Comparing anything to The Expanse is a provocation I do not make lightly. That show is six seasons of some of the most rigorous, politically serious science fiction streaming has ever produced, and I will defend it in any room. But rigor and scale are different things, and when it comes to scale – real scale, that’s measured in millennia rather than astronomical units – Dune: Prophecy belongs in a whole different category.
The Expanse is ultimately a story about people. It’s about brilliant, complicated people in a universe carved with extraordinary care whose decisions you track and whose survival you care about. It takes place in a single solar system at a single moment in history. Dune: Prophecy takes you 10,000 years deep into a foundational mythology. Everything The Expanse builds, Herbert’s universe had already assumed before Paul Atreides drew his first breath.
It premiered on HBO in November 2024, has six episodes, and was renewed for a second season before its finale aired. Season 2 wrapped production in March 2026 and will premiere on HBO Max later this year before Dune: Part Three arrives in December. If you have been sleeping on Season 1, the time to catch up is now.
‘Dune: Prophecy’ Is About the Most Unsettling Idea in Science Fiction
The Bene Gesserit are frightening for a reason that has nothing to do with the Voice, which is their ability to command people through shifts in vocal tone. This is the same thing that Paul Atreides spends two movies learning to master. They are frightening because they think in bloodlines. Every marriage they broker, every daughter they place in a noble house, and every whispered counsel they offer to an emperor is a move in a breeding program designed to produce a being of ultimate prescience. It spans thousands of years, through hundreds of generations of people who never consented to being variables in someone else’s equation. By comparison, the Voice is a parlor trick. The breeding program is the real horror, and Paul Atreides is proof of it.
Dune: Prophecy takes place at the very beginning. Valya Harkonnen (Emily Watson) uses the Voice for the first time in the show’s opening episode, forcing a rival Sister to take her own life over a disagreement about the breeding codex. It’s the first recorded use of the Voice as a weapon. That scene, where Valya communicates, depicts her not as a woman deploying her power, but as a woman making a pragmatic decision about the survival of something she believes in more than herself. That ambiguity is present in all six episodes.
Olivia Williams as Tula, Valya’s younger sister and the show’s moral anchor, is also worth mentioning. She’s colder, more surgical, and driven by grief. The series lets her narrative linger before it reveals the source. Travis Fimmel plays Desmond Hart, a soldier who returns from a battlefield carrying powers nobody can explain. He’s the disruption who forces the Sisterhood to confront the limits of what they have built. His arc is the most classically Dune thing about the series because it makes you wonder: is anyone actually in control?
What the Mixed Reviews Got Fundamentally Wrong About ‘Dune: Prophecy’
Every criticism of Dune: Prophecy that I have read comes down to the same complaint: it moves slowly. The first two episodes are dense and deliberate, and they ask you to care about political maneuvers in noble houses you’re still learning about. That is true. However, that’s what The Expanse does in its first season: spend hours establishing Belt culture and Martian political anxieties before it opens up into something unforgettable.
The difference is that The Expanse had the benefit of being a fresh IP. Dune: Prophecy arrived with the weight of two beloved, extremely successful Denis Villeneuve movies behind it. Impatient viewers expected it to deliver Villeneuve’s visual grandeur immediately… on a television budget. But that was never what the show was trying to do.
What it is trying to do is answer a question that Villeneuve’s Dune movies leave so expertly and so entirely unaddressed: how did something like the Bene Gesserit come to exist? What is their origin? I’m not talking about the mythology they plant across the universe: that there will be a messiah, the Voice is divine, and Reverend Mothers hold sacred knowledge. I’m talking about how they come around to it. Two women, in a particular political moment, decide that the only way to protect humanity from itself is to manipulate it quietly across generations for thousands of years by controlling who procreates with whom. The audacity of that project, and the cold faith it requires, is what puts Dune: Prophecy an inch above The Expanse for me.
Season 2 expands to eight episodes, and Indira Varma, Tom Hollander, and Ashley Walters join a cast already delivering underrated performances, and it takes the story to Arrakis for the first time. Watching Season 1 now means watching Dune: Part Three with the full context of what the Sisterhood has already sacrificed to get there.
- Release Date
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November 17, 2024
- Showrunner
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Alison Schapker
