Season 1, Episode 4: ‘Twice Born’
Two blue lights shine in the darkness, like the eyes of an insectoid machine. Guttural sounds, like speech in a language not yet invented, accompany them, but only for a second.
Throughout “Dune: Prophecy,” this menacing pairing of sight and sound has recurred in dreams and visions. Are they the eyes of God, judging the Sisterhood, as Sister Emeline argues? Are they the eyes of the tyrannical force that Raquella, the Sisterhood’s first Mother Superior, warned about with her dying breaths? Are they the eyes of whatever entity gives Desmond Hart his “beautiful, terrible” power to burn people alive with his mind? Are all these things one and the same?
I suspect we’ll get the answer eventually, but part of me thinks that’s a shame. Right now, the blue lights and the garbled grunts are the most Lynchian thing this franchise has served up since the director David Lynch himself was in charge of it 40 years ago. And as Lynch has demonstrated time and again, sometimes the mystery is its own reward.
Not that the Sisterhood would agree. From Emeline on down, all of them — with the alleged exception of Sister Jen — experience simultaneous nightmares one night. They each begin differently, but they end in the same place: in the sands of Arrakis, standing before a sandworm’s maw, ready to fall in and meet that pitiless blue-eyed gaze. Mother Tula’s experiment with automatic drawing to uncover the meaning of the dreams almost ends in disaster when she completely loses control of the trance into which she places the acolytes, leaving them in the clutches of whatever force sent the dream in the first place.
In a time of apocalypse, cults of personality spring up like fungus. So it is in the Sisterhood: Emeline revives the teachings of Valya’s rival, Mother Dorotea, whose death, we learn, was labeled a suicide by the Harkonnen sisters and their cronies. (In reality, Valya used the Voice to command Dorotea to kill herself.) In what appears to be a nightmare or a vision — though by the end of the episode, that distinction is slim indeed — Emeline confronts Tula with the truth, vowing to inform the Imperium; then Tula slits her throat. (This is the same fate Emeline met in her own nightmare, though in the dream it was she who wielded the blade against herself.)
But the next thing Tula knows, she is sitting placidly by the side of Sister Lila’s stasis chamber once again, where Emeline found and confronted her. There’s no evidence Emeline has been there. But Lila is gone, broken free of her chamber; she emerges from the shadows, her eyes bright blue from overexposure to the psychoactive spice. Are those the eyes everyone is so afraid of?
Blue is a chilling color in this world. In addition to being seen in the eyes of the spice-addict, it is always present in the circuitry of the few thinking machines that survived the great wars against their kind, from the Harkonnen sisters’ illicit medical bay to little Pruwet Richese’s illegal toy to the explosive drone that Kieran Atreides and his rebel leader, Horace, planned to use to blow up the imperial throne room and everyone in it. It’s time for a meeting of the great council of the Landsraad, you see, and what better way for your rebellion to make an impact than to go full Guy Fawkes with it?
This is what Mother Valya is counting on. Because she is puppeteering the rebels, she can also steer herself and her nephew, Baron Harrow Harkonnen, into position to benefit. She maneuvers Harrow into the council so he can officially demand an inquest into the emperor’s role in Pruwet’s murder, hiring herself as Harrow’s truthsayer in the bargain. Meanwhile, her skill with throwing knives will enable her to play hero when she knocks the drone out before it can detonate, once again putting her in the emperor’s good graces. The ultimate goal is to box out Desmond Hart, House Corrino’s new attack dog.
Unfortunately, other players make their moves while Valya waits for the right moment to strike. First, Princess Ynez bursts into the council in order to accuse her parents and Desmond of killing Pruwet, beating Harrow to the punch. Then Desmond produces an assortment of machine dealers, along with Horace and his drone, which Desmond himself destroys, beating Valya to the punch. By allowing Desmond to burn these contraband dealers to death, along with an overambitious aristocrat or two, the emperor sends the message House Corrino had hoped to send.
Desmond’s embrace of anti-machine sentiment is just a means to an end, though. His real goal is to take out the Sisterhood, but they’re too valuable and trusted at the moment to be attacked directly. (Valya herself warns against a frontal assault against an inscrutable or overpowered enemy.) But if he can use anti-machine sentiment to shore up House Corrino, he can eventually come after the Sisterhood using their own use of verboten tech as a pretext. He’s playing the long game.
No one’s playing a longer game than Valya, though. Why did she become the Sisterhood’s most fanatical and forward-thinking member? Because she’s House Harkonnen’s most fanatical and forward-thinking member. Even as she withholds her ancient Uncle Evegeny’s respirator from him, allowing him to suffocate to death, she explains that if he and his generation of Harkonnens had followed her rather than rejected her, it would be their house, not the Sisterhood, pulling the imperium’s strings today.
“I will not apologize for what I did,” she says of her and Tula’s massacre of House Atreides years before. “And I will not apologize for my strength!” She’s a true believer, in other words, but only in herself. Leaders are like that sometimes.
But even a cynic like Valya requires closure now and then. In the episode’s final scene, Valya shares a tender moment with a vision of Griffin, the brother whose murder by the war hero Vorian Atreides she sought to avenge all those years ago. But it soon becomes clear that she is achieving closure not with Griffin himself, spectral or otherwise, but with a simulacrum created by Sister Theodosia. The mysterious young woman’s secret “talent” is shape shifting — facedancing, in “Dune” parlance — and as much as she hates doing it, she’ll do it if it means furthering the goals of her Harkonnen mentor.
Can you trust a Harkonnen? Can you trust a face-eating leopard to change its face-eating spots?
The spice must flow
-
“No one is above the law, not even the emperor,” Valya tells Harrow. It’s a quaint notion given everything we’ve seen.
-
Desmond’s powers may be formidable, but they come with a cost. Using them appears to cause him great physical pain to the point of bleeding. The emperor and empress better be careful how they treat their pet fire-starter before he burns himself out.
-
At this period in time, House Harkonnen’s fortune stems from the whale-fur trade. Based on their repellent depiction in the films of David Lynch and Denis Villeneuve, I always assumed they made their money importing and exporting various forms of goop.
-
For the women of the Sisterhood, knowledge is power. A complete unknown like Desmond Hart, therefore, weakens them just by virtue of existing.
-
It isn’t just Valya who is stumped by this strange man: He doesn’t appear in the source novels, so book readers have been kept guessing along with everyone else.
The post ‘Dune: Prophecy’ Season 1, Episode 4 Recap: Ol’ Blue Eyes appeared first on New York Times.
