‘Dune: Prophecy’ Episode Two Recap: Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Sex, Drugs, and Shai-Hulud

Praise Shai-Hulud, Dune: Prophecy is getting Dune-ier. In the second episode of HBO’s dive into Frank Herbert’s sci-fi universe, the plot gets thicker and the lore gets thornier. There are snakes in the garden, skeletons in the closet, and a man with mystical mind fire powers. The politics and the characters both got trickier, and some Dune fundamentals came to the forefront. I’m here to explain the weirder parts of the weirdness so you can focus on who wants to kill or sleep with whom.

In the premiere, we were introduced to the Imperial House Corrino on planet Salusa Secundus and the Bene Gesserit sisterhood (the psychic space nuns) on planet Wallach IX. Both groups are pushing for a big fancy wedding between the Princess Ynez ( Sarah-Sofie Boussnina) and child-groom Pruwet Richese, heir to a mighty military family. But the plans hit a snag when mysterious soldier Desmond Hart from the planet Arrakis (also known as “Dune”! Like the title!) shows up, pledges his loyalty to the emperor, and, uh, burns the kid from the inside out with his mind.

So the wedding isn’t exactly a hit. Space Rasputin (Hart) also seems to have killed Kasha, the Emperor’s Bene Gesserit advisor, while she was planets away, making his pyrokinetic powers all the more baffling. That’s where episode 2 picks up, with the Mother Superior of the Bene Gesserit, Valya Harkonnen (played by Emily Watson) flying to the Imperial homeworld to figure out what the hell is going on. All the politicians are in the same boat, rushing to find out who killed Pruwet, how, and why.

Once again, the action is set in two separate worlds, Salusa Secundus and Wallach IX. At the risk of oversimplifying, you can think of the former as the politics and the latter as the sci-fi shenanigans. While the events on Salusa Secundus were more complicated and action-packed this episode, the events on Wallach IX were, for my Big Dune Guy Bucks, more important, and probably more confusing to Herbert novices. Let’s break it down.

The imperial homeworld is all about palace intrigue. Right off the bat, Space Rasputin admits to Emperor Corrino that he killed the Richese boy, just because the Emperor was giving off a vibe that he didn’t like the marriage. The Emperor promptly throws him in a “suspensor cell” (one of the cooler sci-fi touches in the show), and the show’s power players (the Corrinos, Valya Harkonnen, Duke Richese) spend the rest of the episode trying to figure out what to do with him. The Richese family wants justice, the Mother Superior sees Hart's power as a potential threat and wants him eliminated, and the Empress wants to harness his power for herself.

A few key takeaways here. First off, there’s an important point buried in a gratuitous sex scene, because this is HBO. Duke Richese’s daughter seduces and dopes up the Emperor’s bastard son Constantine to extract information about her brother’s death. (Canon check: there is sex in Herbert’s universe, but this scene feels more like Game of Thrones than the psychedelic spice orgy in the first Dune novel). As it’s happening, she reminds the audience that, “The real power is whoever controls the desert planet.” Princess Ynez reiterates the point during a sexy sparring session with her trainer/lover Keiran Atreides: “We are all just pieces on the board, to be played in the pursuit of power and spice.” Everybody wants a piece of Arrakis. It’s the economy, stupid!

This leads to the episode’s first big reveal: Keiran Atreides, scion of a war hero and ancestor of Timotheé Chalamet’s character Paul Atreides, is part of a rebellion effort to overthrow the emperor. Why are folks rebelling? Because they aren’t happy with the spice trade—and because the Bene Gesserit are influencing them. Turns out Valya Harkonnen has a Fremen (an Arrakis native, like Zendaya’s character Chani) agent in the cell so she can balance power in the galaxy. What do any of these people actually want? It’s complicated, but bottom line is that it’ll get messy, given the budding romance between Atreides and the princess.

Lastly, we have our first vocab word: Shai Hulud. Shai Hulud is the Fremen word for sandworm, and it has strong religious overtones. Curiously, the Empress knows the term. When her husband explains that Hart claims to have been eaten by a sandworm, she mentions Shai Hulud in a reverent tone. She easily convinces her husband to keep Hart close, further proving that the Emperor Javicco Corrino is a suggestible wet noodle.

If you don’t know already, the worms are a big deal in Dune. They’re a key part of spice production (stay tuned for my 10-page essay on whether spice is worm poop). This means Space Rasputin is directly tied to the spiritual center of the Dune universe.

Which brings us to the Bene Gesserit planet. At the top of the episode, Valya Harkonnen leaves the convent in her biological sister Tula’s (Olivia Williams) hands with a mission. While there’s a lot happening on Selunda Secundus, there’s just one item on the agenda at Wallach IX: the Agony. Valya wants a young acolyte named Lila (played by Chloe Lea) to undergo a dangerous ritual that may provide some insight into Desmond Hart and the threat he poses to the order.

This is where we venture deeper into the lore, with big implications for the rest of the series. The Agony (or “spice agony” in the books) is a central part of Dune—you saw it in the Villeneuve movies, albeit in a different form. Remember how Rebecca Ferguson and Timotheé drink the weird blue worm milk and trip balls? That’s the Agony.

Here’s how it works. A person (traditionally a Bene Gesserit woman) drinks “the Water of Life.” (In an impressive nod to Herbert canon, the sisters in Dune: Prophecy actually use “Rossak poison,” a psychoactive drug that's mentioned in the books as a forerunner to the more powerful Water of Life.) The substance is highly toxic, but induces a form of enlightenment that allows the drinker to access their “genetic memory” and a limited form of prescience (seeing the future). Bene Gesserit are trained to physically transmute the poison at the molecular level in their bodies (science fiction baby!), so they can reap the insights without dying. In the Dune universe, only women can do this, and they can only access memories from their maternal line. In other words, ladies only.

This is why Chalamet’s character is special. He’s a man who drinks the Water of Life, accesses his male and female genetic memories, and sees the future. They call him the Kwisatz Haderach (don’t even worry about it).

The Harkonnen Bene Gesserit in the show want Lila to undergo the Agony because she is a descendent of their founder, Raquella, who prophesied the coming of someone like Hart. They think that if Lila can connect with her, they’ll learn how to handle Space Rasputin. So Tula encourages Lila to go through the ritual, even though she’s young and grossly underprepared for it.

Lila is a young, ardent acolyte of the Bene Gesserit who is appropriately terrified of ingesting a lethal psychedelic. So she talks to her sisters, and we learn a bit more about the young Bene Gesserit girls. Sister Theodosia (played by Jade Anouka) is politically savvy and comes from mysterious “circumstances.” Sister Emeline (Aoife Hinds) is a true believer who preaches sacrifice. Sister Jen (Faoileann Cunningham) is more skeptical and tells Lila to look out for herself. And Mother Tula is a surrogate mother, who advises caution but suggests that Lila could speak to real mother through her genetic memory.

Lila ultimately opts to undergo the Agony, and it’s a doozy. In Villeneuve’s Dune, Paul Atreides’s spice journey brings him to a beach where he meets Anya Taylor-Joy. But Lila is cast into a dark netherworld overrun with mummified women. She does reach Raquella, who issues a prophecy: “The key to the reckoning is one born twice—once in blood, once in spice.” Sure sounds like a certain soldier swallowed by a sandworm. But Raquella also reveals that Lila has been lied to. Her mother isn’t there in her genetic memory, which means she’s alive somewhere. Lila also learns Valya’s and Tula’s secret—they killed one of their Bene Gesserit sisters to clear Valya’s path to power. All that truth seems to come at the cost of Lila’s life.

What do we learn? Valya may be the main operator of the Bene Gesserit, but Tula is the real manipulator. She lied to her figurative daughter to send her to her death, just to learn that Desmond Hart is the big threat to the Bene Gesserit.

That’s not news, though, because Hart is beating that drum himself. By the end of the episode, Space Rasputin is out of the suspensor cell and into the royal hall, burning dukes and sassing the Mother Superior. He boots Valya out of the Emperor’s inner circle and announces his intention to “wipe out every trace of you and your Sisters from our worlds.” This is what this show is really going to be about—not empire and politics, but a power struggle between the Bene Gesserit and the voice from the desert. In a way, that’s the same struggle as the main series—the path ordained by the Bene Gesserit 10,000 years in the future and the path Paul Atreides forges himself on Arrakis.

Still, it’s important to remember that Dune: Prophecy is venturing off book. There’s no precedent for Desmond Hart, or any other aliens with pyrokinetic abilities, in Herbert’s books. Whatever he is and whatever he actually wants, it’s too early to tell. But whatever happens, Dune: Prophecy is about sci-fi mysticism first, politics second.