Dune: Prophecy, Episode 6 Review

What the heck. That was a lot of action for one episode! This finale felt like a whirlwind; every scene added to my anxiety levels, and it kept getting worse.

Desmond's burning ability explained

Finally, the moment we've all been waiting for. We finally figure out exactly what Desmond Hart's burning ability is. At the beginning of the episode, Tula and the Suk Sister Nazir agree that a virus killed Kasha and that the virus is a bioweapon that makes the body attack itself. Tula remarks that Kasha was a master of Prana-Bindu and that she had the unique ability to live through fear, which is probably why she survived for so long while the victims at the Landsraad perished instantly. They hypothesize that since this is a contagion that becomes active in the body before it kills, they should be able to synthesize an antiviral to fight it through the same method that they survive the Spice Agony poison. Nazir undergoes the process of identifying the virus, and just as it seems she has found a way to fight it, the virus replicates and starts to burn Nazir from the inside. In the midst of fighting the virus, she screams a few ominous clues at Tula: "I see it. The monster of Arrakis. Eyes. I see them. They're watching him. It's not human." Nazir eventually succumbs to the burning virus, and Tula goes to Anirul to figure out what this virus could be. Tula's exchange with Anirul is remarkably informative and straightforward:

"Anirul, Sister Nazir detected something inhuman. Something that grew stronger the harder she fought it."
"You're talking about a thinking machine on a nanoscale?"
"Yes, a viral technology that lies dormant in our cells that has been engineered to kill on command."

I mean, was it really that easy for Anirul to figure out based on the clues Tula gave her? And how did Tula figure out that this virus was a technology "engineered to kill on command"? Tula's very simplistic way of coming to understand this virus seems a bit like cheating the plot to me.

One of the last scenes is Valya's confrontation with Desmond Hart, in which she brings about his burning ability on herself by saying, "Desmond Hart, you say you've seen my end. Show me." Upon Desmond inflicting his burning attack on Valya, we see that she is experiencing a hallucination of her fears. In her vision, she sees her brother Griffin accusing her of killing him and their entire family. Luckily, Tula arrives just in time to coach her through the viral attack, telling her that she cannot fight this battle with strength. And that she has to let go of her fear, to let it pass through her. Possible allusion to the Litany Against Fear? Once Valya starts to embrace her fear, she sees the same sandworm coming towards her that crushed Desmond. The sandworm crushes her in the vision and the screen turns black, then the eyes appear. Those two blue eyes that had been haunting everyone's nightmares are revealed to be some type of surgical thinking machine that equipped Desmond Hart's right eyeball with some robot technology. Through this vision, Valya sees for herself that someone had taken Desmond Hart captive and used this thinking machine robot to turn him into a weapon. Exactly how she saw this vision after surviving the burning virus is unclear... Maybe after she survived the burning virus there was a glitch in the technology that let her see the origin of it. I have no idea; maybe this is just a plot hole that could be covered up by saying Valya used prescience.

Anyway, the big reveal is that there is another player grasping for power in the Imperium, and they turned Desmond Hart into a bioweapon to try and advance their cause. It's unclear as to who exactly this hidden player is; they obviously have thinking machine technology hidden from the rest of the Imperium. From the blurry flashback of Desmond's eye surgery, they appear to be wearing a big robe against a bright, sunny background. Yeah, could be anyone. I'm moderately satisfied with this explanation for Desmond's powers. From the beginning of the season, I theorized that he was some sort of cyborg, and whatever technology he had was what gave him the ability to burn people alive. That being said, however, I don't completely grasp the mechanics of this "virus technology." Anirul said that the virus was made up of thinking machines on a nanoscale, but Tula said in response that the viral technology lay dormant in human cells. I see two possible explanations for the virus being a piece of bioweapon technology.

1. Whoever is using Desmond as a weapon realizes that there are small nanobots present in the modern human population (similar to the way that microplastics are currently accumulating in modern humans). They then found a way to hack these nanobots and trigger the active burning response that we see.

2. Or, they found a way to infect everyone with a nanobot they created and are using Desmond Hart to trigger the active response in people through a technological signal mechanism (like Bluetooth, except Desmond Hart is the phone and those little nanobots are the Bluetooth device).

These are just my theories, they are obviously a little half-baked so I'm hoping we'll get a thorough explanation of this virus technology in season 2.

The Emperor is dead!

Emperor Javicco dying at the end of season 1 completely blindsided me and added to the internal sense of dread I felt watching this finale. With the way things were going for him in this episode (not well), I'm not surprised that they killed his character off, but I was surprised that they had him commit suicide. I mean, if I was the Emperor of the entire known universe and things weren't going my way, killing myself would seem like the easy way out. With all the power of the Imperial House at his disposal, there was surely something he could've done about his treacherous wife plotting with Desmond Hart. Although I guess this was the writer's way of showing what a weak-minded man he was, which Mark Strong acted out brilliantly.

RIP Francesca and Theo

However, the Emperor's death was not the only death in this episode. Sadly, we lost Mother Francesca, who was pricked by her very own gom jabbar by the Empress while she was distracted by Javicco's suicide. This scene made me gasp! I think this is the first portrayal of a Gom Jabbar death within the 2020 reboots of Dune, correct me if I'm wrong. In this episode, we also find out that the Gom Jabbars are tipped with meta-cyanide, fast-acting stuff evident from the swiftness of Francesca's death.

Towards the end of the episode, after Valya releases Ynez and Kieran from suspensor jail, she leaves Theodosia to take the place of Ynez. With her Face Dancer ability, Theodosia transforms into an identical copy of Ynez and surveys the scene of the prison break. Before Desmond Hart and the other troops arrive to respond to the prison break, Theodosia transforms herself into one of the fallen soldiers and takes his place, where she pretends to be dying on the floor. When Desmond Hart arrives, she lures him into getting closer to her and stabs him in the stomach before he kills her. The only part of this scene that I liked was that after she dies, she slowly transforms back into her true Face Dancer appearance, which is bald and sexless. Besides that, I was hugely disappointed that they killed yet another woman of color. One of the aspects that made me so excited about this show was seeing all the different women of color in the trailers. I thought it was awesome that we would be able to see a Korean and an Indian Reverend Mother. Imagine my surprise when they killed off Reverend Mother Kasha in the first episode, and now Reverend Mother Francesca and Theodosia as well?! With the way things are going back home on Wallach IX, I imagine Lila and Emmeline won't last long into the second season either. So, while I was saddened by Francesca's and Theodosia's deaths, I was not surprised.

Lila/Dorotea's Uprising

Things certainly are not looking good on Wallach IX! It looks to me as though Lila has gone full Abomination and succumbed to Dorotea's ego. (To make things easier, I will still just refer to her as Lila.) As soon as Lila started asking Jen to loosen her restraints, my heart dropped because I knew what was about to happen next. Of course, Lila escapes from her holding room and, with Tula gone, has the freedom to roam about the school. I thought it was quite funny when she stumbled upon Emmeline's prayer circle and asked them what they were doing, "cloaked in silence and chattering in secrecy," how ironic. It starts to go downhill when Lila asks Emmeline where all her fellow sisters/followers have gone. Once Lila realizes that her followers have "disbanded," she gathers the whole of the sisterhood and exposes the truth. That her followers were killed by Valya and co., who then threw their remains at the bottom of the pond. While this scene was neat, I couldn't help but think I may have uncovered a possible plot hole.

If Lila had to ask Emmeline where her followers were, how could she possibly have known they were at the bottom of the pond?

I mean, it's not like that pond suspiciously appeared after Dorotea's murder, and it seems to be unchanged from that time as well. If I had just been reawakened into consciousness, which is what happened to Dorotea, I wouldn't become suddenly suspicious of a pond, which I saw every day until my murder. So how could Lila possibly know that the bodies of her followers were at the bottom of the pond? And another thing, Valya and her co-conspirators killed Dorotea's followers in cold blood to secure their grasp on power. It doesn't make sense that they would so carelessly dispose of their bodies in such an easy place to find. Why wouldn't they cremate them and scatter the ashes? Or, at the very least, move their bodies outside of school grounds. Whatever, I don't know what the explanation for Lila's knowledge of the bodies in the pond could be, so I'll just write it off as a plot hole.

Tula and Valya

Can I just say, what a brilliant performance from Emma Canning, who portrays young Tula. In the scene where Valya explains to her that Anirul has foreseen how much potential her baby will have, the love she has in her eyes for her baby is palpable. Emma Canning did a wonderful job of portraying how quickly that love turned into fear when Tula realized that Valya would soon sink her claws into her unborn baby. The scene where Tula decides to give up her baby in order for him to be free is truly devastating but brilliantly acted out by Canning as well as Charithra Chandran, who plays young Francesca. It was quite interesting to juxtapose this scene, where Tula is so clearly heartbroken to have to give up her son for his own good, with the scene from the previous episode in which Desmond curses his mother as a heartless Bene Gesserit witch, who didn't even care about her own son and gave him away. One of the final scenes of this episode is where all these conflicts come together. Valya, who is intent on killing Desmond, is stopped by Tula who uses the Voice on her. Tula confesses and says, "I've given you everything, sister. But I couldn't give you him." Valya is obviously bewildered by this and asks Tula if she thinks she is a monster. And finally, the confrontation we've all been waiting for, Tula says to Valya:

"All the carnage, deception, all by your orders. But your hold on the Sisterhood wasn't fixed. I could've broken it at any time. Why didn't I? Because we're the same you and I. Two wolves born to feed with no care for the cost. If my son had the potential that Anirul promised, he deserved a better fate than us."

....Whaaaaaat? The beginning of Tula's tirade had me very excited, but the ending left me confused and disappointed. Yeah, I guess it was cool that Tula made a callback to what their mother said about Valya, that she was a wolf born to feed with no care for the cost. But to also call herself a wolf is where she lost me. From what I've seen of Tula in the show, I don't think she's even remotely close to being as power-hungry and, dare I say, EVIL as Valya. I was really disappointed with the end of her speech because saying that the two of them are both power-hungry wolves took away the power from her first few words. I expected her to unapologetically call out Valya and tell her straight-up that the reason she gave her son away was so he could escape Valya's iron fist. I hope we'll see the ramifications of Tula's words next season if Valya takes time to reflect on them.

Until next time!

This was an excellent first season, and I am so thankful to HBO for producing it. This series gave us a wonderful look into the Dune universe before the Atreides were even established as a House, and I'm sure it brought many Dune fans into the fold as well. Thankfully, HBO has approved Dune: Prophecy for a second season, though there's no information regarding a release date yet. Although I started this blog with the intent to analyze the lore from the Dune books, I had a moderate amount of fun reviewing this series. Honestly, I am happy that this series was only six episodes because releasing timely reviews of each episode was something I obviously struggled with. With that being said, I am very excited to return to my normal content of analyzing the books. In my next blog posts, I hope to write about the cuisine of the Dune universe and a broad overview of the Weirding Way (as per subscriber request). If you would like to read about anything specific, please submit a topic at the bottom of the home page :)

Dutifully yours,
Mother Superior