I saw that Dune: Prophecy was renewed for a season two.
This surprised me because the (brief) first season seemed convoluted and underwhelming. But maybe HBO has too much invested to cut bait, or has faith the storyline will pay off. (The show had a troubled origin.)
I don’t want to dump on the show, because I don’t want to lay a time bomb online that somebody who worked on it finds in eight years when I’m asking for a job. Hah! Kidding, but not.
But I do want to point out two things...
One is that, some 20 years into the Golden Age of Television (or beyond it, by now), the rhythms and tropes of these shows are becoming overly familiar. Long-lost relatives, antiheroes, redemptions—we can feel in our bones the inevitable character arcs.
Stories need these foundations but creators must work harder to make them feel fresh. It’s no fun when we can see the surprises six episodes away.
The other is the long shadow cast by Star Trek on anything with future technology and/or 19th century colonialism in space.
Dune: Prophecy mines the rich Dune universe—and the production design is beautiful—but it also seems to backslide into lesser Trek.
Anytime the characters are explaining the doohicky they need to plug into the Macguffin in order to stop the chain reaction of the whatzit—it’s like, ugh.
Not to get into spoilers, but Dune: Prophecy starts with something (and is personified by a character) that looks mystical but is revealed to be just, well, technobabble.
Also, Star Trek has managed for 60 years to ride the balance between actual science fiction and historical fiction, but in space.
This is a problem that all space sci-fi faces: actual space travel is preposterously slow, boring and empty of “spatial anomalies.”
Because that wouldn’t make for very good television, Gene Roddenberry designed a series that was the navy in space, a la Forbidden Planet—he was doing Horatio Hornblower.
The problem there is that you have alien races that are versions of other Earth cultures. This can very quickly devolve into exposition like, “The Grifaldians are threatening to veto the alliance with the Schmlagelans unless they can colonize the planet of the Hoozies...”
And there’s way too much of that in Dune: Prophecy.
Anyway, when it returns, I’ll be watching. I’m a junkie!
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