Photo-Illustration: Vulture; Photos: Warner Bros., Attila Szvacsek/HBO
Like Princess Jasmine trapped in Jafar’s gigantic hourglass, drowning in sand, we’re back in the world of Dune again. HBO’s latest big-budget IP gamble Dune: Prophecy premieres on November 17, taking over the slot of its last big-budget IP gamble The Penguin and fulfilling similar prequel responsibilities as this summer’s big-budget IP gamble House of the Dragon. Dragons, birds, worms: Is HBO’s premier Sunday-night slot going for a “we bought a zoo” thing?
Set more than 10,000 years before the events of Denis Villeneuve’s Dune and Dune: Part Two (together an adaptation of Frank Herbert’s seminal 1965 novel), Dune: Prophecy focuses on the beginnings of the sisterhood eventually known as the Bene Gesserit. The space-witch order ostensibly provides trusted advisers to the ruling Emperor of the Corrino Empire and his Imperium’s aristocratic great houses, like House Atreides and House Harkonnen, but has secretly harbored long-gestating plans about who can and should rule. The six-episode series, based on the 2012 novel Sisterhood of Dune by Frank’s son Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson, explains and contextualizes the Bene Gesserit’s decisions that lead to Paul Atreides’s rise to power in the Dune movies. Emily Watson stars as Valya Harkonnen, the Reverend Mother who’s led the sisterhood for 30-some years and shaped it to meet her vision of subtle manipulation: Via elaborate matchmaking schemes amid the powerful elite, she hopes they can eventually breed an emperor who will be under their control. (That’s the plan in Dune, anyway; Valya’s motives are a little murkier in Dune: Prophecy.) But as she works to accrue more authority in the Imperium, she’s threatened by a mysterious figure from the desert planet Arrakis, Desmond Hart (Travis Fimmel), who has powers she doesn’t understand and could endanger the sisterhood.
It’s a dense world! There’s unique terminology, complex history, and oodles and oodles of lore, and it might be difficult to dive into Dune: Prophecy with no previous knowledge of Herbert’s works or the sprawling franchise he created. If you don’t have the five-plus hours required to watch Dune and Dune: Part Two or however long it would take you to read Herbert’s novels before Sunday night, your prayers to Shai-Hulud have been answered. Here are five things to remember before Dune: Prophecy premieres.
Herbert’s Dune was basically an allegory for American and British wars for oil, with spice swapped in for petroleum and gasoline. Spice looks like a shimmering burnt-orange dust, smells like cinnamon, and is a natural resource that is produced only on Arrakis. Constant exposure turns the indigenous Fremen’s eyes blue, and on Arrakis, the substance is used for everyday food, goods, and explosives. But throughout the universe, spice has become a signifier of wealth and prosperity, and it’s most valued for its use as a drug by the Spacing Guild; it allows the Guild Navigators to achieve a kind of prescience that helps them map out travel through space. In a universe where everyone’s moving between planets all the time, the demand for spice is immense. Whoever controls Arrakis and the planet’s spice-extraction operation automatically becomes one of the wealthiest and most envied families in the Imperium, and also the target of the Fremen, who have been trying to free their planet from its occupiers for generations.
That’s how spice shapes this world’s financial tensions and power dynamics. But here’s a fun tidbit: The Fremen have a ceremony involving the Water of Life — sandworm bile that becomes a narcotic because the creatures live in spice-infused sand — in which the members of a community share the poison and engage in an orgy. As Paul’s lover Chani explains, “When the tribe shares the Water, we’re together — all of us. We … share.” We never got a spice orgy (or a proper sex scene, really) in either Dune film, but maybe Dune: Prophecy will be brave enough to deliver one. This is HBO, after all!
When Dune begins, House Harkonnen, a clan of sadists, has controlled Arrakis for years, an arrangement that signals their closeness to the Imperium’s Padishah Emperor Shaddam Corrino IV (played in Dune: Part Two by Christopher Walken). As Josh Brolin’s Gurney Halleck says in Villeneuve’s first film, “Eighty years, Arrakis belonged to House Harkonnen. … Can you imagine the wealth? … They’re not human, they’re brutal.” The implication is that some degree of House Harkonnen’s violence and freakishness (Baron Harkonnen’s monstrously large body; their “pets” that look like human spiders) stems from the wealth they’ve hoarded for generations. House Atreides, from which the films’ protagonist Paul (Timothee Chalamet) hails, has a righteousness and goodness that, in contrast to the Harkonnens’ brutality, makes the two families enemies.
The Harkonnens’ iron grip over Arrakis makes Corrino’s decision to take the planet and give it to House Atreides a surprise — until we learn he did this to goad House Harkonnen into starting a war against House Atreides. The Emperor’s plan to eliminate all of House Atreides, which he considers a threat to his rule because of their morality and popularity, backfires when Paul, his mother Lady Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson), and his unborn sister Alia survive the Harkonnens’ ambush attack on Arrakis, adapt to living in the desert, and eventually exact their revenge against both the Emperor and House Harkonnen. (Important detail: Lady Jessica was born a Harkonnen, which causes a schism between her and Paul when he finds out in Dune: Part Two.) The families have hated each other for a long time, and they’re locked in a kind of death spiral that casts a long shadow over the entire Dune franchise. Since Dune: Prophecy has characters from Houses Harkonnen and Atreides, expect more of that feud to play out here.
We never heard the word “jihad” in Villeneuve’s films, which means we’re probably never going to hear the word in Dune: Prophecy, either; the series will likely rename this historical moment. But the Muslim context of this word, in particular how it defines a just war, was important to Herbert when he conceived of the Butlerian Jihad, a “crusade against computers, thinking machines, and conscious robots” led by the last free humans in order to reverse their species’s enslavement. As explained in Dune’s Terminology of the Imperium (a glossary that appeared at the end of the first novel), the Butlerian Jihad occurred more than 10,000 years before the events in Dune (lining it up right with the Dune: Prophecy timeline) and lasted nearly 100 years. The humans ultimately prevail in the conflict they also call the Great Revolt and outlaw these machines, creating various orders to take their place. The human computer Mentats, capable of high-level calculation and strategy, are assigned to each house, while the Guild Navigators use spice to determine paths through space.
Villeneuve’s films haven’t really dug into the uprising and how it transformed the Imperium and its people, but what’s most important to understand from the novel is the guiding law established after the Butlerian Jihad’s end: “Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind.” The Imperium’s citizens would really prefer not to have a Matrix-like situation on their hands again. Who can blame them?
There’s a real disconnect between the faith-based world of Herbert’s book, which regularly discusses its characters’ adherence to futuristic versions of Islam, Christianity, Buddhism, Judaism, and agnosticism, and Villeneuve’s films, which excised religion from the story almost entirely. (In particular, elements of Islam or Middle Eastern culture or languages, which are all over Herbert’s novel as integral world-building elements, barely appear in Dune and Dune: Part Two.) Herbert’s book has a whole “Religion of Dune” appendix that explains the significance of space travel, with lines like “Immediately, space gave a different flavor and sense to ideas of Creation. That difference is seen even in the highest religious achievements of the period. All through religion, the feeling of the sacred was touched by anarchy from the outer dark,” and an explanation of what the Orange Catholic Bible text, a compilation of human religions created after the Butlerian Jihad as a way to protect a core aspect of the human experience, meant to its followers. Conversely, Dune and Dune: Part Two have some generic images of brown people unintelligibly wailing in a temple — a pale comparison to the source material.
But Dune: Prophecy takes place in a fascinating time for religious belief because the Bene Gesserit play a role in shaping how humanity’s rejection of thinking machines and artificial intelligence affects culture for years to come. Are they a religious order with inherently nefarious motives, or just a group of women training and learning together? In Dune, the Bene Gesserit have many detractors who critique that distinction, including Paul. Even if Dune: Prophecy strips back Herbert’s idea that the women’s “symbolism, organization, and internal teaching methods were almost wholly religious,” their rituals — like using the aforementioned Water of Life for the Spice Agony ceremony that connects their consciousness with their ancestors in the order — have a sense of grandiosity and procedure that will still feel spiritual onscreen. (Recall, too, that the Fremen believe in Shai-Hulud as a sandworm embodiment of their god or “Maker,” which the Bene Gesserit might not entirely understand because the Fremen belief system approaches the world in a much different way than their own. That’s going to be an issue when Valya and Desmond, a Fremen, meet in Dune: Prophecy.)
These space witches are running a gigantic, generations-long breeding program to guide all the great houses and eventually put the perfect person, or Kwisatz Haderach, on the Imperium throne and under their control. This supreme being — someone who can see into the past like the Bene Gesserit and also the future, perform all the special mathematical and engineering calculations of a Mentat, and travel through space like a Guild Navigator — will be born as a result of their matchmaking; in assigning members of the sisterhood to counsel various great houses, the Bene Gesserit plots out marriages between families and reinforces their sway. Once the Kwisatz Haderach is born, the sisterhood will control that person when they come to throne. Paul Atreides (who is believed to be that figure) ultimately puts an end to their plans by refusing their influence, but 10,000 years ago, these icons were just getting started with their Punnett squares and scheming to help life find a way. One very specific, Bene Gesserit–approved way.
