The problem with prequels, the mode du jour in Hollywood’s grab-all-the-IP age, is they make the mistake of thinking our appreciation of something is the same as curiosity about its provenance. In Solo: A Star Wars Story, learning how the roguish smuggler Han got his last name punctures the illusion of his devil-may-care aura, a deflating answer to a question that didn’t need to be posed in the first place. Dune: Prophecy is the latest franchise to prove the fault of this approach. When a character complains, “We are all just pieces on the board,” the realization that all their moves have been predetermined applies to the whole show. Dune: Prophecy’s derivativeness is both its greatest flaw and its most defining characteristic.
An adaptation of the 2012 novel Sisterhood of Dune by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson, Dune: Prophecy takes place 10,000-plus years before the events of Frank Herbert’s sci-fi classic Dune. That novel, and Denis Villeneuve’s two blockbuster films Dune and Dune: Part Two, followed the ascendence of Paul Atreides, who avenges his family’s destruction at the hands of rival House Harkonnen by accepting his role as the maybe-messiah of the Fremen, the indigenous people of the desert planet Arrakis. In doing so, Paul seizes control of Arrakis’s spice (the most valued resource in the universe) and rejects the influence of the Bene Gesserit space-witches. The religious order had spent millennia matchmaking to create the Kwisatz Haderach, a figure they want to crown as emperor and then control, and with their long black robes and inscrutable plans for Paul, these women serve as secondary villains in the Dune films. In Prophecy, they take on the role of antihero-ish protagonists, with the series sketching out their beginnings and first maneuverings to acquire power in the Imperium.
Dune: Prophecy is set at a pivotal moment in the history of the franchise, when humans rose up against the thinking machines who enslaved them and established various orders to specialize in the tasks the computers once handled. The Bene Gesserit become essential to the universe in the shadow of that rebellion, but rather than depict how thoroughly this revolution changed reality for the remaining humans, Dune: Prophecy settles for a more Game of Thrones-lite approach, where all disputes are really about surface-level politics (with some supernatural sandworm-related stuff as window dressing) and every so often there’s a sex scene to spice things up. (Literally, there’s a lot of casual spice drug use in this series.)