Dune: Prophecy serves up a meaty finale worthy of its expanded hour-and-20-minute runtime. This was a proper climax to the six episodes so far, and now that we know the show is coming back for a second season, I can rest easy knowing we'll actually get to see what happens next.
And I want to see what happens next, despite some issues I've had with the show over the course of this first season. There's a feeling that Dune: Prophecy tried to fit too much into six episodes. Especially in these last two, things have felt a bit squished.
But there's still a lot to enjoy. Let's dive into the details for our final Dune: Prophecy review of the year:
Dune: Prophecy review: Episode 6, "The High-Handed Enemy"
At the end of the last episode, Tula learned that Desmond Hart is actually her son by Orry Atreides. At the beginning of this one, she learns more about how he's immolating people with his mind: he's using a machine virus that a Bene Gesserit sister should, in theory, be able to transmute in the same way they transmute the water of life, which means they can create a cure. Armed with this information, Tula decides to leave Wallach IX and travel to Salusa Secundus, where she can confront her long-lost son. I get that her errand is urgent, but she apparently leaves without providing any guidance for the other sisters, which seems extremely irresponsible of her.
Without Tula around, the Bene Gesserit school descends into chaos. Sister Lila wakes from her spice agony slumber and convinces Sister Jen to loosen her restraints...only it really isn't Sister Lila, which I think most of us guessed from the start. It's Sister Dorotea, the anti-thinking machine fanatic whom Valya killed right before becoming Mother Superior. Back then, Dorotea wanted to destroy Mother Raquella's breeding program since it relied on thinking machines, and she hasn't changed her mind merely because she's now inhabiting the body of her granddaughter.
In Dune lore, when someone is possessed by the consciousness of one of their ancestors, it's called abomination. It's forbidden by the time of Paul Atreides, and we may be seeing why. After Lila slips her bonds (where did she get the sedative she uses on Jen?), she seeks out the other religious types in the school and starts revealing secrets left and right. She takes an axe to the breeding program and drains the big pool in the school courtyard to reveal...a bunch of a bones at the bottom. These are the bodies of Dorotea's followers whom Valya and her posse killed right after Dorotea's death, which we see in flashback.
Actor Chloe Lea does a great job of embodying someone who feels completely different from Lila, and all of these twists are big and bold. I was compelled while watching, but I wasn't on the edge of my seat. Maybe it's because I don't think the show ever really convinced us of Dorotea's importance in the narrative; we saw her death right at the start of the show, before we had enough context to fully understand what it meant. Or maybe it's because this episode served up so many climatic moments I didn't have enough energy for them all. Not for the first time, I wished that we could have had a couple more episodes.
Still, on paper, a ton of exciting stuff happened here. And things were even more wild on Salusa Secundus:
The best of the rest
We left things last week with Kieran Atreides in suspensor jail for his part in the rebel attempt to blow up the Landsraad, Princess Ynez questioning her loyalty to her family, Emperor Corrino besotted anew with his Bene Gesserit mistress Francesca, his wife Natalya mad about it, Desmond Hart forging an alliance with her to strike back against the Sisterhood, and Valya on the sidelines biding her time. These plotlines barrel forward here, mostly in entertaining ways, but again, not in a way that had me gripping the edge of the couch. I have a similar complaint about this episode that I did about the last one: other than Valya and Tula, the characters aren't drawn with enough love and specificity that I care deeply about their fates.
So what exactly happens? To start, Ynez tries to free Kieran from jail but is caught by Natalya, who arrests her own daughter. Emperor Corrino is upset about this, but Natalya is now determined to take the reins of the Imperium away from him; it's not hard for her to turn Desmond against him now that he's shacking up with a Bene Gesserit witch again.
So the emperor is at a bit of a loss. He turns toward Valya as a possible ally, but she's done with him too; she marches into the Imperial Palace at his invitation and sits right on the Golden Lion Throne, telling him to his face that he's a weak, fickle, changeable man whom the Bene Gesserit have been manipulating since before his birth; it's a fun scene with lots of calm collected sass from Emily Watson.
The emperor reacts exactly how she hoped he would: he has Valya arrested and escorted to the suspensor cells, where she uses the Voice to turn the guards against each other and free Princess Ynez, whom the Bene Gesserit have been grooming to sit the throne for decades. The plan is to leave Sister Theodosia in Ynez's place — remember that she has the ability to change her appearance, which we learn here is the result of experiments by the Bene Tleilax, as Dune fans expected — but that's complicated by Ynez's refusal to leave without Kieran. In the end, Valya changes the plan on the fly and assents.
Meanwhile, Valya has ordered Francesca to kill Emperor Corrino; now that he's been pushed to the sidelines by Natalya and Desmond it feels like he could become a useful ally, but once Valya decides on a plan it's hard to dissuade her. And he is a fickle man who changes his opinion with the wind, so maybe he's better off removed from the board.
Anyway, Corrino is all mixed up after Valya exposed his life to be the results of a series of manipulations by the Sisterhood, including his love for Francesca. For her part, Francesca is loathe to kill the father of her son, and it seems like she's not going to follow through on Valya's orders. Corrino decides it for her by stabbing himself, and then Natalya creeps up from behind and stabs Francesca in the neck using the gom jabbar-like poison needle Francesca was supposed to use on the emperor. She runs from the room yelling that the emperor has been murdered, clearly intending to fill the power vacuum he's left behind.
As on Wallach IX, a lot happened here, and I enjoyed watching it, but there wasn't much that broke the emotional skin. Ynez and Corrino have a scene where they kill a bunch of imperial guards together, which is nice, but I could never summon much interest in these two lovebirds; they're both on the bland side.
A lot of these twists just didn't have the impact the show wants them to. A couple episodes back, Desmond and the emperor shared a sort of father-son bonding moment, but here Desmond is willing to betray the emperor and that bond never really pays off. Natalya imprisons her daughter, kills her husband's mistress and lies about his death, but the episode never slows down long enough for us to appreciate what these decisions mean to her. They just kind of fly by.
And then there's Theodosia, who stays behind in the palace in the guise of a wounded guard. When Desmond Hart comes to investigate, she stabs him with a cry of "Sisterhood above all!" which is cool. But the wound doesn't so much as slow him down, so it feels like another instance where a twist doesn't pay off.
Fear is the mind-killer
The only part of the episode that really got me was the final stretch, where Desmond Hart tries to stop Valya, Kieran and Ynez from fleeing the planet. Valya sends the younger two on their way and stays behind to confront Desmond, mowing down his guards with the Voice. The chemistry between Valya and Desmond has always been dangerously electric and that holds true here.
Steely as ever, Valya dares Desmond to use his power on her, which he does. The virus Desmond uses to attack people prays on fear, and in a trippy sequence we see Valya face her worst: that she got her brother Griffin killed and is responsible for all the misery that followed. In a perfect coincidence that is fairly preposterous if you think about it but which happens all the time on TV, this is the exact moment Tula arrives on Salusa Secundus; she cradles her sister in her arms just like she did when they were girls while Valya was enduring the spice agony, and guides her through the ordeal with her voice. I dig the parallelism.
Tula's advice to Valya is to let the fear pass through her, basically invoking an early version of the Bene Gesserit litany against fear, which in the future will read: "I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past, I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain." We're probably seeing the origin on the litany here, and I like that the show doesn't wink at us about it. It does something similar with the prohibition on abomination. I applaud the subtle fan service.
Valya, who is as fearless a person as you're ever likely to meet, manages to conquer her fear and is rewarded with a look at the truth: Desmond was turned into a human weapon by someone using a thinking machine; there's a truly gnarly shot of Desmond's eye being pulled out of his skull, the thinking machine doing something with his optic nerve, and then shoving it back in.
So Desmond is being manipulated, but by whom? He doesn't seem to know any of this happened to him. All this happens while he's lying on the ground in pain; remember that using his ability takes it out of him. Valya scurries off to join Ynez and Kieran on their trip off-planet, leaving it to Tula to decide what to do with her son.
By the way, Valya didn't know that Tula's baby had survived; as we learn in a flashback, a young Tula switched out her baby for a stillborn out of fear that her son would be manipulated by Valya if he stuck around, which I'm sure is true. Unfortunately, he only ended up getting manipulated by someone else.
In any case, I like that this adds another layer to the Valya-Tula relationship; I get why the show split them up — both Emily Watson and Oilvia Williams are powerhouses who can hold down their ends of the plot — but scenes like this final one make we wish we had more of the two of them together. They're great apart but even better as a unit.
Desmond and Tula don't exchange a single word, but they do share an emotional hug which touched my cold reviewer's heart. And then he orders her arrest. There's a ton of water under that bridge, maybe too much.
Verdict
The finale ends with Valya, Ynez and Kieran landing on Arrakis, where we're told that their journey is only beginning. So we have our setup for next season: this trio will plumb the mystery of what happened to Desmond and find out who's trying to manipulate events, and why. (My money is on the Ixians, the one society in the Dune universe that still uses thinking machines.) Natalya will rule on Salusa Secundus while Desmond and Tula will get closer. And on Wallach IX...I mean, who knows? I guess the personalities within Lila will continue to battle it out. Hopefully one of them will be able to get the Sisterhood back on its feet.
I think the show made a strong showing this season, if not an undeniably great one. Dune: Prophecy is beautiful and a lot of the acting is pristine, but some characters are more compelling than others and the writing is solid but not airtight. And the incentives to watch are weaker than I'd like them to be. Dune: Prophecy isn't like The Penguin, another recent HBO show that told a more-or-less complete story in its first season that still left room for more. Nor is it like the first season of Game of Thrones, which ended with a major character death that completely upended what we thought the show was; fans had no choice but to tune in after that. I'm curious to see what happens next on Dune: Prophecy, but not ravenous to know.
Congratulations to the cast and crew of Dune: Prophecy for turning in some fine work. I wouldn't call it must-see TV, but it's definitely should-see TV. And there's always next year.
Dune: Bullet Points
- We learn that the virus only killed Sister Kasha on a delay because she was able to stave off the effects using her superior ability to grapple with and resist fear. Basically, the more advanced a Bene Gesserit you are, the longer it will take for the virus to get you. And if you're Valya Harkonnen, you may be able to pass through it entirely.
- In one of the flashback scenes, the thinking machine the Sisterhood uses determines that Natalya would have made a good Bene Gesserit. I can believe that. Instead, she became a mortal enemy of the Bene Gesserit, determined to wipe them out in revenge for stealing her power.
Episode Grade: B
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