Season 1, Episode 2: ‘Two Wolves’
Desmond Hart is an anomaly. He is alive after a sandworm attack that should have left him in the belly of the beast. He knows of the Sisterhood’s secret plan to play puppet master with the universe’s rulers as their marionettes. He can burn people to death using only his mind, apparently from light years away. He can resist the Voice, with which Mother Superior Valya Harkonnen has subdued even other powerful members of her own Sisterhood.
He has no compunction about consigning a child to an agonizing death, or about torturing that child’s father for displaying insolence toward the emperor he serves. He’s a scary dude.
He also has a point.
There’s no question where “Dune: Prophecy” wants your sympathies to lie regarding this guy; burning a little boy to death won’t win you many fans. However, in its second episode, the show reveals that Mother Valya is playing a game in which, up until recently, she was the only real player on the field. By installing her Truthsayers throughout the Imperium, she has managed to manipulate not only the emperor and his aristocratic frenemy, Duke Richese, but also the rebel forces responsible for taking down spice harvesters on Arrakis and infiltrating the imperial palace. When the rebel cell has outgrown its usefulness, she has no problem ordering its exposure and destruction. It’s all for the greater good, after all.
The same is true of the orders she gives back at the Sisterhood’s home base. To her sister Tula’s dismay, Valya orders that Tula’s star pupil, Lila (Chloe Lea), undergo “the Agony.” This portentously named process, a version of which is undergone by Paul Atreides and his mother, Lady Jessica, in the “Dune” films, involves ingesting a poison with no antidote. With proper command of the body on a cellular level, an acolyte can break the poison down, unlocking her “genetic memory” — the collected knowledge and wisdom of all her maternal forebears — and becoming a Reverend Mother in the process.
Why Lila? A powerful empath, she is secretly the great-great-granddaughter of Mother Raquella, the Sisterhood’s founder and the first woman to (involuntarily) undergo this process. If Lila is able to contact Raquella within her own mind, Valya believes that they can learn more about their founder’s prophecy concerning “the Reckoning” and “the Burning Truth.”
But training for the Agony usually takes many years, and this is a rush job, precipitated by the coming of Desmond Hart and the monkey wrench he has thrown into the Sisterhood’s plans.
Trapped by the poison within the darkness of her mind, Lila is surrounded by the shrouded, mummy-like forms of her ancestors. Raquella surfaces, her face a (frankly not-so-great-looking) C.G.I. swirl, proclaiming through Lila that “The key to the Reckoning is one born twice, once in blood, once in spice.” Sounds like our boy Desmond to me!
Unfortunately, Raquella isn’t the only person waiting in there. Dorotea, Lila’s grandmother, seizes the opportunity to take revenge against Valya, who killed her and prevented her from destroying the Sisterhood’s genetic database. She seizes Lila’s astral form and effectively feeds it to the “wild, hungry” genetic ghosts of the girl’s foremothers, killing her in the real world as well as in the spiritual plane.
All of this — well, all of this that doesn’t take place in a supernatural limbo — unfolds right in front of the Sisterhood’s other acolytes, who have gathered to watch the ritual. Lila’s friend Emeline (Aoife Hinds), a religiously devoted young woman who comes from a line of war heroes, sees martyrdom on behalf of human life as the highest calling. Jen (Faoileann Cunningham), a big-eyed, smart-mouthed independent thinker, feels Valya and Tula are just using Lila; they care about the Sisterhood, not the sisters it comprises, she argues.
Lila’s third close friend, Theodosia (Jade Anouka), is off-world. She is serving as the personal attaché to Mother Valya on her trip to the imperial capital, where her job will be to become the confidante of Valya’s prize trainee, Princess Ynez. Theodosia seems like the most emotionally stable of the three students, but she hints at some kind of secret or condition that makes her presence on the mission a risk.
For her part, Ynez is struggling to shake the image of the burned corpse of poor little Pruwet Richese, her child fiancé. In the chaos that follows, her plans to move into the Sisterhood’s academy are put on hold. This means she needs to call off her fling with her swordmaster, Keiran Atreides, lest things get too complicated with her remaining in the capital. It’s just as well since Kieran is a rebel spy and Valya is apt to out him in order to protect her own interests — not to mention further the Harkkonen grudge against the Atreides family.
Which brings us back to Desmond and his confrontation with Valya. Despite having spent several days suspended in midair in one of the palace’s sci-fi prison cells, he has no problem telling Valya his plan right to her face: He is going to wipe out every trace of the Sisterhood and its influence. And after all we’ve learned … well, can you blame a guy for trying?
Clearly Valya and Tula never counted on such a figure — nor on Empress Natalya to so forcibly press for his use as a weapon on behalf of her ineffectual husband, Emperor Javicco Corrino. At one point Valya says the emperor’s weakness has gone from boon to liability for the Sisterhood, and it’s easy to see how: Every single person in his court runs circles around him.
Javicco’s own bastard son, Constantine, gives up the goods on Desmond while in the middle of a lengthy sex scene with Duke Richese’s daughter, Lady Shannon (Tessa Bonham Jones), which unfolds languorously in an immense and ornately decorated hollow tree trunk. Detractors might call this kind of eroticized info-dump “sexposition,” a term frequently lobbed at “Game of Thrones.” It’s this critic’s opinion that if you have to get an earful about intergalactic politics, you may as well get it from good-looking naked people.
The bottom line is that the emperor needs a man, if indeed he is a man, like Desmond. He needs someone who can fulfill his darkest requests without being asked, who can cow his rivals with just a bug-eyed stare. He needs someone who can replace the meddling Sisterhood, which is secretly the reason for all his problems.
What he doesn’t need is someone charismatic and powerful enough simply to replace Valya as the person who is pulling his imperial strings. The way things stand now, Desmond is Rasputin with the powers of Professor Charles Xavier from the X-Men. If such a figure had actually existed, the Russian Revolution may have gone very differently, to the chagrin of Romanov and Bolshevik alike.
The spice must flow
At this point it’s unclear how Desmond got his incredible powers. Were they a gift from shai hulud, the deific name given the sandworms by their planet’s native people, the Fremen? The worms’ life cycle is the source of the spice, and certainly inhaling a ton of the stuff has been show to awaken latent psychic powers — as it does with Paul Atreides millenniums later.
Perhaps Desmond is a sort of anti-Paul, the exact kind of male “sister” the Bene Gesserit spend several thousand years trying to either mold and control or avoid and destroy. Who knows? Maybe Desmond is where they get the idea to begin with.
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