spoilers abound
- Chloe Lea is incredible in this episode, and I fervently hope that she goes on to get more roles after this, because WOW did she do a great job of physically and vocally evoking Raquella
- definitely didn’t have “Desmond Hart is Tula’s secret love child from that time she slept with an Atreides and then murdered (almost) all of that family” on my bingo card
- shoutouts to the show for letting the empress be horny
- this is, once again, the strongest episode yet (replacing episode 4), and it finally felt like the actors have some (small bit of) space to lean into the emotional side of things
- that stuff was there before, but now it feels like there’s enough plot stuff revealed that the emotional side of things is landing more for me
- although there’s not much there for her to work with, Sister Jen’s actress is doing a very good job with her material
- calling Lila “Doe Eyes” is, uh, very much coded a certain way to my reading
- the way that Jen is continually set apart from all of the other acolytes is interesting in the wake of the visions
- the emperor is just continually hilarious in how easily he can be controlled – a single eye flutter and he folds like a wet paper towel
- Mikaela continues to be one of the more intriguing characters, and I wish that she’d had a larger role
- I still wish that this show could be 2-4 episodes longer; so much of the plot arc stuff feels stuffed into single episodes that could work better spread across two