Dune: Prophecy “The High-Handed Enemy”

I kept thinking this show felt more like Game of Thrones than the Dune universe from the recent movies.  I wouldn’t be surprised if HBO spent a lot of money on this show, but I somehow suspect they didn’t spend as much on these six episodes as they did on even one of the movies.  It looks good for TV, but it isn’t on par with the films.  It’s like Game of Thrones where there seems to be a fairly talented cast doing what they do, but for all the expense, it’s still TV and lacks a movie’s grand expanse.

I dunno.  It just never quite felt like it was the same universe as the movies.

Regardless, it also feels like they saved all the fireworks for the final episode as the series still doesn’t seem quite sure whether Valya is serving herself, House Harkonnen, the Sisterhood, or some combination therein.  What I can say for certain is she’s on a bad foot right now, having barely escaped Desmond Hart, who really is her nephew.

That may be the most interesting development.  Oh, not that Desmond is Tula’s son, or that Valya wasn’t aware that Tula had a son.  She was aware that Tula once had a son by her dead Atreides boyfriend.  What Valya doesn’t know is Tula faked her son’s death to get him out of the Harkonnen house because they are all pretty toxic people.  Only parties unknown got the boy first and did…something to him, namely that the way he burns people to death is a result of someone putting a thinking machine into him, allowing him to use nanobots to kill people, where the more they fight it, the faster they die.  Surrendering to your fears is the actual way to survive.

And there must be some irony here where Valya gets away by teaming up with Princess Ynez and an Atreides.  Tula essentially offers her abandoned child mercy, and she ends up getting arrested.

But it also ends with Valya in a very bad place.  She has no control over the throne as Emperor Javicco, finally realizing how his entire life had been orchestrated by others, kills himself, leaving the throne ostensibly in the hands of his widow Natalya and Hart.  The Sisterhood, meanwhile, has religious fanatic Mother Dorotea taking control of her descendant Sister Lila’s body to reveal just how many of Dorotea’s descendants are dead now because of Valya and her use of the Voice, and then leading the other sisters downstairs to smash the Sisterhood’s own thinking machine that was used to set up bloodlines in an effort to put the Sisterhood in greater control of, oh, everything.

Valya’s no saint, but Dorotea is a fanatic, so I don’t think either is a good option for the Sisterhood.

However, the set-up here is that there’s the mystery of who took control of Hart, and that leads Valya, Inez, and Keiran to Arrakis.  You know, the planet that they probably were required to visit eventually.

And that’s season one, a season where Mark Strong played a supposedly weak man, but I’ve seen Mark Strong play all kinds of scary dudes and the like and never quite saw him that way.   Then again, he might have been the most expensive member of the cast, so maybe it isn’t that big a surprise that he’s gone again.  I might have liked some more action scenes, but that isn’t what Dune is all about anyway.  Dune is about plotting and politicking.  That doesn’t mean the characters have to be likable, but it took six episodes to answer one mystery while setting up another.  I suppose I will be back for another season when it eventually comes out.  I may not love this show, but I can respect what it is trying to do.

But now, I need something else, so let’s go to the other end of the spectrum from awful people to a man who exemplifies grace and kindness under trying times.  Or at least the novel this mini-series was based on did.  I’ll be looking into the Paramount+ mini-series A Gentleman in Moscow next.

I hope it is as utterly delightful as the novel was.