Clocking in at nearly an hour and a half, the final episode of Dune: Prophecy Season 1 was its own miniature movie. And in all likelihood, even if you were a little iffy on the show before this, any rational person has to admit that in its massive finale, Prophecy very much stuck the landing. The ending of Season 1 very neatly sets up Season 2, but there’s every reason to believe the future of the show — and by extension, the future of Dune — will be completely different going forward.
Here’s how the last episode of Dune: Prophecy Season 1, “The High-Handed Enemy” explained certain plot details, referenced some deep cuts from the books, and prepares us for an entirely different Season 2. Spoilers ahead.
What really happened to Desmond Hart
From the first episode, the Sisterhood has been plagued with visions of a massive sandworm, as well as two blue eyes in the dark. Turns out, this vision was a kind of bio-virus, exacerbated by fear and spread, somewhat unwillingly, by Desmond Hart. When Valya manages to face her fear, and beat back the mind-brutalizing virus, she sees a complete vision of what actually happened to Desmond Hart on Arrakis. To put it simply: a robot with a claw pulled out his eyeball, implanted the virus transmitters on him, and then sent him back into the world.
Valya realizes her hidden enemies are “using a Thinking Machine” to execute their plans. The two blue points of light weren’t two eyes, but rather one eye of the Thinking Machine, which was blurred into two because Desmond Hart’s vision was impaired. As Valya says to her sister Tula, “They’ve put one [a Thinking Machine] inside him. His eye is the virus. He’s their weapon.”
So, Desmond Hart was manipulated by an evil AI, being controlled by someone else. Valya really wants to take out Hart and end the whole virus problem once and for all but, using the Voice, Tula stops her. Desmond Hart is Tula’s son, and therefore, she can’t stand by and see him murdered.
The tearful reunion between mother and son is short-lived, though. After Valya escapes, Hart reverts to his role as the Bashar of the Imperium and has Tula arrested.
“Another Hidden Hand”
The revelation that Desmond Hart was manipulated and modified by a Thinking Machine is huge, but in Valya’s vision, there was another hooded figure behind it all. As she tells Tula, “I couldn’t make out a face... there is another hidden hand, grasping for control.”
But who is behind all of this? One good guess is that the Thinking Machine we saw in the Desmond Hart flashback was being controlled by a character called Omnius, a kind of hivemind AI that, in the expanded prequel and sequel novels, becomes a major enemy for all of humanity. To be clear, the idea that evil AI is the biggest bad in all of Dune is a retroactive notion created by Kevin J. Anderson and Brian Herbert for their various spinoff books, including the 2012 Sisterhood of Dune, upon which aspects of Prophecy are based.
Although Herbert’s Chapterhouse: Dune suggests that advanced Face Dancers have become a new type of humanity, advanced AI only exists in the murky backstory of classic Dune. All the nitty-gritty specifics of the Butlerian Jihad (the battle against the Thinking Machines) come from the spinoff novels, and now, Dune: Prophecy.
So the show doesn’t have to follow the exact storylines from the prequel books, meaning the hidden figure that Valya sees might not be Omnius, and could be a new character entirely. As showrunner Alison Schapker made clear to Inverse at the start of the season: aspects of Prophecy come from prequel books like Sisterhood of Dune, but the show is also forging its own path.
Arrival on Arrakis
The series finale ends with Valya, Princess Ynez, and Keiran Atreides escaping to Arrakis, the planet sometimes known as “Dune.” Yes, it’s only in the final minutes of Dune: Prophecy do we see people arrive on Dune proper, in the present tense. Valya’s plan here is that her hidden enemies live on Dune itself and “if the shadows are where they want to fight, then that is where I shall go.”
She also tells Ynez, “Come princess, the path to our enemy begins here.” While this is literally true for whatever happens in Season 2, there’s a bigger timeline implication here. Famously, in Dune, Paul and Jessica quickly learn that the Bene Gesserit Sisterhood planted the religious myth of “the Lisan al Gaib” on Arrakis thousands of years prior to their arrival. In Dune lore, this Bene Gesserit practice is known as the Missionaria Protectiva, and it’s essentially the opposite of Star Trek’s non-interference Prime Directive. In Dune, the Bene Gesserit specifically manipulate the religious beliefs of other cultures, all with the hopes that members of their order can use those myths to their benefit, centuries later.
The first Dune novel also reveals that the Fremen have their own “Mother Superior” modeled in the image of the Bene Gesserit Sisterhood. By placing Mother Superior Valya on Arrakis at the end of the show, Prophecy is clearly implying that all of those Sisterhood schemes are now being put into motion. In fact, in Season 2, it’s very possible that we’ll see Valya preaching to the Fremen about the coming of the Lisan al Gaib, which means, the title of the show — Prophecy — will suddenly take on a new meaning.
