Well it finally happened. The biggest tragedy of our time is upon us. The news has been bad all over but absolutely the worst thing I’ve seen happen since the start of November 2024 is HBO’s Dune Prophecy show. I didn’t want to rush to judgment after watching just one episode, but also didn’t want to spend any more time watching it, so here we are. I think at this point it is fair to say that this shit sucks.
I should be the easiest mark for this type of thing. I’ve been a big Dune-head, an absolute Shai Hulunatic, for years. I love the David Lynch Dune, and also the SyFy version who’s script is probably the most faithful adaptation of the book even though the costumes and CGI were bad to begin with and have aged laughably. Earlier this year I finally did the dang thing and forced myself to finish reading all six books – it took a while but I did manage to power through Chapterhouse – so a show about Dune ought to combine my two favorite things: big worm, and getting to pause the TV every five minutes to explain something esoteric about my stupid niche interests to my extremely patient wife, who just wanted to know why they’re using swords in the future.
That right there shows you the issue: I said “all six” books – the ones that Frank Herbert was crazy enough to write and not the ones he wasn’t crazy enough to write. I don’t consider any of the Brian Herbert/Kevin J Anderson books to be Real, they don’t count, and one of those is what Prophecy is based on. They are fan fiction at best, and graverobbing at worst.
Anderson I can almost forgive for this – as a tried and true genre tie-in fiction hack, my man knows what he’s about and has been cashing checks on it for decades, so at some point you simply have to respect the grindset. Brian Herbert though, that guy has no real talent other than rent-seeking on his dead father’s notebooks. Why anyone would adapt one of the worthless prequels these two have been shoveling out, when God Emperor of Dune is right there, is beyond my ability to understand or accept.
I haven’t read the book, and I’m not going to read it, so maybe this is a problem with the source material and not the adaptation, but check this out: I don’t care why this show sucks, I only care that it sucks. And it does, mightily. It isn’t Dune. It’s Painfully Generic Science Fiction Product. The first warning sign is that the episode opens with an extended montage and voiceover lore-dump. Then the title card tells us that what we’re about to see – now that the show is about to, ten minutes in, finally do some showing, when it’s finished telling – is set 116 years after “the great machine war”.
The cowards won’t even use the name, but Brian Herbert loves the Butlerian Jihad. The war against computers is the driving force behind everything he ever contributed to Dune and he injects it every single place he can despite there being a lot else going on in the setting that would be more interesting or unique. On top of that, as with many obsessive lovers of things, he manages to misunderstand the object of his obsession almost entirely. The Thinking Machines are supposed to be horrific because they take control of society, reducing humanity to just following their rules. It’s possible they weren’t even doing a bad job of it, but it doesn’t matter: the point of it was that humans lost their agency, the ability to choose their own path. The machines represent mental domination as much as physical control, the submission of humanity’s will to their own, and it’s a recipe for failure and decline. There’s a pretty obvious parallel here to the Kwizatz Haderach, if you’ve read the books, which I’m no longer convinced the people behind this show have.
The machines are heretical because letting a machine call the shots makes you lazy and stupid, and you were instead meant to be more than that, not (or at least not only) because a robot with chainsaw arms is freaky as hell. AI is presented as heresy because of all the debasement and infantilizing, but here it’s just the fucking Terminator. That’s it. That’s as deep as this show – as deep as Brian in general – goes with it.
So the Butlerian Jihad isn’t the Butlerian Jihad, it’s the “great machine war”, and it’s so generic that it could be any great machine war. The Bene Gesserit aren’t the Bene Gesserit, they’re the “sisterhood”, though my guess is that the series finale includes someone coming up with the name and saying it directly to the camera with all the gravitas they can muster. Melange is just “spice”. IX, the Tleilaxu, Mentats, all the messed up weird stuff that makes Dune Dune, none of them seem to exist. Arrakis is still Arrakis, at least, and to the show’s credit it does show worm pretty early on, but this is Dune with the serial numbers filed off – it could be anything. Of course, you better believe we get a random Harkonnen and Atreides thrown in, because it’s a prequel and the audience demands some breadcrumbs to be thrown at them in order to hoot and holler properly. To be fair, this did kind of work on me: I got a little hype seeing Wallach IX on screen for the first time, and the pre-prison-planet version of Salusa Secundus resembles one of the nicer forgettable places from Star Wars, though we only see it in a few establishing shots of each before the rest of the show takes place in a series of non-specific concrete rooms and corridors.
In general the production values are, while somewhat finer than the SyFy channel miniseries of the early 2000s, not great. It looks plain. The thing about Dune, and something that Denis Villeneuve seemed to grasp intuitively, is that everything in that universe has to be huge and weird. Not in a Warhammer way, but monolithic and inscrutable just the same. Every shot should have something massive and imposing in it that doesn’t seem to do anything, or it doesn’t look right. If you aren’t building your sets to the scale of ancient Egyptian colossi, don’t even bother. To give credit where it’s due, they did actually build those sets instead of using a computer, but it doesn’t help much.
The show’s most unforgivable sin though, is that the outfits are trash. There’s no other way to say it. Nobody looks cool. They raided a Spirit Halloween for these fits. I hate it.
The funniest thing about all of this is that the show only exists because of Denis Villeneuve’s Dune movies, a way to keep the franchise (everything has to be a goddamn franchise now) in the public zeitgeist until he gets around to Dune Messiah, but then it suffers immeasurably in comparison to the same. If all I had to measure this against was Lynch and SyFy I’d probably be less harsh on at least the outfits, but there’s no getting around the fact that nothing happens and when it does it doesn’t matter. Some kid and his toy robot get melted by a hobo with ambiguous Worm Powers, and I just did not care. What even is this. It’s just boring characters having boring conversations in boring locations about cool things that aren’t appearing on screen, and none of it has anything to do with Dune beyond a couple of names. It’s not just a bad Dune show, it’s a bad show in general.
If there is a reason to keep watching – and I’m not sure there is, given that I haven’t – it’s that the cast has a number of recognizable people capable of doing good work, even if they aren’t doing any of it here. Emily Watson, Mark Strong, the guy who played Lothar in Warcraft, that level of actor. Unfortunately they’re all wasted here, an attempt to create a new Game of Thrones (lord knows that if there’s anything we haven’t gotten enough of on shows or in real life it’s scheming goddamned viziers). There’s an outside chance that Prophecy partially redeems itself by giving us the first on-screen mention of CHOAM, but I’m not holding my breath on that one.
It’s boring, it looks bad, and it’s a prequel based on a book that I can confidently say sucks without having read it. They did it folks, they made a Dune that even I don’t care about. Congratulations, I hope David Zazlev roasts in hell.
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