Bio-Weapons, Possession, Schisms | Dune: Prophecy Episode 5 Review

0:21 Hi guys, it's Quinn here. If you appreciate my content, consider hitting the like button. It's the best way to get the YouTube algorithm to notice this channel. If you want to do more to support this channel, consider checking out the Patreon link in the description. So we are now on episode 5 of Dune Prophecy.

0:39 We only have one episode left, and in this episode, a couple of the theories that we discussed in previous reviews and during the live streams every week came true. So we'll discuss those as well as the other events of the episode. So first off, in this episode, Valia's plans, Volia's machinations are in full swing.

1:03 We see Benny Jezreet Francesca is coming to Seleucia Secundus, and she has come to Seleucia Secundus on the orders of the Mother Superior. Under the pretense that her son Constantine sent her a letter. Yes, she is the mother of Constantine. This is something that we wondered about and discussed in the past as well, but now we finally have the backstory.

1:27 It seems like the Emperor was betrothed to the Empress, he was married to the Empress, and the Vinnie Gesseret through Francesca wrestled away her power. Which is something that the Empress has remained bitter about this entire time. Now, Vahya has summoned Francesca to Seleuce Secundas for a few reasons.

1:48 For one, Valya is aware that the Emperor loves Francesca. So she wants her to help him see the sisterhood in a favorable light again. And she also wants her to convince him to allow Yenez to join the Sisterhood on Wallach 9. And also as a bonus, although this is more of a favor for Francesca than anything, Constantine will lead the Emperor's new fleet that he acquired from House of Reaches.

2:19 The other part of Valia Harkonnen's plan involves Harold Harkonen going to Desmond, tipping him off as to where the smuggling is happening, so that Michaela can set up a series of bombs and distract Desmond and perhaps kill him so that Francesca can maneuver inside of the palace to accomplish what Vaya needs her to do, which she ultimately does by the end of the episode.

2:47 Which is she sinks her hooks into the Emperor, which diminishes any power that the Empress held up until that point. And she knows that, and that's why she reacts in the way that she does. If you watch Ynez's reaction in this scene as well, you can see that Ynez has an interesting look on her face, and that's because at the same time, Ynez is realizing that as her mother is essentially being replaced by Francesca, she is being replaced by Constantine.

3:15 She realizes in that moment that Constantine is now the favorite, and her father will likely favor Constantine as the future heir to the imperial throne. Valius plan, however, doesn't totally go off without a hitch. Desmond Hart actually survives the bombing. And exactly how he survives is not totally clear to me.

3:36 He did activate his shield, and I guess it's an open question as to whether or not a shield would be strong enough to protect you and such a forceful explosion. It was certainly not a shield that protected him from dying after being swallowed by the sandworm, because shields in the desert is just not something that is done because of the way sandworms react to shields.

4:00 It sends them into a kind of frenzy, so no one uses shields in the desert. But then again, if we are being shown this scene of Desmond surviving an explosion by using a shield, given what we know about the sandworms and the internal furnace of their insides, it is not beyond question that perhaps Desmond was swallowed by the sandworm and then turned on his shield after he got swallowed, and so that allowed him to survive and maybe the sandworm spit him out.

4:30 But then again, him turning on a shield inside of a sandworm would also attract other frenzied sandworms, and so they'd likely attack the sandworm that has the shield inside of it, considering what I know about the way shields affect sandworms. But like I said, open question. We're just gonna have to wait to the next episode to see if they explain the entire being swallowed by a sandworm thing.

4:57 But Desmond does in fact survive this bombing, and when Volga learns of this, she says that she has a contingency plan that is meant to take care of Desmond. What's interesting about this scene is that we also see Michaela's reaction to all of this, and I think this represents what's happening with the sisterhood at this time period in general.

5:22 Valya is losing grip. Vala is losing control, and they are losing faith in the teachings of the sisterhood and Valya especially. We saw on Wallach 9 in this episode that sisters are leaving, acolytes are returning home. In this scene, Michaela directly questions Valya's plan. Which is very strange in the Sisterhood.

5:46 It's not typical for the Mother Superior to be questioned so brazenly. And in fact, I'm pretty sure in the later Frank Herbert books, if a sister said something like what Michaela said to Valea, to the Mother Superior around that time period, the Mother Superior would instantly be thinking about how she's going to eliminate that sister.

6:08 Because you cannot have a sister that puts anything else above the sisterhood. It's just not something that we can have. Later in the books, like in Heretics of Dune, you have sisters that don't totally agree with the way the sisterhood is going, but at the end of the day, the sisterhood is going to be first.

6:28 In their dying moments, they will find a way to help the sisterhood, even if they're not totally in line with the current vision. So it's always about the sisterhood. So it's very interesting to see what's happening with Michaela and what is happening in general. There's a lot of questioning happening.

6:44 And I wonder if that relates to the fact that this is an earlier version of the sisterhood. So as I mentioned earlier, there were two pretty significant reveals in this episode, and they were things that we had previously theorized about in other videos. One of those things was Lila being possessed. So Lila awakens in this episode, and we realize that she is sometimes not herself because she's dealing with the other memories that are now present.

7:15 And we do see at some point in this episode that she becomes fully possessed by Raquela. And this was a really interesting scene to me. Although I wished Raquela could have been more specific about certain things. For instance, she uses he will lead us into tyranny. Are you talking about Desmond Hart?

7:39 Are you talking about the God Emperor? Are you talking about something else? I would love I would have loved some specificity from Raquela. Like you have her here, now is the time to ask the question. So that was slightly frustrating. But it was cool to see possession in action. And in fact, we do even get one of the sisters saying, What kind of abomination is this?

8:00 And abomination is the term that they use for possession. Now, the way I see this going in the next episode is that I don't think Lila is going to continue to be helpful as she was in this episode. I see in the next episode Dortea coming forth, and I see D Lila becoming a more destructive figure for the sisterhood.

8:22 We only got one episode left, so I don't know to what degree they're going to extend this, but that's what I see happening. And they set it up several times. They keep showing the followers of Dortea, Emiline and the ones that hang out around her. Um they've established that they are kind of the followers of what Doritea believed in.

8:41 So I do believe that when Doritea comes forth and possesses Lila, that there will be a kind of schism within the sisterhood. And that might be the climax that the end of this show ends on. Uh Valia thought she got rid of Doritea, but she didn't. And for people that have read the Dune books later on, this is a spoiler, it's just like we thought we got rid of the Baron, but he still comes back to haunt us, so it's an echo of what happens in Children of Dune.

9:12 Now, I will say that when she says that if he succeeds, we will be led into tyranny, sounds way more like Leto II, the God Emperor, than it does Desmond Hart. So I'm very curious. And the way she describes the vision, the wall of Shai Halud swallowed by darkness until two eyes stared out from that darkness.

9:41 Is is Shai Halud being swallowed by darkness, or is she just talking in fractured sentences? Because she says you say the wall of Shai Halud swallowed by darkness. Is that just an artsy metaphorical way of saying the screen cut to black? In which case, be specific, woman. This is the time of crises, as we keep emphasizing.

10:03 Or are or is that in reference to something being swallowed by Shai Halud, which is what we actually saw. So the scene didn't actually clarify anything, which is why I thought it was a little bit frustrating. I thought, oh, Raquela's here, now it's time for some clarification. Not very much clarification.

10:20 The more interesting part of the scene is when we see that Tula has been, you know, studying Casha's brain. Raquela inside of Tula comes in because Jin has just let her out of the dungeon or wherever she was, even though she was told not to. By the way, Jin is also extremely disobedient and mouthy for a sister of the sisterhood.

10:42 I feel like this would not be tolerated in the days of Odrede, but moving on. Raquela determines that this is caused by a virus, and this virus looks very similar to a virus created by machines during the Butlerian jihad. And it's centered in the fear center. All of this that's happening, the dreams, everything, is related to an RNA retrovirus of some kind.

11:11 It is biological technology. It's biological technology, it's some kind of bioweapon. So it's possible that they're gonna tie all of this in to the creation of the litany against fear. Fear is the mind-killer, fear is the little death that leads to total obliteration, total obliteration by fire, potentially.

11:35 So perhaps they're tying that into the litany against fear. And as a lot of people have pointed out, and I can't deny that there have been several implications and references to these eyes watching as being the god emperor, but I guess we're just gonna have to wait to the last episode to get confirmate confirmation of that, or maybe we won't, maybe they will keep it kind of open-ended, because I do think that they are definitely trying to keep it open, judging by the sound that it makes and the fact that the glowing eyes matches the machine.

12:09 But one thing that a lot of people have brought up is what Paul says at the end of the Dune book and the Villeneuve movie, is when he says, Look into that place where you dare not look, you'll find me there staring back at you. So a lot of people have tied that to what we're seeing here, these eyes staring back out of the darkness.

12:27 Now, this to me doesn't totally track with what we get in the Frank Herbert books, right? When in the books the Reverend Mother Guy is Helen Ohayam is talking about this place that terrorizes them, it's not a reference to prescience, even, it is a reference to other memory. She says, There is a place where no truthsayer can see, we are repelled by it, terrorized.

12:52 It is said a man will come one day and find in the gift of the drug his inward eye, he will look where we cannot. And then here's where I think a lot of people stop reading because it specifies it specifies he will look where we cannot, into both feminine and masculine past. So this is a reference to other memory, not a reference to prescience.

13:15 When Paul says, You will find me staring back at you, it's a taunt. It's not literal. That being said, the eyes could still totally be the God Emperor, the eyes could still totally be Paul, the eyes could be Erasmus, the eyes could be Omnius, or whatever they want them to be. At this point, I'm m more and more convinced that they're probably going to keep it vague, that they're probably going to keep it open, and they're not going to say exactly what it is.

13:52 Especially because now we have two aesthetic versions of the image. We have the drawing version, which looks a lot more like a worm shape. One of the images has like worm ridges on it. You can kind of see like a halo around the eyes, which is very reminiscent of like some of the older covers of God Emperor of Dune.

14:16 And the other depiction of the eyes that we see in the show is very not like that. It's a black background, sometimes it's outer space, implying that something is coming from distant space. And if you've read the later Brian Herbert books, you know that the machines come out of distant space to seek out the remnants of humanity, and the glowing eyes and the mechanized, synthesized noise that we hear.

14:43 It couldn't be a more different aesthetic versus what we see drawn on the paper. So that lets me know that they're playing with both concepts at the same time, and they don't really want to commit to either one just yet. Now they might in the last episode or they might hold out for the hope of future seasons, but that's the impression that I'm getting right now.

15:06 Moving on. One of the other things that we've talked about was who is Desmond? Where does he come from? We basically have confirmation of that in this episode. We still don't know, as I said, how he survived being swallowed by the sandworm, but we know where he came from. And this was one of the possibilities that we discussed in the live streams that we've been doing week by week for the show, where we talked about the potential of Desmond being Tula's son with the Atreides Ori, who she killed.

15:39 So he's Tula's son, and he knows that his mother was a member of the sisterhood. He knows that she gave him up, and that is his vendetta. It is a personal vendetta. So this was one of the possibilities that we discussed. Valya is convinced that Desmond is just the head of some big thing, but he's not.

16:00 But I should say he's not seemingly at this point. Of course, there could be something else behind him still that is using his emotions, that is using his that is using his feeling of abandonment to hurt the sisterhood, and that is still a distinct possibility. But from what it looks like now, Desmond's reason for hating the sisterhood is personal.

16:22 That being said, Desmond being Atreides and Harkonnen does not explain how he has this power to burn people from the inside out. It's still not clear there might be some genetic manipulation going on, and the only people that really do genetic manipulation in the Dune universe, we've said it time and time again, the Tlaksu, the same Tlelaksu that create the face dancers, which, by the way, in this episode we saw no face dancing happening.

16:53 So what does Valia exactly plan for Theodosha to do with her face dancer skills? That's still up in the air. I like this episode a lot. Like I said, I was a little frustrated by the lack of clarity and the Lila scenes. That is somewhat forgivable, but jeesh, I wish Tula could have just been like, can you clarify on who he is?

17:13 But even with that, it was still an enjoyable episode. I'm really hoping that the next episode gives us some real clarity on what happened to Desmond on Arrakis. I'm at least hoping that the next episode will do that. Because one thing that I'm wondering about is just judging by this episode, this episode feels like it's setting up another half of a season, unless like it's setting up a big climax.

17:44 Um a lot of things are just moved into into position that seem like they're meant to be long form things, like Francesca coming back to the palace and the Empress hooking up with Desmond. So now we're seeing this split or schism that's happening within House Carino between the Empress and Desmond and the Emperor and Francesca.

18:06 This is gonna lead to an inevitable clash, and then the same thing is happening with the sisterhood, with the inevitable possession of Lila by Dorteia, and we're now gonna have Tula who is trying to manage the sisterhood up against the followers of Dorteia, led by Lila potentially. All of this seems like it's setting up a lot more than just one episode.

18:29 And I'm wondering what actually comes to conclusion in the last episode. If anything, I feel like we're gonna get maybe a couple of things that come to full conclusion, but also a lot of things that remain to be seen, and a lot of things that are still set up and that depend on more seasons. So tell me what you guys thought about this episode, and make sure you watch my stream on Tuesday.

18:58 It'll be around 5 p.m. PST, and we'll go into more detail about the episode and more detail into about what I think is going to happen in the next episode. Thanks, guys, so much for watching!