I can prophesize, unfortunately, that the new Dune TV show won’t be around for more than two seasons. Maybe just one.
The design is fabulous. Most of the cast is stellar—Olivia Williams, Mark Strong, yes please! The actress who plays young Valya is fantastic. Beautiful worldbuilding, visually.
But Dune itself is too weird—and this is like a remove on Dune. There are things that can be swallowed in a two-hour movie that just don’t make sense in a longform TV show. If they’ve banned “thinking machines,” how exactly do they have all this technology that must need, you know, transistors?
All the “biological” sci-fi (the voice, the spice, ancestral memory) is basically comic book stuff—it’s a superpowers show.
All of that could be made to work—and I’m not familiar with the source novels from the extended Dune universe—but we hit the ground running with all this palace intrigue that just isn’t that interesting.
The backstory, on the other hand, does work. Episode three had some great stuff.
I would have set the entire show in the backstory.
I’ll keep watching, sci-fi junkie that I am, for as long as they decide to make it.
Comments