds would appear to be in its favor.
