Until now, this show has been focused on plot, layering mystery upon mystery and expertly building a world. But it has done so at the expense of building characters, who have mostly been along for the ride. By keeping the focus on character, and on the truths they uncover, this episode reversed the show’s polarity in a welcome way. With any luck, the change will stick.

I reviewed this week’s Dune: Prophecy for the New York Times. (Gift link!)

When you step on set on a huge production like this, with the giant sets and elaborate costumes, does that make your job easier?

A lot of actors definitely say all that makes it easier for them. I don’t know if it affects me, really. I appreciate the work that goes into creating those costumes and sets, but I always make it about the other person I’m acting with.

The worst thing for me is walking on a set, and there are so many people in the room, and I know at one point in the day I’m going to be the only person talking. I don’t do speeches. I didn’t read in front of the class. So that’s the most daunting stuff, when I get on set and think: Oh God, there’s a lot of extras and actors here, and I’m going to have to talk in front of everybody — shoot me.

How do you overcome that? It’s your job.

I know! I much prefer when there’s only one person in the scene with me. But I try to make the work high-stakes and meaningful enough to where I can ignore what I’m doing. That scene in [Episode 4] where I’ve got to speak in front of a lot of people, that stuff is extremely difficult for me.

I interviewed Travis Fimmel about his work as Desmond Hart on Dune: Prophecy for the New York Times. Raised by Wolves forever.

Two blue lights shine in the darkness, like the eyes of an insectoid machine. Guttural sounds, like speech in a language not yet invented, accompany them, but only for a second.

Throughout “Dune: Prophecy,” this menacing pairing of sight and sound has recurred in dreams and visions. Are they the eyes of God, judging the Sisterhood, as Sister Emeline argues? Are they the eyes of the tyrannical force that Raquella, the Sisterhood’s first Mother Superior, warned about with her dying breaths? Are they the eyes of whatever entity gives Desmond Hart his “beautiful, terrible” power to burn people alive with his mind? Are all these things one and the same?

I suspect we’ll get the answer eventually, but part of me thinks that’s a shame. Right now, the blue lights and the garbled grunts are the most Lynchian thing this franchise has served up since the director David Lynch himself was in charge of it 40 years ago. And as Lynch has demonstrated time and again, sometimes the mystery is its own reward.

I reviewed this week’s Dune: Prophecy for the New York Times. (Gift link!)

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.

Javicco’s own bastard son, Constantine, gives up the goods on Desmond while in the middle of a lengthy sex scene with Duke Richese’s daughter, Lady Shannon (Tessa Bonham Jones), which unfolds languorously in an immense and ornately decorated hollow tree trunk. Detractors might call this kind of eroticized info-dump “sexposition,” a term frequently lobbed at “Game of Thrones.” It’s this critic’s opinion that if you have to get an earful about intergalactic politics, you may as well get it from good-looking naked people.

I reviewed this week’s Dune: Prophecy for the New York Times.

“Humanity’s greatest weapon is the lie,” says Reverend Mother Tula Harkonnen of the Sisterhood (Olivia Williams). “Human beings rely on lies to survive. We lie to our enemies, we lie to our friends, we lie to ourselves. Lying is among the most sophisticated tasks a brain can perform.”

The acolytes under Tula’s tutelage in this first episode of “Dune: Prophecy,” the new prequel series developed by Diane Ademu-John and Alison Schapker, are learning to lie more effectively in order to better control the people they supposedly serve. As recipes for political success go, it’s hard to argue with the results.

I’m covering Dune: Prophecy for the New York Times, starting with my review of the series premiere.

Not even the desert winds of the planet Arrakis can match the heat around the long-anticipated arrival of Dune, director Denis Villeneuve’s adaptation of Frank Herbert’s landmark 1965 science-fiction classic. Staring Timothée Chalamet as the young nobleman Paul Atreides, Zendaya as his love interest Chani, Oscar Isaac as his father Duke Leto, and Jason Momoa as his mentor Duncan Idaho, this new version of the old classic has weathered the pandemic storm to finally arrive in theaters (and on HBO Max) on October 22nd. But while Herbert’s dense worldbuilding and inventive jargon has made the book a bestseller since its inception, it can be a notoriously impenetrable work — especially when it comes to adapting its long, winding story for the screen.

Don’t know your Baron Harkkonen from your Bene Gesserit? Don’t sweat it: Our quick and dirty guide to Dune will get you up to speed.

I’m thrilled to be back at Rolling Stone for the first time in a long time with this new Dune cheat sheet.

In the contemporary internet sense, the Dune discourse is wild and wide open, without the warring-camp, protect it at all costs mentality that plagues so many other geek-culture staples. If you say “The spice must flow,” you aren’t risking hours of replies from angry pedants the way you might if, oh I don’t know, you point out that in Justice League, Aquaman’s trident (from the Latin for “three teeth”) has five points instead of three. Unless you try very hard, you’re also unlikely to encounter anyone complaining that Dune has been ruined by SJWs and soyboys, or that critics who like it have been bought off by that sweet De Laurentiis money. Yet it’s still a sprawling invented world that provides you with all the esoterica and trivia and map-reading and jargon-slinging joy of any other. You can get stoned and stay up until the wee hours making dank Duncan Idaho memes with your friends, or with no one at all, completely unmolested.

And perhaps I’m going out on a limb here, but based on the source material and the filmmakers historically associated with adapting it — including Villeneuve, whose Blade Runner movie gives us a solid recent point of comparison — Dune-iverse phrases like “Tleilaxu ghola” or “prana-bindu training” or “He is the Kwisatz-Haderach” are never gonna reach “Infinity Stones” or “Ten points for Gryffindor” or “A Lannister always pays his debts” levels. Anyone who’s seen the very real Dune coloring and activity books, which look like an elaborate prank, can attest to how tough it is to boil this stuff down to four-quadrant consumability. It’s true that the books are bestsellers, but so is the comparable work of Jeff VanderMeer, author of Annihilation, which became a well-regarded science-fiction film that nevertheless won’t be getting Happy Meal tie-ins anytime soon.

No matter how much Lynch’s version trends upward in critical estimation, no matter how (or if) Villeneuve’s new version pans out, this is just not a franchise that’s scalable in the Transformers or Harry Potter way. It’s too dense, too weird. It smells like sun-bleached library paperbacks. Which, by the way, are the only form in which Dune has been successfully franchised, in the form of sequels co-authored by workmanlike SFF writer Kevin J. Anderson and Herbert’s son Brian. Dune references signal shared knowledge to those in the know, and that’s about it. Dune fandom is an un-fandom.

More than anything else, this is what makes immersion in Dune such an attractive prospect. Paul Atreides found anonymity, friendship, and freedom in the secret ways of the unconquerable Fremen desert tribes (Fremen, “free men,” get it?); his life after that point was a prolonged struggle to export that sense of freedom to others. Consciously or not, Herbert himself summed up the promise of Paul’s life in his introduction to New World or No World, repackaging it as a plan for the survival of the species and the planet we live on.

“The thing we must do intensely is be human together,” he wrote. “People are more important than things. We must get together. The best thing humans can have going for them is each other. We have each other. We must reject everything which humiliates us. Humans are not objects of consumption. We must develop an absolute priority of humans a head of profit — any humans ahead of any profit. Then we will survive. Together.” Dune is one small, goofy, vital way of sharing something wonderful with each other, and with nothing and no one else.

For my debut at The Outline I wrote about Dune, the nerdiest popular thing you can enjoy without feeling like a corporate shill or a footsoldier in some weird fandom war. I went real long and real deep, so please take a look!