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5 Things to Remember About Dune Before Dune: Prophecy
Spice sex. It’s a thing!
Emily Watson stars as Valya Harkonnen, the Reverend Mother who’s led the sisterhood for 30-some years and shaped it to meet her vision of subtle manipulation: Via elaborate matchmaking schemes amid the powerful elite, she hopes they can eventually breed an emperor who will be under their control. But the Muslim context of this word, in particular how it defines a just war, was important to Herbert when he conceived of the Butlerian Jihad, a “crusade against computers, thinking machines, and conscious robots” led by the last free humans in order to reverse their species’s enslavement. Even if Dune: Prophecy strips back Herbert’s idea that the women’s “symbolism, organization, and internal teaching methods were almost wholly religious,” their rituals — like using the aforementioned Water of Life for the Spice Agony ceremony that connects their consciousness with their ancestors in the order — have a sense of grandiosity and procedure that will still feel spiritual onscreen.
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