Personally, I’m still waiting for these characters to reach out and grab me the way the heroes and villains of “Game of Thrones” and “House of the Dragon” have done. The show is still cramming such huge globs of plot and exposition into every episode that it’s tough to get a real handle on anyone who isn’t Valya or Tula at the moment. This is a time in the series’s progression when character building should probably take precedence over world building.
Frank Herbert relied on an incredibly verbose and complex style of inner monologue as a means of building out his characters amid the incredibly dense worlds he was creating. That works well on the page, but as fans and detractors alike of David Lynch’s “Dune” can tell you, translating Herbert’s approach — whether with voice-over narration or some other means of revealing characters’ interior lives — is a tricky proposition. So far, the series is struggling to pull it off. But the answer for impatient viewers may be simply to do what so many of the schemers and planners of the Duniverse do: sit, wait and see what happens.
I reviewed this week’s Dune: Prophecy for the New York Times.
Tags: dune, dune: prophecy, new york times, TV, TV reviews