Right up front, I want to say that there weren’t supposed to be two of these. In fact, there shouldn’t really have been one, but events transpired that forced my hand.
I regret making fun of Dune: Prophecy after watching only one episode. Not for the reasons you might expect. I wasn’t fair to the show, but I also wasn’t wrong about it either, and it’s nice to know that I’ve still got it, and was able to make a lot of people very mad. No, the reason I regret dogging on a show I barely watched is that I got cyberbullied into watching the rest of it.
In the comments on controversial/bad posts like that one, we usually get a few jokers claiming that they were just about to support us on Patreon, but after the latest particular outrage they simply can’t do so in good conscience anymore. As you can imagine, this is entirely a crock, and none of them were even close to smashing that mf subscribe button in the first place, it’s just a way to try and bully us into thinking about money over integrity (read “doing whatever we want”), a thing we are resolutely too stupid and/or egotistical to do.
Except.
This time it actually did happen. A reader pointed out that the review was bad, and that they weren’t going to pay us money to read more of my trash (which is, to be honest, entirely fair), then Did The Work and came back with a counteroffer: if they subscribed to our Patreon, would Goonhammer CEO Robert Jones force me to watch the rest of the show and give it a fair review? Bob Goonhammer, and you already knew this was coming if you’ve ever interacted with the guy at all, immediately agreed. I was not consulted.
If I’d kept my yap shut and only trashed the show in the #landsraad channel on our Discord, I could have gotten away with only wasting an hour of my life, but because I just had to open my big dumb mouth, one hour turned into six. Why doesn’t this kind of thing ever happen to anyone else? What did I do – what do I continue to do – to deserve this? At any rate, my wife is loving this. Every night she asks me “do you want to watch your show?” in the most threatening way possible.
Having now watched all of Dune: Prophecy, I will not be apologizing. Most of the problems with the first episode remain problems. Something about this show just looks bad in a way I can’t articulate. It’s too flat, there’s not enough color, and everything feels small, like the depth is off. I’m not a camera-knower so I’m too dumb to explain why this is, but it looks awful. The outfits firmly remain trash.
The other big issue, and this only got worse as it went on, is that the show so badly wants to be Game Of Thrones. It has the same basic structure as season 1 of Throne Games – different point of view characters from Great Houses forming their own factions and never meeting each other, not a lot of action but a ton of dialog and schemes, some gratuitous and exclusively female nudity. Nothing happens, but it’s clearly building to something happening later. The difference is that early Games, Throned had good writing and acting, so I actually gave a shit what happened to the people. At least the Lannisters were fun to watch. Prophecy even got the actor who played Robert Baratheon to show up and play another old guy who dies, in a scene that could have been taken directly from Gamey Throney. All the flashbacks – and there are a lot – are like that, actually. Apparently once you get off the spaceships, the Imperium’s main activity is sitting in dimly-lit stone buildings eating from wooden soup bowls, or riding a horse to your job hunting animals. I get that power politics in the Landsraad is part of Dune, especially at this point in the timeline before Paul and Leto II fuck it up for everyone, but it’s a bit much to focus on it like this in a show with all the other trappings of HBO’s last big hit. I know I’m belaboring the point here but Dune Show invites these comparisons at every opportunity, and it’s not flattering.
The only part that marks it as being the future is that precisely one chair – in the entire six hour show, one chair in one room – hovers. It happens in one scene, and in all further scenes shot on that set (I don’t even want to call it a location because I genuinely do not know what planet it’s supposed to be on, but it’s clearly a set they spent a lot of money on because they kept goddamn using it, every boring conversation happens in the same room), the hovering chair is occluded by other furniture, presumably to save the effects team from making it float.
The show does get better, and by the end of episode four it has become mildly entertaining, though there are still too many ghosts, flashbacks, and dream sequence fake-outs. Four full episodes is an unforgivably long time to set up dominoes before any of them start to fall, when you’re talking about a season with only six in total. The fifth is the closest to watchable, and then the overstuffed finale is mostly set-up for the actual story, which will presumably begin later. It makes this entire exercise feel like a prologue, a feeling reinforced by the fact that they saved the Dune part of Dune for the last scene of the last episode, when the remaining leads all land together on Arrakis to solve another conspiracy or something. Honestly I was checked out at that point, I don’t really care what shadowy forces are at play anymore and I don’t have the patience to get jerked around while they dole out exposition about it over another half dozen hours.
Prophecy is lacking all the key Dune signifiers. For example, why is there so little of Bene Gesserits beating the shit out of people? They barely beat the shit out of anyone! Mother Superior has exactly one move, to use Voice to make you stab yourself in the neck. By the third time it happens it’s gotten stale, but it happens a few more times after that for good measure. There is also not enough worm. They simply must show more worm.
The plot is built from load-bearing gravitas, none of it earned. It’s astonishing how unsubtle the entire thing is. I had a brief moment after finishing episode four and being given a big old plot reveal as a treat, where I actually cared a little bit, and then the mask slipped and I realized I was trapped in another drawn-out mystery box show pretending to be a prestige drama and also a space opera, and got mad about it all over again. Honestly shocked this isn’t a Netflix show, because it has that level of second-screen quality, best consumed while doing something on your phone. At least then you won’t have to look at it.
But it’s not all bad. There’s good diversity in the casting, which is always nice to see. There’s a handful of genuinely neat shots – nothing remotely Villeneuve Dune level, but I’ll take what I can get. The Landsraad features heavily, and we get a few throwaway lines about shigawire and Mentats, though in keeping with everything else about this dumb show, the audience never actually sees anything cool or unique, just hears people mention it. An Ixian even shows up! He’s just a guy, with shitty tattoos, who gets about 30 seconds of screen time, and spends half of it dying, so that’s kind of a waste beyond yet more prequel sign-posting to remind you that this is in fact supposed to be a Dune show and not the painfully generic thing that it actually is. There is also a Tleilaxu! But she’s just a lady, who actually does get a fair bit of screen time and development before being revealed as a face dancer, at which point she does one cool thing and also has about 30 seconds to live, so again kind of a waste.
In the end, my final opinion on Dune: Prophecy is that I can finally see why you people lose your minds about the five different Star Wars shows that happen every year. If this is the best Dune can offer then maybe you aren’t wrong to enjoy your little CGI de-aged cameo vehicles and their little breadcrumbs and references to old cartoons I don’t care about. Maybe consuming interconnected content purely so you can update the wiki on how the universe all ties up into a nice neat solved problem is just how it works now. There are no themes, only references. This isn’t a show that tries to say anything, just to show things happening. Sticking your snout into Disney’s endless Skywalker slop trough might actually, somehow, be a better use of your time.
Regrettably, at no point in Dune: Prophecy’s multiple discussions on the finer points of the whale fur trade does anyone ever mention CHOAM. As such, I cannot recommend that you watch Dune: Prophecy. If you want a short weird sci-fi series starring the guy who played Lothar in Warcraft, but isn’t nearly as bad, you should watch Raised By Wolves instead. Except you can’t, because it got yanked from HBOMax for the world’s flimsiest but most common reason: David Zazlev sucks.
GREGNOTE: For some reason, this show did get picked up for a second season, so if anyone else wants to sign up for our Patreon and continue burying me in the depths of prestige TV hell starting around 2026 or so, feel free.
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