Ten thousand years before the birth of Paul Atreides, Valya and Tula Harkonnen join the Sisterhood, an order of warrior nuns who are used as living lie detectors by the Houses of the Imperium. But Valya has bigger plans. Plans that end, 10,000 years later, on Arrakis.

The first ten minutes or so of this are hard work. There’s a tangible air of Game of Thrones to it, with none of the spark of the early seasons. Worse, there’s a colossal, rolling info dump that, combined with introducing the large cast and the thirty year time jump, means you’re asked to do a lot in a very short space of time.

Stick with it.

The moment that section is done, you get an increasingly confident deep dive into the proto-Bene Gesserit anchored by two of the best actresses in the world. Emily Watson as Valya is focused, calm and ruthless and has a vast amount of interiority. She’s always thinking, always working. There’s a great scene with Constantine Corrino (Josh Heuston), which tells us everything about where the power lies in the world. And it does not lie with Constantine or his Emperor father. Olivia Williams as her sister Tula is always feeling, her emotional awareness the equal of Valya’s strategic awareness. Along with a group of acolytes, they form the core of the order and once you’re past that opening there’s a lot of smart engrossing stuff about how the Sisterhood works.

We also spend a lot of time at the Imperial Court, also populated by some fantastic actors. Mark Strong plays brilliantly against type as Emperor Javier Corrino, a man coasting on the reputation of his past and his uniform. He’s a weak man, a desperate one who is about to marry his daughter to a nine year old to shore up his hold on Arrakis. He’s human, flawed, deeply unlikeable and deeply relatable. Jodhi May is spectacularly good too as Empress Natalya, essaying similar ground to her exemplary work in The Witcher but giving it far more of an edge and focus.

But Travis Fimmel is going to be the cast member who stays with you from this episode. He’s playing Desmond Hart, an Imperial soldier and sole survivor of an attack on an Arrakis spice convoy. Except, as Javier finds out, he didn’t survive. Sha-Halud ate him. Yet here he is.

Fimmel’s doing the same gently spoken, wide-eyed maniac routing that was so much fun on Vikings but he’s adding some welcome extra elements here. The biggest one is Desmond is calm and empathetic and painfully aware of the monstrous thing he does at the end of the episode. But he does it anyway. Why, and what the consequences are, isn’t for this episode.

Verdict: Despite the slow start, I’m looking forward to finding out. 7/10

Alasdair Stuart