Dune Prophecy

This year I was introduced to Dune, yes I know that I am several decades late. But when the first Villeneuve film was re-released into theaters, I saw it for the first time and fell in love. I counted the days until the second film came out and then when Dune Prophecy was announced; I was beyond excited. Now Max took some concerning steps regarding its marketing and release (including not giving fans a release date until 3 weeks before) so I am interested to see how the show performs overall. But it is released in a weekly format so hopefully it will have time to find its audience. Let’s get into the first episode.

The show is the rise of the bene gesserit and theoretically that goes hand in hand with the rise of the great houses. Our narrator at the top of the episode is a Harkonnen. Valya Harkonnen is our story center so the blood lines that we are dealing with are very familiar to Dune fans.

The vision that the audience sees at the top of the episode is really intense. We see a sand worm basically consume an entire city, accompanied with a few other images that point to death and destruction (charred flesh, dripping blood). Pointing to the end of times, or at least the end of the sisterhood.

The factions within these women seem to be clear cut between the younger women and the older women. And when Valya rises to the top of the order, hers is the only way. Valya is also the first one to use “the voice”. When Valya can’t convince the existing order to follow her way she kills their leader. This certainly points to the Harkonnens being inherently violent.

We then have a 30 year time jump which is weird but okay. 10,148 years before Paul Adredies is so specific.

Oh, we've been harvesting spice from Arrakis for a hot second. Seems like that planet has always been a source of power. My problem with this is that you are saying that in 10,000 years they still haven't gotten a handle on this planet.

After Valya took over the sisterhood became more of a school, training not in values and truth saying but truth saying, the voice, physical and mental strength, their personal sign language

Desmond has crazy eyes and it is really distracting. This man is off his rocker.

Great vision transitions. Cinematically this show is beautiful, That is something that HBO is really consistent with, they constantly produce really gorgeous shows.

There is some clear conflict between Valya and her sister, she also seems to be the only one from the old regime at this school, everyone else is off at the great houses.

This poor baby, does this child even know what is happening? He does seem to know what is happening and he doesn't seem happy about it. Super fair kid you should be playing outside. The kids got a little robot lizard, and judging by the reaction in the room, anything life-like and mechanical is illegal, and terrifying to these people.

What is crazy eyes doing to this child? Also how? OOF this is not great.

The first episode certainly set up a lot of things. They tried to shove a lot in this first episode. I am not sure that they are going to be able to properly explore all of this and wrap it up in 6 episodes. Unfortunately a major problem with streaming series is that they are really short. 6 episodes for a prequel series would be perfect if it was documentary style but there really isn’t enough time to tell a story here.