Season 1, Episode 4: ‘Sisterhood Above All’
They share a last name and a mission, but Valya and Tula Harkonnen are two very different women. At least that’s what “Dune: Prophecy” primed us to believe until this week’s episode.
Tula, played by Olivia Williams as an adult and Emma Canning as a young woman, is the sensitive one, the sister who goes along to get along. Her older sister, Valya (Emily Watson all grown up, Jessica Barden in flashbacks), is the one who rages against House Atreides for slandering her great-grandfather as a traitor. She is equally angry with her own family, especially her mother, Sonya (Polly Walker), and her uncle, Evgeny (Mark Addy), for meekly accepting their fate of exile on Lankiveil, a frozen wasteland of a planet. Sonya warns Tula and her brother, an aspiring politician named Griffin (Earl Cave), to stay away from their sister, a “wolf” who will devour them both with her ambition.
But both siblings are fond of Valya. Why wouldn’t they be? For one thing, the three of them seem to be the only members of the family willing to show one another consistent affection. For another, Valya saved Griffin from drowning by using the Voice on him, forcing his muscles to swim through icy water to the surface.
So when Griffin is murdered, allegedly by an Atreides, after Valya encourages him to get involved in Imperial politics, her thirst for vengeance consumes Tula as well. The younger sister poses as the lover of a young Atreides, then massacres him and the entire male side of his family the night before a big traditional hunt. She spares only a disabled young teenager named Albert (Archie Barnes, whom you may remember as the bold young Lord Oscar Tully from “House of the Dragon’), to whom she had been friendly the day before.
Thus, House Harkonnen has its vengeance — not that Tula and Valya’s older relatives are anything but aghast. It’s not only the murders they object to; it’s also the involvement of Tula, of whom they clearly have a higher opinion than they do of Valya.
But the Harkonnen sisters weren’t out to curry their family’s favor with this mission; Valya, at least, was more interested in scoring points with the Sisterhood’s mother superior, Raquella, who had encouraged her to go home and take care of family business so that she could fully commit to the order. Her disgraced surname hangs around her neck like a millstone — Raquella’s granddaughter and apparent successor, Dorotea, hates Valya for being a Harkonnen as much as for anything else. You can almost feel Valya’s defiance as she makes her move via Tula: Fine, Dorotea. I’ll give you something to hate me for.
Whether the preceptive and psychic Raquella knew of Valya and Tula’s plans is anyone’s guess. What’s certain is that she hands Valya some of the poison that induces the clairvoyance-unlocking ordeal called the Agony — Valya earlier chickened out of the ritual even as Dorotea went through with it — and tells Valya that she either comes back from dealing with her family as a reborn reverend mother, or not at all. We already know how that works out. It seems Raquella wanted a genuine hardcase to lead the Sisterhood upon her death. In Valya, that’s exactly what she got.
But what about Tula? Far from hardening her heart, her coldblooded murder of all those Atreides men, including the one she said she loved, seems only to have heightened her empathy for others. This seems to be the root of her deep connection to Lila, the young student whose failed attempt to undergo the Agony has left her in a vegetative state. After being scolded by Sister Avila for failing to pull the plug, Tula finally agrees to go through with it.
But this is the person who said, “Humanity’s greatest weapon is the lie.” Tula sneaks the girl into the Sisterhood’s secret underground levels, where Valya maintains an obviously illegal high-tech medical bay. Here, she doses Lila with mass quantities of spice in hopes of reviving her.
Which points to the sisters’ big problem, doesn’t it? I don’t mean just the Harkonnen sisters — I mean the entire Sisterhood. The episode’s title, “Sisterhood Above All,” is the motto of the organization. Already we’ve heard students question its true meaning. It obviously doesn’t mean that one must care about one’s sisters first and foremost. Based on what happened to Lila, its real meaning, apparently, is that one should put the organization before its individual members.
Some members of the order seem readier than others to sacrifice themselves for the greater good. But does Valya? I’m not so sure. So far, we’ve seen Lila risk her life and Tula risk her soul to advance Valya’s interests. What does Valya risk, for example, when she returns to House Harkonnen’s wintry home world to meet up with her reigning nephew, Baron Harrow Harkonnen (Edward Davis), and her grumpy Uncle Evgeny, other than embarrassment? What does she risk by sending various double agents to do her dirty work while she relies on the penumbra of her office to insulate her from even the Emperor? Valya seems OK with sacrifice, but so far the offerings have been only other people.
However you feel about the game Valya is playing, it’s rather a game of thrones, isn’t it? Tula’s poisoning of the Atreides camp echoes the time when the “Game of Thrones” antiheroine Arya Stark murders an entire enemy family. The whole idea of having great houses at war feels like a donation from the author Frank Herbert to George R.R. Martin, who wrote his epic fantasy novels decades after the “Dune” books debuted. The prophecy of a coming darkness? These folks may not know the Song of Ice and Fire, but if you hum a few bars I bet they can keep up.
Personally, I’m still waiting for these characters to reach out and grab me the way the heroes and villains of “Game of Thrones” and “House of the Dragon” have done. The show is still cramming such huge globs of plot and exposition into every episode that it’s tough to get a real handle on anyone who isn’t Valya or Tula at the moment. This is a time in the series’s progression when character building should probably take precedence over world building.
Frank Herbert relied on an incredibly verbose and complex style of inner monologue as a means of building out his characters amid the incredibly dense worlds he was creating. That works well on the page, but as fans and detractors alike of David Lynch’s “Dune” can tell you, translating Herbert’s approach — whether with voice-over narration or some other means of revealing characters’ interior lives — is a tricky proposition. So far, the series is struggling to pull it off. But the answer for impatient viewers may be simply to do what so many of the schemers and planners of the Duniverse do: sit, wait and see what happens.
The spice must flow
Does Tula realize that using spice to bring Lila back to life may be what Mother Raquella’s prophecy of the Reckoning and the Burning Truth was referring to? I get the feeling she’s just trying to save her surrogate daughter, all other concerns being secondary.
It is early in the season yet, and we may discover that there are wheels within wheels when it comes to Valya’s machinations. In a “Dune” story, this is usually the case. But the primary political fixation of “Dune: Prophecy” seems to be whether it is possible to separate the ideological goals of an organization from the personal desires of its charismatic leader. If the real world teaches us anything, it’s that the answer to that question, more often than not, is a great big no.
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