‘Dune: Prophecy’ Episode 1 Lacks The Spice To Keep Things Interesting

Creators: Diane Ademu-John, Alison Schapker
Cast: Emily Watson, Olivia Williams, Travis Fimmel, Jodhi May, Mark Strong, Sarah-Sofie Boussnina
Directors: Anna Foerster, John Cameron, Richard J. Lewis
Language: English

No one said adapting Dune would be easy. While Frank Herbert’s epic 1965 sci-fi novel contains inherently cinematic elements such as interstellar travel, giant sandworms and vision-spurring hallucinogens, it’s also packed with reams of lore and backstories, exposition delivered through internal musings and switching points of view, all of which is hard to translate on screen. Various attempts over the years have yielded misfires — like David Lynch’s flawed yet fascinating 1984 take on the material — or been left stranded in development desert, like Alejandro Jodorowsky’s adaptation, which he envisioned as 10 hours long and starring Salvador Dali in the role of the Padishah Emperor. With a sandbox this rich to play in, however, the last thing a Dune adaptation should be is dull. No show whose description entails the term “space witches” should ever be this dull. Unfortunately, for all its attempts at palace intrigue and furtive plotting, that’s exactly where Dune: Prophecy lands.

The prequel is centred around the Bene Gesserit, a religious order that has spent centuries developing a eugenics programme, crossing bloodlines in order to produce the Kwisatz Haderach, a messianic figure of unparalleled power. In the Villeneuve films, they were rendered compelling by their enigmatic natures and unchecked authority, their whispers orchestrating the arrival of a saviour or the end of a dynasty. Dune: Prophecy is an attempt to lift the veil on these shadowy figures, but there’s no thrill to them maneuvering the pieces into place, none of the despair of characters discovering that what they took for granted as free will has, in fact, already been predetermined and factored into the Bene Gesserit’s plans. Instead, there’s just a shrugging fatigue baked into the show, the idea that everything is a foregone conclusion wearying even with five episodes left to go.

“What holds more truth, history or prophecy?” is the first line spoken in the series. It’s an evocative premise  —  history, as presented at the beginning of Dune: Prophecy, has been rewritten and reshaped by the victors, and prophecy, as distilled in Denis Villeneuve’s two Dune films, is little more than a smokescreen conjured to control the masses. The rest of the episode, however, squanders this potential. 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 birth of Dune protagonist Paul Atreides. Following the war against the “thinking machines” that enslaved humanity, the banished Valya Harkonnen (Jessica Barden) joins a Sisterhood of powerful women. (Minus Tabu, who isn’t in the first episode.) 

Valya, following in the footsteps of her late Mother Superior (Cathy Tyson), devises a long-term plan to maneuver one of the Sisterhood onto the throne, a move to ensure the order’s continued safety. Barden, steely-eyed and speaking in hushed tones, displays the resolve of someone who simply can’t be swayed, but even she can’t sell her abrupt heel turn from begging her fellow sister (Camilla Beeput) to reconsider destroying the order’s genetic index to coldly commanding her to slash her own throat when she refuses. With this scene, Dune: Prophecy is set up as the inverse of Dune: Part 2, in which the decisions of an individual (Paul’s fanatical Holy War against the Great Houses) outweighed the needs of the masses. Here, the constant refrain of “sisterhood above all” necessitates individual sacrifice.

Valya’s genetic engineering of the royal bloodline involves Princess Ynez (Sarah-Sofie Boussnina), heir to the Golden Lion throne, who is to be married off to the young prince Pruwet (Charlie Hodson-Prior). It’s an alliance made to help her family secure a fighting fleet that would help stave off attacks on their spice harvesters on Arrakis, all information delivered through dull dialogue. Still, it’s amusing how Ynez’s attitude towards her future spouse and his childish games goes from gentle indulgence to outright fury. The other relationship that shows dramatic promise is that of Ynez’s father, Emperor Javicco Corrino (Mark Strong, given little else to do but furrow his brow in worry), and his wife (Jodhi May), a fraught stretch of silence before he publicly undermines her at a crucial moment more revelatory than any exposition dump.

Dune: Prophecy trades the warm sands of Arrakis for overcast exteriors and sepulchral interiors that cast a grey pallor on their characters. The briefest sense of life beyond endless dimly lit corridors and vast palace rooms only comes towards the end of the episode, which follows two characters into a nightclub that’s like any other, with little attempt to envision such a setting in a world different from ours. There’s a last-minute attempt to add spice (heh) to the proceedings, with drug-fuelled sex and two character deaths, but little can pull this episode out of the quicksand it’s mired in. The theme of careful planning mirrors the series itself, so preoccupied with telling the one story it wants to tell, there’s little room for inventiveness or imagination. Meant to be prestige TV, Dune: Prophecy instead bears the sheen of various indistinguishable run-of-the-mill young-adult adaptations from the last decade, like Divergent (2014). So far meant to be intimate and contained, it’s instead slight, extinguishing any of the films’ carefully burnished sense of wonder and curiosity. No Dune adaptation should ever feel this small.