Television Without Pity » Mondo Extras » Recaps & Extras » Season 2003 Episode 4

"Muad'dib instructs us that prescience is immutable. A thing once seen cannot be changed. Thus was it inevitable from the first sentence of the mentat Aaron's retelling of the saga of Arrakis that his jihad of snark would one day be loosed upon the Children of Dune. But can a man, flush with foreknowledge of the fate which befalls him, steer a different course through the muddied waters of time? Might he not fashion a new path? A Golden Path? A path for the betterment of all TWoP-kind? The Kwizatz Haderach was not strong enough to make this choice. The fate of Aaron is yet to be determined."

-- Princess Irulan's commentary on The Book of Diatribes, as edited by The Holy Reverend Mother Sars XXII

There are many cosmic clich�s when it comes to science fiction, but none so constant or closely held as that of the sequel. To date, of course, there have been five Star Wars, ten Star Treks, four Aliens, five Planets of the Apes, six Riverworlds, seven Foundations, four Hyperions, seven Ender's Game books, twenty-nine Discworlds, four rendezvous with Rama, 2001, 2010, 2061, 3001, two Uplift trilogies, the Sprawl trilogy, the Bridge trilogy, the five-book Hitchhiker trilogy, an entire universe of stories based on three simple rules of robotics, and, lest we forget, ten separate Dunes (by three different authors), with more still to come. And so today I present you with the first installment of a three-part recap of a three-part mini-series based on the sequel to a sequel of a book that was once made into a movie that I loved and another three-part miniseries that I recapped with considerably less love. And if you think that's confusing, then you haven't read the books, seen the sequels, or watched the movie, because it's nothing compared to the plot. A guy saves humanity by transforming himself into a giant worm, people. But can a book written almost forty years ago and set ten thousand years in the future really speak to today's hip pop-culture audience? Well, when it's about the violent horrors of an obviously Islamic strain of fundamentalism and the power-mad war-mongering of an arrogant hegemon, I think it's safe to say the answer is yes.

We fade up on a ghostly, out-of-focus image of a House Atreides war banner, fluttering in the winds of a planet I'm just going to call Hoth Lite. As she is contractually required to do in all filmed adaptations of the Dune saga, Princess Irulan serves as narrator and informs us that twelve years have passed since the events of the original book. We pan across a frozen landscape littered with dead bodies to see a cloister of facially-tattooed Fedaykin, who are engaging in any number of normal everyday Fremen activities like forcibly converting unbelievers and executing captured prisoners of war. Their leader is Farok, a figure of some minor importance later in the story, and he's interrupted by an underling who tells him that his son has been wounded in battle. This scene doesn't appear in the book, by the way, and was obviously included solely to allow the director to expand his color palette a bit before we go all orange all the time. And also to provide a nice bit of dramatic symmetry, as it turns out that Farok's son has been blinded, and is crying out in fear of being cast into the deserts of Arrakis, which is standard Fremen policy for those with disabilities. Nice, huh? But where were these guys when I was dealing with Augustus Hill?