Dune: Part One presented Paul Atreides as caught between shared lineages favoring profits and prophets, respectively. By the end of Dune: Part Two, a harsher realization settles in. Both forms of control depend on a higher law: everything is a resource.

Spice exploitation becomes the clearest example of that law, but every faction, creature, and character within Dune can be exploited just as easily. The Emperor manipulates the Houses as the Reverend Mother of the Bene Gesserit leads him by the nose, herself clueless to her own pupil, Lady Jessica, parlaying seeded prophecy into self-survival and ascendance for herself and her son. Resource exploitation is not a chain, though, it is a circle, an ouroboros, a sandworm eating its own tail. The Fremen may praise the Shai-Hulud as a god, but they use them as transport, proving that any semblance of power only has to wait until the next challenger forces them to bow to a new master.

Only across the span of Frank Herbert's Dune series does that realization become clear. Vast spans of time , empires fall, populations and planets are eradicated, heroes become villains only to have themselves and their descendants forgotten in the blink of an eye. Within the diegesis of Dune: Part II the showdown between Paul and Feyd-Rautha carries weight; it's a battle between good and evil, proselytizing and profiteering, freedom and oppression, revolution and fascism. And none of it matters. Whichever side wins, the victor will only use their newfound crown - like the old emperor - to treat those below them as resources until they are themselves deposed.

Narratives, like the one planted by the Bene Gesserit or that Dune: Part One and the first half of Part Two tell us, where messiahs and saviors exist, where the colonist can be transformed, where true love exists, those are what deludes us to the fact that we are all just resources for the taking.