Headscratchers / Dune: Part Two

Chani and Paul timeline

• In the film's ending, a certain deviation from the book's plot risks causing issues for Villeneuve's project of making a sequel based on Dune Messiah. In this film, Chani breaks up with Paul when he accepts to marry Princess Irulan once he seizes the imperial throne. In the book, she doesn't and remains his main concubine (basically being his official wife in all but name). Paul and Chani still being together a decade later is very important in the sequel's events (notably, her death in childbirth is the last straw who eventually breaks Paul's mind and causes him to go in exile at the novel's end). Also Paul and Chani's breakup would also completely wreck the timeline for hypothetical sequels based on later books: the protagonists of Children of Dune — the sequel of Dune Messiah — are Paul and Chani's twin children born during the events of Dune Messiah, and them not existing would prevent the events of Children of Dune's own sequels to be possible.
  • It's possible that Chani and Paul may be reconciled in the future, as Paul does say to Jessica that he has 'seen' that Chani will come to understand; albeit Paul's visions sometimes don't come to pass. It would add extra weight to Paul's despair if, after having gotten back together with her after a few agonizing years apart, he then loses her forever.
  • It's probably appropriate to point out that while it's obscured by the dark and Shoulders-Up Nudity, there's a scene showing Paul and Chani having had sex already—and while it's not commented upon, it's not outside the reason Chani's unaware she's already conceived the twins. The fact that her last conversation with Jessica implies Chani still plays a part in all this—apart from her own combat in the climax—is likely where this is going. The discovery that Chani has Paul's Atreides-Fremen children—coupled with Irulan's increased agency in the film timeline—is going to make this storyline's version of Dune Messiah significantly darker, competing motivations-driven, and more emotionally-wrought than it already does.
  • Considering how this movie already shrinks the timeline to avoid long timeskips, it's very likely that Chani is already pregnant with the twins, and the events leading up to her death by childbirth will all happen in the next 9 months in the adaptation, instead of the almost 20 years that go by in the book version. It's not hard to imagine that, being reunited with Chani just to see her die in childbirth soon after would be a strong enough moment to knock Paul out of his messianic journey and make him decide to live in exile, like she decided to at the end of this movie.
  • The timeline problem here only arises if you assume Chani storming out means that she and Paul are permanently broken up. Paul has already confirmed via vision that they will reconcile at some point in the near future. So there's no problem at all—they simply get back together at some point during Paul's marriage to Irulan, they wait around for a few years doing Messiah stuff, and then we're back on track.
    • Note the films establish that Paul's visions don't always happen.

What do the mice eat?

• When we see a cute little mouse running in a vast sea of sand, nothing but sand, what do those mice eat? For that matter, what do the humans eat?
  • Insects, that are both mentioned and seen. Like most of the planet's fauna, they likely live under the sands. The books also state that the fremen farm root vegetables.
  • The films' grand sweeping aesthetics definitely favor wide-open stretches of sand but there are plenty of real-life instances of plant life adapted to extremely dry environments. Root-heavy plants seem to have been the main cultivated crops on Arrakis before the coming of outside planetologists like Dr. Kynes, who introduced Earth desert plants in the interest of offsetting the negative impact of spice extraction, but most flora and fauna on the northern hemisphere of Arrakis probably cleave pretty close to areas of human habitation like the sheltered sietches for the same reason humans do when they're not stillsuited up.

Laser usage

• During the takedown of a spice harvester, part of the plan seems to be that Chani has to take down their aerial support with the missile launcher, and then the Fremen can devastate the harvester with lasers. Is there any reason they didn't just use lasers to take the air support out to begin with? The lasers seem brutally efficient and long-reaching.
  • It could be that the air support is shielded (since it doesn't have to worry about attracting sandworms) and so it could be self destructive to target them with a lasgun. Also, it's easy to see where a lasgun beam originates, they may have attacked the air support first so they don't target the lasgun operators when they make their location obvious.
  • The patrol ornithopter is explicitly shielded, so targeting it with a las weapon would be suicidal. The films never show what would happen if a las beam hit a shield, but it's made clear that it's something to be very wary of. For example, the Harkonnen soldier in the opening sequence who tells his squadmates 'no shields' when they're fired upon by Fremen. On the other hand, Part Two also makes it a point to show that all soldiers and vehicles that touch the desert soil are unshielded, in line with Liet's warning in Part One that it drives the worms into a frenzy.
  • Its mentioned repeatedly in the books, and I believe briefly in a scene in one of the new movies. Briefly as in a blink and you miss it brief. If a laser hits a shield it creates a large nuclear explosion. So wiping out the ornithopter, the harvester, and every things else in a multi kilometer radius including, presumable the person or crew who fired the laser.
  • On re-watching the trailers, I believe there is at least one instance of a laser hitting a shield. Trailer 3 at 1:19 shows an explosion in the sky, which then extends down an illuminated beam diagonally to the ground. It's very much not a nuclear-level explosion, but then, neither is the explosion of the three warheads Paul fires.
• Also on the subject of laser usage. In the first movie there was a scene where Duncan is dodging a laser from a Harkonnen ship while escaping Arrakeen. If ships are also equipped with lasers, then why didn't any of the Sardaukar use one the sandworms during the attack on the Imperial base?
• How expensive and valuable are the laser projectors? Why not just build a cheap and expendable one, have one guy man it, and use it in a suicidal attack against a harvester?

Fremen popping up in front of the imperial base

• During the final battle, the imperial base is attacked by worm-riders through a gap in the mountain range, by southern Fremen led by Paul from over a hill, and by yet another Fremen army. This last groups pops out of the sand within a short sprint of the Sardaukar ranks and includes Chani, who had previously been present at Paul's war council, overlooking the same imperial base. How did this Fremen army get in place and dig in, and why would they do that to begin with?
  • Why the did it is easier. In the previous scene we learn it is a three pronged attack. First Stilgar breaching the new hole in the mountain Shield wall with worms draws the majority of the attention. Then Paul and Gurney Halek attacks with a second group from the direction of the landing pads, I think, preventing escape. Finally Chani attacks from a third direction overwhelming the defenders who are already busy fighting on two fronts. As to how the third army got set up under the sand, I have no idea.
  • You see before Paul launched the nukes that Chani and her team are on the rocky ridges, not in the sand flats yet. They moved when the nukes were launched and the Sardaukar were distracted (Paul even calls Stilgar's team the distraction earlier), using the blast and the resulting sand clouds to approach the Sardaukar, only to bury themselves as the dust settled and the Sardaukar returned in formation. Stilgar's unit on the sand worms attacks, and the Sardaukar do not know they've been flanked until Chani's team comes out of the sand to close the pincer.

Dismounting from sandworms

• Through this film and the first, we see the Fremen using sandworms as transportation both for military attacks as well as long-distance travel. We see Paul calling and mounting one as part of his Fremen-training. However, how does anyone dismount? Sandworms move very fast, and from what we see from the mounting process, they move a lot of sand and when they dig in after a ride there should be suction that buries the rider in the sand...
  • Wormriding works by lifting scales that the worm than rotates up to avoid sand getting underneath. As is shown visually in Paul's wormriding scene. The book states that the worms eventually tire and move more slowly, at which point it's safe(-ish) to dismount.

Atreides nuclear warheads

• When did the Atreides have time to move their entire nuclear arsenal from Caladan to Arrakis, let alone build an entire vault to hold them?
  • While they were doing everything else to move their household to Arrakis. Getting a single room full of warheads into a hidden vault would seem to be be a pretty small fraction of their total efforts. The only difference is that this one task was done in secret.
  • It probably took a little while to actually organise and move everyone and their property from one planet to another. So it's likely that they sent some important stuff ahead first along with scouting parties to make sure that it was relatively safe and to install defensive systems so they couldn't be attacked while the family was moving.
  • That was what Duncan was doing in the first movie. Well, not the nukes specifically, but he was one of the advance scouts making sure they could set up properly.

Bombing the seitch

• Why didn't Rabban bomb the seitch? It seems like a very Harkonnen thing to do, and Feyd-Rautha doesn't seem to have anything that Rabban didn't.
  • The Baron seemed to imply bombardment wasn't normal practice, so it's probably just not standard military tactics due to Holtzman shields vastly blunting it's effectiveness. Rabban just wasn't imaginative enough.
  • Rabban wasn't given the resources. The floating bomber ship is first seen in the parade on Giedi Prime in honour of Feyd-Rautha getting the military command. By implication, the baron didn't really intend for Rabban to succeed (not necessarily to fail either, just not get enough done) so the na-baron could claim the pacification of the fiefdom.
    • This is very likely the reason and backs up condensed plotlines from the book in that Rabban was never meant to actually stop the Fremen. Just make things somewhat worse so Feyd would look better when he took over. As shown throughout the film Rabban only really had smaller copter fleets and ground forces to fight the Fremen. Not any of the heavy vehicles or weaponry seen in the attack on the Atreides. Plus his tactics were very simple (just looking blindly and reacting to attacks). Likely the Barons reaction to Feyd tactics was just in the brilliance of its simplicity. Rabban probably would have just rushed in there with troops. Feyd opted to just bomb them out rather than the previous tactics of confronting them directly.
    • I think Feyd mentioned a spy after the attack on the Sietch. The implication is that Feyd somehow got an insider to reveal the location of the Sietch. Rabban most likely never knew where the Sietch Tabr was located.
    • The “spy” in question was Shishakli, who stayed behind to monitor the Harkonnens as everyone else escaped. That’s why Feyd set her on fire.

Harkonnen command center

• Is there an in-universe way to explain the monitoring and display systems the Harkonnen use without conflicting with the setting's ban on thinking machines?
  • If I remember correctly the scene, the personel operating it are implied to be mentats (one of them is seen entering a transe similar to the scene where Thufir calculates something in the first film) and use their abilities to set the position of things on the map.
    • They appear to be physically connected to the map. Implying that their brains work as the CPU for the monitor.
  • For the movies continuity it seems that the mentats are connected directly to the holographic device, seemingly being fed data directly to their brains and sending data through the links as well. This is supported by the fact they seem to be actively in a trance and not verbally receiving information, so likely are connected directly to the monitoring system. Essentially serving as the main CPU for the display device. This is likely achieved through some cranial implant allowing the mentats to input and output vast amounts of data more efficiently in real time.

Jinn?

• When Stilgar is warning Paul about the dangerous creatures in the desert, he mentions “jinn”, demons that can possess people. Is there any greater meaning to this, or is this simply another example of the Fremen’s religious beliefs?
  • I think it's best interpreted as madness from long periods of isolation causing hallucinations, rather than literal spirits. Djinni ('genies') are spirits in Arabian myths.
  • Or Stilgar was screwing with Paul for his own amusement.

Fremen can fly ships?

• At the end, where the Fremen hijack the Imperial ships and take the fight up to the other Houses' armada, how do they know how to fly them? Also, why doesn't the other Houses armada just shoot them out of the sky before they get to where they're going?
  • I'm guessing Paul, Jessica and Gurney have at least some kind of knowledge about piloting spaceships, so they likely taught the Fremen off-screen. There seem to be a lot of time skips, after all. As for why the other Houses don't attack them, Paul mentions that if they attack, he will blow up every Spice deposit on Arrakis, which would likely give them (and the Spacing Guild, since Spice is vital to them and nobody flies anywhere without them) pause.
  • It's a plot point in the books that the Fremen are not quite as backward and primitive as everyone thinks they are - and that they have secret dealings with the Spacing Guild - whom they bribe with Spice to keep weather satellites from being installed on Arrakis that might be used to track their movements. It thus seems likely that some Fremen might know how to fly ships for said smuggling. They might also have just coerced the crews of the ships to pilot for them.

When exactly was Arrakis colonised?

• In the scene where Paul declares himself as Lisan al-Ghaib, he reads the mind of a man and talks to him about grandmother, saying that when his grandmother was a child, Arrakis still had a Fremen name. This would seem to imply that back then Arrakis still hadn't been colonised, since the colonisers hadn't yet renamed it. But that doesn't seem to jibe with the idea that the whole spacefaring empire has lasted for thousands of years, since the empire's whole existence relies on harvesting Spice from Arrakis.
  • Dune had been settled for a very long time, without use of the Guild. Spacefaring in the Dune setting requires neither the guild or computers. Without either, space travel is possible, but a lot more dangerous. The original settlers of Dune were cultists (do a search on "Zen Sunni Wanderers" for info) who were willing to take those risks ...so the real headscratcher is: why isn't the whole galaxy - every planet - populated with the descendants of these people, and similar risk-takers? It only takes one space vessel to populate a whole planet. IRL, many remote spots on Earth were populated via similarly dangerous means. For example, the entire native population of New Zealand are descended from an initial small group (or several groups) who arrived via long and perilous canoe journey (mitochondrial DNA implies approximately 70 women settlers).
    • And the answer to this secondary headscratcher is that the author probably just decided that making a 100% realistic setting was too much work / not what he wanted. He wanted a very constrained setting. If a billion non-guild settled worlds are inhabited, you can't have the monolithic feudalism and galaxy-wide rules that prohibit the use of computers, and the shaky house of cards that the plot rests upon would fall apart. So, to prop up the story he wanted to tell, there's a bit of necessary nonsense: only the Zen Sunni Wanderers ever took this risk, and they only did it to get to a few places, and this (by an absolutely amazing coincidence!!) took them to the only planet in the whole galaxy that has the correct magitech required to power the rest of the story.
  • Arrakis has been an imperial fief forever, but the rule of the Harkonnen only dates back about 80 years (the Emperor rotates which house runs the place for him). It's implied in both book and film that it's the Harkonnen who brought with them heavy repression of Fremen culture.

How did the whole interstellar civilisation come to be?

• Expanding on the previous headscratcher, if interstellar travel is only made possible with Spice, and Spice can only be found on one remote planet, how exactly did the whole galaxy-spanning civilisation come to be in the first place? It seems like it couldn't have been founded without Spice, but how did the founders ever get of hold of Spice if they couldn't yet travel to Arrakis? The only explanation that would make sense is that the Fremen were the first interstellar travellers and the founders of the empire, but that doesn't seem to be the case?
  • See above - spacefaring in the Dune setting requires neither the guild or computers. Without either, space travel is possible, just a lot more dangerous. The original settlers of Dune were cultists (do a search on "Zen Sunni Wanderers" for info) who were willing to take those risks.
  • The interstellar civilisation is older than Spice's discovery because Spice wasn't needed for space travel at first. AIs and computers are outlawed since an ancient backstory event referred as "Butlerian jihad" (either a revolt against technology or a robot war depending on the continuity, mentioned in passing in the original Frank Herbert's novels, and the event is the main focus of one of the novels' prequels series). Also, Spice isn't literally spaceships' fuel. The prescience granted by Spice serves to replace the use of "thinking machines" to pilot spaceships: instead of using computers to calculate trajectories, the Spacing Guild's navigators rely on short term visions of the future.
  • So when Paul threatened to destroy all spice production, could the Spacing Guild have just said "ok sure, we'll just go back to using machines"?
    • They theorically could reuse pre-Butlerian Jihad tech, but it's would have been a slow process. They would need to overcome their rejection of thinking machines, a tenet which is very deeply ingrained in the setting's culture (the Butlerian Jihad happened thousands of years earlier). Because of this, they would also need to reinvent computers almost from scratch.
    • The Spacing Guild only exists because of the ban on Thinking Machines. If computers to replace the Navigators were invented and accepted, any Great House could make and use their own interstellar spaceships. And the whole Empire only exists because of the checks and balances based in major part on the Guild's monopoly. The whole social structure would come crashing down if the Spice-reliant system would be disrupted and in the minds of the people in this society, it would be tantamount to the Apocalypse.

Jessica's pregnancy

• Do pregnancies just take longer in the Duniverse? Or were all these events happening in less than 9 months? Do Bene Gesserit have the ability to delay birth? I know in the books and 1984 film, Alia is born by the time of the battle at the end, since she is the one who kills the Baron.
  • The events most likely took less than 9 months. Nothing in the movie suggests they took longer than that, nor is there in any mention that the birth was somehow delayed.
  • The Villeneuve's version alters the plot to compress the timeline. It notably removes an about two years-long time skip (Alia's birth happens at this time in the book).
  • In the books, Bene Gesserit have the ability to slow their own aging—they never do it, but they could if they wanted to—so it stands to reason that they also have the ability to slow down a pregnancy. It is highly unlikely that Jessica did that in this case, however, for the same reason that she wouldn't slow her own aging; it draws too much attention to the Bene Gesserit abilities which are supposed to be kept reasonably secret.

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