Dune: Prophecy
Where history looks to the past, prophecy looks to the future, Valya Harknonnen a woman forced to live in exile on the planet Wallach IX following the shaming of her house in the aftermath of the Machine Wars, the final victory led by the Atreides while her own ancestor was deemed a deserter and a coward, she and her sister Tula finding a new family in the Sisterhood, raised, trained and conditioned to become Truthsayers to the Imperial Court.
Invaluable assets to the great houses fortunate enough to have been loaned a Sister, over thirty years Valya has risen to the position of Mother Superior, and to Emperor Javicco Corrino she has assigned Reverend Mother Kasha Jinjo, brokering a marriage between Princess Ynez, heir to the Golden Lion Throne but also a prospective acolyte of the Sisterhood, and Lord Prewet Richese whose father can provide a fleet of ships which would aid the Emperor in his struggle to control reactionary elements on the planet Arrakis.
Prewet a precocious child, Ynez hopes to use the time before he comes of age to bend him to her will, the Sisterhood encouraging the alliance with a view to having control through their agent Ynez over the man who will one day ascend to the throne and also uniting the bloodlines of the two families, their long-term vision of the path to the future tainted by a recurring fearful vision of blood and burned bodies first glimpsed by Valya when the late Mother Superior Raquella Berto-Anirul shared it from her deathbed.
Developed by Diane Ademu-John and Alison Schapker from the ideas and characters of the Great Schools of Dune trilogy written by Brian Herbert and Kevin J Anderson, Dune: Prophecy may be set over 10,000 years before Duke Leto Atriedes was assigned as governor of Arrakis but that is the distant future point on which it anchors itself, very long game played out with an indifference to anything so gauche as pacing by those who concern themselves with manipulations over generations, instead presenting exquisite costumes and production design and a web of characters of complex motivations.
Starring Emily Watson and Olivia Williams as Valya and Tula Harkonnen, Mark Strong, Jodhi May and Sarah-Sofie Boussnina are Emperor Javicco Corrino, Empress Natalya and Princess Ynez, the latter drawn to Chris Mason’s handsome Imperial Swordmaster Keiran Atreides rather than her betrothed, while a wild card is thrown into the carefully arranged strategies of alliances and assets by the unexpected arrival at court of Travis Fimmel as Desmond Hart, carrying information that the attack on Arrakis in which he was thought to have been killed was not spice pirates but organised by rivals within the great houses.
Yet for all that Dune: Prophecy is an epic tale of the wealth, power and ambition, it takes place in a joyless universe of duty and distrust, friendships few and marriages based on advantage rather than affection, the Harkonnens in time discovering their pleasure in hedonism but for now the vast and towering stone chambers of the Sisterhood and the palace on Salusa Secundus are cold and empty, “barren landscapes of minimalism,” even the ceremony of union accompanied by a haunting drone which presages betrayals to come.
Arrakis as yet unseen other than book tape recordings and visions in opening episode The Hidden Hand, written by Ademu-John and directed by Anna Foerster, the desert world remains the key to the Empire, only source of the vital spice melange which mediates interplanetary travel through folding space and with it all trade, control of the flow of spice synonymous with control of the Empire, a precarious balance which all sides wish to exploit but without being seen to do so lest the finger of accusation draw acrimonious reprisals.
The aim of the Sisterhood the long-term stability of their organisation which will ultimately be known as the Bene Gesserit, there are parallels with the Foundation seeking to preserve the gathered knowledge of the universe which go beyond the persistence of vision, one already established and the other with the potential to become the current standards of compelling intellectual televised science fiction storytelling against which others are measured as Battlestar Galactica was earlier this century.
Dune: Prophecy is streaming now on HBO and Sky Atlantic
