That way you can see Ben's beautiful face as he talks to me about spice and other things on this podcast. I'll hold her up. And your dog. There she is for those of you watching. She's my prop for podcasts. You can only enjoy that if you watch these podcasts, which you can in both the Spotify app and on our not so new, uh, YouTube feed, the ringer verse YouTube. So that is all the stuff that you should know, except for last but not least hobbitsanddragons at gmail.com we don't have a ton of doom prophecy emails coming in i don't know if that is because people are too confused or if they're not confused at all i don't know you answered all their questions um yes i mean at length a couple weeks ago and we will do so again today um but if you have any questions, hobbitsanddragonsatgmail.com, any comments, any advice for any of us on how best to wear a veil or a large hat or anything like that, we would love to know it. And also, skeleton crew questions, Star Wars questions. We love a Star Wars question. Got the lore master himself at your beck and call. So officeanddragonsatgmail.com. We are structuring the podcast today. The conversation that Ben and I are going to have is around six-ish questions we have about Doom Prophecy coming off of episodes two and three. First things first, before we get into any of that, Ben, what is your relationship with Dune? How intensive of a spice head are you? What's your deal?

Well, while attending my all scholarship, all boys high school, which was sort of like a gender-swapped Benny Jesser at school with less eugenics, maybe more agony, if anything. I immersed myself in the white guy sci-fi canon, which I somehow squeezed into my busy social calendar. So Asimov, Clark, Heinlein, you know, the grandmasters. So

as

part of those sci-fi studies, my independent study, which I received no actual credit for, I read all of Frank Herbert's Dune books and also saw and was somewhat disturbed by the Lynch movie. And then probably like a lot of people, I lost touch with the Dune-iverse until the Villeneuve movies, which also like a lot of people, I really like. So that's about the extent of it. I have not swallowed the water of Brian Herbert. I was going

to ask you.

Beyond the broad strokes, I'm not familiar with the source material for Prophecy. But I am pretty fascinated by the attempts to force Dune into the mold of a modern multimedia franchise, despite at least half of the original novels being batshit and Brian's many many novels with kevin j anderson being divisive to say the least so yeah

that's a that's a good word i've written about the the

dune franchise building for the ringer.com what a great website in fact by the time this pod is posted probably an even greater website go check it out spoilers

that's that is quite a spoiler i love it um all right so we are here to talk about season one, episode two, Two Wolves, and season one, episode three, Sisterhood Above All. And I think you are much more versed than a lot of people are. I think a lot of people are coming into the show. This is what I'm hearing anecdotally. Word on the street, Ben, is that a lot of people are coming to the show just having seen the Villeneuve movies and not having a broader context beyond that, not having read any of the books. I don't know how much of a percentage that is the house of our listenership, but I think in general, what I'm seeing is I'm seeing a lot of confusion from people and a lot of uncertainty for people. And I'm just curious for you, we're halfway through the season. There's only six episodes this season. We're halfway through. How are you feeling about doing

prophecy

so far? Well,

this is awkward. I thought I was here for the Paul of Fame episode. Apparently not. I thought we were doing it finally. Should

we do it right now and just not tell Mallory and release it? Yeah.

It's the only way it'll happen. So Paul

Atreides is

both

a martyr and a messiah figure. In this episode, I will explain that. Go ahead. My

feelings have been mixed for most of the same reasons that you and Mal expressed after the premiere. It's partly the prequel problem of having seen the future that these characters are all trying to anticipate. It's partly the six episode season problem of trying to cram this much world building, this many characters, this much backstory and timeline hopping in several episodes. But I think it's more so the feeling of just having seen series like this before and not just Thrones. We'll see if we have quite as many Thrones references as you and Mal crammed in last time. But it's also series like Foundation and Raised by Wolves, which, to be fair, only I have seen. But those

are... No, it's you and at least like five other people. Yeah. It's definitely the casting director on House of the Dragon, I will say that. Yes. But yeah.

It's like a personal screening for me and a handful of other HBO Max and Apple TV Plus subscribers. But Travis Fimmel, Desmond Hart, is playing almost exactly the same character that he played in Raised by Wolves, which was a great character. But identical acting choices and costumes, it's kind of uncanny. So this is sort of Raised by Wolves season three for me, which is not necessarily a bad thing, but it just feels a little like I've seen this before in more distinctive series. And then I've had some issues with some of the on-the statements of themes, as you outlined last time. Nez in episode two saying, we're all just pieces on the board to be played in the pursuit of power and spice. Yes, we know. We're watching the show. So there's a little too much of that. I'm

having trouble. I mean, I think I understand the impulse. I'm like fairly middling on this show so far. I actually really did like episode three. I did too. I know some people were like thrown by the flashback, especially like Arjuna was worried that we were getting accolade vibes, getting an entirely flashback episode in the middle of a short season, which is a really fair. A

female accolade-based short season episode three extended flashback. Yeah, the track record's not great.

Very fair comp, but I liked this so much better than I liked that episode of television. And this is my favorite episode so far. So hopefully, you know, things... And it doesn't bode well, like the fact that we weren't in the palace at all. Yeah. With the Emperor and his family at all. We were just sort of drilling down on these two characters. It was also the first time I felt this season that we didn't get... Every single scene was only there for like exposition or world building explanation. I felt like we were getting a little bit more of character development, um, especially, you know, with the younger version of these two sisters. And so, um, yeah, so I'm optimistic, you know, that things could always like go up and up and up from here. Um, at least this isn't like the worst episode of the season, you know, so it's possible things will get better and better, but I have been just really stuck on the, the cop that a lot of people keep making and hearing all over the places. Like, this is like early aughts sci-fi channel, something Mal and I talked about a little bit, but I'm just hearing this constantly. And, you know, and then a lot of people are like, well, a lot of that era of sci-fi channel was really good. And granted it definitely was, but this is coming off often as the not great version of that.

Yeah, when it looks good, it looks great, like Foundation does, for instance. And at other times, not so much. There are a couple things that I haven't been bothered by as much. I know some people have bounced off the series, including my wife, because of the unchanging nature of the universe and the technology. It just kind of beggars belief. We're talking 10,000 years here, as you and Mal alluded to last time. And this is an issue with a lot of sci-fi and fantasy franchises, mostly for off-screen, out-of reasons. Just you establish a vibe and a look and a template for a franchise. Yeah, and we have that here with Villeneuve. And so you want to give people a way into this world by having it look somewhat familiar, even if there's a lot lower that you're not familiar with. But then how do you square that with how has nothing changed over these eons? And I kind of wrestle with that with Star Wars or Alien or Blade Runner, all these shows that were series that kind of came to us in the late 70s, early 80s and are forever frozen in time looking like they looked then, which is a great look, but can it ever look different? Something that I think Star Trek has done well. In Dune, though, I think it bothers me. Nice Star

Trek smuggle then.

Yes, I know you'd appreciate that. But in Dune, I think it bothers me less, even though the time span is so long, just because it's kind of already addressed by the canon. There are in-universe reasons why it's so static, just because you have the Bene Gesserit manipulating everything, and you have them kind of keeping things in line, and you have the Butlerian jihad, and you have the anti-thinking machine sentiment. And it's all about engineering humans as opposed to engineering technology. inclined to excuse than if you're just coming to this from the movies and saying, this is 10,000 years ago and we've got the same house on the throne and the same feuds and the same shield technology, which I understand why that throws people. I

think in general, I'm willing to accept this idea that, and I'm ready to embrace it because my AI sentiments are as anti as they come, But the idea that if we rid ourselves of AI concept, we might slow down in our technological advances. And I'm really fine with that as an idea. I think there are things, and it's not enough to make me bounce off the show in any way or really, really like hold me up too much. I think the only one really is that is the hand-to combat shield technology that just looks identical. Like, you know what I mean? If it didn't look identical, but almost the same, then maybe. But yeah, I mean, I also understand from like an, yeah, like you establish this look also for an IP reasons, right? It's like the draw, the allure of IP is that you're serving up people something that looks familiar, something that feels familiar. And so to completely restructure the look of or the design of the world is to lose that basic idea, which is we put the word dune in front of the colon so that you will tune in to something that's not just called sisterhood or prophecy or whatever. And

it's asking a lot of creators to not only engineer this future world, but also convincingly extrapolate from there over hundreds or thousands of years, how would all of this evolve in this world? That's a lot on top of everything else you're asking them to do. And those personal shields, they work so well for the kissing and the stabbing. They do. It's just the color-coded kissing. It's just great.

The

no means no. Red light means no. Yes. I've also been struck, I think, by just what a world we're living in where HBO has been so IP-pilled. We've kind of become accustomed to this. People point to superhero stuff at the box office. Oh, superhero stuff does so well or historically has done so well. I think it's even more striking to me that we're living in the nerd culture world that Sunday night, Prestige on HBO now, is House of R, Ringerverse content. It's Thrones and The Last of Us. I mean, we're talking Hot D into The Penguin, Dune Prophecy, the franchise. HBO is all in on IP for better or worse and worse. And worse? Yeah. I

mean, The Last of Us, amazing. I'm really excited for Dunkin' Egg. There's obviously stuff on here I'm very excited about. I thought The Penguin was really good. But as much as I love all this House of Ourself and as much as we love to have content to cover, you don't want to miss that HBO Sunday night drama content, which we all love as well. So I don't think it needs to be either or. If they made it Sci-Fi Mondays or something, you know what I mean? Did something where they like picked another night of the week where they, you know, Zaslav and his various initiatives, you know, kept the IP TV machine going in that regard. We're eating well as it is.

We don't need every network and every night necessarily. But to bring it back, I was with you on episode three being my favorite so far. Not so much because of what I'm calling the red engagement. Because unlike in the red wedding, we didn't really know the victims here. R.I Ori. So, you know, it's just...

The golden retriever Atreides. Yeah.

Did Ori remind you distractingly of Steve or was it just me?

Oh, that's a you thing, but I love that for you. From the neck up.

I haven't seen the rest of Steve, but I was facially certainly seeing some similarities there. But because I had a hard time connecting with individual characters and finding the emotional core of this story as opposed to just the lore. And so the focus on Valia and Tula here, even if they aren't the most cuddly characters, I think that helped here. And there was a lot of just thematic stuff about the past and the future and how all of this resonates that we can get into a little later. It's

interesting from a sort of who are we rooting for standpoint. A friend of mine walked in while I was watching this episode and I was like, sorry, I can't, I'm watching it for work. I can't stop watching it. So she like sits down and watches the back half of the episode with me and she watches Tula kill all of these Atreides men. And she's like, wow, that sucks. I was like, well, you know, and she's like, on the one hand, she's like, you know, she knows enough about noon to know Atreides good, Harkonnen bad, right? That's her understanding of the situation. I was like, yeah, but this is our main character. And in theory, they killed her brother. And I don't know, there are a few, you know, and I just like finding myself justifying a mass uh you know killing uh she you know she put stuff in the kool-aid at the atreides hunt and i thought it was just a pretty compelling sequence even watching it even figuring out even before they start chanting atreides that she has infiltrated the Atreides camp. Watching her have her own conflict about what she's doing here. Thinking about the Tula we know in the present day and thinking about how we think of her as the nicer sister. But when it comes down to it, has she actually got more blood on her hands than her older sister does? these are these are questions but i thought that was like i don't know i thought all of that was really well done and even though we don't know the atreides men they were uh except for of course rt barnes from house of the dragon that might be my last no it won't be my last game of Thrones reference. But I was with her and I was really feeling it. I thought the young actress playing her was really, really good. And I was really intrigued by that plot. And also just intrigued by how much we didn't know and how much can you justify in something like that. What is war? What isn't? All that sort of stuff.

Yeah. And how much of that relationship was real? Was there actual affection between Tula and Ori, or was it all a show? And you know I love an official companion pod, so I did listen to the official Dune companion pod, and Emma Canning was on, who plays young Tula, and did a great job in this episode, and was saying something that I thought I had picked up on while I was watching it, which is that there is a moment when she expects Ori to reject her when she reveals that she's a Harkonnen and he doesn't. He's like, oh, that's cool. We can chart our own future. We

are not who they say we are. What is hate? What is war?

She's like, well, I have something to tell you.

She's like, the syringe is already loaded. Yeah. Like, I already put the poison in the syringe. Right.

So in that moment, I think she's thinking, was there another way? Could we have avoided this? Could this have been a way out of the Montagues and Capulets situation? And we could have charted our own path. And is this Valia steering me down? The two wolves are the two sisters, right? And which is the worst wolf, the one who cries while eating the lamb or the one who doesn't? And Tool is the one who cries, who actually she wells up, she feels emotion. She lets Albert, aka Oscar Tully, go. in a way, that makes her maybe more dangerous and more unpredictable. But is that just because she's been coached that way? Because she was raised by a wolf herself, sort of, in Valya. And, you know, in a way, I guess, did Valya engineer Paul, in a sense, by perpetuating and deepening this feud? Because even as she's worried about the sisterhood and the future, things could have been different if she hadn't driven Griffin to his death, presumably, and then caused Tula to kill all of the Atreides. So is it the self-fulfilling prophecy that you and Mel talked about that we all love. Is it her trying to avoid that fate for the sisterhood and yet in getting the revenge before she fully commits while she's still a Harkonnen first, she's the one who maybe leads eons down the road, thousands of years down the road to Paul and everything that comes after that. And there are other parallels like Valia put Tula through something she didn't necessarily want to do or had to be coaxed into in killing Ori and all of his kin. Much like Valya is kind of pressing Tula to do with Lila, right? Because Tula has that relationship with Lila and Valya doesn't, really. If anything, I mean, there's no love lost between Dorothea and Valya, whereas Lila means a lot to Tula. So it's sort of a parallel with that present day timeline as well. I

think that's true. But I think what's interesting is like how much do we lay on the machinations of one person? Like obviously the Bene Gesserit, the sisterhood in general are manipulating things all around them. How much do we put that on Valiant? How much do we put that on the individual choices of people? And how much information is being held back from us as viewers? And that takes us to my first official question that I want to ask you about this idea of withholding information. We're going out of order in case you're confused. You're like, I thought we were talking about sex first. Nope, we'll get there though. Okay, so my first question is this. Speaking of truth as we believe it, that's a reference to something I haven't gotten to yet, how much is the show holding back certain things to generate surprise for us, the audience? And how much to demonstrate how our main characters are often operating on false or incomplete information? So we see Valia speaking with her brother, to your point, sort of like urging her brother or urging her family into this vengeance path. I actually liked the way that he's like, I will go do this, and then we just cut to corpse. Harsh cut to corpse. I found that unintentionally

funny in a way. It's, you know, we deserve to make it. We will, you'll see. Cut to corpse on slab. Cut

to corpse. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, definitely have that vibe. But also my question was, do you think they did that so that we would be, however, temporarily duped or unclear as to the fact that Tula has infiltrated the Atreides camp, like to not show us what Ori or any of the other Atreides men look like so that when we, you know, when they start chanting Atreides, that's when Yeah. supposed to go like, oh my God, it's the Atreides. Or did they not show us how Griffin died because they have a story about how Griffin died, but we didn't see how he died. And so is the story actually more complicated? Is Ori actually, you know, much more innocent and all of that? You know, so the question is, are they holding back this information? I guess three reasons. Number one, comedy. A cut-to comedy moment. Number two, to twist the knife on us, the audience, by trying to surprise us with the Atreides clan or to show that Valdea specifically, who is the one who is often the most certain of the path forward, despite not always having a grasp of the entire picture, she is frequently caught on the back foot. I would say she was caught on the back foot a lot in episode two in a way that you would hope that this woman who has risen all the way up the ranks of the Bene Gesserit and has all of this incredible power wouldn't be caught so unaware so frequently. But the fact that she is means that she's operating in many senses on a lot of bluster uh and sort of false certainty rather than actual informed certainty so what do you what do you think the show has more especially as we talk about like truth as we understand it uh truth as we believe it to be which we'll go back to with desmond hart how much do you think the show is interested in that as like theme versus plot mechanic? Do

you know

what I mean?

Well, the Atreides gathering reminded me very much of the Lindbergh Thanksgiving tradition, where we dab ourselves in mud and circle a fire chanting, Lindbergh, Lindbergh. So I immediately clocked what was happening. You felt at home? Yeah. You felt at home. Okay. I think when it comes to Griffin specifically, I got the sense that that was more just about efficiency, about saving time and kind of clumsy in a way that this show sometimes is. And you don't know if it's, again, because the constraints of the six episode season or because some of the creative turmoil and who knows how many drafts some of these episodes were subjected to. That just felt to me like, look, it's episode three. We haven't met Griffin yet. We don't really have a lot of time to get to know Griffin. And Griffin is really just a plot device here. He's sort of meant to illustrate the effect of Valia and how manipulative she can be. And also the actual heartbreak that she went through and that Tula went through. And so we don't really have time to convey the essence of Griffin and why he was so special and how great a representative on the lens rad he would have been and exactly what would have happened here with him confronting the Atreides. That just felt to me like a cut, maybe a deleted scene somewhere on someone's hard drive. Just like, let's get moving.

All the Griffin cut? Yeah. Okay. All right.

Yeah. Literally the Griffin cut, I'm sure. Somehow, one way or another, I guess we don't know exactly what happened to him. But yeah, that felt to me like, look, this is a Tula and Valia episode, and Griffin is mostly a means to an end. All

right. So let's go back to... Let's start back at the beginning with sex, which is where I had intended to start. In honor of Mal, who is not here today. Yes. This is snarkily put, but I'm sorry. What's in greater danger of wearing itself out? The protracted sex scenes or valia telling someone to get out a knife and cut their own throat as she has in some for another in every single episode so far um before you answer that i would say the you know we get it it's hbo sunday night and i know that like there are some shows like succession where it where the powers that be at hbo were like please, can we have more sex? The weirder, the better, the longer, the better, you know, the audience is used to it. And Jesse Armstrong, in that case with Succession was like, nah, you know, so there are some shows that are not, you know, engaging in that. And it seems like the folks making Doom Prophecy were like, oh, we'll give you something every episode. Don't worry about it. The most egregious example, I think, was episode two, which was this terribly clumsy sex position interrogation scene between Constantine and Shannon Richese. But we've had a sex scene in every single episode. We'll talk about the possible consequences of what happened with Tula here. But how are you feeling about either Jessica's go-to move of take out the knife or the proverbial take out the knife of the sex scenes in these various episodes?

Yeah. I mean, that had a little more impact the first time she used it, I guess, now that we know that it's such a go-to.