Episode 5, “In Blood, Truth”
With two episodes left to go, Dune: Prophecy still has a lot of question marks floating through its plot. We know where things will stand 10,000 years in the future—but how is the Sisterhood going to overcome Desmond Hart’s weird magic and reassert its power? And how will the Harkonnens restore their status as a Great House?
Not all is revealed, of course. But this week’s “In Blood, Truth” gives us some big chunks to chomp on while we wait to see how the HBO show wraps up all its spicy, sandy scheming.
After a glimpse of the Emperor’s shiny new fleet circling the planet, we get a look at Desmond Hart in his palace quarters—seemingly recovered from last week’s exhausting, violent heroics, and donning a snappy new uniform. (Still no haircut though; his grooming screams “rough and ready” and he’s keeping it that way.)
The new outfit debuts at a ceremony in which the Emperor praises Desmond’s loyalty, then announces he’s elevating him to Bashar, in command of a new elite regiment dedicated to rooting out treason. Everybody’s seen what he can do, and he already makes everyone nervous anyway, so it feels like the perfect promotion.
Princess Ynez flounces out of the ceremony as soon as she’s able, but as we’ll see, this is Constantine’s week to step up. Thus far Ynez’s half-brother has been sort of in the background—he’s Corrino’s bastard son, so isn’t in line for the throne—and we’ve seen him party, screw around, and lose his nerve when Ynez asked him to back her in demanding an investigation into Desmond. But “In Blood, Truth” fills in some of the big blanks, including who his mother is—which in turn explains a lot about why Empress Natalya hates the Sisterhood so much.
Corrino practically gasps when he sees her: Sister Francesca, stunningly beautiful even in her Sisterhood robe and veil. (We’ve seen the younger version of this character before; she was in Valya’s tight-knit group in their acolyte era along with Tula and Kasha.) Natalya’s face, meanwhile, contorts into jealous disgust. “I am here to see my son,” Francesca explains, but we immediately realize she means our son. It can only be Constantine she’s talking about.
Speaking of, he’s at that moment making amends with his sister for leaving her in the lurch at the Landsraad. “I won’t let you down like that again,” he promises.
On Wallach IX, the acolytes are in the middle of a lesson with Sister Avila when Jen can’t stop herself from speaking out. Though Jen’s maybe the only one not having the shared nightmare, she’s furious that Sisterhood leadership hasn’t taken more action. “Whose eyes watch from the darkness?,” she demands. “You want us to discern truth? How is that possible when none of it exists here?”
Tula enters the classroom at that moment and orders Jen to come with her. But she’s not expelling her, as Jen expects; she’s in need of help that only someone whose mind has been able to resist the nightmare can give. It’ll require Tula letting Jen in on the fact that Lila is a) alive, and b) occasionally being possessed by Mother Raquella. She handles it pretty well, all things considered; mostly, she’s just thrilled to see that her dear friend, who she saw die before her eyes, isn’t actually dead.
Back in the palace, Constantine and Francesca reunite. He assumes she’s there because of Kasha’s death, but it’s the first she’s hearing of it.
Nearby, Baron Harkonnen visits Desmond to apologize for speaking against the Emperor at the Landsraad. Both men are polite (Desmond is, as always, in the “menacingly polite” arena); both men also have their own agendas. Harrow blames his Aunt Valya for his error in judgment; Desmond takes that as an opening. “I want to know what the ties are between the Sisterhood and the rebellion,” he says, offering Harrow a toot of spice. “Give me evidence and the Imperial house will reward you.”
After he indulges, Harrow takes a deep breath and tells Desmond he might have some useful information in hand already. His attempts to stop pirates from disrupting his whale-fur business led him to discover a ring of Arrakian smugglers with their hands on all the contraband in Zimia, Salusa Secundus’ main metropolis. The rebels must have gone through this underground market, Harrow posits, to sell spice to get the money to buy their “thinking machine” weapon.
Desmond looks intrigued. “It’s a start,” he says. “But to clear your name, I’ll need proof that your aunt is involved.”
Speaking of Aunt Valya, she’s meeting with Francesca, who’s irritated that she was brought to Salusa Secundus under false pretenses. But Valya assures her there’s a good reason for all the secrecy. “The situation is too precarious,” she tells her old friend. “What happened to Kasha was just the beginning.” After she fills Francesca in on what’s happened since Desmond appeared, Francesca immediately recognizes that it’s Raquella’s prophecy, starting to come true.
Valya tells her she’s got a plan to take out Desmond; Francesa’s part is to exploit her special connection with Corrino to bring the Sisterhood back into his good graces. They need Princess Ynez to study on Wallach IX, and there’s something in it for Constantine, too: wouldn’t he make a fantastic commander of the Emperor’s new fleet?
Francesca worries that this pitch won’t land if Desmond’s in the way, but Desmond is now occupied with his new task, merrily looking for insurgents. (Travis Fimmel’s line delivery when Desmond asks Keiran Arteides “You want to come?”—complete with eyebrow waggle!—is chef’s kiss.)
Keiran declines and finds a way to wriggle out of his sword-fighting lesson with Constantine, heading straight to the nightclub where Mikaela—the Fremen undercover Sister who’s both part of the rebellion and Valya’s main information source on the rebels’ activities—is the opposite of worried about being found out. Instead, she’s gathering explosives to greet Desmond and his soldiers when they come a-knocking.
Desmond Hart’s DNA sample arrives on Wallach IX as Jen and Lila are sharing a heartfelt moment. Jen’s sorry she didn’t do more to protect Lila, but Lila forgives her. Suddenly, the young girl’s countenance changes completely (props to Chloe Lea, whose two-in-one character performance is impressive) when Jen mentions the nightmare. “The gaping maw of Shai-Hulud… swallowed by darkness until two eyes stared back,” she intones. “It wasn’t a nightmare, it was prescience. I foresaw the reckoning that would drive the Imperium to tyranny. If he succeeds, humanity will backslide into self-destruction.”
These are clearly the words of Raquella, now controlling Lila’s body and ready to work. She bursts into Tula’s lab and takes charge, immediately scrutinizing Kasha’s tissue samples. (She doesn’t seem to know Dorotea’s fate, to Tula’s relief.) While a curious Jen takes it all in, LilaQuella makes a startling announcement: “This tissue damage… I’ve seen this before, during the war.”
Back in the Harkonnen house, Valya asks Harrow “Did the lead I gave you help?”—in case anyone thought she wasn’t fully aware of Harrow’s meeting with Desmond. She tells her nephew that the information about the smugglers won’t defrost the relationship between Harrow and Desmond, but “we can use his distrust to your advantage.” If he helps the Bashar, it’ll help House Harkonnen in the eyes of the Emperor.
He warns Valya that Desmond is very interested in what the Sisterhood is up to—something Harrow himself is also interested in, though his aunt isn’t about to let him in on their secrets. “You’ll just have to trust me,” she says, and the smirk they exchange as she hands over Evgeny’s ring telegraphs that they’re both glad the old man is dead. They have that in common, at least.
After Harrow dutifully departs to bring Evgeny’s corpse to the Harkonnen home planet, Theo steps forward. She’d also like to know what the Sisterhood is up to, since she’s part of whatever it is. Valya explains that Sister Francesca has a special bond with the Emperor—”imprinting,” another Sisterhood skill—that forms “an emotional and physical bond that never breaks.”
We cut to Francesca leaning into that bond by telling the Emperor their feckless son needs to be given more responsibility, or else he’ll never learn to be a leader. His reaction to this parenting chat is to kiss her, but she pulls away. She’s not there to wreck his marriage, she says—but it’s indeed very clear he has powerful feelings for her.
Meanwhile, in Tula’s lab, LilaQuella is telling Tula and Jen what she meant by “I’ve seen this before.” During the war, “machines designed a pathogen that incubated in the human body, releasing an enzyme that infected the liver.” The enzyme that killed Kasha is similar, but instead of her liver, it concentrated in her “fear center.” Fear is the mind killer, literally!
Sister Avila shows up then with Desmond’s DNA sample, and she’s understandably shocked to see Lila up and about and saying things like “This is a virus: the nightmares, the deaths, they’re connected to a genetically modified airborne RNA retrovirus.” Tula swears her to secrecy.
Back in Mikaela’s nightclub, she’s still placing her booby traps—with Keiran’s help—when Desmond saunters in, eager to discover if the place is, as he’s tortured out of a source, “a hotbed of insurgent activity.” (Desmond is in a very good mood this week!) She denies it, but soldiers start ripping up the place anyway.
Desmond turns to Mikaela and asks her how she, as a Fremen, has justified what she does for a living: “profiting off the rape of your own planet, communing with your oppressors.” He close-talks her, asking her “how the Sisterhood is connected to the rebellion.” She’s not intimidated, and watches as Desmond and his gang head upstairs for additional ransacking. Just as Desmond discovers her Sisterhood robe and is fondling it with fascination—and just as Keiran notices Mikaela is carrying one of the Sisterhood’s signature blades—the place explodes. He’s angry that she’s secretly been a Sister all this time, and they part on bad terms.
On Wallach IX, Jen raises a very good question with Tula: “Is Lila just being used for the Sisterhood’s gain?” The answer is clearly yes, but Tula snaps back with Valya’s old “sometimes sacrifices must be made” line. When Jen asks what Tula has sacrificed, her face darkens. “More than you can ever imagine,” she says.
We cut back to the smoldering ruins of the nightclub to see not only did Desmond somehow survive the explosion, he’s completely uninjured. Viewers were likely not at all surprised by this (were you??), but Valya is disappointed to hear he wasn’t among the dead. Then she shrugs it off. “So be it,” she tells Mikaela. “There’s a contingency plan for him.”
Mikaela is distressed. Her entire operation, years of work, has been completely destroyed, both in a literal and a spy-craft sense—all so that Francesca could get to the Emperor for five minutes and engineer Constantine’s promotion without Desmond leering over his shoulder. It gets worse when Valya tells her to go to the Sisterhood’s safe house on Arrakis, and Mikaela responds by saying she won’t betray her own people, not like she did the rebels. Theo steps in to remind her “the Sisterhood is your people,” and Mikaela’s disgusted by the blind obedience. “Let’s see how long you remain this naive, acolyte,” she mutters as she exits.
Speaking of, back at the palace, Francesca finds Constantine in a petulant mood. He’s having an existential crisis along “What was I made for?” lines. She tells him to be patient; the father he’s never gotten along with will soon be giving him a big opportunity. But his purpose, she explains, is to protect his sister, the future leader of the Imperium, from “anyone who seeks to do her harm. Including the ones who claim to love her.”
He’s given a chance to do just that when he discovers Keiran’s carelessly discarded scans of the throne room—intel he took for the rebels ahead of their failed bomb plot. Keiran is swiftly arrested and taken to suspension jail.
Then, we get a tense dinner scene stuffed with heavy hitters: the Emperor and Empress, Francesca, Constantine, and Princess Ynez are all there. The Emperor announces that they’ve nabbed a traitor thanks to Constantine (Ynez’s face drops when she realizes who he means). Then, Corrino makes the announcement we all knew was coming: Constantine is the new fleet commander, soon to be on the front lines overseeing the spice trade on Arrakis. “I know your mother is as proud of you as I am,” the Emperor says. Francesca looks pleasantly startled by the shout-out; Natalya, meanwhile, stews in fury.
After dinner, Ynez visits Keiran in the jail and uses truth sense on him. She wants to know if he was just using her affection for him to help the rebels. “I chose you over my principles,” he admits. “But I am willing to die for them anyway.” He truly wants to bring about a better Imperium, he says, and he believes he can do it.
On Wallach IX, Tula takes Desmond’s genetic sample to the supercomputer. To understand his power, Valya instructs her sister in voice-over, “We must understand his bloodlines.”
While that’s happening, we cut back to the palace. Desmond is holding a small piece of fabric we saw him with earlier in the episode. What could it mean? Not sure yet, but it’s clearly important, and he keeps it tucked in his outfit. “I should have died,” he tells Natalya, who’s come to see him after ditching the dinner party. “You’ve been chosen,” she says. Then she goes off on how she was also chosen to help lead the Imperium into the future, but the Sisterhood got in her way. “What did they do to you?” she asks Desmond.
We lean forward. Finally, some dirt on this guy! On Wallach IX, the computer spits out “Bloodline… Atreides. Bloodline… Harkonnen. Match… identified.” A picture of a baby appears, and Tula begins to gasp and cry.
Meanwhile, Desmond explains it for us: “The woman who gave birth to me sent me away to live among scavengers, and left me fighting for scraps just to survive. She was a Sister.” This revelation moves Natalya to plant a kiss on Desmond. “Let us rid the Imperium of these witches forever,” she hisses.
An Atreides-Harkonnen baby? We’ve seen people from that family hook up (see: episode three). Is the math correct, though? What other secrets are Tula and Valya protecting? We’ll find out next week, presumably, with just one episode left to go.
The Dune: Prophecy finale arrives Sunday on HBO and Max.
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