Dune: Prophecy Season 1, Episode 1: Recap, Review & Spoilers

Since then Game of Thrones ended in 2019 – and what a terribly small ending it was – there has been a seemingly never-ending quest to find the “next”. Game of Thrones.” What that means is twofold: a series that captures Game of Thrones‘s extensive fantasy world-building and the drama of political succession and a show that appears on HBO’s main Sunday night spot that everyone wants to talk about the morning after.

Dune: Prophecy feels like that more than any other show right now.

Loosely based on the 2012 novel Sisterhood of Dune, Prophecy has Got it trappings: political maneuvering among the universe’s wealthy families, underhanded and surprising deaths, conniving villains, and sweaty sex scenes. The battle for power in the Duniverse is just as difficult and deadly as it is in Westeros. And conveniently enough, it airs Sunday nights on HBO.

But what convinced me Prophecy is that, while it’s officially all of those aforementioned things, it’s mostly gossipy, ambitious space divas ambitiously diving into space. Promised, Prophecy is yet another chapter in Hollywood’s infatuation with IP, but it has also spawned a lavish little soap opera starring Emily Watson as a super-powered leader of an all-female finishing school for young intergalactic magicians.

Prophecy is about how dangerous women in STEM – i.e. sorcery, transmutation, eugenics and motherhood – can be.

Dune: Prophecy It’s about who gets power

Prophecy takes place at the very beginning – 10,148 years before Paul Atreides is born.

Played by Timothée Chalamet in Denis Villeneuve’s two Dune films, Paul Atreides is the anchor for all casual fans. Both Dune films chronicle his journey: he flees home after an attack wipes out nearly his entire family and those loyal to the Atreides clan, then becomes a refugee on Arrakis (aka the desert planet known as Dune), where he assimilates with the Fremen, an indigenous population oppressed by the same Empire that slaughtered his loved ones. Paul, according to the premonition of a sisterhood of precognitive, super-powered women known as the Bene Gesserit, is a messiah who will rule the universe.

Zooming in on 10,000 years BP (before Paul), Prophecy focuses, as the title suggests, on the formation of that very important Bene Gesserit revelation and the Bene Gesserit themselves.

How did these space divas become so powerful? Who are they? What do they believe in? What is their purpose? Are they always a bit mean?

Their raison d’etre, like so many other suspect organizations, is somewhat based on eugenics. Oh no. Mother Raquella (Cathy Tyson), their founder, maintains a vast DNA archive of the most powerful families in the universe. Her belief is that humans are fallible, weak beings who always seek their own destruction. By bringing families together based on this archive, Raquella believes she and her sisters can breed leaders they can control and influence – culminating in Paul Atreides.

To ensure even greater influence over people and their future, Raquella has founded a school for future space witches on the deserted planet Wallach IX, where sorceresses in training learn powers such as being able to tell when someone is lying or blood magic divination. Raquella calls protégés Truthsayers, and these skills make them very valuable. Soon, every ruling family in the universe will want a Truthteller by their side.

What these aristocrats do not know is that although their Truthsayer seems to integrate into their homes and customs, their true loyalty lies with the Bene Gesserit sisterhood.

There’s also some political commentary here about who gets to rule the great houses of Dune, what roles women are limited to, and how the Bene Gesserit turns the social limitations and underestimations of women to their advantage.

Prophecy opens with Raquella’s death, finding a group of her acolytes who think the eugenics thing is kind of gross, while her most devout follower, the ruthless Valya Harkonnen (played by Jessica Barden in her youth, but especially by Emily), thinks that it actually rules. But even though we know that Valya and her sisters managed to bend the future and bring us Paul, a lot can happen in 10,000 years.

Dune: Prophecy is about who really has the power in the Duniverse

Prophecy‘s greatest achievement is how it manages to break the density of the Dune universe. Making accessible all the complexities of Frank Herbert’s expansive world is no easy task. But Prophecy does this primarily by portraying this immense society and all relationships within it as gossip. That makes Valya and her sisters the gossip girls of the universe.

If you want to make a comparison between this HBO fantasy show about politics, power and a throne and HBO’s previously hugely popular fantasy show about politics, power and a throne: Prophecy is like like Game of Thrones was told through the eyes of Varys, Littlefinger or Olenna Tyrell – players without explicit power, but who know how the game is played.

Prophecy is about how the whispers can influence the world, and about who powerful people listen to. And that the politics of Dune – and politics in general – can be much more compelling when you realize that so much of it is about who is talking nonsense to whom.

Heavy spoilers for the first episode of Dune: Prophecy to follow.

Whether it’s half-princes who have no right to the throne or the messiness of House Corrino – the rulers of the Imperium – with their shaky grip on the production of spices (the most valuable resource in the Duniverse), every episode comes down to Valya and her girls talk about everyone else, and how they want to manipulate them.

At one point during the premiere, Valya and her sister Tula (Olivia Williams) have a private bitch session. Like evil sororities, they coolly go up and down their list of acolytes, pointing out their strengths and weaknesses, usefulness and uselessness. Brows furrow, lips pucker and side eyes move – wonderful. Valya and Tula must figure out which sister to match with Ynez Corrino (Sarah-Sofie Boussnina), the princess they want to lure to the Bene Gesserit. They are more than happy to put together a list of all the hopefuls who won’t make it.

Watson imbues Valya with the warmth of gazpacho and the charm of a cursed porcelain doll. Valya is unwavering in Raquella’s mission and has what it takes to keep the entire system running. Thanks to her faithful truth teller Kasha (Jihae), she has House Corrino in her grasp and has just signed a deal to bring Ynez to her school. She has also used her connections to engineer a marriage between Ynez and a boy – literally a nine-year-old – from House Richese, a powerful family that promises Corrino the artillery they need to keep spice production intact. The Bene Gesserit are undoubtedly counting on this future heir to be favorably malleable.

But Valya’s plan seems to go up in smoke with the arrival of Desmond Hart (Travis Fimmel), a Corrino loyalist and survivor of what was supposedly a Fremen attack on Arrakis.

As Hart tells Emperor Javicco Corrino (Mark Strong), the reports from the region are not the whole truth. Since there aren’t many survivors like Hart, Corrino must rely on second-hand accounts that pin the victims on Fremen. Hart tells the Emperor that no one – including Corrino’s loyal truth-teller Kasha, Valya and their sisters – can be trusted. As Corrino decides whether to weigh Hart’s word against the loyalty Kasha and the Bene Gesserit have promised him, someone – the episode doesn’t tell us who – gives Corrino surveillance footage of Hart on Arrakis showing that he survived the attack, but also, and even more intriguing: being swallowed by a sandworm. The episode ends with Hart killing 9-year-old Pruwet Richese (Charlie Hodson-Prior) by roasting him with mind powers. He also apparently burns Kasha to death.

Hart’s arrival and pyrokinesis appear to be what Raquella (earlier in the episode) refers to as the Tyrant-Arafel, a “holy judgment” that will destroy the sisterhood. But at this point it’s unclear if Hart represents the big bad Bene Gesserit destroyer that Raquella had visions about, or possibly is connected to the other enemies of Bene Gesserit. As my colleague Patrick Reis explained when Dune: Part two was released, the Bene Gesserit have counterparts known as Bene Tleilax, a patriarchal group of genetic splicers and cloners who are also eager to control the universe. It’s not too far-fetched to believe that they could exist in this universe too.

For Valya and her sisterhood to flourish, Hart must undoubtedly be crushed. He’s clearly a threat. The closer he gets to Javicco, the worse things look for our space witches. We just need a little more time, some gossip and maybe a few more episodes to find out if he’s the big bad Raquella dreamed of, or just a piece of the puzzle leading us to it.