Dune: Prophecy “The Hidden Hand”

I’m not 100% sure if this show is a mini-series or intended to run multiple seasons.  I do know I was drowsy when I tried watching this episode, but it made a lot more sense when I rewatched it the next day.  I know I am going to have a lot of trouble spelling these character names.  And I know this is the second thing I have seen in recent weeks where actress Emily Watson plays a Mother Superior who thinks she knows what’s best for everybody in a way that suggests corruption.

I’m gonna check it out anyway.

So, first off, I am not a huge Dune fan.  I think the recent movies were fantastic, and I can’t wait for more.  Heck, I even like the campy weirdness of the David Lynch movie.  But the original novels?  I read the first one, it didn’t work for me, and that’s that.  So, anything that happens here, in a story set roughly 10,000 years before the birth of Paul Atreides, is going to be new to me.  It’s a prequel, but one set so far in the past that it doesn’t matter.

Here’s what I do know, based on the opening minutes:  the Harkonnen family was disgraced and labeled as cowardly during a war against artificial intelligence, one where the heroic forces were led by the Atreides.  As such, Watson’s Valya Harkonnen (and her sister Tula) joined a sisterhood of what will become the Bene Gesserit, but for now just trains women to be Truthsayers and determine who is and isn’t lying to the leaders of the great families.  Valya has a mission that she has had for years, as handed down to her from the old Mother Superior on her deathbed, namely to use all the resources in the Sisterhood’s arsenal to put one of their own on the throne.  The best chance that they have to that is to ensure that Emperor Javicco Corrino’s headstrong daughter Princess Ynez marries a certain nobleman’s son.  It’s a political match, not one of love.  The groom is all of nine years old, and his father is a presumptuous bore who, if he wasn’t giving over a fleet of attack ships to the Emperor for the wedding, something the Emperor needs to put down a revolt on Arrakis, would probably not be getting the time of day from the royal family.

Then again, Desmond Hart, a soldier who just did a tour of Arrakis and survived an attack of some kind, says the Fremen are not the ones attacking the Emperor’s stuff so much as it might be someone in one of the various noble houses that serve the Emperor’s interests.

By the by, always nice to see Mark Strong, here as the Emperor, and Travis Fimmel as Hart.  Strong always has that gravitas, and Fimmel’s roguish charm that served him well on Vikings here makes for a much darker version of his Vikings character.

Anyway, it sure does seem like everything is going the Sisterhood’s way.  Small problem:  the Emperor and his wife Natalya don’t care much for this marriage, and the Emperor says as much to Hart, and Hart is not above a little child assassination to break off a marriage, putting him on a collision course with the Mother Superior…probably.  This is Dune.  It’s much more about political maneuvering than sci-fi action, and it would be good to remember that.  I just know that Hart ruined Valya’s plans, but it may only be a temporary setback.

Keeping with the stated tone and style of Dune, this isn’t the most action-packed of pilot episodes.  To be clear, there is a short action sequence at the start of the show, and there’s promise for more, but this is a show where a young Valya uses the voice to silence a zealot of a rival for the direction of the Sisterhood, and the child death here is done via a poison of some kind.  For all that it is set in the same universe as the newer movies, it doesn’t look quite the same–not that I expect a TV adaptation to do so–but it is a bit simple to start.  Yes, there are about a dozen characters to keep track of so far, and I only mentioned a couple above.  What I know is that I am not sure who the heroic protagonist is here.  The Sisterhood is plotting for power that they may eventually get, and Hart is a child-killer.  I know Dune isn’t exactly a world of white hats and black hats, so I’ll wait for later to see who the “good guys” are here.

I mean, it could just be the best course of action is the one that only gets a fraction of the large number of people who will die otherwise to drop dead.

Basically, I have only a vague idea where this is going, and I am not sure how much I am going to like the journey, but the first episode is promising.