‘Dune: Prophecy’ Recap: A Chat With Travis Fimmel, and a Working Theory of What This Show is Even About

After six weeks of Dune: Prophecy, we got a season finale that tied up several loose ends while making everything more complicated. Centered around a mess of a jailbreak, episode 6 flipped all the power dynamics in the show—everyone who started out on top is dead or exiled, and everyone’s moral position and goals seem to be teetering. With season 2 officially confirmed this week, it looks like things may get even more complicated. We caught up with Travis Fimmel, the actor who plays Desmond Hart, and did a deep dive on the lore to give you the context you need.

Let’s recap as quickly as possible: Near the start of the episode, Tula leaves the Truthsayer planet Wallach IX to track down Desmond Hart, revealed to be her son in the last episode. But ditching school opens up the Sisterhood to regime change. Dorotea, the Sister who Valya murdered in the pilot, takes over Sister Lila’s body and reveals literal skeletons in the closet: Valya, Tula, and their followers killed all the dissident Truthsayers during their rise to power. It’s safe to say that if the Harkonnen sisters return to the Order, they won’t be in charge.

Over on the Imperial planet Salusa Secunda, the intergalactic game of thrones is thrown into chaos when the Princess Ynez attempts to spring her situationship Keiran Atreides out of floaty-jail. Her mother the Empress Natalya catches her red-handed and tosses her right into floaty-jail with him.

This puts everyone in a tough spot, but none more than Valya. By this point in the series, you may have forgotten that the Princess is actually the prize the Sisterhood wants above all—a Truthsayer-trained woman on the throne. That means getting Ynez out suddenly becomes priority number one for the Mother Superior. To save her, Valya plots to get thrown into prison, rescue Ynez, assassinate the Emperor, and somehow stop or escape Desmond Hart. She gets all the outcomes she wants, but none of them according to plan.

In the closest thing he’s ever had to a moment of clarity, Mark Strong’s Emperor Corrino realizes that he’s been hustled nearly every waking moment of his life and kills himself. Natalya seizes on this moment to consolidate power, allying with Hart, killing Sister Francesa, and refusing to save her husband. She’s the new top dog in the galaxy.

Meanwhile, Valya rescues Ynez, but the Princess insists on bringing the Atreides swordmaster along for the ride. This complicates Valya’s plan to have the shapeshifting Sister Theodosia take Ynez’s place, and Desmond Hart is quickly tipped to the escape plan of this new protagonist trio: Valya, Ynez, and Keiran.

This sets up the big showdown of the season: Valya vs Desmond. A quick refresher on all the sci-fi shenanigans and interpersonal drama at play here: Desmond hates the Sisterhood because he was abandoned by his mother. His seeming psychic powers are actually the result of a mysterious fear-based virus that he can selectively transmit. This virus harms him as well as his victims. So when Desmond sets his powers on Valya, it floors them both. Tula arrives in an emotional reunion with her sister and her son. She guides Valya through the fear, and Valya has a mysterious vision of a machine that caused Desmond’s “condition.”

This moment is the biggest nod to the core Dune canon. By now, fans have recognized that Dune: Prophecy seems to be telling the origin of the “Litany of Fear,” the famous mantra from the series with the “fear is the mind-killer” line. While that line in particular doesn’t make it into the episode, we see Valya and Tula processing fear in a way that Bene Gesserit will practice 10,000 years in the future.

So what does this all mean? Here at the end of Season 1, allow me to present a unified theory of what Dune: Prophecy is up to—I think they’re setting up the Bene Tleilax as the main antagonists of the series. The Bene Tleilax, or Tleilaxu, are the morally dubious genetic engineers of the Dune universe. Having surveyed fan theories and reviewed the arguments, here’s my case:

In the season finale, Valya confirms what fans have suspected since episode 4, that Theodosia is a “Face Dancer” (shapeshifter) created by “Tleilaxan geneticists.” That’s the first name-drop. We also know that Theodosia doesn’t like what was done to her, so we know the Tleilaxu aren’t exactly good guys. There’s also a good case to be made that they are behind what happened to Desmond Hart. There’s been much online debate as to whether Desmond is something in the Dune lore called a “ghola”—basically a Tleilaxu clone of a dead person. Without getting bogged down in what that means and whether it’s true, the finale shows that something bizarre was done to him, and the Tleilaxu are plausible suspects. Lastly, it would make sense to do this for the franchise, because the Tleilaxu are major antagonists in Dune: Messiah, the source material for the recently confirmed Dune 3. For all these reasons, I’m betting Dune: Prophecy is setting the table for a a major conflict between the Truthsayers and some creepy geneticists on the other side of the galaxy.

But if that’s what it means, a better question might be, “Does it even matter?” The last two episodes of this season have revealed that the real motivating force between all these characters are their mommy and daddy issues. In running Dune through the HBO filter, we’ve gotten a show that’s more about interpersonal relationships than spice and worms. This can be a hard move for a sci-fi/fantasy franchise to execute (it’s where Rings of Power, for example, has really struggled). But from White Lotus to House of the Dragon to Succession, HBO has proven its ability to milk extremely watchable television from the tortured inner lives of elites, and they’ve done a solid job turning psychedelic science fiction into a story of palace intrigue.

Plus, Dune is a great franchise for this type of treatment. Across the 20+ books in the canon, the stories range from abstract to action-packed, far-out to familiar. The lore is as rewarding as you want it to be. If you’re looking for a show about the ethics of AI, mystical visions, human destiny and giant worms, any kind of Herbert content has you covered. But it will also hold you if you’re looking for folks struggling to do right by the people they love, whether it’s the characters in Dune: Prophecy or Chalamet and Zendaya in the Villeneuve films.

Travis Fimmel, who plays Desmond Hart, was more interested in the latter approach. GQ caught up with him to mark this weekend’s season finale, and he explained that Desmond is really just “a tortured little kid that nobody wanted.” Fimmel hasn’t seen Dune: Prophecy—he never watches anything he’s in—and he’s retreated to his farm in Australia to focus on his beer brand Travla. He took a break from spray painting the brand logo on the back of his boat to talk about sandworms, S&M, and Erin Brockovich.

You played the most mysterious character on the show this season. What did you know when?

I knew a fair bit. I’m pretty sure I knew my mother was a Sister. There was meant to be more scripts at the start, but then the strike happened and the scripts were condensed. But I had a pretty good outline, and the writers were so collaborative and great. They started, very early on, changing stuff for me from what they saw that I was doing.

Like what?

Just behavior and the way they saw that I dealt with people. I preferred to not have as many words, and a character trying to get into people’s heads. My power was hurting people without physically touching them, and I wanted to make everything about that, even the behavior and comments.

How did you approach Desmond’s powers? Did you get direction or did you develop it on your own?

It was all me. I wanted a physical thing that could scare people quickly. This thing [Ed note: He puts one finger on his temple].

No, I had no idea what to do. I don’t think anybody did. I was always very fearful that it might not work. But I just tried to make sure I had an inner monologue in my head, reasons why I was hurting a person and also making sure it hurt me at the same time. Sometimes a little bit of enjoying it, getting off, a bit of S&M.

In the finale we see that Desmond Hart had something strange done to him by some sort of machine. Is that something you knew from the start?

That’s one thing that I didn’t know. I’m pretty sure I didn’t know that til later on in the shooting of it.

Maybe more importantly, does Desmond know about it? Does he understand what happened to him?

That’s a great question, man. Hopefully that’s answered in Season 2. I have no idea and I’m intrigued to find out. He thinks it’s more of a spiritual thing that’s occurred to him.

What motivates Desmond? Is it spiritual, personal, political?

I always looked at him as a little tortured kid that nobody wanted. He’s abandoned and all that stuff, so he’s always fighting for love, always fighting for someone to be proud of him, always fighting to prove himself. It comes from a very child-like place.

He just wants love and a little bit of respect, but it’s not that he wants to live in a palace. I don’t think he enjoys that world at all. I think he’s fighting for everybody like that: all the people that are forgotten about and left, that the higher up class don’t care about.

In the Dune universe, I’d love to see the ghetto. The poorer people, how they live, and what they’re forced to do by the Imperium. I feel like my character is fighting for all those people. Even when he walks in, the choice to dress the way he does—he won’t dress nice and he keeps the messy hair. He doesn’t ever want to forget where he came from or what’s important to him. I’d love for him one day to get the key to the palace and let all the people in.

What is going on with Desmond at the end of the show when he hugs his mother Tula, then arrests her?

It’s that childhood thing. It doesn’t matter how much you say you hate somebody, because normally it’s because you love them. I’m sure he’s planned that moment for 40 something years, what he’s going to do when he meets his mom. Then suddenly he meets her and everything’s not what he thought it was going to be. That little boy that just wants his love, then the hatred comes back in and he’s confused and he’s panicked. I look forward to seeing what actually happens. More than anything, he’s confused.

You’ve been playing a character that’s not in the books. Did that shape what you thought you had to learn about the lore?

I learned about the franchise, in a way. The world that’s been created and the public that are so heavily invested in it. It’s so remarkable that a book that started in ‘65 can be so relevant now and have this amazing, dedicated, complex, entertaining fanbase who are so passionate about the stuff. But I don’t know much about the franchise at all beyond what I learned here.

But I'm an actor, so all I care about is the other actor, whoever I’m acting with, what my character wants, and to make anybody relate to being abandoned, or if there’s somebody in their life who I want love from.

To that end, do you think it’s a show about sci-fi, or is it really a show about families—brothers, sisters, moms and dads?

There is [the sci-fi], but that’s not something I have to get invested in or worry about. That’s up to the creators. I just concentrate on all the human relations. Like any good stuff, like any genre or period, everything that I like is all about character relations, what they’re going after, what they’re fighting for.

I don’t relate to the sci-fi world, I didn’t grow up in it, I don’t have a spaceship. But I do relate to trying to make somebody proud or having issues with parents or speaking up for people or wanting to hurt people.

Well in that spirit—

In the spirit of hurting people?

Sort of! Desmond does fit in with a type of character you’ve played in the past, like Ragnar Lothbrok in Vikings: capacity for violence, complicated family. Putting it even more broadly, you often play these murky, powerful, intimidating men from the wilderness. How is Desmond different from other roles you’ve played?

A lot of fighters are very similar. Ragnar was a fighter, who fights for what he believes in. And I love that in anybody. I love that in Erin Brockovich. I don’t like people in real life either who play victims.

What about the weird world of Dune left the biggest impression on you?

I guess the worm’s got to be the thing. Worms are for fishing where I’m from, but it’s such a big part of the world. And I know how excited people get about it, and it obviously plays a big part of my character. I love that people can be so passionate about a worm!