While this show was far from the most interesting thing I've watched this year, it was miles better than Rings of Power season 2. I'm sort of stunned at some of the comments from Mal and Jo (who I LOVE listening to!) regarding some of the logic when RoP is full of utter nonsense that went unmentioned in every deep dive from season 2. This was overall a relatively boring show but a far cry from being bad. In the era of quick cancellation it's not a bad thing to get season 2 of this show.
RoP was an absolute mess. Hilarious and sad Mal and Jo completely ignored all the issues so they could have access to showrunners. Guess they don't have access for this show they need to worry about.
the young actors in this show were all so good. Lila's actor had so much to work with and she COOKED!!! and omg she was 17 or 18 thats nuts what a talent
the finale was really good in my opinion, i knew javico and his mistress (im so sorry i never learned her name but i adored her) were gonna end up in some romeo and juliet situation because i liked their love too much, aslo the empress like basically smoothing her skirt and fixing her hair to go into hysterics about him dying was high comedy, I really like Inez but as with all the characters i feel like we arent getting enough time with her, i genuinely thought desmond was gonna kill tula im so so glasd she didnt die she really grew on me, the little actress who plays lila/raquella/dorotea was INCREDIBLE she was really playing up the reserved aspects of lila cuz when she burst in as raquella and then dorotea you could feel an immediate switch, very talented preformances like hers make me actually want a second season, but i really hope we get more raquella and lila thank you as always for your coverage mal and jo you two make every show you cover something to look forward to happy holidays and new year
FRANCHESCA (i just got to the part in the pod when u mentioned her lol) also Valya young and old i enjoyed felt very much like the same person in both portrayals
I enjoyed from start to finish. The length didnt bother me, especially on a six episode season. Was some of the deaths kind of brisk, maybe. but i think it wrapped up a bunch of things. Tula was reunited with her son, Vayla got over Griffin, Lyla revealed the beginging of Vayla's rein, and now the Motherhood is in shambles, and Nez is off to Arakis for the next season, which was confirmed. idk the season and the finale were fun for me. The shape shifting-impersonation portion was not great.
I like the show and I am more of a casual Dune watcher and it is an un-expected pleasure to get a season 2 after I was made mostly online to feel sub-par for liking this "crap show" that was bound to be canceled. I am happy that it was renewed. I am also delighted that there was an actual plot reason for Travis Fimmels one eye twitching all season long. Oh dear, I do not want to go to my eye appointment after Christmas.
Couldn’t agree more. Also note those people who dragged on it are now raving about the show. I love RUclips recaps bc it’s an opportunity to learn more about the lore but they’re also equally as powerful to make/break a show before it’s even fully aired. Very glad to see a season 2 is on the way!
I see and agree with all the issues with the season, BUT... I'm ok with them and I enjoyed the last 2 eps especially. Same as Rings of Power. Lots of issues, but enough good to make it worth it.
Six episodes so either wrap some of the story put a bow on something or explore more of the universe. Not getting either seems to be the biggest complaint. The final episode did have the finale feeling without a finale ending but still felt like a good watch especially with more characters becoming likable in the end.
I loved the finale and the season as a whole, and it’s a perfect setup for the Mentats of Dune part of the overall story with the reveal of where Desmond’s power comes from. It also sets up the Sisterhood’s pivot from working to breed better leaders to breeding a KH with Desmond seeming to be KH-adjacent especially with his comment to Valya early on in the season that he can see where she cannot. There’s obviously a LOT of fail in attempting to produce what they’re after, because the Sisterhood never really succeed. Paul arrives a generation too early and is missing the “control” factor their ultimate KH would have had with Feyd & Paul’s offspring if Paul had been the female that Jessica was supposed to have had. HBO needs to green light 10 episodes. I think they did a great job for only having 6. I’m with Morgan, and here’s to this show running 10,000 years! YES, PLEASE! It won’t be Star Wars, because there’s exponentially more to the Dune universe. We can get tons more flashbacks to the Butlerian Jihad, how the Holtzman Field is discovered, how Mentats & Navigators & The Suk School came to exist. Leto II & Norma Cenva being able to traverse time in all directions. Why the Lansraad, CHOAM, and the Spacing Guild were needed...
Yup Westworld after season 2 vibes. Last two seasons of GOT, characters move around doing illogical stuff for unclear reasons. It breaks your heart because it looks so good and the world of Dune is so intriguing.
Except if you pay attention throughout GOT, what the characters end up doing in the last 2 seasons makes a ton of sense for the characters and the story being told.
They talked about it last week. Due to scheduling issues (pre-recording all the extra episodes to post during the holidays) they couldn’t fit it in, so this one will cover both.
Y'all have a problem with watching that weak man of weak character be a weak man of weak character. Just because he's played by Mark Strong. The fact is He's not Leto Atreides. He was a punk ass. That's who he was That's what we got. I mean burying those girls bodies at the bottom of that well was fine as long as you don't have a dead woman coming back to life to show everybody. It was inside their sanctum, who else is going to expose them, who else would know the meaning of the bodies at the bottom of the well? That's different than Kieren's bad hiding spot for evidence in the Emperor's Palace. Idk, I like the show like I like Rings of power, Agatha, Hotd, skeleton crew, etc. I liked the first episode and I was excited to hear what you guys liked about, and then....
Admittedly, in a weird way, I enjoyed Prophecy more than I have either of the films? That isn't to say that I would place Prophecy in competition with other series like HOTD for example, but I think a lot of this came down to me just really not finding Timothy Chalamet to be a particularly compelling actor, which completely tanks the films for me. Adore Rebecca Ferguson, but she doesn't have enough to do in those films, and while I think they tried to make Chani a more interesting character, this actually really undermines the relationship with Paul, for me. I don't believe that Chani would fall for this neurotic arsehole for as long as she does in the films, and that only gets elevated by my disbelief that Zendaya is falling for him in the first place (could be an acting thing, could just be a star text thing, idk). Either way, Jessica ends up the most interesting character in the films, but I weirdly get this feeling like the films are not enough interested in her (even if part 2 expands on her a bit more, it felt emotionally empty, oddly). While Prophecy has a whole slew of dud characters that I couldn't care less about (would tend to agree with Jo and Mal regarding all the palace characters, particularly Kieran, who felt like a somehow more-poorly-written Torrance Combs on The CW's Reign), the difference comes in that there are characters that I both find interesting in this series, *and the series validates that interest*. Tula is definitely key here, I am easily more invested in this character than literally anyone in the films. Olivia Williams is always a pleasure to watch, but combined with seamless transitions between her performance and Emma Canning (who I wasn't familiar with prior to this series), I felt like Tula was a dynamic character who both cleaves to conform to her sister's desires, while also seeking genuine freedom from her, and importantly, there are tangible emotional stakes to the tensions between those two poles that we get to see change her over the course of the six episodes (and between within the present and past timelines). This is in stark contrast to the film characters, who (again, perhaps in part because of acting, but also because of certain writing choices) feel remarkably static and deterministic, with Paul being the clearest example of this. I would echo the sentiments about Jessica Barden's young Valya being compelling as well, and I think in her performance she did a pretty solid job of planning out the emotional development, so that there was some emotional change over time, even if the writing itself didn't really emphasize that on its own. Great performance from here. Regret to say that I felt Emily Watson's performance felt flatter to me in comparison, which was unexpected. I think having more scenes between her and Theodosia (which would have much benefited the underdeveloped but interesting Theo as well!), would have given the older character some more levels. I also agree on Lila. Fabulous performance from Chloe Lea, who was compelling pretty much whenever she was on screen. This goes towards the love for Tula as well, in that good writing and good performances from both actors meant that each was able to enhance the value of the other. Jen was underdeveloped, but totally agree that of the acolytes, she was the one who I most had my eye on for further elaboration; the payoff has evidently been delayed for this character until next season, but I remain interested in seeing what her deal is. The other two that I would really call out are Jihae as Kasha and Tabu as Francesca. Both of these actors are so compelling to watch, and we get so frustratingly little of them, which makes little sense to me, given that they are part of this quad with Valya and Tula who ensure Valya's rise to power. I think what really needed to happen here in that the series should have started, say, a year or 2 prior to where it does. Instead of starting with Kasha's death, it should have ended with this. We should have spent this season focusing on this core group of four and their political machinations in palace, again, with Francesca in the palace from the beginning, instead of off somewhere else. This would have given us the time to invest in the past and presents of these characters, and ensured there were higher stakes for the eventual loss of both (Kasha at the end of S1, Francesca end of S2, assuming 6 ep seasons). We could have gotten a sense of their backgrounds and motivations (why are they so jazzed about the voice, instead of terrified, like normal people? how does this jive with the fact that Kasha dies of fear, and Francesca is even more of a softie than Tula, in the end? I'd have liked to have known). This would also have given us more time for better intrigue, as we could have stretched out the engagement period, spent more time with the Richeses and other dukes, and fleshed out some more of the acolytes as well. (Sidebar, while I don't dislike Jodhi May by any means, there is a part of me that really mourns the fact that the wonderful Indira Varma had to move on from this role. It would have been really cool to see her work with both Tabu and Sarah-Sophie Boussnina.) This would also have meant a much more staggered introduction to Desmond, which I think is very much needed. The desire to place Travis Fimmel front and center from the very beginning of the series necessarily shrank the timeline because the main "reveal" is entirely based around how long it will take Valya to send his DNA back to the ChatGPT X. Like... follow him around on Arakkis pre-worm a little bit to have some action scenes, by all means, but frankly, I think this would have worked far better if we either didn't see him at all in S1 and only heard rumours about him, or, if we got to see the worm eating, but lose pieces, and have a whole lot more mystery going into S2 about what/who has caused the burning. Like sure, there is the later reveal that it's not technically Desmond, it's a nanovirus, but I would have liked to see there be more obfuscation from the show around what's going on instead of them just coming out with the very first burning being "done" by Desmond. Delay that longer, develop more esoteric stuff that will draw our eye to Natalya and her ties to religion or something, idk? Bluntly, the way Fimmel is used in Prophecy made me think that HBO was concerned they wouldn't be able to keep the male audience interested if they focused on developing the female characters in S1 instead. On an entirely other note, I admit to being floored that, with all of the (we are agreed, very poorly done) sex scenes in this season, there is not a single lesbian in sight? Which isn't to say that every show requires queer representation at all, but it is frankly astonishing that in an HBO show that was supposed to be about a bunch of space witches/nuns who approach sex with men in such a utilitarian fashion is so... bizarrely heteronormative? It's a bit of a divergent choice for some of these modern adaptations of older fantasy series, in that Prime's Wheel of Time elevated the (largely) subtextual queerness of the Aes Sedai so visibly, and while Netflix's The Witcher has done a lot to cultivate queer subtext among the female mages at Aretuza (particularly between Yennefer and Tissaia), even while the only characters that are explicitly queer are the ones who were queer in the books and/or games. Heck, HOTD was always going to be gayer than Game of Thrones, but I think it is actually far gayer than a lot of the general audience even realize? Even characters who aren't queer are camp enough that they appeal to queer people. In contrast, *none* of the characters in this series read as queer, it is basically a sliding scale between straight (but, with the exception of Tula and Orry, completely lacking in chemistry; I believe Tabu's Francesca loves Javicco, but Mark Strong isn't selling the relationship anywhere near as well) and blank/asexual (I will say, the films also suffer from this same lack of eroticism in the way it depicts heterosexuality, which I had thought was due to a decision to cast Chalamet and Zendaya on star power instead of chemistry, and while that is definitely an issue in this series as well, the sheer number of pairings in which this happens is staggering to watch). This goes for the male characters as well: every single one of them who is of age, and who we spend any meaningful amount of time with (with the exception of the one we are supposed to see as a grasping wimp) has a sex scene with a female character in this series (Constantine, Kieran, Javicco, and Desmond, with bonus Orry, who has the most screen time and development of the minor male characters, even if it is just one episode). Again, I'm not saying anyone *needs* to be queer, it just feels unusual that a series dealing with the kinds of issues this one does has none in sight. Anyway, tldr; Prophecy made me care about more of its characters than either of the Dune films did, *despite* the extent to which it underdeveloped and/or botched various parts of its narrative, leaving me much more excited for a S2 of the show than I am about what I can only assume is going to be another slog through Messiah.
You guys are harsh. The show wasn't a masterpiece or anything but I liked it for the most part. I find it cool to just be hanging in the Dune universe.
6 episodes and you want an arc? Hah. Welcome to modern television. Did you watch the season? Constantine has a lot going forward, his mother and father were killed, he is in charge of the fleet at Arrakis and his sister who who he was told to protect is planetside. A show around the actual Butlerian Jihad with the origins of Houses would have been better.
Shrugs. They can be vicious when they don't like something. I find it funny how they were thirsting on that pretty guy who plays Constantine. They are very entertaining to watch.
Yeah, not really surprised by the commentary. They didn't really hide their disappointment throughout the episodes. They must have had massive expectations because the show isn't necessarily bad, it's just average.
Idk why but I can't get into Dune. I did like the old movie better than the new ones though. Maybe it's because I watched Jodorowsky's Dune and my imagination went wild with this space opera possibilities when the new Dune movies just really isn't that. Or what I consider a space opera anyway. Needs more aliens and scifi-fantasy elements.
@@Cellardoor_ Dune isn’t a space opera, and there are no aliens in the Dune universe. It’s a political story within an environmental story within a story of oppression within a story of religious cults, that just happens to be set 20,000 years in our future. Jodorowsky’s Dune would have been a train wreck on an epic scale (even if it had been a TV series considering the screenplay was 14th hours long.) He didn’t understand the book even if Giger did. Lynch’s Dune missed most of the points of the first book by changing the story making Paul a victorious hero instead of the tragic figure from the books and trying to fit too much into one film. There are no Weirding Modules in the books and were a ridiculous addition because Lynch was too lazy to read the source material, didn’t understand the Bene Gesserit, Prana Bindu, and The Weirding Way, and thought all that equated to “kung fu in the desert.” Seriously, making Gurney carry a Pug through the desert while fighting? Surely a canteen of water would be more efficient. It’s great you like that film. It’s just not really Dune. You should read the first three books (though they’re not an easy read.) There are very good audiobooks you should be able to access from your local Public Library’s website.
While this show was far from the most interesting thing I've watched this year, it was miles better than Rings of Power season 2. I'm sort of stunned at some of the comments from Mal and Jo (who I LOVE listening to!) regarding some of the logic when RoP is full of utter nonsense that went unmentioned in every deep dive from season 2.
This was overall a relatively boring show but a far cry from being bad. In the era of quick cancellation it's not a bad thing to get season 2 of this show.
RoP was an absolute mess. Hilarious and sad Mal and Jo completely ignored all the issues so they could have access to showrunners. Guess they don't have access for this show they need to worry about.
the young actors in this show were all so good. Lila's actor had so much to work with and she COOKED!!! and omg she was 17 or 18 thats nuts what a talent
the finale was really good in my opinion, i knew javico and his mistress (im so sorry i never learned her name but i adored her) were gonna end up in some romeo and juliet situation because i liked their love too much, aslo the empress like basically smoothing her skirt and fixing her hair to go into hysterics about him dying was high comedy, I really like Inez but as with all the characters i feel like we arent getting enough time with her, i genuinely thought desmond was gonna kill tula im so so glasd she didnt die she really grew on me, the little actress who plays lila/raquella/dorotea was INCREDIBLE she was really playing up the reserved aspects of lila cuz when she burst in as raquella and then dorotea you could feel an immediate switch, very talented preformances like hers make me actually want a second season, but i really hope we get more raquella and lila
thank you as always for your coverage mal and jo you two make every show you cover something to look forward to happy holidays and new year
FRANCHESCA (i just got to the part in the pod when u mentioned her lol) also Valya young and old i enjoyed felt very much like the same person in both portrayals
I enjoyed from start to finish. The length didnt bother me, especially on a six episode season. Was some of the deaths kind of brisk, maybe. but i think it wrapped up a bunch of things. Tula was reunited with her son, Vayla got over Griffin, Lyla revealed the beginging of Vayla's rein, and now the Motherhood is in shambles, and Nez is off to Arakis for the next season, which was confirmed. idk the season and the finale were fun for me. The shape shifting-impersonation portion was not great.
I like the show and I am more of a casual Dune watcher and it is an un-expected pleasure to get a season 2 after I was made mostly online to feel sub-par for liking this "crap show" that was bound to be canceled. I am happy that it was renewed. I am also delighted that there was an actual plot reason for Travis Fimmels one eye twitching all season long. Oh dear, I do not want to go to my eye appointment after Christmas.
Infinitely agree!
Couldn’t agree more. Also note those people who dragged on it are now raving about the show. I love RUclips recaps bc it’s an opportunity to learn more about the lore but they’re also equally as powerful to make/break a show before it’s even fully aired. Very glad to see a season 2 is on the way!
This world deserve’s the deep dive. I feel a little disappointed
Tabu (actress playing Francesca) is awesome!
Love for yall and the show from India
mal: You'll find out when you watch yellowstone
Jo: i simply never will
"Get Help" routine 😂
Mark strong wasnt Ned he was Robert and played the role perfectly
They didn't say mark strong was Ned, they compared the two characters. Also Mark Addy was Robert
I see and agree with all the issues with the season, BUT...
I'm ok with them and I enjoyed the last 2 eps especially.
Same as Rings of Power. Lots of issues, but enough good to make it worth it.
Six episodes so either wrap some of the story put a bow on something or explore more of the universe. Not getting either seems to be the biggest complaint. The final episode did have the finale feeling without a finale ending but still felt like a good watch especially with more characters becoming likable in the end.
I loved the finale and the season as a whole, and it’s a perfect setup for the Mentats of Dune part of the overall story with the reveal of where Desmond’s power comes from. It also sets up the Sisterhood’s pivot from working to breed better leaders to breeding a KH with Desmond seeming to be KH-adjacent especially with his comment to Valya early on in the season that he can see where she cannot. There’s obviously a LOT of fail in attempting to produce what they’re after, because the Sisterhood never really succeed. Paul arrives a generation too early and is missing the “control” factor their ultimate KH would have had with Feyd & Paul’s offspring if Paul had been the female that Jessica was supposed to have had. HBO needs to green light 10 episodes. I think they did a great job for only having 6. I’m with Morgan, and here’s to this show running 10,000 years! YES, PLEASE! It won’t be Star Wars, because there’s exponentially more to the Dune universe. We can get tons more flashbacks to the Butlerian Jihad, how the Holtzman Field is discovered, how Mentats & Navigators & The Suk School came to exist. Leto II & Norma Cenva being able to traverse time in all directions. Why the Lansraad, CHOAM, and the Spacing Guild were needed...
Mel’s poetic rant about Keiran’s charms was an early xmas present.
Yup Westworld after season 2 vibes.
Last two seasons of GOT, characters move around doing illogical stuff for unclear reasons.
It breaks your heart because it looks so good and the world of Dune is so intriguing.
Except if you pay attention throughout GOT, what the characters end up doing in the last 2 seasons makes a ton of sense for the characters and the story being told.
they just skipped 5?
They talked about it last week. Due to scheduling issues (pre-recording all the extra episodes to post during the holidays) they couldn’t fit it in, so this one will cover both.
@BenJack nice
wait did we ever understand why the sister got burned in episode 1 from a distance
Y'all have a problem with watching that weak man of weak character be a weak man of weak character. Just because he's played by Mark Strong. The fact is He's not Leto Atreides. He was a punk ass. That's who he was That's what we got. I mean burying those girls bodies at the bottom of that well was fine as long as you don't have a dead woman coming back to life to show everybody. It was inside their sanctum, who else is going to expose them, who else would know the meaning of the bodies at the bottom of the well? That's different than Kieren's bad hiding spot for evidence in the Emperor's Palace. Idk, I like the show like I like Rings of power, Agatha, Hotd, skeleton crew, etc. I liked the first episode and I was excited to hear what you guys liked about, and then....
Javicco was not Mark Strong, but Mark Weak
I’m becoming more simple with IP, its either good or bad, and want to see more or not, so for this show it was good and I want to see more
I loved the show overall
Admittedly, in a weird way, I enjoyed Prophecy more than I have either of the films? That isn't to say that I would place Prophecy in competition with other series like HOTD for example, but I think a lot of this came down to me just really not finding Timothy Chalamet to be a particularly compelling actor, which completely tanks the films for me. Adore Rebecca Ferguson, but she doesn't have enough to do in those films, and while I think they tried to make Chani a more interesting character, this actually really undermines the relationship with Paul, for me. I don't believe that Chani would fall for this neurotic arsehole for as long as she does in the films, and that only gets elevated by my disbelief that Zendaya is falling for him in the first place (could be an acting thing, could just be a star text thing, idk). Either way, Jessica ends up the most interesting character in the films, but I weirdly get this feeling like the films are not enough interested in her (even if part 2 expands on her a bit more, it felt emotionally empty, oddly).
While Prophecy has a whole slew of dud characters that I couldn't care less about (would tend to agree with Jo and Mal regarding all the palace characters, particularly Kieran, who felt like a somehow more-poorly-written Torrance Combs on The CW's Reign), the difference comes in that there are characters that I both find interesting in this series, *and the series validates that interest*. Tula is definitely key here, I am easily more invested in this character than literally anyone in the films. Olivia Williams is always a pleasure to watch, but combined with seamless transitions between her performance and Emma Canning (who I wasn't familiar with prior to this series), I felt like Tula was a dynamic character who both cleaves to conform to her sister's desires, while also seeking genuine freedom from her, and importantly, there are tangible emotional stakes to the tensions between those two poles that we get to see change her over the course of the six episodes (and between within the present and past timelines). This is in stark contrast to the film characters, who (again, perhaps in part because of acting, but also because of certain writing choices) feel remarkably static and deterministic, with Paul being the clearest example of this.
I would echo the sentiments about Jessica Barden's young Valya being compelling as well, and I think in her performance she did a pretty solid job of planning out the emotional development, so that there was some emotional change over time, even if the writing itself didn't really emphasize that on its own. Great performance from here. Regret to say that I felt Emily Watson's performance felt flatter to me in comparison, which was unexpected. I think having more scenes between her and Theodosia (which would have much benefited the underdeveloped but interesting Theo as well!), would have given the older character some more levels.
I also agree on Lila. Fabulous performance from Chloe Lea, who was compelling pretty much whenever she was on screen. This goes towards the love for Tula as well, in that good writing and good performances from both actors meant that each was able to enhance the value of the other. Jen was underdeveloped, but totally agree that of the acolytes, she was the one who I most had my eye on for further elaboration; the payoff has evidently been delayed for this character until next season, but I remain interested in seeing what her deal is.
The other two that I would really call out are Jihae as Kasha and Tabu as Francesca. Both of these actors are so compelling to watch, and we get so frustratingly little of them, which makes little sense to me, given that they are part of this quad with Valya and Tula who ensure Valya's rise to power. I think what really needed to happen here in that the series should have started, say, a year or 2 prior to where it does. Instead of starting with Kasha's death, it should have ended with this. We should have spent this season focusing on this core group of four and their political machinations in palace, again, with Francesca in the palace from the beginning, instead of off somewhere else. This would have given us the time to invest in the past and presents of these characters, and ensured there were higher stakes for the eventual loss of both (Kasha at the end of S1, Francesca end of S2, assuming 6 ep seasons). We could have gotten a sense of their backgrounds and motivations (why are they so jazzed about the voice, instead of terrified, like normal people? how does this jive with the fact that Kasha dies of fear, and Francesca is even more of a softie than Tula, in the end? I'd have liked to have known). This would also have given us more time for better intrigue, as we could have stretched out the engagement period, spent more time with the Richeses and other dukes, and fleshed out some more of the acolytes as well.
(Sidebar, while I don't dislike Jodhi May by any means, there is a part of me that really mourns the fact that the wonderful Indira Varma had to move on from this role. It would have been really cool to see her work with both Tabu and Sarah-Sophie Boussnina.)
This would also have meant a much more staggered introduction to Desmond, which I think is very much needed. The desire to place Travis Fimmel front and center from the very beginning of the series necessarily shrank the timeline because the main "reveal" is entirely based around how long it will take Valya to send his DNA back to the ChatGPT X. Like... follow him around on Arakkis pre-worm a little bit to have some action scenes, by all means, but frankly, I think this would have worked far better if we either didn't see him at all in S1 and only heard rumours about him, or, if we got to see the worm eating, but lose pieces, and have a whole lot more mystery going into S2 about what/who has caused the burning. Like sure, there is the later reveal that it's not technically Desmond, it's a nanovirus, but I would have liked to see there be more obfuscation from the show around what's going on instead of them just coming out with the very first burning being "done" by Desmond. Delay that longer, develop more esoteric stuff that will draw our eye to Natalya and her ties to religion or something, idk? Bluntly, the way Fimmel is used in Prophecy made me think that HBO was concerned they wouldn't be able to keep the male audience interested if they focused on developing the female characters in S1 instead.
On an entirely other note, I admit to being floored that, with all of the (we are agreed, very poorly done) sex scenes in this season, there is not a single lesbian in sight? Which isn't to say that every show requires queer representation at all, but it is frankly astonishing that in an HBO show that was supposed to be about a bunch of space witches/nuns who approach sex with men in such a utilitarian fashion is so... bizarrely heteronormative? It's a bit of a divergent choice for some of these modern adaptations of older fantasy series, in that Prime's Wheel of Time elevated the (largely) subtextual queerness of the Aes Sedai so visibly, and while Netflix's The Witcher has done a lot to cultivate queer subtext among the female mages at Aretuza (particularly between Yennefer and Tissaia), even while the only characters that are explicitly queer are the ones who were queer in the books and/or games. Heck, HOTD was always going to be gayer than Game of Thrones, but I think it is actually far gayer than a lot of the general audience even realize? Even characters who aren't queer are camp enough that they appeal to queer people. In contrast, *none* of the characters in this series read as queer, it is basically a sliding scale between straight (but, with the exception of Tula and Orry, completely lacking in chemistry; I believe Tabu's Francesca loves Javicco, but Mark Strong isn't selling the relationship anywhere near as well) and blank/asexual (I will say, the films also suffer from this same lack of eroticism in the way it depicts heterosexuality, which I had thought was due to a decision to cast Chalamet and Zendaya on star power instead of chemistry, and while that is definitely an issue in this series as well, the sheer number of pairings in which this happens is staggering to watch).
This goes for the male characters as well: every single one of them who is of age, and who we spend any meaningful amount of time with (with the exception of the one we are supposed to see as a grasping wimp) has a sex scene with a female character in this series (Constantine, Kieran, Javicco, and Desmond, with bonus Orry, who has the most screen time and development of the minor male characters, even if it is just one episode). Again, I'm not saying anyone *needs* to be queer, it just feels unusual that a series dealing with the kinds of issues this one does has none in sight.
Anyway, tldr; Prophecy made me care about more of its characters than either of the Dune films did, *despite* the extent to which it underdeveloped and/or botched various parts of its narrative, leaving me much more excited for a S2 of the show than I am about what I can only assume is going to be another slog through Messiah.
Thumbs up for the Dragon Queen.
Let’s go Dune heads.
You guys are harsh. The show wasn't a masterpiece or anything but I liked it for the most part. I find it cool to just be hanging in the Dune universe.
6 episodes and you want an arc? Hah.
Welcome to modern television.
Did you watch the season? Constantine has a lot going forward, his mother and father were killed, he is in charge of the fleet at Arrakis and his sister who who he was told to protect is planetside.
A show around the actual Butlerian Jihad with the origins of Houses would have been better.
such haters.
I know right?
Shrugs. They can be vicious when they don't like something. I find it funny how they were thirsting on that pretty guy who plays Constantine. They are very entertaining to watch.
The show was pretty bad.
Yeah, not really surprised by the commentary. They didn't really hide their disappointment throughout the episodes. They must have had massive expectations because the show isn't necessarily bad, it's just average.
For the alg
Idk why but I can't get into Dune. I did like the old movie better than the new ones though. Maybe it's because I watched Jodorowsky's Dune and my imagination went wild with this space opera possibilities when the new Dune movies just really isn't that. Or what I consider a space opera anyway. Needs more aliens and scifi-fantasy elements.
@@Cellardoor_ Dune isn’t a space opera, and there are no aliens in the Dune universe. It’s a political story within an environmental story within a story of oppression within a story of religious cults, that just happens to be set 20,000 years in our future. Jodorowsky’s Dune would have been a train wreck on an epic scale (even if it had been a TV series considering the screenplay was 14th hours long.) He didn’t understand the book even if Giger did. Lynch’s Dune missed most of the points of the first book by changing the story making Paul a victorious hero instead of the tragic figure from the books and trying to fit too much into one film. There are no Weirding Modules in the books and were a ridiculous addition because Lynch was too lazy to read the source material, didn’t understand the Bene Gesserit, Prana Bindu, and The Weirding Way, and thought all that equated to “kung fu in the desert.” Seriously, making Gurney carry a Pug through the desert while fighting? Surely a canteen of water would be more efficient. It’s great you like that film. It’s just not really Dune. You should read the first three books (though they’re not an easy read.) There are very good audiobooks you should be able to access from your local Public Library’s website.
Meh. Looking too deep. Season was awesome.