I’ve been watching prequels my whole life. It’s a thought stuck in the back of my mind, coming up more over the last few years. It surfaces every time a new series debuts that aims to “explain” the past or show us how “so and so became so and so”. Prequels have become a common occurrence, mainly because they’re an easy franchise-extender for user-hungry streaming services. Why leave something to the imagination when you can reveal it in exact detail, preferably in a 6-to-8 episode season that either has too little or too much story?
Dune: Prophecy is all of that and even more. Set some 10,000 years before the events of the Dune films, the series focuses on sisters Valya and Tula Harkonnen as they establish the Bene Gesserit. A near-superhuman sisterhood whose members use their power and influence to direct the course of humanity. The Bene Gesserit plays a pivotal role in the movies. They’re left mostly unexplained, making them a perfect subject for a prequel series.
Anchored by outstanding performances from Emily Watson and Olivia Williams as Valya and Tula respectively, Prophecy is at its best when the duo are on screen. It helps that they are also the most developed characters of the whopping 15 listed as the main cast. There are other interesting characters, namely Mark Strong (filling out his HBO punch-card after an appearance on The Penguin), as Emperor Javicco Corrino and the mysterious Desmond Hart (Travis Fimmel). Fimmel’s performance is especially fascinating and his origins provide the show with a central mystery. The rest of the cast land somewhere between malicious and naïve on the characterization scale. They are blank slates either waiting to enact their ill-conceived plans, die, or both.
There’s plenty of TV that takes inspiration from Game of Thrones, but Dune: Prophecy might be the most unsubtle about it. There are entire scenes that feel cribbed from a GOT script with the names and other proper nouns changed. These moments feel especially incongruous next to events with the Bene Gesserit. They provide the most connection with the films’ combo of epic space opera and sci-fi mysticism. It’s a necessary trade-off. The show can’t match the scale of Denis Villeneuve’s work and doesn’t bother trying. Instead, they trade it in for palace intrigue, forgetting that those types of scenes only work when you have interesting characters to anchor them.
None of this makes Dune: Prophecy outright bad, even as I lean toward tuning out. The show has plenty to like, but sandwiches those enjoyable moments with scenes that take the wind out of its proverbial sails. It falls into the common TV prequel trap of never justifying its existence. The show is three episodes deep, and we still don’t understand this world any better. What we learn only serves to flatten the interesting edges of this franchise. Ultimately, Prophecy has so many voices whispering in its ear that it can’t find a direction.