Prophecy wants to be the next Game of Thrones. Good luck.

When Denis Villeneuve made the first one Dune film without guarantee for a second, he risked not only telling part of the story. He risked telling the wrong person. In its entirety is Dune cycle is a story about a cult of personality run amok, but at the end of Dune: Part Onewe are left with the image of Timothée Chalamet’s Paul Atreides as an ascending savior, with a slight hint of the totalitarian excesses to come. It’s as if a film about the rise of Nazi Germany cut in the mid-1930s depicts Hitler as a charismatic leader who brought pride and stability to an oppressed country – and if that seems too extreme a comparison, it’s not for Paul Atreides, who, i Dune Messiah, do it yourself.

IN Dune: ProphecyThe HBO series is set a century after the end of humanity’s war against “thinking machines”, the birth of Paul Atreides is still several millennia away, but the sisterhood of the Bene Gesserit is already laying the groundwork for his ascension, gathering the genetic data and formulating the schemes that will allow them to breed and control the future rulers of the universe. Given that the Order is led by Valya Harkonnen (Emily Watson), whose family is a mortal enemy of House Atreides, the long-term results of the plan are likely not what she envisions. Still, 10,000 years is a lot of time for things to go wrong and for intentions to be twisted beyond recognition.

But if Dune movie is about a noble rebellion gone wrong, nobody on Prophecy starting with such lofty ideals. Valya and her sister Tula (Olivia Williams), who runs the sisterhood alongside her without being quite her equal, may talk about securing the future of their order, but it’s clear that the only real preservation they have in mind is their own. In a flashback that opens the series, a young Valya, played by Jessica Barden, forces her rival for the role of Mother Superior of the Order to cut her own throat using the guttural, hypnotic voice that, at this point in the galaxy’s history, she is the only one in command. Self-aware technology may be forbidden, but the Bene Gesserit remapping project is too valuable to discard, and there’s no rule Valya won’t break and no life she won’t sacrifice if it helps return the disgraced Harkonnens to a position of power .

Unfortunately for the universe, the opposition to the quasi-religious extremism of the Bene Gesserit is just another form of zealotry. On the planet Salusa Secundus, Emperor Javicco Corrino (Mark Strong) is preparing the wedding of his daughter, Ynez (Sarah-Sofie Boussnina), to the nine-year-old son of a vital military ally, Duke Ferdinand Richese (Brendan Cowell). ). But these plans, which include the Emperor gaining control of a fleet of warships needed to maintain power on the vital mining planet of Arrakis, are thrown into disarray by the arrival of Desmond Hart (Travis Fimmel), a veteran soldier whose close encounter with one of Arrakis’ giant sandworms has left him with a mysterious sense of purpose and the power to burn people alive with his thoughts. (It’s both as terrifying and as gross as you might imagine.) Transformed and traumatized by his death breath, Desmond is as wild-eyed as Valya is stoic, but no less ruthless, in either his devotion to the Emperor or his hatred of “thinking machines”.

Dune: Prophecy hit several road bumps on its way to the screen, among them losing Diane Ademu-John, who wrote the series’ first episode, as co-showrunner (Alison Schapker is now in charge) and ditching the girl-coded subtitle The sisterhood. While still largely a series about palace intrigue and space nuns, it seems clear that somewhere along the way the order was given to make the series more of both Game of Thrones (understandable) and Westworld (less so), especially in a hilarious scene where the princess’s fight instructor extracts information from Duke Richese’s daughter while the two flop around naked inside what looks like a hollow tree. At the same time, Prophecy had a paltry six-episode run, which, from the four provided up front, is far too little room for the kind of expansive ensemble drama the show seems to be aiming for. The first episode spends several scenes individualizing the young women of the sisterhood as if they will be characters in their own right, only to essentially sideline them as the plot collapses around the conflict between Valya and Desmond. There are hints of a larger, presumably multi-season story, most of them involving the mysterious visions that increasingly plague characters both major and minor, but they feel more like Lost‘s four-toed statues than pieces of a predetermined puzzle, designed to create a sense of mystery without advancing toward any firm revelation.

That sense of stasis envelops Dune: Prophecy as a whole. By focusing solely on the competing power centers, the show’s writers have neglected to include any of the ordinary people whose lives might be affected by all this scheming and skullduggery, which also makes the consequences seem far less important. When both sides desire power for its own sake, what does it matter who wears a black robe and which a gunslinger’s duster? Does the fact that Valya and Tula deliver icy zingers in clipped English accents mean—that they are, as Watson puts it, “badass” – nullify the fact that their plans ultimately lead to a genocide of truly galactic proportions? (A review of the show ended with “Long may the Bene Gesserit rule.”) Maybe Dune: Prophecy will last enough seasons that the worm will eventually turn, so to speak. But until that happens, we’ll be rooting for the wrong side, whichever we are select.