Dune: Prophecy ended its first season with an epic, 80-minute episode that didn’t exactly tie up any of its storylines, including its central mystery about who or what is using forbidden technology to create bio-weapons on Arrakis. So it’s good that the HBO series, a prequel set 10,000 years before the Denis Villeneuve films, will be returning in the future.
At a press conference timed to the season one finale, “The High-Handed Enemy,” Dune: Prophecy’s showrunner and executive producer Alison Schapker, along with stars Emily Watson (Valya Harkonnen) and Olivia Williams (Tula Harkonnen), mostly talked about season one—but they did tease a tiny bit about what’s coming.
Speaking about how the series paced itself across six episodes, considering its scope and number of characters, Schapker said the team stuck to one guiding rule: “to give each episode its own identity.”
But at the same time, she added, it was important to “feel like things had changed and that the characters had undergone something that had shifted the story going forward. And it was very important to always understand Valya’s through line and Desmond’s story and Tula’s story. I would say they were our main characters. But it was then a matter of trying to introduce everyone—and it’s a big world and it’s a dense world. So it was a bit of a balancing act. But I’m really pleased with how the six episodes build and culminate in the finale.”
As for where she wanted to leave things at the end of season one, Schapker said, “I wanted to feel like the ground had really shifted beneath their feet by the end of the season, but at the same time that we would have revelations that would make us understand these characters and their dynamics differently, and that there would be a kind of re-contextualizing of the story. So that by the time you had watched the whole story, you would understand, ‘Oh, there was more going on than I first realized’, which I think is in keeping with kind of the way that the Sisterhood works—the sense that there’s plans within plans, that there’s more to the story than you see the first time around. By the end of season one, I think you have a real sense of the history of [the Harkonnen] sisters, the history of the Sisterhood, and then a real revelation, a truth coming out. And that was important to me, that fundamental shift in the dynamics.”
Asked about the state of mind of their characters at the end of season one, both Watson and Williams were reflective.
“I think everything [has changed between them],” Watson said. “But I think Valya is still holding on to [her idea that] ‘I am the chosen one. I have a destiny.’ [That’s still] her guide through this. But I’d be very curious to know what happens next.”
Added Williams, “I think the huge thing for Tula it’s the moment when [she says] ‘Please don’t kill my son. Trust me, I’ve got this.’ And the fact that [Valya] does trust me and [leaves her with Desmond], little knowing that shortly afterwards my son has me arrested—[it’s] that moment between the sisters where finally Tula is entrusted with something, when all these years she’s known that she is highly capable and highly effective and has been treated as the lesser sister. Sometimes people of that character like to stay in the shadows, and it will be interesting to see what happens if she is pushed farther to the front and whether she can handle it.”
Schapker built on that. “I love that idea of what you’re saying: in some ways the sisters exchange [places] in the sense of Valya does retreat to the shadows, and Tula is suddenly out front in the capital, and what that’s going to mean to them going forward,” she said. “But I also think like any secret that comes out, the longer you keep it, the pain around it needs to be metabolized … it makes you have to rethink your relationship going back over the years of like, how did I miss something?”
Watson added, “I think it’s also a humiliating moment because everything [my character has] done has been based on my leadership, my sense of truth. But in a way, Valya doesn’t do humiliation. It’s like ‘I’m not going to do the emotions and I’m fearless, so I’m just going to carry on.’”
Asked probably the biggest question remaining after season one—who was behind Desmond’s transformation?—Schapker remained vague on any potential season two spoilers. “[If you] look back over season one, there are clues to Desmond’s identity and his power and kind of where it all comes from,” she said. “As far as sort of shadowy figures [seen controlling his fate in his visions], I think that remains to be seen in the future. But, we try to seed it in—I don’t know if people notice, but the cloth he’s carrying the first time we see him, when Desmond Hart appears and salutes and walks up to the palace, he’s got this black cloth. That is really his sort of token of his mother, and [it reappears] through the whole series. He uses it in private moments as a [way to keep] alive sort of his drive and his connection. Finally he meets her and is clutching her actual dress, and realizing kind of what once was a piece of his baby blanket that she swaddled him in [is[ Sisterhood cloth that he’s held on to. And now he’s finally with his mother. I mean, we tried to do things like that to kind of build in and foreshadow where the story was going.”
Ok, but what about the second biggest question: what’s going to happen now that Valya Harkonnen, Keiran Atreides, and Princess Ynez are on Arrakis? Here’s Schapker with, as expected, some hints but not many details.
“After a season of Arrakis kind of exerting its pull from afar—whether that’s in the economics of the spice trade, or the psychological aspects of the visions and nightmares that are sort of imagery of Arrakis and Desmond’s path seeping into everyone’s consciousness—[it was our chance] to actually go and put boots on the ground at this incredibly overdetermined and sort of almost mythic Dune space that we know very well but we sort of kept it a distance the whole season. I think it’s very significant that Valya is back there, and she’s back at the origin point of Desmond, where he emerged from with a story and a myth: ‘I’m from Arrakis and I was swallowed by a worm aAnd I survived after my whole regiment was killed.’ All I would say is I think Valya is going to find out a lot more given that she is where Desmond emerged as an adversary, and it’ll be interesting to see what she finds out there.”
Indeed it will! You can watch Dune: Prophecy season one on HBO and Max; season two is coming but does not yet have a release date.
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