Season 1, Episode 1: ‘The Hidden Hand’
“Humanity’s greatest weapon is the lie,” says Reverend Mother Tula Harkonnen of the Sisterhood (Olivia Williams). “Human beings rely on lies to survive. We lie to our enemies, we lie to our friends, we lie to ourselves. Lying is among the most sophisticated tasks a brain can perform.”
The acolytes under Tula’s tutelage in this first episode of “Dune: Prophecy,” the new prequel series developed by Diane Ademu-John and Alison Schapker, are learning to lie more effectively in order to better control the people they supposedly serve. As recipes for political success go, it’s hard to argue with the results.
As related in a lengthy flashback at the beginning of Episode 1, the Sisterhood’s story begins over 10,000 years before the birth of the messianic Paul Atreides, the antihero of the “Dune” films, played by Timothée Chalamet. Humans have won a hard-fought victory in a universe-wide war against the “thinking machines” they built, overthrowing their robotic would-be masters. Known in the source novels as the Butlerian Jihad, this successful struggle against artificial intelligence birthed heroes and villains among its human participants. (The source novel for the movies, “Dune,” was written by Frank Herbert; this series is based on both “Dune” and “Sisterhood of Dune,” a prequel novel by Herbert’s son Brian and Kevin J. Anderson.)
Here, as we learn in a voice-over by Emily Watson, is where the great rivalry between House Atreides and House Harkonnen, the warring families at the heart of the “Dune” saga, began. According to the commonly accepted history, an Atreides led the fight while a Harkonnen slunk away from it. That act of cowardice led the triumphant emperor to banish the Harkonnens to a remote and desolate world.
But not all the Harkonnens — notably Tula and her fierce older sister, Valya (Watson) — accepted that version of history, or exile. As the exposition continues, we watch Tula and Valya (played as young women by Emma Canning and Jessica Barden) leave home to join an organization of women founded by the legendary war hero Raquella Berto-Anirul (Cathy Tyson). The group is called simply the Sisterhood — known later as the Bene Gesserit, a name familiar to fans of the “Dune” books and movies. Through intense mental and physical training, Raquella and her acolytes hope to harness powers that will enable them to guide the rulers of the various great houses.
At this early stage, the Sisterhood’s primary power is “truthsaying,” an inerrant ability to detect lies that makes them invaluable to any emperor or aristocrat who can convince the increasingly powerful organization to send such a human polygraph their way.
Yet Raquella has another, even more ambitious mission she is pursuing in secret. In a hidden vault, she has assembled a massive genetic library for the purpose of literally breeding rulers who are as perfect — and pliant to the Sisterhood’s ideas — as possible. A faction led by Raquella’s own granddaughter, Dorotea (Camilla Beeput), opposes the breeding program, viewing it as an attempt to rule the galaxy rather than guide it. Dorotea also sees the index for what it is, a forbidden thinking machine.
Valya, on the other hand, is one of the project’s major supporters. Raquella seems to sense the growing schism on her deathbed, to which she summons Valya, rather than Dorotea, to hear her dying prophecy. A terrible “reckoning” is coming, she says, at the hands of a tyrant. But a sister capable of seeing “the burning truth” can yet stop it. (Or something to that effect; honestly, I’ve heard clearer prophecies.) When Dorotea tries to destroy the genetic database anyway, Valya kills her using a handy new power she has developed: the Voice, a sort of telepathic holler that forces the listener to obey the speaker’s every command, even if the command is to stab yourself in the neck. Valya is not playing around.
Flash forward 30 years, and this remains the case. In the present timeline, Valya is the well-established head of a thriving Sisterhood, headquartered on a planet called Wallach IX. She and Tula are preparing to welcome a new addition to their motley crew of young trainees: Princess Ynez (Sarah-Sofie Boussnina), daughter of Emperor Javicco Corrino (Mark Strong) and heir to the Golden Lion Throne. (If “Game of Thrones” has taught us anything, it’s the importance of thrones with cool names.) Once Ynez is successfully trained and then inherits the throne, the Sisterhood will achieve directly what it hoped to do indirectly through influence and interbreeding: It will literally rule the known universe.
But there are plenty of problems with the plan. For starters, Ynez does not seem like much of a seminarian. She would rather party with her callow half brother, Constantine (Josh Heuston), and her hunky sword master, Kieran Atreides (Chris Mason). The three of them wind up at an underground nightclub where half-naked people take unnamed drugs and dance to late-90s-style electronica. Paul Atreides would never.
Beyond that, Ynez’s mother, Empress Natalya (Jodhi May), disapproves of her daughter’s choice to join the Sisterhood. The emperor himself is preoccupied with Ynez’s pending nuptials to little prince Pruwet Richese (Charlie Hodson-Prior). The boy’s father, Duke Ferdinand (Brendan Cowell), is an ascot-sporting sleazeball who clearly sees himself as the senior partner in this alliance. He may be right: Richese has a battle fleet that can help the emperor subdue the restive, all-important planet of Arrakis and secure the invaluable, naturally occurring psychoactive compound found there, known as spice.
Recent attacks on the imperial mining operation on Arrakis — also known as Dune — have been blamed on the planet’s Indigenous people, the Fremen. This is merely a convenient cover story for the Sisterhood, which is secretly supporting raids on the spice miners by off-planet rebels in order to weaken the emperor’s political position. The cost of the attacks has House Corrino coming to House Richese, hat in hand.
But someone out there is onto the Sisterhood’s game. The big wild card in all this is Desmond Hart (Travis Fimmel, a singularly twitchy screen presence), the veteran of a dozen tours of Arrakis and the sole survivor of the attack that prompted the Corrino-Richese marriage alliance. Desmond warns the emperor that outside forces, not the planet’s native population, were responsible for the massacre. Moreover, he knows — though he doesn’t yet say it outright — that the Sisterhood is behind it.
His means of fighting back is horrifying. With the emperor’s truthsayer, Kasha (Jihae), back at the Sisterhood’s home base, trying and failing to convince Valya and Tula to call off the wedding lest they accelerate the “reckoning,” Desmond roams the palace until he finds young Pruwet, who is off hiding away with his illegal robotic lizard toy.
Then several mysterious things happen at once. The Emperor reviews footage of the attack that wiped out Desmond’s crew and discovers that Desmond somehow survived a direct strike by one of Arrakis’s gargantuan sandworms, an attack he welcomed with open arms. At the same time, Desmond somehow burns Pruwet alive with his mind, killing the child with agonizing slowness. And back on Wallach IX, Kasha succumbs to the same burns, all while Valya sees the same prophetic vision as Raquella’s. The “burning truth” has been revealed, and the burning part has already begun.
If this sounds like an inedible triple-decker plot sandwich, rest assured that the meal being served here is a sumptuous one. In part, that comes down to casting. Watson and Williams radiate sisterly energy in their easy banter, which hides both deep affection and serious disagreement. Their tempered-steel demeanor provides the perfect contrast for any number of other performances, from Strong’s ineffectual Emperor to Boussnina’s swaggering Ynez.
Appropriately, Watson’s and Williams’s restraint feel 180 degrees away from the man-possessed comportment of Fimmel, who has played this kind of role before in the fascinating, prematurely canceled “Raised by Wolves.” As the Sisterhood’s apparent nemesis, he should come across almost as a different species of human altogether.
Whatever else it does, closing the episode by having his character brutally murder a child onscreen — more echoes of Westeros; child murder is becoming HBO’s season-opening go-to — instantly ups the dramatic ante. It also makes Desmond an easy character to root against, even if you find the Sisterhood’s methods underhanded or unethical.
The spice must flow:
It shouldn’t be unusual for a piece of tent-pole I.P. to rest on the shoulders of two women in their late 50s. But Hollywood tends to opt for the hot young things, and the “Dune” franchise is a case in point: The director Denis Villeneuve’s two blockbuster films featured Timothée Chalamet and Zendaya as its romantic leads. “Dune: Prophecy,” by contrast, centers on Williams and Watson, playing sisters of a certain age with no apparent romantic inclinations. It’s nice to see a tent pole with a big tent, so to speak.
On the other hand, this partial adaptation of the book “Sisterhood of Dune,” once slated to be called “Dune: Sisterhood,” is now titled “Dune: Prophecy.” To paraphrase the great social-media wit Dril, the whole switch smacks of gender.
The director Anna Foerster had a tough act to follow after Villeneuve’s “Dune 2,” which is cinematic science fiction at its most spectacular and visually innovative. There may be nothing on the level here of the Harkonnen’s blindingly black-and-white future home world, Giedi Prime, but Foerster makes every chamber, hallway and courtyard and throne room look like worlds unto themselves. Her blacks have real depth, her colors warmth and texture. Shot compositions rely heavily on symmetry, which suits the regal, almost ceremonial feeling of much of the material. The show instantly joins “House of the Dragon” and Apple TV+’s splendid “Foundation” as one of the best looking sci-fi fantasy epics on television. If the spice must flow, this is the way to go.
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