Dune: Prophecy (Max) (2024)

heres the teaser trailer, it looks so good

OK, so we're 10,000 years before the events of DUNE. OK, that's one hell of a jump backwards in time. What does this world look like? Well, it looks the same as it does 10,000 years later. Huh, that's weird.

How about the Fremen in Ye Olde days? In the books, it is revealed that they began as regular settlers who were slowly hardened into an ethnic group over time. Neat. What do we get here? Yeah, the Fremen were always "the Fremen." Huh, no growth. No change. No evolution. The Fremen were always the Fremen? Not exactly a revelation.

How about the spice? Not much here. The Emperor is griping about needing to make spice flow, so that seems to be the same.

Shields? Nah, they're there and depicted exactly as they were in the new films.

The great houses? Nope, same stuff. Sword masters teaching elites how to fight and people worrying about arranged marriages and emperors contriving to hold onto their thrones.

OK, how about the Bene Gesserit? Surely, they're different, right? They weren't always super-powered, right? They slowly grew in sophistication over time, right? Well, not really. Are you serious?
We find out that our Mother Superior has just worked out how to the voice (it's her invention!). How did she invent it? Doesn't matter. It exists. It must exist. This is what they do... ...you know... ...that voice thing and as of episode 1 they've got it. So, again, fixed pieces. Oh yeah, and the they dress totally the same. Sure... And the breeding program? Yep, that's going strong and apparently that's always been a thing.

So, what's different? Not much, really. We get the sense that the Butlerian Jihad was relatively recent and that people are a bit freaked about AI's and robots. And we have a disco with people doing space cocaine while listening to rather conventional house-music. Huh? That's the future?

Watching the first episode my question is, apart from the girl-boss angle of exploring the gynocracy of the Bene Gesserit ("the power of maaaannny!!!), it just seems like the time-jump allows them to do "the same thing again," but so far in the past that it does not disrupt the later canonical events of Paul Atreides. It's different (in the past), but the same (same s**t, different millennia). In short, this is feeling quite uninspired, a bit of a cash-grab.

If we're 10,000 prior to the events of Dune, the universe should look different. We're in a prior stage of evolution. And yet this universe is static.

Seen it, dune it, been there.

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Boldly going.

3 episodes into the series, I can sort of see why the Atreideses and the Harkonnens are kind of like the Hatfields and McCoys of their era.