The end of Dune: Prophecy finds dramatic climaxes for its biggest storylines, but it also leaves almost everything open-ended. It’s a fitting stopping point, perhaps, for a story that takes place 10,000 years before the main Dune narrative—especially with that just-announced second season on the way.
Along with cliffhangers galore, however, it also gives us some emotional reunions, revelations, and a scenery-swallowing appearance by our old pal Shai-Hulud. Let’s dig into the 80-minute finale, “The High-Handed Enemy”!
We open on Tula in distress—not surprising, after last week’s big unveiling of who her baby grew up to be—then cut to another angle on the long-ago but still-reverberating confrontation between Valya and Dorotea. It’s something we’ve revisited in flashbacks and visions, but this time we’re seeing it from the point of view of Tula, Kasha, and Francesca, who fully witness Valya forcing Dorotea to cut her own throat.
The girls set about getting their cover-up stories straight, but Tula—who is by far the most horrified by what she’s just seen—runs from the room and vomits. When Valya chases after her, Tula tells her sister the news: she’s pregnant. Valya offers to help her raise the child, and says Tula doesn’t need to worry about that rule requiring Sisters to be separated from their babies. “When I’m Mother Superior we can do whatever we want,” she says, adding “Sisters above all.” Not Sisterhood. Sisters. Tula smiles through her tears and repeats it: “Sisters above all.”
In the present day, Tula and Nazir, the Sister who’s also a doctor (she came to Wallach IX to do Kasha’s autopsy, remember?), puzzle over the acolytes’ eerie drawings of their shared nightmares, and of Desmond Hart’s virus that has so far killed Kasha and others, including the rebels paraded before the crowd at the Landsraad. They realize that the reason it took Kasha a few days to die, and the rebels died almost instantly, is because she was uniquely skilled at repressing her sense of fear.
“Fear… that’s what it’s feeding off, this virus. It begins a chain reaction. The body attacks itself,” Nazir says. “It’s a bio-weapon.” What is not clear is who did this to Desmond. Who created this bio-weapon? Who made him the virus’ first victim?
That’s an ongoing mystery. But in the meantime, the women realize they can theoretically generate a cure for this virus, but it’ll be a dangerous process. Tula volunteers to be the guinea pig, but Nazir insists her medical training makes her better-equipped for the task. Unfortunately, mind over matter isn’t enough to keep the virus at bay and she succumbs to its agonizing effects—after gasping out that she can see “the monster of Arrakis” whose “eyes are watching him,” and though she can’t identify the monster, she knows “it’s not human.” Tula sobs in horror as Nazir dies.
In the palace, Desmond is at that very moment interrogating rebel sympathizer Keiran Atreides. But the threats, and the guards roughing him up, get nowhere: “I’ve got no love for the Sisterhood or the Harkonnens, but I hate you and everything your Emperor stands for,” Keiran says.
Keiran’s back in his suspension cell when Princess Ynez runs in, intent on breaking him out. Empress Natalya—Ynez’s own mother—stalks in and has her arrested. Harsh! Elsewhere in the palace, Francesca and Emperor Corrino are in bed together, and he asks her to stick around… permanently. In his mind, his wife would be totally cool with this arrangement. When Francesca hesitates, he asks her to request a meeting with the Mother Superior. Just then, a guard enters to tell the Emperor that Ynez has been arrested.
Francesca makes haste to tell Valya the news, first of Ynez and then of Corrino’s offer. In Valya’s mind, priority one is getting Ynez out of the clink; nothing else matters right now. “Corrino has forfeited his right to live out his reign in peace,” she says. Freeing Ynez will require making use of Theodosia’s special set of skills—and then swiftly getting Ynez, the future ruler of the Imperium, to a safe place until her coronation. Also, sorry Francesca, but Corrino’s gotta be removed from the picture entirely.
To that end, we return to the flashback in the wake of Dorotea’s “suicide.” Valya shows Tula, Francesca, and Kasha the thinking machine that’s overseeing the Sisterhood’s breeding program—two elements that, taken separately, are shocking and go against what most believe the order stands for. Combined, their very existence is almost unthinkable.
Valya asks the AI to come up with a combination of parents to produce the future ruler of the Imperium—a woman in the Sisterhood, in adherence with Valya’s interpretation of Raquella’s deathbed wishes. As we know it will, it comes up with Prince Corrino (not yet Emperor), and Natalya—and that’s how their not-very-happy marriage came to be. It’s in this room, as well, that Kasha’s ill-fated position as royal Truthsayer, and Francesca’s role as the Sister who sensually “imprints” on Corrino, are also set in motion.
This is how, Valya smugly declares, they’ll one day get a Sister on the throne. When Tula points out that Dorotea’s followers aren’t going to go for it, Valya asks to speak with her in private. Then, she shows her the AI’s predictions for Tula’s unborn child, a blend of Harkonnen and Atreides bloodlines. “Your child has incredible potential,” she says. “He could shape the trajectory of worlds! We can guide him together.” Tula’s face betrays that she’s already thinking it’s not the best idea to have Valya involved in raising her son.
In the present day, Tula is alone with the AI, and she asks it about Nazir’s detection of something “inhuman” in the virus. “You’re talking about a thinking machine on a nanoscale?”, the computer asks—and tells Tula the only way to stop the virus from doing further damage is to kill Desmond. Tula argues that he wasn’t born to be a weapon. He was made into one. She decides the only thing she can do at this point is go talk to him herself.
Tula’s departure from Wallach XI is supposed to be top-secret, but Emeline overhears two Sisters talking about it. In her room/cell/creepy hospital room, Lila awakens and is annoyed to find she’s in restraints. She puts on her best pitiful voice and asks Jen to loosen the straps, only to stab her with a syringe full of sedatives that someone really should’ve kept out of her reach.
In the palace, the Emperor is ripping into Desmond over Ynez’s arrest. Desmond’s like, “Your wife made me do it.” The Emperor comes back with “Well, I’m sending my wife on a ‘tour of goodwill,’” which is obviously another way of saying “getting her out of the way so I can hang out with Francesca.”
Desmond chuckles. He is well aware the Emperor is still being manipulated by the Sisterhood, even if the Emperor can’t see it for himself. But he is surprised to hear that Corrino has softened his stance. He’s no longer in favor of cutting the Sisterhood out completely. “You’re choosing their council over mine?” Desmond gasps.
On Wallach IX, Emeline is rallying her circle of fellow devout followers— “We must band together in faith!”—when a ghost appears. It looks like Lila, who everyone thought died a few episodes ago. But it’s not Lila, and it’s not Raquella either. She looks around and demands to see certain Sisters who aren’t present; Emeline, who’s up on her Sisterhood history, tells her their faction disbanded after Dorotea’s suicide. “Suicide? No,” Lila says, and that’s when we know: she’s now possessed by Dorotea, back from the dead to settle the score.
Emeline doesn’t know that, though, and she’s surprised to see Lila searching through the Sisterhood’s files. As it becomes clear the Sisterhood (aka Valya) has erased records of Dorotea’s followers, Jen bursts in and brings Emeline up to speed. They realize then that they are in the presence of Mother Dorotea, as incredible as it sounds.
At the palace, Valya figures the most efficient way to get into the suspension cell area where Ynez is being held is to get arrested herself. It’s time for a JAILBREAK! As Valya’s walking up to the palace—she was summoned by the Emperor, after all—Theo enters at another entrance, where Francesca takes her to a secure room where she can undergo her transformation. Francesca, meanwhile, has in her possession a needle coated in deadly poison that Valya has instructed her to use on the Emperor. It’s a tough ask, because she does have deep feelings for him. But, you know: “Sisterhood above all.”
The Emperor is in a terrible mood once his meeting with Valya rolls around. Just before, he’s realized that Natalya and Desmond are ganging up on him. There’ll be no sending the Empress on a “tour of goodwill.” Oh, no no no. She’s the new sheriff in town, and though Corrino may continue to pretend he’s in power, from here on out, Natalya and Desmond will be calling all the shots.
So he’s especially peeved to see Valya sitting on his throne when he enters the room. She’s deliberately provoking him—she’s trying to get arrested—though it has to be gratifying to hear him say she was right and that he never should have trusted Desmond. There’s no going back to the way things were, she says, calling him a “weak man” who’s easily puppeteered by others. Francesca doesn’t really love him; he was just a Sisterhood assignment for her. His time as Emperor was 100% engineered by the Sisterhood, and really he’s just a placeholder for the ruler they’ve been angling into position for decades: Ynez. In short, she tells him: “Your time is coming to an end.”
Of course after that truth bomb, flavored with some choice cutting insults, Valya is hauled off to the suspension cells. Success!
Back on Wallach IX, LilaDorotea has a truth bomb of her own. As Emeline and Jen watch in horror, she recalls her own death, then tells them, “The Harkonnen sisters have been lying to you about the history of this place.” Turns out we only know part of the story, as LilaDorotea yanks a lever that drains the murky pool in the middle of the Sisters’ main courtyard.
We go to a flashback. It seems that after Dorotea’s death, and Valya’s self-assured rise to the rank of Mother Superior, she, along with Tula, Kasha, and Francesca, used the Voice on all of Dorotea’s devout followers—making them choose to either swear to follow Valya, or take their own lives. The end result is a grim, forced mass suicide. The only survivor is Sister Avila.
From that scene, another grim tableau: Francesca knows she has to kill the Emperor, but he’s angry with her, having just heard Valya tell him Francesca was with him out of duty rather than love. She pulls the poisoned needle from her sleeve and tells him it was Valya’s plan, “never mine.”
In the jail, Valya easily overpowers the guards (with Theo’s help) and swiftly frees Ynez. Speaking of Theo, she’s transformed herself into Ynez, and she’ll be assuming Ynez’s place “until we can set things right.” After some back and forth Valya agrees to free Keiran too. (Keiran does a funny double-take when he sees Theo in disguise, and wishes her good luck.)
At that very moment, guards burst in on a meeting between Natalya and Desmond, and they’re told Valya has been arrested. Desmond immediately knows it’s a set-up to free Ynez. “Sound the alarm,” he sighs, wearily. “Lock down the palace.”
Keiran, Ynez, and Valya hurry toward the shuttle port as Desmond enters the cell block. The prisoners are all gone, but there’s an injured guard lying on the floor. We have a pretty good idea it’s Theo transformed again, since faux-Ynez is nowhere to be seen. When Desmond leans down to talk to the soldier, Theo gets one good knife-jab to his stomach (while grunting out “Sisterhood above all!”), but as we know he’s weirdly resilient. He stands up, yanks the knife out, and orders “this monstrosity” suspended in a cell as she begins to transform back into herself.
Meanwhile the fraught conversation between the Emperor and Francesca is getting scary and emotional. He threatens to stab her, but the imprint she has on him won’t let him hurt her, and we know he wouldn’t do that anyway. He reflects on his very recent realization that his entire life has been plotted beyond his control, and realizes he can finally take charge… by stabbing himself. She’s horrified, and as she’s comforting him as he’s bleeding out, we see someone creep into frame with the poisoned needle and stab her with it. It is, of course, Empress Natalya, who then flutters out of the room acting like she’s just discovered her husband’s dead body.
We cut to another gruesome sight: the bones of those Sisters forced to slash their own throats 30 years ago. The current sisters stare into the drained pool in horror as Dorotea shares her tale. “These are the remains of our most faithful. Valya Harkonnen murdered them.” Then: “The Sisterhood has lost its way. But I will not be silenced again!” Her next move? She leads the group into the hidden AI room, and smashes the computer to bits.
While all this is happening, Tula’s alone on her ship to Salusa Secundus. She gets her own flashback, to the last time she saw her son: sweetly cradling the infant and telling him “You deserve the chance to find your own path—not Valya’s, the Harkonnen’s, or the Sisterhood’s, or mine.” That’s why, we learn, she swapped him with the stillborn son of an itinerant laborer, and sends him on his path to become… well, Desmond Hart. Only Francesca knows that Tula’s son survived.
In the present day, we get one quick scene with Harrow Harkonnen, gleefully checking the surveillance device Desmond Hart gave him to spy on Valya and company. Gleeful because, presumably, it captures a bunch of Sisterhood plotting—ammo he can use to help get himself back in the Imperium’s good graces. It’s valuable no matter who’s in charge, you have to assume. And since we know House Harkonnen gets back up on top eventually, he has to start somewhere.
Having made their way to the shuttle, Valya, Keiran, and Ynez zoom to the space port; they’ve gotta haul ass to meet a Valya contact who can smuggle them off-planet. En route, Valya hangs back to buy some time, using her Sisterhood powers to fend off guards while Keiran and Ynez show off their sword skills while making their escape.
At last, it comes to this: Desmond and Valya standing face to face again. “You say you’ve seen my end,” she says. “Show me.” The virus begins to activate in her, and we step into her vision—it starts on Lankiveil as she re-lives using the Voice to save her brother, Griffin, from drowning. Tula walks in while Valya and Desmond are both collapsed on the ground, she from the virus and the weight of the vision; he from his Theo-inflicted wound and the pain of transmitting the virus.
Tula tries to guide her sister back, much like she did all those years ago when Valya underwent the Agony by herself. “You have to let go of your fears!”
It seems to be working until the dream Griffin accuses Valya of causing his death, and then some: “You killed me. You killed us all.” The dream landscape begins to change; though it’s icy, we can see the familiar rumbling of a sandworm approaching on the horizon.
As Tula helps Valya gain control of her fear and pain, the dream landscape further changes. It’s no longer snowy Lankiveil—it’s desert Arrakis. Thumpers do their thing as Shai-Hulud rises from the sand. Then, we cut to those two glowing eyes that so terrified the acolytes in their nightmares. We see now it’s glowing blue lights on a thinking machine. Suddenly we’re looking from Desmond’s POV; he’s strapped on a table, and a robot arm plucks out his eyeball and makes some alterations to its stem and iris before shoving it back into his skull. We can also see the shape of a cloaked figure watching from above.
“I saw what they did to him,” Valya gasps, but she admits she couldn’t make out who “they” might be. She is certain, however, that they put a thinking machine inside him to weaponize him. When she makes a move to finish Desmond off, Tula uses the Voice to stop her. “He’s my son,” she explains. Valya is shocked that Tula has lied to her, telling her that her baby died—and has kept the secret all these years.
“I’ve given you everything, sister, but I couldn’t give you him,” Tula says. She wanted to protect him. Valya is shocked by this—“You think I’m a monster, sister?”—and Tula unloads. “All the carnage, deception, all by your orders. But your hold on the Sisterhood wasn’t fixed. I could have broken it at any time. Why didn’t I? Because we’re the same, you and I. Two wolves, born to feed, no care for the cost… my son deserved a better fate than us.”
Valya is horrified that Tula’s son has now become a tool for the enemy—a hidden enemy, but one wise enough to harness Desmond’s great potential for their own use. Valya’s ready to kill him, but Tula begs for her to trust her. She wants to save him and resolve the threat herself. Valya agrees, but says she knows the Reckoning is still upon them. If their enemies want to fight in the shadows, Valya figures she’ll do the same.
Desmond, of course, has overheard all of this from his position on the floor, and he’s not at all thrilled to become reacquainted with the mother he believes abandoned and betrayed him all those years ago. Still, they share a brief hug before guards appear behind him, and he orders them to arrest her.
In the final scene, our fugitive three—Valya, Ynez, and Keiran—arrive at their destination: Arrakis, where else? “Come, Princess. The path to our enemy begins here,” Valya says.
Despite its length, “The High-Handed Enemy” manages to leave quite a few dangling threads in its wake. What will happen to the Sisterhood now that’s Dorotea’s back in charge? Who will lead the Imperium now that Emperor Corrino is dead and Ynez is off-planet? What’s Harrow Harkonnen going to do with that surveillance footage? Is Theo going to shape-shift her way out of prison, maybe helping the newly arrested Tula on her way out? What’s ahead for the Arrakis newcomers? Will the Fremen Sister Mikaela help them out? And who or what turned Desmond into a robotic virus-carrying weapon?
It’s fortunate that a season two was announced by HBO late last week, because that’s a lot of material left to sift through! What did you think of the finale—and do you have any theories about all those questions that need answering?
You can watch season one of Dune: Prophecy on HBO and Max. A second season is on the way.
Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what’s next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who.
