Dune: Prophecy Needs to Embrace Its Weird Side

[Warning: The following contains spoilers for the Season 1 finale of Dune: Prophecy, "The High-Handed Enemy."]

When Dune: Prophecy returns for a second season, its female leads need to get much weirder and less relatable. This may sound like a strange suggestion for a show about two mass murderers who develop mind-control powers and spend decades manipulating an imperial dynasty. But hear me out. 

Like most big-name prequels, Dune: Prophecy's goal is to expand a popular franchise without disrupting the main storyline — in this case, Denis Villeneuve's Dune movies, which take place 10,000 years later in the timeline. Borrowing heavily from Villeneuve's aesthetic, the show builds a new story around familiar Dune themes: court intrigue, sci-fi eugenics, feuding aristocratic families, and so on.

Comparisons to Game of Thrones are unavoidable, but Dune: Prophecy boasts a unique selling point. It focuses on the Bene Gesserit sisterhood, a religious order who wield power as advisors, concubines, and spies across Dune's Imperium. When they're not swooping around in black robes or whispering ominously in shadowy corners, they're probably stabbing someone with a poisoned needle: perfect material for a dark fantasy story about unpleasant, bizarre, and psychologically warped women.

Emily Watson and Olivia Williams add some gravitas as our two Bene Gesserit antiheroes, Valya and Tula Harkonnen — a malevolent social climber and her more sensitive younger sister. In theory, we're all set for a deliciously amoral witchy melodrama. Except Dune: Prophecy then proceeds to pump the brakes at every turn. The show's creators seem infuriatingly determined to humanize a set of characters who should not, in fact, be all that human.

Adhering to conventional screenwriting wisdom, every Bene Gesserit character gets their own sympathetic motives and emotional vulnerabilities. Undercutting their image as ruthless zealots, they constantly express moral qualms and get sidetracked by love. Hell, some of the younger acolytes seem downright normal. The cold-hearted Valya Harkonnen ultimately comes across as an outlier in her community, and even she is shaped by grief for her beloved brother.

This kind of storytelling would make sense in a grounded real-world drama, where morally ambiguous characters grapple with nuanced problems. However, it's not a very fun approach to Dune: Prophecy's source material, which is anything but grounded. Frustratingly overshadowed by serious drama, the show's best moments revolve around outlandish and uncanny behavior, enacted by people with twisted personal values. Funnily enough, that's also a defining strength for Villeneuve's Dune movies. They overflow with personality, whether it's the reptilian Lady Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson) whipping up a messianic fervor, or Austin Butler slinking around as the sadomasochistic warrior Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen. 

Most of the time, Dune: Prophecy is comparatively reluctant to let its main characters get weird. Amid the constant attempts to make the Bene Gesserit more relatable, only one storyline lives up to the sisterhood's grotesque potential: the death and resurrection of Sister Lila, a teenage acolyte who gets possessed by the spirits of her ancestors. Anchored by 19-year-old Chloe Lea in an eerie, Exorcist-style performance, Lila's subplot shows how unsettling the Bene Gesserit can (and should) be. Unfortunately, it only kicks off during the final two episodes.

After sacrificing herself in a torturous ritual known as "the Agony," Lila becomes a Frankenstein-like experiment for Tula Harkonnen, who refuses to let her favorite pupil die. Pumping Lila's body full of hallucinogenic spice, Tula brings her back to life… along with several invading ghosts. This precipitates the Harkonnen sisters' downfall, when one of the ghosts reveals that Valya faked her predecessor's suicide. 

Gothic and otherworldly, this arc is far more compelling than the wannabe Game of Thrones flashbacks to the Harkonnens' youth. Lila's role may be rooted in comprehensible emotional motives (Tula's grief; the dead Reverend Mother's desire to avenge her own murder), but the meat of its world-building is a wild departure from reality. In other words, it's exactly what you want from a space opera setting. Most importantly, the central performance is fun.

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Throughout this season, I've often found myself comparing Tula and Valya to their main antagonist, Desmond Hart (Travis Fimmel), who always appears to be having a blast. Introduced as an obsessively loyal imperial soldier, Hart is a volatile, swivel-eyed monster. After smirking and showboating his way into the Emperor's court, he sets the tone by incinerating a 9-year-old boy in Episode 1. Why? Because the kid owned a robotic toy, breaking the Imperium's law against AI. 

Hart's inflexible fanaticism and lack of social graces make him the most compelling character in any given scene, reflecting some familiar issues for hero/villain dynamics. We're used to seeing villains steal the show, from Count Dracula to Scar from The Lion King. Despite the darkness of Dune: Prophecy's two protagonists, a similar situation unfolds here. The Harkonnen sisters wrestle with weighty emotions and moral quandaries while Hart struts around smirking seductively and setting people on fire, which is unavoidably more enjoyable to watch.

There's an awkward subtext to this gender divide, highlighting which characters get to let loose and chew the scenery. By positioning the Bene Gesserit as tormented, conflicted figures instead of enticingly nasty freaks, the show saps their entertainment value. And in a space opera about manipulative psychic nuns, the male villain really shouldn't be the most interesting character.

Dune: Prophecy Season 1 is now streaming on Max.