spoilers abound
- Watching the first episode of Dune: Prophecy
- It’s…honestly really just GoT in space. I’m also really confused by the decision to have so much of the story in this first episode communicated by rather awkward info-dump narration and exposition
- Oooh not even 15 minutes into the episode and there’s already a 30 year timeskip
- Oh the joys of very flimsy logic giving a paper-thin pretense for one character to identify characters to the audience
- …oof. Not only is this fight choreography very awkward, this scene is essentially a rehash of the Gurney/Paul scene from the first movie
- Oh hey Mark Strong (I’d forgotten he was in this)
- Already have a character saying “the spice will flow”
- Okay, having both Jodhi May (who played Calanthe in the first season of The Witcher) and Mark Addy (Robert Baratheon from GoT) is continuing to make this feel more like GoT with a space veneer
- I think there has to be a reason for it, but Mark Strong is playing the emperor as the least comfortable person in every room he’s in
- Space cocaine exists
- Now they’re space vaping
- It really is the future
- Oh, also like the first episode of GoT (death): it ends with the (in this case successful) attempted murder of a child
- Thinking about it more, I feel like the series would have gotten off to a better start if the first episode had actually committed to spending time with younger Valya and only jumped forward 30 years at the very end, because that would have allowed for some more organic storytelling about the Great Houses, the Empire, and the Bene Gesserit themselves