‘Dune: Prophecy’ Review: HBO’s Lavish New Sci-Fi Drama Gives ‘Dune’ Back to the Herbert Heads

Dune: Prophecy premieres on HBO and Max next Sunday night and I honestly can’t believe this show even exists.

Only a few years ago, the thought of Frank Herbert’s Dune spawning a massively successful film franchise, complete with a lavish HBO spin-off series, would have been inconceivable to me. As someone who has ranked Dune as one of her all-time favorite books since high school, named her apartment wifi network “House Atreides,” and diligently watched each adaptation ever made — including the one where a young James McAvoy begins to turn into a sandworm — I’ve always know that Dune did not cater to the masses. Then Denis Villeneuve put Timothée Chalamet and Zendaya in stillsuits and suddenly Dune became one of Warner Bros.’s most lucrative emerging franchises.

Which leads us to Dune: Prophecy, a show created because corporate bean-counters believe the spice must flow. To my shock (and personal delight), though, Dune: Prophecy is not built for the normies. Dune: Prophecy gives Frank Herbert’s vast and strange world back to the science fiction dorks like me.

Dune: Prophecy is set about 10,000 years, give or take, before the birth of Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet). Humanity is a mere century and change away nearly being annihilated in a horrific holy war against machines. “Thinking machines,” like AI, drones, and even mechanical toys are strictly forbidden, with the punishment for owning them being death. A key political force in the universe is the Sisterhood, an organization that purports to merely teach women to sift truth from lies, but is actually working to guide humanity towards an ultimate goal. What exactly is that goal? Well, that’s a deep concern for Sisterhood skeptics and a major source of a massive schism that almost destroys the group from within.

Dune: Prophecy opens with a young Valya Harkonnen (Jessica Barden) explaining the fissure brewing within the Sisterhood. The organization’s founder, Reverend Mother Raquella Berto-Anirul (Cathy Tyson) has a secret side project where she is cataloguing the DNA of every major house in the universe. To ensure that humanity never again wages a catastrophic war, she wants to breed better rulers. It’s a scheme that horrifies her granddaughter and heir apparent, Reverend Mother Dorotea (Camilla Beeput), but Valya is a true believer.

When Raquella finally does die, she is gifted a vision of a great reckoning that will test the Sisterhood. She orders Valya to do whatever it takes to protect the Sisterhood from this potential destruction. When Dorotea dares to defy Raquella’s dying wish, Valya unleashes a secret weapon to destroy her rival and thereby takes control of the Sisterhood’s future.

Thirty years later, the adult Reverend Mother Valya (Emily Watson) believes she is poised to finally assure the Sisterhood’s mission to lead humanity forever. The heir to the Imperial throne, Princess Ynez Corrino (Sarah-Sofie Boussnina) will join the Sisterhood’s school as an acolyte after she marries the young son of an important military ally. Because Ynez’s fiancé, Pruwet Richese (Charlie Hodson-Prior), is a literal little boy, the young and spirited royal will have years to spend among the Sisterhood before her marriage or the Imperial throne demands her attention. Valya will have a Empress loyal to the Sisterhood and its mission.

But then Desmond Hart (Travis Fimmel) shows up to ruin everything.

Desmond Hart is a soldier renowned for his multiple tours of service on Arrakis, the home of the all important spice that fuels commerce, healthcare, and more in the Imperium. When he arrives at the palace, he immediately ingratiates himself to Ynez’s parents, Emperor Javicco Corrino (Mark Strong) and Empress Natalya (Jodhi May), and targets the Emperor’s truthsayer, Mother Kasha Jinjo (Jihae) as an enemy. Desmond Hart has returned from Arrakis with more than just his loyalty to House Corrino. He has a religious-like zeal to purge the Imperium of its enemies and few spoiler-y tricks up his sleeve to get the job done.

The thing that’s truly wild about Dune: Prophecy is I’ve spent all this time just hashing out the basic overarching story without digging into all the eccentric nooks and crannies of Frank Herbert’s universe the show explores. Among the show’s massive cast of characters, there’s a group of young acolytes who find themselves pulled into Valya and her sister Tula’s (Olivia Williams) schemes. These incredibly compelling young women serve as echoes of the younger Valya, Tula (Emma Canning), Kasha (Yerin Ha), and friend Francesca (Charithra Chandran), to whom the show often flashes back to. Princess Ynez also has a hot illegitimate brother, Constantine (Josh Heuston), and a hot weapons instructor, Keiran Atreides (Chris Mason), and she parties with both of them in the cleanest, emptiest underworld club I’ve seen. There’s also a Fremen bartender, complex political drama, and the return of sexposition to HBO. You know, people explaining that all that complex political drama while having sex…as in early Game of Thrones days.

You can tell that HBO has invested a lot of time (and a rotating roster of showrunners) in figuring out how to give Dune the same narrative formula that translated George R.R. Martin’s equally dense fantasy world into a massive hit. There are tropes, twists, and echoes of themes running throughout Dune: Prophecy that Game of Thrones fans will recognize. However, Dune: Prophecy is still very much Dune. So much so that I screamed in delight at a twist that arrives at the very end of Dune: Prophecy Episode 4. Then I sheepishly realized no one who has not spelunked into Herbert’s vast lore could possibly understand what had just happened! (But it’s good. Oh my god, it’s so fun!)

All of which is to say that I had a great time watching the four episodes of Dune: Prophecy sent out to critics for review, but I have no idea if you will. The acting is exquisite, with Emily Watson and Olivia Williams both giving profoundly layered performances, while so many of the younger, fresh faces cast pop as literal stars in the making. The costumes are exquisite and the drama unrelenting. I think Dune: Prophecy is a thrilling show to behold. I’m just curious if people who don’t get a kick out of seeing literally orange-bound Orange Catholic Bibles will be able to plow through the tsunami of Easter eggs and lore to get to the meat of the show.

Dune: Prophecy is an epic show that might have literally been made just for little old me…but then that’s what I initially thought when I first watched a little HBO show called Game of Thrones.

Dune: Prophecy premieres on HBO and Max on Sunday, November 17 at 9 PM ET.