Dune: Prophecy Will Expand Franchise Canon With One Surprising Omission

When Dune: Prophecy debuts on HBO this November, the new series will explore a time 10,000 years before the story of Paul Atreides and his adventures on the planet Ararkis (aka, Dune). And yet, in the show’s latest teaser trailer, it seems Dune itself won’t be the setting for most of the action. Instead, Dune: Prophecy seems to expand the visual canon of the overall franchise by focusing the story on various worlds that are very much not Dune.

In the story of the first Dune novel, we learn that although the Spacing Guild and the ruling body of the Landsraad control much of the universe, the true power behind the Imperium is the Sisterhood of the Bene Gesserit. These outer space “witches” don’t possess magic, per se, but they can see into the future (blurrily) and control the actions of others through the suggestive power of “the Voice.”

In this new teaser, it’s suggested the Sisterhood “do our thinking for us.” This is an interesting detail simply because in the Dune timeline, Prophecy takes place pretty much right after the formation of the Spacing Guild and the end of the “Machine era” in which humanity fought back against thinking machines during the Butlerian Jihad and outlawed AI. The Mentats (human computers) take the place of the AI in society, but the Bene Gesserit are deep thinkers, too.

However, it seems their machinations in the new series may only touch on Arrakis lightly, and perhaps, not really feature the planet much at all.

Many of the environments glimpsed in the new Dune: Prophecy trailer are clearly planets that have massive bodies of water, including oceans. As all spiceheads know, the planet Arrakis has no oceans. That said, in the distant past, it probably did, it’s just that Prophecy isn’t far enough into the past to depict a version of Arrakis that still had oceans. Why? Well, the Bene Gesserit drinking the Water of Life is key to their rise to power because it allows them the power of prescience. And because the Water of Life comes from sandworms, and the sandworms are indigenous to the desert planet of Arrakis. This means you can’t have watery Arrakis in a Dune prequel and still have the Bene Gesserit.

So if Arrakis/Dune doesn’t appear in Prophecy, which other Dune planets will? That’s fairly easy to guess. Because we see a good deal of House Corino here, the planet Kaitain (briefly glimpsed in Dune: Part Two and the opening of the David Lynch film) will probably be a major setting. On top of that, we’ll almost certainly spend a good deal of time on the planet Wallach IX, home base of the Bene Gesseirt.

All that said, the show is called “Prophecy,” which seems to refer to the fact that the Bene Gesserit will seed the prophecy of “Lisan Al Gaib” among the natives of Arrakis. This is part of the Bene Gesserit’s multi-world Missionaria Protectiva initiative, which seeds various religious myths on different planets to assist the Sisterhood in the far future. Will we see the Bene Gesserit planting the prophecy of “Lisan Al Gaib” in Dune: Prophecy? Right now, based on this teaser, the answer is... maybe. But if the Bene Gesseirt are hitting up Arrakis in this series, we might expect them to tread very lightly in those sands.