“Dune: Prophecy” showrunner and filmmakers break down that premiere twist

“Now they’ve won and thinking machines have been outlawed. But as with anything that's outlawed, can it ever fully be eradicated?”

Warning: This article contains spoilers for Dune: Prophecy, season 1, episode 1, "The Hidden Hand."

If you’ve been reading Entertainment Weekly’s coverage of Dune: Prophecy, then you already knew that the series would feature flashbacks to the “great machine wars,” when humans overcame robot armies in order to reclaim their independence and create the Dune universe as we know it — where “human computers” known as Mentats have replaced actual computers, and the spice of Arrakis is needed to expand human mental capacity and pilot spaceship travel routes.

Related: Inside the Dune dynasty: Timothée Chalamet, Zendaya, Austin Butler, and Florence Pugh dig into the battle for Arrakis

But the end of Sunday’s premiere episode made clear that the threat of thinking machines is not just in the past. Such technology still exists, and is close to the throne. After the merchant’s son Pruwet Richese (Charlie Hodson-Prior) married the imperial Princess Ynez (Sarah-Sofie Boussnina) in order to guarantee his father’s spaceship armada for the throne, young Pruwet revealed that he has a little robot toy, capable of shifting back and forth between a ball and a lizard form. In EW’s new video interview below, members of the Dune: Prophecy filmmaking team (including the cinematographer, production designer, and VFX experts) explain how they pulled off the sci-fi technology.

“Now they’ve won and thinking machines have been outlawed. But as with anything that's outlawed, can it ever fully be eradicated?” Dune: Prophecy showrunner Alison Schapker teases to EW. “I think when we look at all our prohibitions throughout history, it's very difficult to fully put a genie back in the bottle. That technology exists. Yes it has been banned, yes it has been destroyed, but how might it return? That's something the books explore and we wanted to explore as well, because it's a very precarious time in this young Imperium, and they haven't gotten so far out that things couldn't start backsliding. That’s where we’re beginning our story.”

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In the video below, Dune: Prophecy production designer Tom Meyer explains what they wanted to convey in the design of the mechanical lizard.

“It had to have a sense of intelligence to it, but also a sense of beauty and wealth,” Meyer says. “To achieve this, we wanted to think of it as a high-class piece of couture jewelry.”

But creating something that could shift between two forms (one stationary, the other highly mobile) was no easy task for the show’s VFX team.

Related: How Dune: Prophecy unfolds the secret history of the Bene Gesserit

"We took that design and re-thought it so it could be actually transformed from a lizard to ball shape,” Mike Enriquez from VFX tells EW. “We had a lot of challenges in terms of how we were filming it with this prop, because there were times where the prop would’ve been blocking other actors’ faces. We had to do many takes with a prop in the hand, and many takes without anything in his hand.”

At one point, the lizard makes a run for it through the ballroom full of esteemed guests. Obviously, its movements had to be depicted via special effects, but cinematographer Pierre Gill thought of a clever way to convey the machine’s motion to the actors.

“It’s all extras, but they still have to look at the same place, at the same time, at the same speed,” Gill says. “So what I came up with is to have my practical lighting team create me a long line of LED lights, with pixels, so it was going tit-tit-tit. Everybody was just looking at the light. It was great!”

But in addition to being a triumph of visual effects, the machine lizard is also crucial to the plot of Dune: Prophecy. The revelation of its existence eventually inspires rogue warrior Desmond Hart (Travis Fimmel) to kill young Pruwet, scuttling a political marriage that the Bene Gesserit and its leader, Valya Harkonnen (Emily Watson), had spent years working to achieve.

“It’s the culmination of a plan they've had for like 30 years,” Schapker says. “The princess was supposed to get married, then she was going to go study and become a sister, and then eventually she would take the throne and she would be deeply loyal to the Sisterhood. It’s a plan that is decades in the making, that involved a lot of machinations from people behind the scenes. Here we have Valya Harkonnen, who's the second Mother Superior of the Sisterhood, on the brink of putting the final touches on a plan that she feels is going to not only be good for the Imperium, but that's going to protect the Sisterhood as an order and allow them to continue to grow and shape the future.”

Schapker continues, “I think it's important to see that that plan is shattered by the end of the pilot. What she does now, how she responds in this kind of crisis, is going to be very character-revealing and fun to see unfold.”

See how the Bene Gesserit sisterhood moves forward after this disaster in subsequent episodes of Dune: Prophecy, which air Sundays on HBO and Max. Watch our full video interview above.