Dune: Prophecy “Sisterhood Above All”

Oh look!  Mark Addy as Tula and Valya’s uncle, Evgeny Harkonnen!  And he’s not just limited to a flashback!  He’ll bring some sort of gravitas to the proceedings…even though everyone else is already doing that.  This much gravitas might actually create a black hole.

Actually, most of this episode is a flashback showing how both Valya and Tula Harkonnen ended up in the Sisterhood, and the title has a dual meaning because the family bond of the Harkonnen sisters is as important to them as the obligations of their order.  Plus, what this episode shows is both of them have been dangerous for a very long time.

For Valya, that isn’t hard to see why.  The pilot episode showed her, in a flashback, using the Voice to have a rival kill herself.  She was selected by her predecessor, Mother Raquella, and her more fanatical rival Mother Dorotea wanted to do more purity and the like, something that didn’t fit in with the more practically-minded Valya.  Given she was killed in the opening minutes, Dorotea has been a rather active force on this show, and not just because she was Raquella’s granddaughter and the comatose Lila’s great-great-grandmother.  Apparently, being dead was never a roadblock, and if anything, I think the show did some really good casting for the young actresses playing the more teenage Valya and Tula.

But as I said, the show has already demonstrated that Valya is ruthless.  Here, with some background, we see she had a hard time in the Sisterhood thanks to Dorotea, but she likewise had Raquella’s ear early on.  She also could use the Voice well before she joined the Sisterhood as she ordered a drowning brother to swim to shore, but said brother died under unspecified circumstances when he took Valya’s advice and confronted a powerful member of the Atreides family over purported lies told about the Harkonnen family that got them all banished to a frozen wasteland of a planet where they harvest furry whales for fun and profit.  That’s not anything new in a sense.  It only shows where Valya’s motivation comes from, and it is more for power whether it’s for her family or the Sisterhood or both.

That said, while I never got the impression Tula was some sort of shrinking violet of a character, this episode shows how the quieter sister could be just as dangerous in her own right because she played the long game.  Valya was in no position to avenger their brother’s death at the hands of the Atreides (allegedly).  Her family wasn’t willing to do anything about it.  But Tula?  Oh man, she does indeed in a plan that involves seducing an Atredies about her age under a false name, getting invited on a hunt with his family, and then poisoning most of the men while she and Orry enjoyed each other in their own tent.  Oh, and she stabbed him with the poisoned syringe later, letting only one younger member of the family escape.  Heck, Orry didn’t even mind that she was a Harkonnen when told.  But family means more to the sisters than it does to Orry from the looks of things, and seeing a rare bull that was the apparent target of the hunt seems to mean something to Tula, just as it means something to Valya that Tula is the one there when Valya wakes up from the Agony that made Valya a very young Mother Superior in the Sisterhood.

As it is, in the “present,” both sisters have been hit with set-backs, but neither seems the type to let things go and move on too easily.