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Max released the trailer for Dune: Prophecy at its NYCC 2024 panel, and it plus the panel delivered lots of sweet details for fans.

Probably the most exciting thing in the trailer was a sandworm, and what appeared to be a castle on Arrakis collapsing into the sand. The show, which focuses on the rise of the Bene Gesserit, takes places largely on a swamp world. “We’re on a very damp planet,” said cast member Olivia Williams, who plays the Sisterhood’s Reverend Mother Harkonnen. But there will be sandworms, showrunner Alison Schapker confirmed (though don’t expect anyone riding them in season one).

Cast members also revealed that we will be seeing some fun mind powers, most especially “truthsaying.” Said cast member Emily Watson, who plays Mother Superior of the Sisterhood (and Williams’ sister),“One of the things we can do is, if you stand in front of us saying something, we know whether you’re telling the truth.” Watson said it’s an ability that grants them incredible power in the universe—“It’s a way of exerting a tremendous amount of control, because no one is able to deceive us”—before adding, “or so we think…”

The trailer also shows Emily Watson’s character—in both her present-day self and a younger version (played by Jessica Barden) using the Voice to force someone to cut their own throat. Barden kidded of doing the Voice, “I basically stood in a room doing different versions of ‘BRING ME WATER.’ How is that a job of a grown woman?”

Probably the most mysterious element of the trailer is the character Desmond Hart, who tells Watson’s Mother Superior that he wants “to wipe out every trace of the Sisters from our worlds” and has some sort of power of his own. Hart actor Travis Fimmel wouldn’t say much about the character. “You don’t know if he’s a good guy or a bad guy,” he says, “but he’s certainly driven to find somebody that messed with him as a child.”

While the cast does not include any members of House Atreides—or at least not seem to, there is talk in the trailer of “a war going on in plain sight.” Schapker confirmed that the show will reveal the origins of the Harkonnen/Atreides feud. “We see that, how it started, and how it became entrenched.” She noted that “we’re seeing the beginning of the Harkonnen family at a time when they’re not quite the more monstrous version that you see 10,000 years later. But there are seeds.”

“10,000 years before the birth of Paul Atreides,” executive producer John Goldberg said, “the prophesy called for a new hero. And that [hero] is a Harkonnen.”

A show set in the Duneverse wouldn’t be complete without some spice. Goldberg promised the series format gives them the chance to “show a recreational world built around people using spice, synthetics based on spice.” Sarah-Sofie Boussnina, who plays Princess Ynez Corrino, reveals that spice will continue to involve a political element as well. “The Corrinos manage the spice trade at the moment, but it’s kind of under stress. It’s not quite as strong as we’d like to think.”

Panel host Maude Garrett pointed out that the Corrino family will be delivering a “very different kind of spice” in the form of Princess Ynez’s very handsome brother Constatine, played by Josh Heuston. In the trailer Constantine seems shut out, perhaps frustrated at the attention and authority his father Emperor Javicco, played by Mark Strong) is giving Hart.

Dune: Prophecy, says Schapker, is a show concerned with “what does it mean to have charismatic leaders. Is that something to be followed or something to be suspicious of?...It highlights some questions we should be asking of power at any given moment, including today.”

Dune: Prophecy begins November 17th on Max.

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