HBO’s saga of scheming space nuns and clueless royals rumbles to a close. Our review of Dune: Prophecy episode 6…
NB: The following contains relatively minor spoilers for Dune: Prophecy episode 6. All the same, we’d advise you watch the finale first before reading the paragraphs below.
Together, dear readers, we’ve made it. Through the jarring edits, the meaningful looks, the scheming and the space weasels. Everything we’ve experienced in Dune: Prophecy so far has built to this – the grand finale. The moment where truths are revealed and scores are settled. Well, sort of.
In the land of television, final episodes are often supposed to leave us with something to chew over and questions to ask ourselves. But not quite like this. Maybe it’s just this writer, but there were at least two moments in episode six that prompted reactions along the lines of, ‘Eh?’ and ‘Wait, what…?’
Not that this last instalment was without its positives. It was the point in the story where chickens came home to roost; the revenant Lila (Chloe Lea), now confusingly possessed by the spirit of the late Mother Dorotea rather than Raquella, reveals that Valya and Tula’s means of controlling the sisterhood was even nastier than we initially suspected. That was definitely an ‘ooh’-inducing moment.
Mark Strong’s beleaguered Emperor Corrino discovers that he’s been little more than a pawn all along; a moment of realisation delivered with real soul by Strong. (We may have grumbled in the past that Strong’s a bit too commanding to play such a feeble character, but will happily concede that he’s terrific in these scenes.)
Read more: Dune: Prophecy episode 5 review | What is this abomination?
Meanwhile, Valya gathers her loyalists around her for a daring rescue mission – her destination being the Emperor’s palace, where Empress Natalya (Jodhi May) has had her stepdaughter Ynez (Sarah-Sofie Boussnina) rather abruptly thrown in prison. As we’ve seen in early episodes, Valya and her acolytes have a long-term plan of turning Ynez into the Imperium’s first female ruler, and so they rightly conclude that it’s probably a good idea if she doesn’t spend too long in a prison cell.
The stuff that goes on in this part of the episodes is quite entertaining (we even get some sword fights!). The problem is that it largely revolves around two incredibly dull characters. Ynez doesn’t exactly leap out of the screen; her fellow prisoner Keiran (Chris Mason) is so generic that in my notes for the entire series so far, I’ve simply credited him as Scouse Atreides because I kept forgetting his proper name.
In a busy finale, several more engaging characters are reduced to little more than cameos. Sister Avila (Barbara Marten), so memorable in the last episode, is here asked to do little more than hand Lila a crowbar. Where did she get the crowbar from? Why was she holding it? How did she know Lila even needed it? There’s no time to think about that too much.
Similarly, Valya’s weasly nephew Harrow Harkonnen (Edward Davis) gets a solitary scene in which he reviews some CCTV footage. Oh, and Theodosia (Jade Anouka), Valya’s shapeshifting sidekick of few words, is revealed to be little more than an ambulating plot device.
It’s all a by-product of a series that has struggled with pacing and structure somewhat. Looking back, the plot’s broad strokes aren’t particularly complicated: two women from a disgraced family seize control of a secretive religious group, then use it to gain access to the Imperium’s most powerful household – their endgame being to install someone of their choosing in a position of ultimate control.
Dune: Prophecy’s execution has been such that it’s all seemed a lot more labyrinthine and complex than it actually is. Cutting back and forth in time, it’s often felt as though someone wrote 360-plus pages of script and dropped them on the floor. The series was then shot in the scrambled sequence the pages were picked up in.
Or, more likely, Dune: Prophecy began life as a much longer saga – spanning some 10 episodes or more – that was brutally cut down, potentially to save on costs. Filming in all these expensive sets, many of which are augmented with time-consuming-to-add digital matte paintings, couldn’t have been cheap.
It’s also been incredibly dry and serious; even Denis Villeneuve’s operatic movies found space for the odd moment of levity (remember Josh Brolin’s Gurney Song about morons and piss?). In episode six, the humour appears to be accidental; Valya’s solemn pronouncement that “There’s a piece on the board just out of view” is dangerously close to Zap Brannigan’s sage observation, “In the game of chess, you can never let your adversary see your pieces.”
All of which brings us back to those ‘wait, what…?” moments mentioned a few paragraphs ago. The series’ arch villain, Desmond, we learn, is Tula’s son, secretly spirited away to another family while he was still a newborn. It’s a plot point few could have seen coming, not least because the two characters look almost the same age (Olivia Williams, who plays Tula, is 56; Desmond actor Travis Fimmel, is 45). Then there’s the whole detail about Desmond’s eye, which turns out to have an entire backstory of its own…
Running for almost 90 minutes, Dune: Prophecy’s closing episode is certainly eventful. There are fights and deaths, revelations and skeletons hauled out of closets. But it’s also notable just how little it resolves; while we weren’t expecting it to be entirely self-contained, we also didn’t expect the episode to leave so much open for a second series.
The ratings for HBO’s Dune prequel appear to have been solid (roughly on a par with its Batman spin-off series, The Penguin)., and season 2 has already been greenlit. But for all its strong points – the production design, the performances from the better members of its cast – Dune: Prophecy’s first run has been a bit of a muddle. This writer will no doubt tune in to the second season when it emerges; for now, maybe we all deserve a rest from the bustling frocks and confusing soap operatics.
