‘Dune: Prophecy’ Episode 3 Recap: “Sisterhood Above All”

Let’s leave Desmond Hart and his Emperor Javicco Corrino influence-peddling on the back burner for now. Well, that is as long as the metaphorical flame for a gas stove doesn’t count as a thinking machine. Because in Episode 3 of Dune: Prophecy, while Mother Superior Valya Harkonnen endeavors to shore up the Sisterhood’s Imperium support in the present, we also return to flashback mode, and what Young Valya and her sister Tula (Emma Canning) were up to in the past, before their mutual rise in the order. When word reaches snowy Lankiveil, the House Harkonnen homeworld full of harvested whale fur, that Vorian Atreides has somehow returned – Atreides, the Battle of Corrin war hero and noble, who one hundred years before was instrumental in banishing the Harkonnen name – Valya and Tula hope their brother and ally Griffin (Earl Cave) can negotiate in the Landsraad council to return their family to status. Instead, he is killed. And though her mother Sonia (Polly Walker) scorns her ambitious ideas and sends her to Wallach IX, Valya makes a side deal with Tula to ensure that the Atreides clan will pay dearly.

In Prophecy, the desolate, harsh environment on Lankiveil, not to mention all the whale slop everyone eats and their coarse cold weather clothing, feels evocative of life on the Wall in Westeros. You know, except that it’s in outer space. But with the flashback, it’s also apparent that Valya has always merged her Sisterhood duties with her determination to reclaim the worth of her family name. While we revisit Valya’s competition with Dorotea in the years before she used The Voice to force her rival reverend mother to stab herself in the neck, we also tag along with Tula elsewhere in the Imperium, as she joins her loving boyfriend Orry (Milo Callaghan) for his family’s annual hunt in a gorgeous wilderness. They’re after the Salusan bull, an elusive and powerful creature that is drawn to the scent of a deadly toxin contained in a varmint native to the area. The bull is of the same breed considered sacred by a ruling dynasty thousands of years in the Dune universe future.

Delicately, Tula demonstrated how to use this toxin for Albert (House of the Dragon’s Oliver Tulley), a young relative of Orry’s. Much less delicately, and after her boyfriend proposed marriage and they had sex in his yurt, she uses the same toxin to murder his entire clan. Yikes! “We do what we must,” she says, echoing the words one of Orry’s uncles used to explain their killing of an injured horse. And then Tula plunges a hypo needle full of toxin right into the neck of Orry Atreides. “I need you to know that I regret that things are the way they are,” she told him before her massacre of his Atreides kin was revealed. But she still did the deed, per Valya’s instructions. Later, even Valya says she wasn’t sure if Tula actually had it in her.

While Young Tula was getting even on the Harkonnen-Atreides vendetta, Young Valya was impressing Mother Superior Raquella Berto-Anirul with her fortitude. “Crisis, survival, advancement” – all traits that fuel The Voice in Valya – “the human race is still evolving, and we found that adversity is the key to change. You can achieve extraordinary things here. Even shape the course of the Imperium.” Raqeulla reveals to her the forbidden technology in the Sisterhood’s tunnels, and the order’s genetic library designed to influence rule over humanity for generations to come. But when the Agony ceremony is prepared, Valya balks. Raquella agrees to let her trusted pupil travel to Lankiveil upon a message from Tula. But she also gives her a mobile version of the Agony instrument to take with her. Either come back a reverend mother, or don’t come back at all. 

On their homeworld, Valya and Tula are still outcasts within their own family, who predict their Atreides murder plot will only cause more Harkonnen condemnation. But the sisters stand firm, and Tula is there to awaken Valya after she ingests the Agony substance, witnesses the ghostly foremothers in her other memory, and returns to the land of the living. Still, almost using The Voice to make your mother murder herself will get you re-banned from the fam, and Valya and Tula depart Lankiveil together for training with the Sisterhood. 

In the Dune: Prophecy present, Olivia Williams plays Tula with a gentleness matched by Emma Canning as the character in the past. But this quiet, attentive temperament obscures her lifelong ruthlessness. Heartbroken and frustrated that her prized acolyte Lila apparently died during her own Agony ritual, Tula has kept Lila’s body in a kind of monitored limbo, which is against Sisterhood protocol. We see her grudgingly agree to let the young lady go. See her allow the rest of the sisters to profess their farewells. And then we see her take the key Valya entrusted to her, enter the tunnels beneath Wallach IX, and set the dials on the forbidden tech in there to secretly keep Lila in stasis indefinitely. Through the healing mysteries of spice, and with the guidance of talking computer Anirul, Lila just might still have a chance at life. “Sisterhood above all” is the mantra. And it’s not like the Harkonnen sisters don’t believe in it. But Tula has her own agenda, too, just like Valya. They are aligned in their ongoing purpose, one that will combine their personal aims with the Imperium-maneuvering machinations of the reverend mothers.

Johnny Loftus (@glennganges) is an independent writer and editor living at large in Chicagoland. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, All Music Guide, Pitchfork Media, and Nicki Swift.