Obviously, Raquella kept the use of the computer secret and shared it with very few people, including Valya. As a result, Valya has privileged information about her predecessor’s plans, which helps fuel the fanaticism she shows in Dune: Prophecy.
Where Is Arrakis? What Is Salusa Secundus?
As even a novice nerd will tell you, “Dune” isn’t the name of the planet in Dune, not really. The desert planet that contains spice is actually called Arrakis. Still, every entry in the franchise has the name “Dune” in the title, so it stands to reason that Arrakis would figure heavily in each, including Dune: Prophecy.
Arrakis does get a mention in “The Hidden Hand,” when Duke Ferdinand Richese (Brendan Cowell) makes his play for control of the planet’s spice reserve. But because the Guild Navigators, the people who use precognitive abilities from spice to chart courses across deep space, are still relatively new, Arrakis isn’t quite the political hotbed it will eventually become.
Instead, most of Prophecy takes place on Salusa Secundus. Where Arrakis and Paul Atreides’s first home Caladan adhere to the old sci-fi trope of one climate per planet, Salusa Secundus looks a lot like Earth in Prophecy. That’s particularly surprising to those who recall the depiction of the planet in the first Dune. We see Salusa when Baron Harkonnen (Stellan Skarsgård) dispatches his mentat Piter De Vries (David Dastmalchian) to retrieve the Emperor’s super warriors called the Sardaukar. In that movie, Salusa appears gray and rainy.
That’s where the time difference between Prophecy and Dune comes into play. Prophecy takes place 10,000 years after our time, when humanity has spread across the galaxy in an event called the Scattering. Because of it mirrors Earth, and was the home of the previous ruling system called the League of Nobles, the Emperor’s House Corrino is seated in Salusa Secundus.
But like every ruler in Herbert’s world, the Corrinos make massive mistakes with huge costs. Sometime around the reign of Emperor Javicco Corrino (Mark Strong) in Prophecy, an atomic weapons attack destroys the environment of Salusa Secundus, turning it into the hellscape we see in Dune. Javicco’s successor Hassik III moves the Corrino seat to a planet called Kaitain and turns Salusa Secundus into a prison planet. In this increasingly harsh environment, Salusa Secundus becomes the ideal ground to breed the remorseless Sardaukar.
