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Dune: Prophecy’s showrunner wants you to think beyond the hero / villain binary

To bring the Bene Gesserit’s Agony to the small screen, Alison Schapker turned to psychological body horror.

But when I recently sat down with Schapker to discuss the series’ progression so far, she explained that the more time she spent thinking about how Dune has always been a rumination on the way evolution reshapes reality, the more the Harkonnens felt like the perfect characters to lead Prophecy ’s story. With Valya, it’s an energy that’s rooted in the novels in the sense that this is an ambitious woman who feels like she’s destined to play a greater role in history, but also that her life’s trajectory has been shaped by a lie. Those ideas are core to Dun e, but they felt especially relevant to our moment because of how artificial intelligence is being presented to us here in the real world as this technology that we should want because it canmake things easier.

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