The ‘Dune: Prophecy’ Sets Have a Secret Built Into Them
[Editor’s Note: This article contains spoilers for Episode 3 of “Dune: Prophecy”]
Say whatever you will about Frank Herbert and Brian Herbert, but you cannot accuse them of being narrow in scope or not comprehensive in the fictional worlds they’ve built. There is a 10,000-year gap between the Denis Villeneuve “Dune” films and the events of “Dune: Prophecy,” and enough lore for production designer Tom Meyer to imbue every piece of that history into the design of the HBO series.
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The assignment is a designer’s dream in many ways; Meyer needed to create a variety of extremely different environments that would be immediately visually distinct, even if they all share the same large-scale, imposing geometric force established in the films. But whether with the stern austerity of the Bene Gesserit base on Wallach IX or the cancerous grandeur that could potentially swallow up the Corrino family on Salusa Secundus, Meyer thought through how well, or how harshly, history would have treated them.
“With the Corrinos, you need to see the opulence. You need to see the wealth. So everything — not just the scale of the space, but the maintenance of that space — is well maintained. It might be old and antique and patinated, but it’s pristine,” Meyer told IndieWire. “When you go to the Harkonnen homeworld, there’s this kind of neo-gothic decay. They’re not the uber-scary villains that you see in the films. Their betrayal is just 130 years old, so part of the family is still fighting for acceptance. They’re not resigned to their villainy yet.”
In all these spaces, Meyer leaves physical traces of the legacy of the now-banned technology behind the machine wars. The Corrino palace and the Bene Gesserit chapterhouse on Wallach IX are dominated by complex parametric shapes. “We wanted to have these shapes that were intricate, not hard-carved. You knew they had to be machined, and, visibly, the math or the kind of design behind them is so complex,” Meyer said. “But it’s got this archaic patina so hopefully gives it further age, makes it feel real and grounded.”
Much of the action of the series takes place on Wallach IX, a planet that, in the extended “Dune” lore, was devastated in a thermonuclear exchange as part of the machine wars that are only just beyond living memory for the characters of “Dune: Prophecy.” It’s a cold, dead, austere place, but it’s one that Meyer and his team could layer in a sense of that lore as well as tease tensions that play out in the show itself.
A perfect example is the reveal of just where the Bene Gesserit breeding program is on Wallach IX. Raquella Berto-Anirul (Cathy Tyson), one of the great heroes of the machine wars, has kept a thinking machine deep underground to spin the orders plots within plots (wheels within wheels) that will one day lead to Paul Atreides. The AI system, affectionately named Anirul, is also — as of the end of Episode 3 — keeping Lila (Chloe Lea) alive.
Because of its forbidden nature, Anirul has to be stored so deep underground that not even vibrations can reach the surface and potentially cause detection. But Meyer utilized that necessity to build tunnels and warrens that only a Bene Gesserit sister could manage. There’s a sense of paranoia, scheming, and contingency-planning in the dimly lit environment that matches the expression on Tula’s (Olivia Williams) face as she strides through the final hologram hiding Anirul.
The immersion into Anirul’s space was way more important to Meyer, and also more cinematic, than depicting a giant server bay. “Right now with AI, everybody has a virtual reality or altered reality glasses, and I went with the idea that at some point the artifice of using those tools isn’t going to be needed anymore. The computer will be around you,” Meyer said. “Technology comes to where we’re at, where our imagination is. So [we liked] the idea that the cave becomes the computer.”
That fusion of environment and computer allowed Meyer to make the design of Anirul itself intriguingly organic and visually unlike anything else in the series. “It lets the audience project what they want it to be because the important part is the information, this tree of knowledge and this kind of unending, unspooling family DNA structure of the universe that [Anirul] has,” Meyer said.
Meyer wanted to build that sense of the accumulation of knowledge into every Bene Gesserit environment. If you look at the library of the Bene Gesserit in the flashback sequences of Episode 3 and compare it to the library that Valya (Emily Watson) and Tula lord over 30 years later, there’s a visual imprint of the power they’ve expanded.
“[The library] has been filled with knowledge. The bookshelves go up four stories to the ceiling — all built for real — and I put these museum vitrines at eye level all the way around the library and within Valya’s public and her private office,” Meyer said. “You get the sense that they are collecting information because it is the sisterhood’s knowledge that controls the universe. So you want to feel that this is the repository of everything that is known in their universe.”
That accumulation of knowledge melds with the history that Meyer sculpted into the repeated machined patterns of its environment. How much of the Bene Gesserit’s plans and hopes are down to human agency, and how much of them are due to forces and structures that spin out far beyond our control? That is the question that every chapter of “Dune” reckons with — and “Dune: Prophecy” sets it into the very stones of Wallach IX.
New episodes of “Dune: Prophecy” premiere Sundays on HBO and stream on Max.
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