Frank Herbert's
CHILDREN OF DUNE

EPISODE 1

Muad'Dib's crusade has spread the Fremen throughout known space, colonising planets and bringing everyone who stands in their way under the control of the de facto Emperor. Despite his apparent control of everything, he is beset by consipiracies on every side. The Bene Gesserits wish to regain control of the Atreides bloodline and have allied with Irulan, who schemes to keep Chani childless in the hope Paul will turn to her for the heir he seeks. Irulan's sister, Princess Wincesia, schemes with the Tleilaxu to place a cloned copy of a trusted lieutenant in Paul's retinue, preprogrammed to strike when the time is right. The Spacing Guild continue to scheme with anyone who will keep the Spice flowing. For the first time, even previously loyal Fremen are turning against the changing of their world and the diluting of their faith. Muad'Dib, however, seems to be struggling with what he sees in his future, a future he tries to resist.

Following on from the masterwork that is Dune, the sequel Dune Messiah was something of a disappointment, both in terms of length and quality. The third book, however, Children of Dune returned to the themes, detail and complexity of the original, whilst increasing the scope and scale of the consequences from the control of a galactic empire to the entire future development of Mankind. The opening episode makes it clear that this series will cover the events of both.

This opening episode revolves around the setting up of the new chess game and the tumultuous events in Muad'Dib's personal life. No allowance is made for anyone who has not seen the original series, Frank Herbert's Dune, or read the book. Though many of the characters have been recast, it is up to the audience to keep up with who each of them are and how they relate to each others. That said, some of those characters don't act at all like they had before. Stilgar, for example, is reduced from Muad'Dib's right hand man to a mere bodyguard who seems only to want to kill people. Lady Jessica appears in only a single scene, apparently returned to Caladan despite being the Fremen's Mother Superior and Gurney Halleck, Atreides master at arms is beside her as some sort of aide. Fortunately, Paul, Chani and Irulan remain much as before. Susan Sarandon is introduced as Irulan's sister Wencisia and she features large on the publicity materials despite having very little screen time. Paul's sister Alia has grown to run his empire for him, but she seems to be struggling with the fallout from being given full access to her ancestors' previous lives before she was born. Finally, there is the ghola (or cloned copy of) Duncan Idaho, who played such a small part in the original series that the significance of his being brought back as Paul's greatest friend is muted.

The plotting is twisty turny, of course, as there are all these plots going on, but there is precious little action to go with it. At least the first episode of the original series had a Harkonnen assault and the final episode fetaured the final battle and downfall of House Corrino. There are no such moments in this episode. As such, it may be too sedate and dull for some audiences, rather than enthralling and compelling as it clearly hoped. That said, the point where the intricate plotting against Muad'Dib comes together to offer him what he wants the most at his time of greatest loss, at the cost of everything he controls, is very satisfying.

In the three years between the original series and this follow-up, the special effects available to the productions have improved by a remarkable amount. What once undercut all that was excellent about the original, now enhances this. Nowhere is this seen more than in the shape of the Spacing Guild navigator. Embarrassingly inept in the original, this version is not perfect by any stretch, but is good enough to be featured as a character in its own. right. The original design aesthetics of ornithopters, desert, sietches and giant worms have been kept, but the quality with which they are rendered cannot be compared to the earlier ones, such is the leap in quality.

The ambitions of this series are clear from this opening episode and this time around the technology matches them.

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EPISODE 2

Muad'Dib's twin children are grown almost to majority when his son will inherit the mantle of Emperor from the regent, his sister Alia. Leto, however, shows more interest in visions of the future and his sister Ghanima is his closest confidante. Even their aunt Irulan no longer shares their intimacies. Alia's regency is beset by issues, not least of which is her own deteriorating mental health. The arrival of Lady Jessica from Caladan only serves to heighten tensions, tensions which competing factions wish to take advantage of.

This second episode time jumps forward to introduce the twins of Leto and Ghanima as practically adult. They are at the centre of a storm they do not control, but they seem uninterested in that anyway, focusing on something called the Golden Path, something that even their father was unwilling to contemplate. Again, there is precious little in the way of action as the focus is entirely on the internal power struggles of the Atreides family, most of which are fuelled by Alia's mental breakdown and coming under the influence of her dead grandfather, Vladimir Harkonnen. The script doesn't go into any great depth of how this occurs, assuming the audience will remember that Alia inherited the memories of all the previous Reverend Mothers when Jessica drank the water of life whilst she herself was still in the womb and that the Baron was Jessica's own father. Jessica, played now by Alice Krige, plays a much increased role in this episode, whilst Duncan Idaho is reduced to a jealous cuckolded husband after being so pivotal in the last. Irulan and Alia bicker over the welfare of the twins, all to the amusement of the dismissive pair. The twins themselves remain charismatic despite acting like brats for the most part.

The manouevring is interesting enough to begin with, but soon starts to pall without any driving action of any kind. The subplot of the preacher from the desert, who is quite obviously Muad'Dib returned despite the fact nobody else seems to notice the fact, is annoyingly irrelevant.

It is to be hoped that the final episode can bring the plot together for a satisfying ending because this is steering dangerously close to being an interstellar space version of DALLAS.

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EPISODE 3

Alia's grip on the Regency of the Empire is crumbling almost as much as her sanity. One is under peril from conspiracies from all the factions who want control of the spice back and the other from the memories of the evil Duke Vladimir Harkonnen, implanted in her mind before she was even born. The twins are lost in the desert, Lady Jessica has taken refuge with enemy House Corrino and Stilgar fights to keep the Fremen from revolution over the changes made to the desert. Ghanima becomes a pawn in potential alliance and Leto takes an action that will change the universe almost as much it will change him.

John Harrison's script for the final episode of the story is unfortunately too simplistic and muddled. Some of that can be laid at the door of Frank Herbert's source material. The role of Muad'Dib, still masquerading as an itinerant desert preacher, is never explained. He's just there, on the periphery of the story, doing little more than re-enacting the moneylenders in the temple scene from the Bible. The story has moved past him and keeping him in beyond the point of the children being born hampers the bigger story.

The politicking in the Dune saga was always as dense and complicated as the religious stuff and that is true of The Children of Dune, but the adaptation follows the movements of the plots without ever truly getting to the heart of why people are doing what they are doing. The machinations by Susan Sarandon, finally getting a worthy share of the screen time, if not the plot, are at least easy to understand. She wants to bring the throne back to House Corrino. The Fremen don't like what is being done to their desert way of life as the planet is terraformed, but wasn't that what Lyet Kynes and Stilgar wanted all along? When the fanatics capture Leto they decide to use Spice to send him mad, just like his sister. How this course of action serves their purposes any more than just killing him is not explained. Everyone already thinks he's dead anyway. And whilst Jessica's flight from Alia's wrath is explicable, her choice of sanctuary is not. The Bene Gesserit could secrete her anywhere, but she runs to the home of her most bitter enemy? That makes no sense. Then there are the war tactics of Stilgar. He raises an army on the backs of giant worms and rides all the way to the edge of the capital city. Then he stops for what appears to be a picnic. Why? It's never explained.

And then there's young Leto, played with a inner intensity by a young James McAvoy. He takes on the task of following the Golden Path that his father couldn't. What is this Golden Path that will save humanity from the prison of prescience? Well, it involves sticking his hand in a tank of previously unmentioned sandtrout (progenitors of the giant worms) and then slowly morphing into a composite creature who can move very, very fast. Exactly how this is going to alter the future course of history is, of course, left unexplained.

Frank Herbert's CHILDREN OF DUNE reverses the situation of the previous adaptation by having effects up to the task of carrying the story, but having a script that fails at the same job. The nature of the source material means that for this adaptation to really work, it has to be seen with an adaptation of God Emperor of Dune in which the Golden Path is fully explained. That, however, was never to come as this marked the last of the Sci Fi Channel adaptations.

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