Dune: Prophecy Team Unpacks Finale Twists (‘Everything Has Changed’) — and Valya’s ‘Exciting’ New Destination
The following contains spoilers from the Dec. 22 Season 1 finale of HBO’s (newly renewed) Dune: Prophecy.
Given what happened in the Dune: Prophecy Season 1 finale, “Everything has changed,” says series star Emily Watson. And though she was speaking strictly for her character, Mother Superior Valya Harkonnen, the same could be said for the sci-fi prequel series as a whole.
More from TVLine
DOROTEA DROPS A BOMB
With Jen left to mind her while Tula treks to Salusa Secundus, Lila sneakily tranquilized her fellow acolyte and escaped Anirul, and it quickly became clear that she now is channeling a new ancestor — her grandmother. Dorotea found the other acolytes and asked where her allies were, only to be met with not just silence, but puzzlement. Upon revisiting the scene of her long-ago “suicide” and then “listening” to the pool nearby, Dorotea revealed to the Sisterhood that not only did a Voice-wielding young Valya orchestrate her death — which, a new flashback revealed to us, Tula, Kasha and Francesca had witnessed from a balcony above — Valya & Co. then teamed up to use The Voice to murder the rest of the Sisterhood, leaving just the four of them. To prove her point, Dorotea drained the pool to reveal her friends’ skeletons piled at the bottom. Dark stuff.
THE EMPRESS STRIKES BACK
With her husband now freely fraternizing with old flame Francesca as well as defying Desmond Hart’s further counsel, Empress Natalya killed two birds with one stone by poisoning Francesca with the cyanide-tipped needle that the sister had been assigned to use on her lover — after Javicco had fatally stabbed himself.
PRISON BREAK
Valya, with face dancer Theodosia’s help, made her way to the brig where both Kieran and Ynez were suspended. The plan was to swap Theodosia for the real Ynez, but the princess insisted that her beau be sprung, too, and Valya obliged. As those three raced to flee Salusa Secundus, Desmond arrived at the jailbreak scene, where a wounded guard waved him over to whisper something. The “guard” stabbed Desmond up close, bellowing, “Sisterhood above all!” — and we realized that Theodosia had shapeshifted again.
MUM’S THE WORD
After landing on Wallach IX, Valya sent Ynez and Kiera on ahead while she dealt with an arriving Desmond and his goons, using The Voice to turn her adversary’s men on one another. Once face-to-face, Desmond used his “whammy” on Valya and they both collapsed — her from the virus, him from his stab wound. Arriving at the scene, Tula rushed to Valya’s side and coached her sister through fending off the virus, and we witnessed a stunning, stylized tableau in which Young Valya lurched across a frozen lake to save her brother Griffin, by using The Voice to command him to swim his way out of an ice hole.
That Valya then morphed back into her older self, and the frozen tundra before her turned into the sands of Arrakis — and then the visual we’d seen before, of a sandworm emerging from beneath to swallow Desmond. Virus-stricken Valya, though, experienced a “bonus scene” from that ordeal of Desmond’s, one that revealed that during his recuperation, a thinking machine had implanted in his right eye socket an eyeball outfitted with its own tech. All as a cloaked figure observed from above….
Having successfully nipped the virus in the bud, Valya went to finish off Desmond with her blade, but Tula used The Voice to make her sister “Stop!” in her tracks. “He is my son,” Tula explained to a confused Valya. After barely processing her sister’s decades of deception, Valya maintained that the “reckoning” is still upon them, and that “if the shadows are where they want to fight, that is where I shall go.”
Valya walked away, and Tula shared an ultimately warm hug with the son she’d sent away, for his own good, so many years ago. Desmond however wasn’t moved quite enough to not have his newfound mom arrested, right then and there.
As for Valya, Ynez and Kieran: We next see them emerging from a transport ship that has landed on no less than the planet Arrakis itself. “The path to our enemy begins here,” Valya announced as they embarked down the ramp….
THE SHOWRUNNER AND STARS SPEAK OUT, PREVIEW SEASON 2
Speaking to the finale’s many twists — specifically, how they impact the Harkonnen sisters — Dune: Prophecy showrunner Alison Schapker says, “We wanted to feel like the ground had really shifted beneath their feet by the end of the season, but at the same time [deliver] revelations that make us understand these characters and their dynamics differently. There would be a recontextualizing of the story so that by the time you had watched the whole story, you would understand, ‘Oh, there was more going on than I first realized.’ By the end of Season 1, you have a real sense of the history of the sisters, the history of the Sisterhood, and then a real revelation, a truth coming out.”
That truth — Tula’s lie — changes “everything” for the sisters, says Emily Watson. “It’s blown everything up, though I think Valya is probably still holding onto ‘I am the chosen one, I have the destiny’ as her guide…. But I think by the end of [the finale], everything she thought she knew is incinerated…. Everything has changed.”
Olivia Williams, meanwhile, says that “a huge thing for Tula is the moment when she says [to Valya], ‘Please don’t kill my son. Trust me, I’ve got this’ — and the fact that [Valya] does trust her, and goes. All these years she has known that she is highly capable and highly effective, but has been treated as the lesser sister.”
WELCOME TO ARRAKIS
TVLine asked Schapker about the choice of Arrakis for Valya’s destination, and what exactly Mother Superior hopes to accomplish there. In a word, the showrunner said that introducing the desert planet associated with the Dune film franchise is “exciting.”
Throughout Season 1 of Dune: Prophecy, Schapker notes, “Arrakis [has been] exerting its pull from afar, whether in the economics of spice trade, or the psychological aspects of these visions [from] Desmond’s past seeping into everyone’s consciousness.” But in Season 2, the TV series will “actually put boots on the ground in this… almost mythic Dune space that we know very well.
“It’s very significant that Valya’s there,” the showrunner previews. “[Desmond] emerged with a story and a myth — ‘I’m from Arrakis, I was swallowed by a worm and I survived after my whole regiment was killed’ — and all I would say is that Valya is going to find out a lot more, given that she is back where Desmond emerged as an adversary. And [it will] be interesting to see what she finds out.”
Want scoop on Dune: Prophecy Season 2, or for any other TV show ? Shoot an email to [email protected], and your question may be answered via Matt’s Inside Line!
Best of TVLine
Sign up for TVLine's Newsletter. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
Solve the daily Crossword
