Season 1, Episode 6: ‘The High-Handed Enemy’
“Come, princess. The path to our enemy begins here.”
That’s a big wet gob of science-fantasy dialogue to force out of anyone’s mouth, let alone that of an actor the caliber of Emily Watson. It’s an ominous thing to say, less for the characters than for the viewers. The very last line of the very last scene of the very last episode of a show’s first season is where “the path to our enemy begins”? (Emphasis mine.) What were we doing for the past six hours, then? Sitting in a waiting room? I’ve watched too many season finales titled “The Beginning” to put up with this kind of foot-dragging anymore.
But so says Valya Harkonnen, Mother Superior of the Sisterhood, to Ynez Corrino, the rogue heir to the throne of the Imperium. Valya has taken Ynez and her rebel lover, Kieran Atreides, to the desert planet of Arrakis — Dune, in the parlance of our times — in order to investigate the origin of their common enemy, the machine-augmented soldier Desmond Hart. Thanks to the intervention of Valya and Tula, Desmond’s mother, they know now that he was experimented upon and turned into a walking techno-organic bioweapon, and they need to know who did it and why.
What’s wrong with this picture?
Titled “The High-Handed Enemy,” the sixth, final and longest (by nearly 20 minutes) installment of “Dune: Prophecy,” is where the cracks in the show’s world building and character construction really start to show. We are currently 10,000 years before the events of the “Dune” films, in which an Atreides kills the Harkonnens and overthrows the Corrinos on Arrakis. Yet here, now, a Harkonnen, an Atreides and a Corrino stroll onto Arrakis to decide the universe’s fate.
What, then, is the point of the intervening ten millenniums? We are currently just two generations past the great universe-wide war between humanity and the machines that sets up the course of all human development for the future. If the three most important families are the same in both time periods … well, can you name the three most important families in the world from ten thousand years ago? And if so, are they still running the world today?
It doesn’t help that the giant-size episode practically groans under the weight of all the stuff that the writers cram into it: This finale feels like at least three episodes jammed into one. Given the show’s behind-the-scenes turnover rate — the directors Denis Villeneuve and Johan Renck and the showrunners Jon Spaihts, Dana Calvo and Diane Ademu-John all came and went during the show’s development — who’s to say it didn’t start as three episodes.
At any rate, here’s how it goes down. Learning the news that Empress Natalya has had Princess Ynez arrested in connection with freeing her swordmaster, Kieran, Valya decides that the reign of Emperor Javicco Corrino is at an end. With the help of her shape-shifting acolyte Theodosia, Valya will enter the palace, get herself arrested and use her powers to spring Ynez from captivity. Valya’s friend Francesca, Javicco’s lover of many decades, is tasked with assassinating him. Valya even decides to confront the emperor directly, arrogantly telling him he’s a nothing and a nobody whom the Sisterhood manipulated from before he was born to the present moment, before she is carted away.
Do things go to plan? Well, more or less. Valya springs Ynez but is pressured by the princess to free Kieran as well. Francesca refuses to kill Javicco, but he solves the problem by killing himself. Natalya comes across the scene and kills Francesca before announcing to all and sundry that the emperor has been murdered. (It’s an outcome that by this point she isn’t really opposed to, but she sees the chance to correctly pin it on the Sisterhood and take them down.)
When cornered by Desmond and his troops, Valya uses the Voice to kill most of them off while controlling some of them to attack Desmond. Though wounded, he still ignites the techno-organic virus within her, nearly burning her to death. Only the arrival and guidance of her sister, Tula, saves her from death. She improvises a series of encouragements and affirmations which will eventually become the Bene Gesserit Litany Against Fear, arguably the most famous lines in all of Frank Herbert’s Dune-iverse. (Once again, my theory that “Dune: Prophecy” exists mainly to show us the origin of a bunch of familiar “Dune” stuff holds up.)
During the psychic vision that results, Valya sees the series’s most mythic and impressive visuals to date. At some point after being overrun by one of the great sandworms of Arrakis, Desmond is subjected to horrible experimentation by some kind of blue-lighted intelligence that speaks in a series of ominous mechanical grunts.
In a scene straight out of a Sam Raimi movie, Doctor Octopus-like machine tentacles pull out Desmond’s eyeball, allowing him to look back at himself from outside. They implant a series of glowing blue nodules that apparently give him the power to unleash the techno-virus and burn people from within. Who did this? What do they want? Finding out is Valya’s next big quest, hence her trip to Arrakis with Ynez and Kieran.
With the vision complete and Valya returned to consciousness, Tula uses the Voice to prevent Valya from cutting out Desmond’s virus-eye, then tells her the truth. Desmond is Tula’s long-lost son, whom she sent away as an infant long ago to free him from Valya’s control. After Valya flees, Tula hugs Desmond, who hugs her back — then has her arrested. He wasn’t going to change his tune about the Sisterhood on a dime, mother-and-child reunion or not.
Meanwhile, back on the Sisterhood’s home planet, Wallach IX, strange things are afoot. Lila, now fully possessed by the spirt of her grandmother Dorotea, is on a one-woman (or is that two-women?) mission of vengeance against the Harkonnen sisters. Emptying the complex’s contemplative pool, she reveals a pile of skeletons belonging to all of Dorotea’s loyalists — true believers in the Butlerian Jihad against thinking machines, including the Sisterhood’s genetic computer — whom Valya, Tula, Francesca and Kasha used the Voice to force to cut their own throats after Dorotea’s murder. The whole Sisterhood is more or less literally built atop a pile of corpses.
The problem lies with how this material is presented in flashback. Given its place in the season’s climactic episode, one would expect it to contain some kind of shock or surprise. But we’ve already seen Valya use the Voice to murder Dorotea, and we’ve already seen Tula and the others help cover it up. Moreover, we’ve also seen Tula commit a massacre with a much higher body count, when she wiped out much of the Atreides clan. Does it really make that big a difference to us as viewers that they orchestrated yet another mass murder? We know who these women are by now. This material is not new news, so to speak.
Many of these missteps could be forgiven if the character work were particularly compelling. Unfortunately its core cast — Watson, Olivia Williams, Travis Fimmel and, until this episode at least, Mark Strong — swamp the rest of the show with their relative intensity. It is simply very hard to care about, say, Sister Lila walking around with glowing blue eyes and issuing commands in Dortea’s voice when we’ve seen how much more interesting this sort of behavior is when the twitchy, shuffling, humorous, kind of cracked Desmond Hart does it. Same with Empress Natalya, who lacks the in-over-his-head melancholy granted to Javicco by Strong, or the mettle brought to Valya and Tula by Watson and Williams. Simply put, the show is lopsided.
But there’s every possibility it will right the ship. Sophomore surprises, in which flawed but promising first seasons are succeeded by second runs that exceed them in every way are fairly common in Sci-fi-fantasy TV. “Foundation,” “The Wheel of Time” and “The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power” all took off during Season 2 in a way I wouldn’t have thought possible having watched their first seasons. “Dune: Prophecy” is most notable right now for where it goes wrong. But you have to believe that when things fall apart, they can be put back together.
The spice must flow
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Regarding the Litany Against Fear (“Fear is the mind killer,” etc.): For some reason, Denis Villeneuve decided to make his two uses of the Litany in his “Dune” films all but unintelligible. I’m still baffled as to why. Then again, this is a director who has said, “Frankly, I hate dialogue,” so maybe it’s not that baffling after all.
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Harkonnens gonna Harkonnen: Remember Baron Harrow, Valya’s impressionable nephew? Not so impressionable after all: He has been secretly recording the conspiratorial conversations Valya has been having with the other sisters while living in his apartment. That should come in handy if he wants to curry favor with the empress or her cybernetically enhanced enforcer.
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I’ve heard some complaints about the show from a visual perspective, so let me push back at them: Holy smokes, this thing looks expensive. You might quibble with this or that aspect of the production — the costume designs are fairly Outer Space Basic, for example — but the sets uniformly come across as colossal, weighty and real. This is the most convincing illusion of science-fantasy scope and scale this side of “House of the Dragon” and “Foundation,” and that’s no mean feat.
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What does the Sisterhood spend the next 10,000 years doing, exactly? Within 50-odd years of their founding, they already control many of the noble houses and have a hook on the imperial throne. They’ve developed the Voice. They can imprint on men. They have their hand signals. They can serve as lie detectors. They’re crossbreeding noble bloodlines. They’re improvising the Litany Against Fear on the spot. (Apparently Desmond’s machine virus either feeds on or increases fear, so Tula had to help Valya fight it off, and this is what she happened to come up with.) They’ve even learned that an Atreides/Harkonnen match creates people with extraordinary potential. Ten thousand years is a long time to know basically everything but do basically nothing.
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