“Dune,” the multi-novel, multi-movie saga, is in part about the battle for a precious commodity hoovered up from a desert planet to enrich the rapacious nobility. It’s called spice.
“Dune: Prophecy,” the six-episode prequel series beginning Sunday on HBO, also concerns a valuable resource hoarded by empires and processed through machinery. It’s called intellectual property.
Spice is a dangerous substance, controlled through violence, but at least the universe gets something out of it. Its mind-expanding properties make hyperspace travel possible and can induce prescience in the user.
I.P., on the other hand, tends to simply give us lavish, lesser copies of things we already have. “House of the Dragon” is “Game of Thrones: Blonder and Blander”; “The Rings of Power” substitutes the mystic wonder of “The Lord of the Rings” with C.G.I. and metalsmithing.
“Dune: Prophecy” is set 10,000 years before Timothée and Zendaya strode the sands. Its action unfolds shortly after an uprising against “thinking machines” that enslaved humanity. But the series itself is securely in the control of the I.P. machine.
Its focus is the Sisterhood, the precursor to the Bene Gesserit of the films, now overseen by the ruthless and subtle-minded Mother Superior Valya Harkonnen (Emily Watson). A combination of deep-state apparatus and deadly yoga colony, this secretive society of female mentalists provides “truthsayers” (human lie detectors) to the ruling nobles while guiding history with a genetics program designed to breed ideal rulers. (Humankind may have faster-than-light spaceships, but the galaxy remains a patriarchy that women can influence only by stealth.)
The empire can use the help. Emperor Javicco Corrino (Mark Strong) holds power in a restive galaxy through a delicate web of alliances. At present, he is marrying off his strong-willed daughter, Ynez (Sarah-Sofie Boussnina), in a union meant to secure his hold on the spice planet Arrakis (in this series, a place more heard about than seen). Isolated and beset, he falls under the influence of Desmond Hart (Travis Fimmel), a feral, fanatic soldier who is able to tap into dark psychic forces and who threatens the Sisterhood’s invisible hold on power.
“Prophecy” resembles less the Denis Villeneuve films than it does “House of the Dragon.” The settings are imposing and quasi-medieval; the costumes are heavy on veils, which function as both ornament and symbol. (One must keep one’s self partly hidden, especially the women who seek power in this society.) The action moves from one minimalist cavern to the next. The future loves an open-plan layout.
The dialogue, unfortunately, is similarly austere and grandiose. The rare laugh is like a sip of water in the desert. The early episodes intersperse heavy exposition downloads with the occasional gnomic epigraph: “The key to the reckoning is one born twice, once in blood, once in spice.” Burma-Shave!
The world-building can be impressive, especially when “Prophecy” digs into the inner workings and politics of the Sisterhood. Diane Ademu-John and Alison Schapker, who developed the series for TV, had a tough job in giving life to the threadbare “expanded universe” “Dune” novels that the series uses as a starting point. (Schapker is now the sole showrunner, the series’s fourth since 2019.)
You wonder what the makers of “Prophecy” might have made building a new story from scratch. The third episode departs almost entirely from the galactic-politics arc to give the back story of Valya (played as a youth by the excellent Jessica Barden) and her sister and colleague Tula (Olivia Williams as an adult, Emma Canning as the younger version) — and it’s the best of the four installments shown to critics.
But everywhere in “Prophecy,” one feels the merciless tractor-beam pull of franchise service. It is a story of characters who share familiar names — an Atreides makes the scene as well — but lack a spark of life. There is a sense of checking off lists. Arrakis is no longer the center of the action, but a sandworm is still involved, because you don’t spend this kind of coin on a “Dune” show and not give the people a sandworm.
The most interesting character is Watson’s steely Valya, who is driven by both a sense of historical mission and a desire for familial revenge. (The Harkonnens, the powerful baddies of the films, are in this prequel a disgraced house exiled to a frigid whaling planet.) The most interesting performance, however, comes from Fimmel, late of the exquisitely loopy “Raised by Wolves,” whose wild-eyed, twitchy fervor suggests the weirder and richer show I wish “Prophecy” were granted permission to be.
It still could become that. To its credit, “Prophecy” knows that it is TV, not a serial movie, which means focusing on political and psychological warfare over screaming-metal battle scenes. Its themes of power and fate have potential, and there is certainly something timely — as with “The Handmaid’s Tale” in 2017 — in the story of a sisterhood of “women unafraid of their power” that is under attack by a ruthless, unstable man.
But a story needs to invest us in people, not just circumstances. Who do you care about in this conflict, and why? The shadowy cabal running a eugenics program? The lunatic zealot gifted with terrifying abilities? The corrupt empire and its vassals? The person with the last name of the person you remember from the movie?
Too often, “Prophecy” seems to believe that we’re all just rooting for the I.P. This is glaring in an early scene, in which the young Valya violently demonstrates “a new skill I’ve been honing”: the Voice, which is the Bene Gesserit mind trick, famous from the films, that can force people to act against their own wills. Thus “Prophecy” checks another box. But can it hone a compelling voice of its own?
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