It’s hard to think of many modern works that had an impact comparable to Frank Herbert’s Dune, and traces of this tale are woven into everything from Star Wars and its desert planets full of sand worms to Warhammer 40K and its god emperors. But if you’ve read the original book, it’s honestly a tad surprising that enough patient readers got through its infamously dense opening barrage of proper nouns and space feudal jargon for it to go on and become so influential—listen, I love that stuff, but it doesn’t make for the friendliest introduction. By contrast, Villeneuve’s recent Dune adaptation and its big-name actors, grandiose imagery, and slightly more straightforward storytelling have made the series dramatically more accessible in a way that’s fully opened the floodgates, transporting more than ever to the wastelands of Arrakis.
Piggybacking off that surge, Dune: Prophecy is a TV prequel from HBO and showrunner Alison Schapker that adapts Sisterhood of Dune, one of the many spin-off novels, in an attempt to bring more of this impossibly vast mythos to the screen. Overall, while this series doesn’t have nearly the same humming otherworldliness of the film adaptations, it places us in a complicated time and place defined by Machiavellian maneuvering and a familiar obsession with a certain ochre psychedelic. It may start off slow and remain somewhat inconsistent, but at least through the first four episodes, there’s just enough here for both the Dune diehards who know too much about how the Spacing Guild works and those who recently glided in on a Chalamet-lead rebellion and the ethereal vibrations of Zimmer’s score.
As for where this iteration takes place in the series’ several millennia-spanning timeline, it’s set roughly 10,000 years before Paul Atreides mucked things up royally. Specifically, events center around the Bene Gesserit, a then-nascent sisterhood seeking to influence Imperium politics. Valya Harkonnen (Emily Watson) is the main character, a Reverend Mother who has taken over the order to prevent a prophesized calamity. The Imperium is also freshly formed, a dynasty established within living memory following a war against the “thinking machines,” AI overlords that almost ensnared humanity before the Great Houses stopped them.
As for how all this information lands, much like its source material, the beginning of the show is a bit too dense and a bit too cold. While existing fans will likely perk up with each reference to the greater mythos, the premiere struggles to make us care much about its sizable cast—there’s enough time to partially introduce their motivations, but that’s about it. Thankfully, though, as it sets the table, the series eventually moves into some compelling bureaucratic jousting as factions vie for power; the Imperium is fairly brittle, and so the Great Houses, Bene Gesserit, and others engage in some good old-fashioned backstabbing to try to seize control of Arrakis and the spice that comes with it. There’s a solid sense of build-up and payoff when it comes to these ploys, specifically in the fourth episode, where machinations are dramatically laid bare.
This politicking takes on more weight as we eventually gain context for the conflicting motivations at play. In particular, we gain insight into what’s driving Valya Harkonnen in her quest for power and prestige. Unlike the bald, murderous freakazoids who bathe in black goo that we see in the flicks, during Valya’s time, her family is made up of disgraced whalers ostensibly living out a blue-collar existence on a forgotten planet. Emily Watson deftly captures the glint of ambition in Valya’s eye as she carries out well-calculated ploys to avoid a terrible foretold future. There’s a compelling, tragic irony at work around her storyline, but probably only if you’re familiar with where the story goes in the original books. Meanwhile, Olivia Williams delivers a similarly excellent performance as Valya’s literal and figurative sister, Tula, her closest ally in the sisterhood. She is much more morally conflicted about their dubious methods, which leads to agonizing conflicts over whether she wants to help her blood relative or her found family. Together, these Harkonnen sisters are the show’s bedrock, and flashbacks to their shared past result leads to some of the series’ most emotionally rich material.
That said, many of the other characters and performances are a bit of a mixed bag. As for the good, there’s Mark Strong’s Emperor Corrino, who strikes a fascinating balance between competence and ineffectualness, making us buy both sides of the ruler. But then there’s Sarah-Sofie Boussnina’s somewhat uneven performance as Princess Ynez, who hasn’t gotten much to do yet outside of a corny romance subplot that doesn’t land.
While this TV format is honestly a more natural fit for Dune’s dense worldbuilding and storytelling than the movies, there’s still too much crammed into this show’s short six-episode run, which means that much of the cast lacks the screentime to make an impression. This problem affects many of the Bene Gesserit sisters besides the leading Harkonnens, which is a bit of a problem because the show is supposed to be focused on this group. And then there’s Travis Fimmel’s scenery-chewing presence as Desmond Hart, a soldier trying to curry favor with the Emperor, who often feels as if they’re from a different show entirely in ways that can sometimes be amusing or distracting depending on the sequence.
Similarly, while the series often does a good job of placing us in this far-flung era by conveying cultural specifics, like taboos around thinking machines, the visual presentation only partially measures up to the most recent Dune adaptations. The costuming is suitably ornate, and many of the sets bring us into some of this setting’s techno-feudal intricacies, but it’s hard to avoid comparing the show’s aesthetic to that of the films, which much more masterfully delivered sights that felt strange and intentionally off-putting. There’s no monochromatic planet of blade-licking, murder-happy perverts, and there’s nothing as jarring as the sudden cut to Sardaukar, the Emperor’s holy shock troopers, whose chants conveyed the depths of their zealotry. I get that the relative plainness of these locales is probably supposed to contrast against their eventual pomposity, and it’s not quite fair to compare across mediums like this for various reasons, financial and otherwise, but if what drew you into Villeneuve’s films was mostly the haunting ambiance, you may be disappointed.
But still, there’s certainly more than one way to adapt this series, and this rendition gets across the backroom dealings, drug-laden phantasmagoria, aristocratic squabbles, and self-fulfilling prophecies tied to the horrors of eugenics. Sure, some of the writing can be clunky at times, and there’s not enough runway for all of its characters, but it succeeds in placing us in a far-flung world of false saviors and near-intractable systems of power. It’s messy, it’s weird, and that’s all very Dune.
Dune: Prophecy premieres November 17 on HBO/HBO Max.
Elijah Gonzalez is an assistant Games and TV Editor for Paste Magazine. In addition to playing and watching the latest on the small screen, he also loves film, creating large lists of media he’ll probably never actually get to, and dreaming of the day he finally gets through all the Like a Dragon games. You can follow him on Twitter @eli_gonzalez11 and on Bluesky @elijahgonzalez.bsky.social.
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