The Fremen were some of the most interesting characters
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Re: The Fremen were some of the most interesting characters
I think he needed to have all of those traits to be successful infiltrating the Fremen openly. He was an obvious outsider to them. Piter had only the fighting ability (although presumably not as much as Duncan. I think his demeanor would have given him away in a second to any fremen worth his water, would only have been about a page and they would have thrown him in a deathstill.
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Re: The Fremen were some of the most interesting characters
Speculation: What if, as is suggested above, Piter knew full well about the capabilities of the Fremen, but the Baron didn't? The Baron's plan was to squeeze the Fremen and have Feyd take over, using the Fremen as a voluntary workforce. He may not have foreseen their use in battle, but he certainly saw them as a labor pool to draw from. If Piter knew they could be an army then perhaps he had a secret variant on the Baron's plan he intended to carry out himself. We know that things between the Baron and Piter were coming to a head and that shortly after the victory against the Atreides each of them assumed the other would try kill him.MrFlibble wrote:...
Secondly, I think it is possible that Piter worked out the real power of the Fremen (just like Thufir did later), but for some reason he was withholding this information from the Baron. In this case, perhaps he had a plan of his own we will never know.
And the third option is that while the Harkonnens underestimated the Fremen on a large scale, they still thought it possible to use them against the Atreides, especially since it was known that the Atreides sought to ally themselves with the Fremen.
From this standpoint we can see why the Baron would be happy to entertain a plan whereby Piter went to infiltrate the Fremen - because then he would be gone, and possibly dead in the process. No doubt Piter would have been the instigator of such a plan. On Piter's side, we can guess that Piter had intended to try to take control of Feyd, the na-Baron, after killing the Baron. Feyd would have been overjoyed to suddenly be 'in charge', and we can see from Feyd's interactions with Thufir that he could be manipulated in situations where he was made to feel superior. Thufir, as far as we could tell, was playing him like a fiddle. If Piter had similar aspirations for controlling Feyd then his goal in infiltrating the Fremen would have been to learn enough about them to make sure they'd follow Feyd, with Piter as 'advisor'. In the scene where the Baron offers Piter a choice between Jessica and Arrakis Jessica believes the Baron is tricking him. Since she doesn't have the truthsense we can only assume this is a hunch on her part, rather than certainty. In fact, we could even foresee Piter anticipating the Baron's wish to toy with him and putting on his 'insanity' the whole time just to keep the Baron off-guard and on the wrong track. Even if he was half the mentat Thufir was he could certainly have come up with this. But either way we do know from this exchange that Piter wanted power, and so it isn't far-fetched to assume that Piter had planned to acquire it over the Baron's dead corpse. With Feyd ruling House Harkonnen Piter would be the logical person to govern Arrakis.
Again, all speculation, but since we're never really given a chance to get into Piter's thoughts it's fun to imagine.
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Re: The Fremen were some of the most interesting characters
Piter was offered temporary governorship of Arrakis by the Baron as an alternative to having Jessica and exile. It seemed to take Piter by surprise but for some reason I thought of it while reading your post.
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