Dune: Prophecy Recap: The Agony and the Ecstasy

Let’s start with one of the more ridiculous premium-cable-TV-package sex scenes in quite a while, an absolute howler. After locking eyes over the shrouded body of 9-year-old newlywed Pruwet Richese, the boy’s sister, Lady Shannon (Tessa Bonham Jones), and the emperor’s illegitimate son (but legitimate galactic hottie), Constantine (Josh Heuston), steal off for a space-cocaine-fueled rendezvous. “The stories of your prowess have transcended time and space,” says Lady Shannon mid-grind, which counts as pillow talk in a universe where the glittering sands of Arrakis make interstellar travel (and mind-altering trips) possible. If the heads of the Richese and Corrino families were aware of this hookup, which is happening in the midst of a bitter fight over the man responsible for Pruwet’s death, they’d be furious. But in the world of Dune, that’s what they call a little dramatic spice.

The scene itself is amusingly gratuitous and stilted, but nothing Dune: Prophecy can’t get past pretty easily. In fact, the second episode, after the labored setup of the pilot, is much more dramatically engaging, if only for dialing down the exposition and cranking up the conflict on several fronts at once. The postcoital chitchat between Lady Shannon and Constantine does touch on important information about the priority of those “beautiful little flecks of orange dust” on Arrakis and the soldier the Corrinos currently have in custody for Purwet’s death.

But all this sexy stirring-of-the-pot suggests a basic question that Dune: Prophecy has not yet answered two episodes in: What is this show about?

That’s a different question than what is happening on the show, because there’s conflict brewing all over the place, some of it quite compelling. But Frank Herbert’s novel Dune and its two screen adaptations have a point of view on the material that is hard to glean in Dune: Prophecy, which so far seems divorced from the political allegory of the book or the spiritual torment of a Chosen One hero whose power might ignite tragedy on an unimaginable scale. At present, the show is feeling a bit more like the iffier Star Wars spinoffs or series on Disney+, filling in some piece of the timeline without its own thematic agenda. Juicing up the action with palace intrigue isn’t enough.

Yet there’s palace intrigue galore in “Two Wolves,” which reckons with the fallout from Pruwet and Kasha’s near-simultaneous deaths by psychic immolation. (The official postmortem on Kasha is death by “an acute imbalance in her meridian network,” a phrase you’re hereby encouraged to use the next time you have heartburn.) It’s a massive crisis on multiple fronts at once: Desmond Hart, the mysterious survivor of an ambush on Arrakis that took out Emperor Corrino’s other men, suddenly seems like the most powerful person in the universe, given his responsibility for wiping out two people on different planets with his mind. He creates quite a mess for the leader he professes to serve, too, breaking up a royal wedding that was intended to seal the alliance between the chief harvester of Arrakis spice and the manufacturer of the military fleet necessary to protect his operation. It also botches the plans of Valya Harkonnen and the Sisterhood, which had looked to Pruwet and Ynez’s union as an early opportunity to exert long-term influence.

Driven by her fervor for prophecy and what she interprets as the “burning truth” that Mother Raquella had envisioned, Valya springs into action with typical aggression, but one of the more compelling ideas of the episode is that she seems to misread the situation. In the wake of Kasha’s death, she immediately jets off to Salusa Secundus to sort out the crisis, leaving her sister Tula to take over in her absence, despite her obvious lack of faith in Tula’s decision-making. But the directive she has for Tula is strikingly bold and even reckless: She wants Tula to put her sensitive young acolyte Lila (Chloe Lea) through the Agony, a physically and psychologically excruciating ritual in which a sister is poisoned in order to unlock ancestral memories. As Raquella’s great-great-granddaughter, Lila might be able to see if Valya is on the right track.

Though it’s not explicitly called “the Agony” in Denis Villeneuve’s films, the procedure calls to mind the memorable sequences in Dune where Paul Atreides puts his hand in the Bene Gesserit “pain box” and, later, when his mother, Lady Jessica, drinks from the Water of Life. These are transformative moments, but they’re also tests of the subject’s training and personal resolve, which for Lila is an open question since she’s still an acolyte and seems more vulnerable than her peers. Tula feels a motherly attachment to Lila that Valya more or less disregards in her single-minded quest for information, which makes Tula wonder if the Sisterhood really is a sisterhood or if it’s all about Valya accumulating and wielding power. When Lila finally does go through the Agony, she does indeed communicate with the ancestors, but the one doing the talking is Dorotea, the woman Valya had slain 30 years earlier in the power struggle following Raquella’s death.

As that chicken comes home to roost for Valya, another humbling awaits her on Salusa Secundus. In front of Corrino, Desmond calmly confesses to killing Pruwet on his behalf, since it was obvious to him that Corrino did not want the wedding to happen. Appalled that his soldier has taken such extreme initiative, Corrino had Desmond arrested and sent to a “suspense cell,” which basically involves hoisting a prisoner to a fixed position far off the ground. (The logistics of bathroom breaks go unexplained here.) But Corrino’s influential Lady Macbeth, Natalya, seems open to the idea that Desmond could help them maintain the control and influence that seems to be slipping from the emperor’s grasp. They may well be empowering a psychopath, but if Desmond really does have Corrino’s interests in mind, he could be just the tool they need. At a minimum, he succeeds in quieting Duke Richese’s complaints for good.

For Valya, however, the reckoning she’s so desperate to combat appears to be coming for her. At the same time Dorotea is having her revenge through the Agony, Valya squares off against Desmond in a scene that echoes the one 30 years earlier where she used the Voice to force Dorotea to drive a dagger through her own throat. When confronted now with an obvious threat to the Sisterhood’s plans, she tries to do the same with Desmond, but her mind control has no power over the second sight apparently given to him by a sandworm. “I always wondered what your greatest fear would be,” Desmond tells Valya. “Now I have seen it. It’s not that no one will hear you. It’s that they’ll hear you and just won’t care.”

We know that in 10,000 years, the Sisterhood’s voice will be heard loud and clear. But for now, this sister’s voice is intriguingly silenced.

Kwisatz Haderachs

• The spaceships of Dune and Dune: Prophecy are so massive and ungainly that perhaps the Cybertruck proved a more influential design than humankind might have anticipated.

• Some foreshadowing from Tula on the consequences of putting Lila through the Agony; “There are secrets we’ve gone through great lengths to keep.” Assuming that Lila isn’t as dead as she seems, she’ll return to consciousness with a big secret about Valya’s rise to power.

• The drama among the younger characters on the show, the acolytes and the royals, continues to be under-realized. Nothing quite so clunky as the sex scene, but last week’s decadent club sequence proved to be a bad omen on that front.

• “My wife has always been a champion of debate,” says Corrino of Empress Natalya, calling to mind Bill Paxton’s line about Newt in Aliens: “Why don’t you put her in charge?!”

• “Our library is amazing. Some volumes date back to the days of wood pulp.” E-books are convenient, but there’s nothing like the feel and smell of wood pulp, right?

• Sister Jen’s words to her fellow acolyte Lila are prophetic: “Sisterhood above all. Not sisters. They don’t care about you. Not like they care about the Order overall.” Valya will be facing some trouble from within, too.

• Yet another plot wrinkle is the role the rebellion — and one saboteur within the rebellion — might have in affecting both the emperor’s business on Arrakis and the Sisterhood’s sphere of influence.