Emily Watson in HBO’s Epic Sci-Fi Prequel

When it premieres on HBO on Sunday, Nov. 17. Dune: Prophecy will take its place The penguin on the schedule. It will also continue the premium cable giant’s recent run of strange corporate integrations, taking blockbuster Warner Bros. film franchises and retrofitting them as new television versions of popular HBO series.

Just like the creative team behind it The penguin saw the opportunity to make a stand-alone show focusing on Colin Farrell’s waddling crime lord and delivered The sopranos with more latex, the developers of Dune: Prophecy apparently looked at the possibility of making a prequel attached to Denis Villeneuve’s Dune and delivered House of the Dragon with (very few) sandworms instead of (horribly many) dragons.

I’m not saying that when HBO’s Harry Potter series finally comes out of its endless gestation, it will be a stealth reboot of Arli$$. But I’m not saying that.

Excessive familiarity aside, The penguin wasn’t bad, with Cristin Milioti’s performance serving as the primary draw. Nothing in Dune: Prophecy rises to a miliotic (trademark pending) level of greatness, and the show falls short of most of what is so technically astonishing about the Villeneuve films. But as an overwrought meditation on the struggles for female agency in a patriarchal society—one where names like “Harkonnen” and “Atreides” are occasionally tossed around to pander to an imagined base—it offers moments of beautifully produced, morally murky scheme and backstitching.

Edited by Diane Ademu-John and Alison Schapker, Dune: Prophecy is apparently an elaborate origin story for the Bene Gesserit, the franchise’s influential sisterhood, although it is only loosely based on the novel Sisterhood of Dune. The general groundwork is exhaustively set with about four minutes of voiceover from Valya Harkonnen (Emily Watson, plus Jessica Barden in frequent flashbacks), whose goal is to use the power of sisterhood—and the power of sisterhood, as you may recall, members of the Bene Gesserit are in able to do a lot of supernatural things – to gain some degree of galactic control and to help restore her family’s good name.

It’s established in these opening minutes that Valya did a very bad thing, and as she admits, “I knew then that the name Valya Harkonnen would forever be condemned to the wrong side of history.” But was the bad done for good reasons? Or is there not a good reason to do ambitious things in the name of power? And is it perceived differently when women do those things instead of men? Good questions!

Valya’s most trusted sidekick is her sister Tula (Olivia Williams, plus Emma Canning as a younger woman). They oversee a whole school of novices or acolytes or whatever, from whose ranks we meet a few, including martyrdom-obsessed Sister Emeline (Aoife Hinds), anti-authoritarian Sister Jen (Faoileann Cunningham), secretly gifted Sister Theodosia (Jade Anouka) and youthful sister Lila (Chloe Lea), who is perhaps the most notable of all.

The Sisterhood is about to add some status in the form of Emperor Javicco Corrino’s (Mark Strong) daughter, Princess Ynez (Sarah-Sofie Boussnina), who hopes to dabble in Truthsaying—the Sisterhood’s original primary ability is that they are trained to be human lie detectors – while she waits for her arranged husband to come of age. But things are about to turn sour at the royal palace, with the arrival of soldier Desmond Hart (Travis Fimmel), the sole survivor of a spice harvest disaster down on Arrakis.

What follows is something of a game of thrones, as the Emperor, the Sisterhood, several ancient families, and the enigmatic Desmond all begin to make moves in hopes of controlling the Empire and the flow of spices. Because as Posh, Ginger, Sporty, Baby and Scary – the Bene Gesserit of ’90s pop music – once sang, “People of the world, spice up your life!”

There is a very real sense that someone cut and pasted lines of dialogue from one Game of Thrones template script and just added the word “spice” at random intervals like, “We’re all just pieces on the board to be played in the pursuit of power and spice” or “Ho-spice-dor.”

The story takes place around 10,148 years before the birth of Paul Atreides – a far wider gap than in similar current prequel series such as House of the Dragon or Amazon’s The Lord of the Rings thing – and it’s mostly set on non-Arrakis planets, so don’t expect many direct connections to the Villeneuve films. Which factions will rise to power many millennia later is not very relevant here, but the drama underscores the core characteristics of its famous families as they play games with each other’s lives, forge tenuous alliances, perform heartbreaking betrayals, and engage in schemes and counter- schemes, all imbued with a moral ambiguity that frankly leaves the entire series a thematic mess.

I get “ambition is dangerous” and “absolute power corrupts absolutely” and “religious zeal is scary.” But any takeaway that might make the narrative more current, like the threat of powerful women in a post-Kamala universe or the encroaching dangers of artificial intelligence, tends to be self-contradictory.

Still, this is clearly a chance for some world-building that Villeneuve’s features couldn’t approach despite a combined runtime of over five and a half hours. Dune: Prophecy is also not loopy in the maturity department. Each of the four episodes sent to critics exceeds an hour, which is too much, but is at least enough for a whole lot of context into the war with “thinking machines”, the political structure of the Empire and the origin of elements from later in the plot, just like The Voice.

The very real question of whether viewers actually want that whole context can be answered in the negative by those who enjoyed the films for the epic visuals achieved by Villeneuve and cinematographer Greig Fraser. While the first picture doesn’t want spectacle, the sequel in particular is as sprawling and comprehensive as any theatrical experience in decades.

Dune: Prophecy isn’t it. It is dark, gloomy and, despite the size of some of the palaces, citadels and whatnot, often claustrophobic. The films’ endless horizons and rolling dunes have been replaced with winding passages, confusing catacombs and smoky hookah dens. This is entirely deliberate and offers both aesthetic contrast within the storytelling and presumably a more manageable budget. But no matter how urban the design is, there’s a difference between “subduing” and “generally well-produced.”

And this isn’t just a movie versus TV thing. There is a gap between Pierre Gill and the company’s photography and the varied sets provided by production designer Tom Meyer i Dune: Prophecyand stuff like that Foundation or Silo on Apple TV+, representing the current peaks of the medium’s current cinematography, effects and scenography. On a practical level Dune: Prophecy directors, starting with Anna Foerster, are more invested in the contours of the actors’ faces than in what was set up on a soundstage in Budapest.

The double casting of Watson/Barden and Williams/Canning is the center of the show and all four actresses are excellent and impeccably on the same page in their characterizations. My favorite of the early installments was the flashback-heavy, really twisty third, with Barden and Canning in the spotlight. It was the only episode that contained anything that genuinely surprised me.

Among the familiar veteran actors, Strong is a wise choice to play an emperor who conveys the appearance of domineering authority but is pushed around this chessboard by his wife Natalya (Jodhi May) and possibly by Desmond, a role that lets Fimmel deliver his usual mix of movie star charisma and character actor quirkiness.

As long as the chapters are, there hasn’t been enough time so far for the younger actors to really stand out as individuals. Despite a useful exposition sequence where Valya and Tula look at pictures of each acolyte and discuss their pros and cons, very few of their personalities are really distinctive or consistent.

I spent most of my time scratching my head about what the show will tell us about Princess Ynez and whether or not Boussnina, who seems far older than the character is supposed to be, was simply miscast. She’s stuck in the least interesting side of the story with an extremely bland love interest, Keiran (Chris Mason), who would be completely forgettable if his last name wasn’t “Atreides”, and a dreamy half-brother, Constantine (Josh) Heuston), who contributes Game of Thrones-y discussion of legitimacy in royal bloodlines and becomes part of the season’s one extremely unmotivated and extremely Game of Throneshis sex scene so far.

Although part of a brand, Dune: Prophecy has plenty of elements to introduce, and the series is already a slow, sometimes lugubrious build. But I found myself becoming more and more invested as it went on. Maybe by the end of the first season, I’ll be hooked. Right now, though, everything could use a little more spice.