Dune

I just finished watching the TV miniseries based on Frank Herbert’s Dune. I read Dune and several of its sequels when I was a teenager, and I remember finding them fascinating. But watching them on TV I find very depressing. Not because the series wasn’t beautifully done, but because I know how the story is going to end.. Bad enough to lose a beautiful baby and for the real wife to have to take second place as the concubine (is there some reverse Bible imagery there? With the concubines being the true wives and producing the heirs rather than the official wives?), but to know how Maud’dib dies, how Chani never gets to raise her own children, and how poor Alia becomes a villain? To see that the main characters’ lives and loves are sacrificed on the altar of “greater destiny” and their own desires are never met, never fulfilled? It ends with an empty ache – the whole series does. It seems like Herbert was trying to create a new religion – or at least a plausible religion, but without Christ, without redemption, without any hope of the joy to come – just miserable people playing their roles in a faceless universe – knowing their doom, meeting it stoically, and dying alone.