Praise Shai-Hulud, Dune: Prophecy is getting Dune-ier. In the second episode of HBO’s dive into Frank Herbert’s sci-fi universe, the plot gets thicker and the lore gets thornier. There are snakes in the garden, skeletons in the closet, and a man with mystical mind fire powers. The politics and the characters both got trickier, and some Dune fundamentals came to the forefront. I’m here to explain the weirder parts of the weirdness so you can focus on who wants to kill or sleep with whom.
In the premiere, we were introduced to the Imperial House Corrino on planet Salusa Secundus and the Bene Gesserit sisterhood (the psychic space nuns) on planet Wallach IX. Both groups are pushing for a big fancy wedding between the Princess Ynez ( Sarah-Sofie Boussnina) and child-groom Pruwet Richese, heir to a mighty military family. But the plans hit a snag when mysterious soldier Desmond Hart from the planet Arrakis (also known as “Dune”! Like the title!) shows up, pledges his loyalty to the emperor, and, uh, burns the kid from the inside out with his mind.
So the wedding isn’t exactly a hit. Space Rasputin (Hart) also seems to have killed Kasha, the Emperor’s Bene Gesserit advisor, while she was planets away, making his pyrokinetic powers all the more baffling. That’s where episode 2 picks up, with the Mother Superior of the Bene Gesserit, Valya Harkonnen (played by Emily Watson) flying to the Imperial homeworld to figure out what the hell is going on. All the politicians are in the same boat, rushing to find out who killed Pruwet, how, and why.
Once again, the action is set in two separate worlds, Salusa Secundus and Wallach IX. At the risk of oversimplifying, you can think of the former as the politics and the latter as the sci-fi shenanigans. While the events on Salusa Secundus were more complicated and action-packed this episode, the events on Wallach IX were, for my Big Dune Guy Bucks, more important, and probably more confusing to Herbert novices. Let’s break it down.
The imperial homeworld is all about palace intrigue. Right off the bat, Space Rasputin admits to Emperor Corrino that he killed the Richese boy, just because the Emperor was giving off a vibe that he didn’t like the marriage. The Emperor promptly throws him in a “suspensor cell” (one of the cooler sci-fi touches in the show), and the show’s power players (the Corrinos, Valya Harkonnen, Duke Richese) spend the rest of the episode trying to figure out what to do with him. The Richese family wants justice, the Mother Superior sees Hart’s power as a potential threat and wants him eliminated, and the Empress wants to harness his power for herself.
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