Dune: Prophecy and the Prequel Series Problem

Dune: Prophecy, HBO’s six-episode prequel series set ten thousand years before the events of the Denis Villeneuve films, aired from November into December 2024. It is the first major television project inside the Villeneuve-era Dune franchise, and it arrives with the specific structural problem that any prequel series to a beloved current film franchise carries. The problem is that the audience showing up is looking for two different things, and the two things are not fully compatible.

The audience wants the specific aesthetic, tonal, and world-building texture of the Villeneuve films: the architectural scale, the patient pacing, the Hans Zimmer sound palette, the sense that every shot is composed at the scale of a Renaissance altar painting. The audience also wants the specific thing television does that film does not, which is sustained character arcs across a ten-hour runtime. These are different pleasures, and the series is, across its six episodes, unevenly successful at delivering either.

What the series is

The creative team is led by showrunner Alison Schapker, who came onto the project late in development after earlier exits by Diane Ademu-John and Jon Spaihts. The production instability is visible in the finished product, though not as visible as the industry press around the show suggested it would be. The show is set ten thousand years before Dune, during the founding period of the Bene Gesserit sisterhood, and draws on Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson’s novel Sisterhood of Dune, though the show has made substantial departures from the novel.

Emily Watson plays Valya Harkonnen, Mother Superior of the order. Olivia Williams plays her sister Tula Harkonnen. These two performances, together, are the show’s central asset, and the degree to which the show works or does not work is primarily determined by how much runtime the scripts give them against each other.

The Watson and Williams register

Watson and Williams are both actors of a specific late-career authority. Watson in particular has been doing the kind of concentrated dramatic work (God’s Creatures, Small Things Like These, Chernobyl) that makes her arrival in a large-format fantasy project an event. The Valya Harkonnen role gives her a specifically demanding register: the character is politically calculating, physically restrained, psychologically guarded, and required to convey ten thousand years of institutional history through small behavioural choices. Watson plays it at a level the material does not always deserve.

Williams’s Tula is the more emotionally available of the two sisters, and the specific dynamic between them is structured around the long shared history that the script keeps opening up in measured flashbacks. The flashback material, featuring Jessica Barden as young Valya and Emma Canning as young Tula, is the show’s strongest formal device. The flashbacks are used sparingly, always to illuminate a specific decision the present-day sisters are making, and the specific cause-and-consequence structure is the best-controlled element in the show.

The wider ensemble

The problem starts when the show moves away from the two sisters. Travis Fimmel plays Desmond Hart, a mysterious soldier whose arrival at the Imperial court destabilises the political order. Fimmel is giving the performance he gave in Vikings and has been giving for a decade, which is a specific kind of oblique magnetism that reads as interesting until the script requires him to articulate specific character motivation. The motivation is vague, and the vagueness reads as writer’s uncertainty rather than character design.

Mark Strong plays Emperor Javicco Corrino. Strong is a reliable presence whose part is written at exactly the thinness his screen time will support. Sarah-Sofie Boussnina plays Princess Ynez; Josh Heuston plays Prince Constantine. The younger royal ensemble is pitched at a specific YA-adjacent register that sits uneasily against the Harkonnen material. Chloe Lea plays Lila Mikaela, an acolyte whose visions drive parts of the plot, and the performance is stronger than the part the scripts have built for her.

The production design

Production designer Tom Meyer, working from the specific visual template Villeneuve and Patrice Vermette established on the films, has built a show that looks convincingly like the same universe. The Wallach IX interiors, in particular, are handsome. The costumes by Bojana Nikitovic are the kind of detailed period-fantasy work that television-scale budgets have recently been rewarding. The look of the show is, consistently, the least questionable element.

The cinematography, handled across the six episodes by Pierre Gill and others, does not match the films, and could not. The specific Villeneuve long-take blocking, the specific Roger Deakins scale of the light, are not reproducible at television budgets or schedules, and the show is sensible not to try. What it does instead is adopt a specific kind of controlled medium-shot register that reads as unambitious without being embarrassing. It is a correct decision.

The score by Volker Bertelmann, which leans into Bertelmann’s specific string-and-percussion register rather than attempting Zimmer, is the show’s best formal decision. Bertelmann is doing his own thing inside the franchise template, and the result is a score that complements the films without imitating them.

What the show is structurally

The show has three simultaneous plotlines across its six episodes. The Bene Gesserit political maneuvering inside the sisterhood. The Imperial court intrigue following Desmond Hart’s arrival. The longer-arc theological question of Tula’s relationship to a specific event in the sisters’ shared past. The three plotlines are uneven in their dramatic return, and the show’s editing does not always negotiate the transitions between them well. The fifth episode, in particular, leans heavily on the court-intrigue plotline and produces a specifically static hour of television.

What works, consistently, is the material set inside the Bene Gesserit mother house. The training scenes, the political interior meetings, the specific ritualistic texture of the sisterhood’s operation, are all doing the work of world-building and character development simultaneously. When the show is inside the mother house, it is a genuinely interesting piece of genre television. When it leaves, the specific structural weakness of prequel series becomes more visible.

The prequel problem

The prequel structure imposes a specific set of constraints. The audience knows that the Bene Gesserit as an institution survives. The audience knows that the Harkonnen house survives into the Villeneuve film period. The specific political stakes the show is attempting to dramatise are, in a certain sense, pre-resolved by the parent property. The show is aware of this problem and attempts to manage it by shifting the dramatic weight onto the specific internal-character stakes of the sisters and onto the specific theological questions that will not be answered within the six-episode arc.

This is the right instinct. It is also a harder instinct to execute than pure political-thriller mechanics, and the show does not always have the writerly resources to pull it off. The second half of the finale, in particular, pivots into a specifically supernatural register that the show has been building toward but has not fully earned.

What a second season could do

HBO renewed the show for a second season in January 2025, and the renewal is the specific commercial endorsement the show was hoping for. The first season premiere drew reportedly strong numbers across HBO Max, and the completion rate across the six episodes held up better than some industry observers expected. Whether the second season can deliver on the first season’s structural promises will depend on two specific things.

The first is whether the writers’ room can give Watson and Williams more dedicated two-handed material. The sisters are the show, and every episode that underuses them loses momentum. The second is whether the show can develop the court-intrigue material into something more than a series of thinly motivated political moves. Desmond Hart in particular needs character depth the first season did not supply.

What to watch it for

Dune: Prophecy is not a great television show. It is, in specific stretches, a genuinely good one, and the stretches are concentrated in the Harkonnen material. If you are coming to the show as a Villeneuve-film fan looking for tonal continuation, you will get some of what you are looking for. If you are coming to it as a television viewer looking for a sustained dramatic arc, you will find one, unevenly distributed across the six episodes, and you will find two specifically excellent lead performances.

The show exists in the specific territory of fantasy prequel series that recent television (House of the Dragon, The Rings of Power) has been trying to occupy. It is the third-best of that cohort, which is not meant as faint praise. The form is hard. Watch the first three episodes. If the second season commits to the sisters at the centre, the show may become something worth a more enthusiastic recommendation.