Dune: Prophecy just aired one of the scariest TV scenes of 2024

Dune: Prophecy Episode 2 depicts the spice agony like never before, showing not only its effects on the human body but the terror that lurks in the Other Memory.

Dune may be classified as sci-fi, but its world is full of cosmic and existential horror: giant sandworms that burrow through the desert, Baron Harkonnen’s hideous spider creatures, religious zealots that refuse to see how they’ve been manipulated (*cough* the end of Dune: Part Two *cough*).

However, Dune: Prophecy Episode 2 boasts the franchise’s scariest scene to date when Lila goes through the Agony, the fabled process that transforms an acolyte of the Bene Gesserit (or, at this point in the Dune timeline, the Sisterhood) into a Reverend Mother.

In the movies, this involves the Water of Life, a blue “awareness spectrum narcotic” extracted from a dying sandworm. However, the ritual originated with a poison found on Rossak, and as seen in the second episode, Tula puts a droplet of the drug on Lila’s eye.

HBO

She immediately screams out and writhes in pain as the poison floods her blood. If that wasn’t bad enough, she wakes up in a dark, damp tomb, surrounded by towers of skulls and half-skeletal hooded figures. Her body remains with the Sisterhood, but her soul is elsewhere, and she was doomed from the beginning.

Lila can’t speak, nor can she move – all she can do is watch as the ghosts of her ancestors surround her and rip her apart. Then she wakes up again, this time with one person above her: Raquella, the Sisterhood’s first Mother Superior and her great-great-grandmother.

At first, it seems to work. Raquella communicates with Tula through Lila, giving her crucial information about the Tiran-Arafel – but another Sister hijacks Raquella’s possession: Dorotea, Lila’s grandmother, who was murdered by Valya in Episode 1. Seconds later, she’s smothered and lost to the void, slipping away and dying in front of everyone.  

HBO

It’s a horrifying fate for Lila, condemned to a nightmare from which there’s no escape; Tula begs her to see the light, but she’s blinded by the dark. When it comes to the Agony, death can be its own reward.

The show has incredible production value, but this feels like the first time it’s cultivated its own identity (excluding the Butlerian Ji- sorry, the Great Machine War) rather than just a small-screen facsimile of Denis Villeneuve’s world-building; cinematography, sound design, performances – all singular to this series.

But its effectiveness goes beyond the episode’s craft. It’s a bit like the actual fear people have when they do a Ouija board: it’s not that they’re scared of connecting with a ghost, it’s what happens after; are they friendly, or have they been looking for a way out? Embracing the spirits of your ancestors should be a revelatory occasion, but Dune: Prophecy brilliantly and terrifyingly reframes that prospect.

As Stephen King once wrote, “I’m so afraid that all I can reach will lead me to all I dare not see.”

Make sure you keep up to date with our Dune: Prophecy release schedule, find out more about Dune 3 and why Salusa Secundus looks so different, and check out other TV shows streaming this month.