It’s not easy to judge a show based on one episode, which is all that I’ve seen of Dune: Prophecy so far. I find myself juggling mixed feelings, and I’ll sum up those feelings like this.
After watching the Season Premiere, I feel like I must go back and watch it again because there was so much going on, so many characters, such an enormous amount of exposition and explanation, that I’m sure I missed a lot. But there’s so much in the first episode that I found dull and convoluted, I really have no desire to go back and watch it again. Mostly, I have two rather big issues with Dune: Prophecy so far. Spoilers follow.
First, it centers on the Sisterhood but most of the scenes involving the Sisterhood are ponderous, laborious exposition dumps. I found my brain glazing over repeatedly.
Second, while some of the casting is phenomenal—Emily Watson as Valya Harkonnen, Travis Fimmel as Desmond Hart, Mark Strong as Emperor Javicco, Olivia Williams as Sister Tula Harkonnen, etc.—a lot of the younger actors feel like they’re only there because of their youthful attractiveness. There’s a decidedly CW-ish vibe to the young acolytes at the Sisterhood’s Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Truthsaying.
I had to watch this episode in two sittings. The first half is almost unbearably dull and hard to follow. One of the first things you’re taught in creative writing is the maxim “show, don’t tell” and yet time and time again, especially in sci-fi and fantasy, we get the exact opposite. And so in Prophecy’s opening minutes we are beleaguered with narration, a time-jump, lots of dramatic dialogue between characters we’ve barely met, discussing plans we hardly care about.
If you cut the entire first half of the episode, you’d have a much better premiere because all of this stuff could be hinted at, explored in other scenes later and so forth. Great shows like Game Of Thrones worked because they introduced us to characters first, made us care about them, and then led us naturally into the stories those characters would be a part of—rather than the other way around.
The episode picks up considerably in its second half. There is less reliance on exposition. We start to actually get to know some of the characters. Aside from one deeply silly and out-of-place clubbing scene—why do we need to follow our beautiful princess Ynez, her beautiful half-brother, Constantine, and her beautiful sword trainer, Keiran, to a dance club, HBO?—it’s far more engaging.
I especially enjoyed the mysterious Desmond Hart, a veteran soldier of Arrakis who returns to the imperial city and is welcomed by Emperor Javicco Corrino with open arms as the last survivor of a dreadful attack on his troops. The emperor is a cautious and indecisive leader, and perhaps a little too trusting. Desmond is clearly a man with secrets, and perhaps ought to not be given such free reign around the imperial palace. But he’s a hero, basically, and heroes get special treatment.
Fimmel is always a fascinating presence, though I have to question why an Australian actor continues using his Ragnar Lothbrok accent in every show. Is he, in fact, Caleb from Raised By Wolves, transported from that tragically cancelled show to the deserts of Arrakis? Was Caleb Ragnar resurrected? Why did Fimmel’s Anduin Lothar from Warcraft have such a similar way of speaking? No matter, I still enjoyed his scenes here. I may criticize his use of this particular gimmick—the half-mad prankster with the Viking voice—but I still enjoy it.
It’s also interesting to see the ever-formidable Mark Strong play someone so weak, so incapable of making up his own mind that he lets everyone around him do it instead, including his Sisterhood advisor, Kasha.
Of course, Kasha isn’t around to help him by the end of the episode. It turns out that Desmond has been given “a great power” that he’s to use against the witches of the Sisterhood—they’re not the Bene Gesserit yet, though we learn in the most laughably clumsy way that the Voice was just something that young Valya Harkonnen came up with because reasons.
Desmond finds the young Dukeling, betrothed to Princess Ynez, and uses that power to immolate the boy. Grotesque child murder definitely screams “premium TV” especially when it’s in the first episode. I was expecting Desmond to be something of a Duncan Idaho in this series; he clearly is not that.
I wish they’d done more to get us to like the boy. Hell, they could have framed young Pruwet as the main character this episode, showing us his arrival on the imperial planet of Salusa Secundus as the opening scene, introducing us to this place through his eyes, only to have Desmond brutally kill him in the end. Now that would have been a twist.
Pruwet isn’t the intended target, however. Desmond sees an opportunity to kill two birds with one stone, doing the emperor a favor by ending the troublesome betrothal and using the boy’s death to kill Kasha. It’s unclear how the power works, but it seems that by killing one person near him, he can kill another target far away. It’s magic! Spicy magic!
In any case, what we got was a wildly uneven episode with far too much “tell don’t show” and the good bits mostly in the second half, long after I’d lost interest. Yes, that interest was rekindled by the end, but it shouldn’t be this much work to get there.
Maybe this is a problem with beginnings and the season will continue to pick up as we go along. Perhaps, however, it is also a problem of setting and timing. The events take place 10,000 years before Dune, and not long after the Butlerian Jihad, when humanity across the galaxy destroyed and forbade “thinking machines” including ones much more powerful than the little gecko toy the young Pruwet unleashed by mistake at the ball. This might be too far back in the timeline to give it a real sense of connective tissue with the Dune films. But there are other problems that arise, like the use of the Voice so early on, when it ought to have been something that the Bene Gesserit developed over centuries or longer.
Also, while I understand that the Imperium breeds stagnation in terms of technology and advancement, surely after 10,000 years things would look and feel quite a lot different. Stagnation does not mean frozen in time. Yet the clothes, the architecture, the vehicles, all appear to be exactly the same (though the current imperial home planet has changed radically by the events of Dune). The empire has been fighting the Fremen on Arrakis for 10,000 years and by the time Paul Atreides arrives they still don’t have a clue how to stop them? Even as a huge fan of fantasy and science-fiction, I find this all a little goofy and implausible—though easily overlooked if I was more drawn into the story.
I also have to wonder, is this really the most interesting point to explore in the Dune timeline? The war against the machines that took place not long before this show might have been more exciting. Or a time when the Bene Gesserit have more firmly established their control over the Great Houses, making the arrival of someone like Desmond Hart more dire and consequential.
I am still intrigued. I still wonder what exactly the emperor saw when he brought up the hologram of Desmond kneeling before the sandworm. Is this how he was given power? Is it some kind of spice magic gained from being ingested by one of the gargantuan beasts?
We’ll find out more next week. For now, I can’t help but feel a little letdown. HBO used to prize quality over everything, but the unevenness in the writing and casting, and even in the costumes and set design (which are occasionally magnificent, but often feel a bit cheap) make this feel quite weak compared to Denis Villeneuve’s films.
I should also note that while I’ve read Frank Herbert’s Dune, I never continued with the series. I thought Dune was an okay book. Herbert has big, interesting ideas but his writing style left me a little cold. I tried starting the sequel but found I just really didn’t care enough and never went back. I suppose my feelings about the films largely reflect my feelings about the book. Villeneuve is a talented director and visually (and sonically) the movies are outstanding. But the story remains one that I have a hard time caring about, and that certainly carries over to this ungainly prequel. Hopefully it improves.
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