Dune: Prophecy review – a surprisingly different sci-fi dominated by women at every level | Television

Welcome to the Sisterhood – equal parts nunnery, finishing school, psychic gymnasium and political think tank. The project is run by wise older ladies, decked out in tight black, who train impulsive young women to become the wise leaders of the future. The project is to foster a heroine who can rule the Sisterhood’s home planet, as well as all surrounding planets. It might just save humanity.

Ten millennia from now, the Sisterhood will become the Bene Gesserit, a group of women with formidable mind-control skills who appear in Frank Herbert’s 1965 book Dune and its film adaptations: Rebecca Ferguson, Charlotte Rampling and Léa Seydoux played BG members in the Denis Villeneuve films. Dune: Prophecy – a six-part drama that, vaguely controversially, was inspired not by Herbert’s own canonical writings, but by a spin-off book co-written by his son Brian in 2012 – provides the basic story of Bene Gesserit.

However, there’s still some backstory to plow through before we can settle into the corridors, libraries, and dojos of the Sisterhood. Two generations ago, war raged between sentient machines and humans – in the aftermath, the Mother Superior of the Sisterhood made a grave deathbed statement, warning of a reckoning, a terrible judgment by a tyrannical force. Only her anointed successor, Valya Harkonnen, could stop this. Now Valya plots to take over the Imperium, the region’s government, at a time when its leader, Emperor Corrino, is weakened by military setbacks. But just as she plans the Sisterhood’s big move, it seems the reckoning has come.

Dune: Prophecy, developed by Alison Schapker and Diane Ademu-John, is female-dominated at every level. Not only are the community leaders female, but key figures such as rebel double agent Mikaela (Shalom Brune-Franklin), the powerful clairvoyant “truth teller” Kasha (Jihae) and the Emperor’s disruptive old flame Francesca (Tabu) are also women, something that would be unthinkable would have been on a show like this if it had aired twenty or even ten years ago, although a gender imbalance would have gone unnoticed the other way around.

But the critique of patriarchy, where the men in charge are drawn to waging war as a way to compensate for personal weaknesses, is subtle – as is any assessment of the dynamics of an all-female hierarchical establishment . At its core, Dune: Prophecy is a fantasy saga just like any other, albeit with a little more thoughtfulness and a lot less machismo.

The drama centers on the relationship between Valya (Emily Watson) and her sister and second-in-command Tula (Olivia Williams), siblings with temperaments shocking enough to cause eternal friction, but not enough to drive them apart. Valya is the leader, restlessly ambitious, her compassion hidden behind layers of hard-won realism; Tula is her conscience, lacking her older sibling’s killer instinct and always looking to temper it, without necessarily rejecting it entirely. Watson and Williams, one steely but softly centered and the other the opposite, mesh exactly: you relax into the sheer quality of both performances when they appear on screen together.

The interplay between Emperor Corrino (Mark Strong), a chest-first army man who insists on being in charge but hesitates at key moments, and his smarter wife Natalya (Jodhi May), who longs to take power and a few kicking people in the air is also fascinating. But are these delicate contrasts enough, especially when the early episodes pack in a lot of exposition and world-building, most of which is done verbally? The early episodes feature treacherous sex and a few grisly deaths, but even the fatalities are cerebral: the doomed meet their fate by experiencing visions so vivid they prove fatal, or – when the killer comes to them is in the room – by being willing to die at the hands of an opponent with mental powers stronger than their own.

With much of the dialogue involving paranormal insights, cryptic prophecies, religious beliefs, and political strategies, Dune: Prophecy sometimes feels like a show where people discuss what has happened and will happen, more than making things happen themselves. Things are slowed down even further when, having begun by briefly introducing young adults Tula (Emma Canning) and Valya (Jessica Barden) in an introduction, it later returns to this earlier timeline, in scenes that struggle to add anything yet has not been demonstrated. by the characters’ older selves.

Dune: Prophecy looks great, with its bright monochrome style and its beautifully alien architecture, the latter based on the hairpin turns evoked by the franchise’s title font. The world it builds – intense, intellectual, ruthlessly meritocratic and yet tinged with the unpredictable and supernatural – is a template for a refreshingly different kind of science fiction. But there is still work to be done to overcome this shaky start.