The Grand Plan in Dune
Posted: 26 Apr 2016 15:47
Alright let's do this. I was lazy and never got around to this thread a couple of years ago but here we go.
By “grand plan” I mean the conspiracy of which we only see glimpses in Dune, and which is referred to either in passing or in the epigraphs. I’ll try to detail who was involved in the conspiracy and why, but first I must mention that there was not just one conspiracy but two. The first was arranged prior to Paul’s birth, and the second was made upon Jessica bearing a male child and the first plan being scrapped. I’ll try to be as specific as I can but I’m going to avoid finding the quotes to save time and space. If they’re needed later on I’ll hunt them down. I’m trying to gather my thoughts here so if I make a mistake let’s talk about that.
The initial plan was made many years prior to the start of Dune, and I believe it was conceived around the time of the death of Elrood, Shaddam’s father. The plan involved the BG ‘allowing’ Shaddam to succeed the throne, and in exchange he would agree to have only daughters and to allow another bloodline to combine with the Corrino to continue the dynasty. The BG were to breed Jessica with Leto, and the Baron with a once-mentioned BG, and their children (Feyd and Paulette) would marry and breed the KH. The KH, in turn, would marry Shaddam’s eldest daughter, Irulan, and take the throne as the new Emperor, thereby joining the Harkonnen and Atreides bloodlines to the Corrino dynasty. It’s unclear whether the KH would legally take the name of Corrino or would keep an Atreides or Harkonnen title, but from the BG perspective that probably didn’t matter. They likely told Shaddam he'd be called Corrino. At this point in time the Guild probably didn’t need to be included in the conspiracy since it was an entirely political plan and would involve the ending of kanly between the Atreides and Harkonnens. The benefit to Shaddam was that he got to become Emperor with BG support, and that his bloodline would be retained at least in part. Since the Atreides were already his cousins it wouldn’t have been a problem in that regard, although mixing in Harkonnen blood was likely a sticking point at first. The Atreides and Harkonnens may or may not have been in on it at this point. If they were, then Leto requesting Jessica to bear a son would have been a deliberate scuttling of the plan, which might mean he was against it. The Baron also might have had designs to scuttle it, since he would have preferred Feyd to become Emperor rather than Feyd’s child under BG control. Another thing I’ll just throw in there is that Fenring was certainly a BG asset, and him paired with Margot would make a good set of double agents working both for Shaddam on the surface as well as for the BG in reality. I kind of want to believe that Fenring was the BG insurance policy against Shaddam going against their plan, which goes into my belief that Fenring was by no means Shaddam’s subordinate in real terms. I suspect that Fenring would have been the one to enforce the BG plan if Shaddam strayed from it. As a failed KH Fenring would surely have been brought up with BG teaching, and he is the only person in the entire series as far as I can recall that had an active alliance as equals with his BG spouse.
From the BG perspective the plan wasn’t, of course, to merely end the feud and combine the warring Houses with the Corrinos to establish a new peace, but rather was to “put a BG on the throne” who would be under the control of the BG and would lead the Fremen in a jihad to establish a new order in the Universe. They would also completely control spice production and have complete leverage over the Landsraad, the Imperium and the Guild. It seems to me this was going to be the ‘unveiling’ of the BG breeding program and the culmination of thousands of years of quietly gaining power, where once the KH was in control it would be all too apparent that he was allied with them. In this sense the BG may have been quite similar to what we see of the BT in books 4-6, where they, too, planned in secret so that they could reveal themselves at the correct time. In fact, Scytale in DM tells Paul that the BT religious engineering people learned a lot from Paul’s rule, which in a sense means they learned it from the BG.
Should they have known about it the Guild would have been accepting of the apparent plan since on its face it looked like it was going to usher in a time of peace and stability.
Once Jessica bore a son the plan was killed, and a new plan was made, this time involving the BG, Shaddam, the Harkonnens and the Guild. We see it play out over the course of Dune, but each side has its own take on how they want it to turn out.
The BG no doubt decided to invoke one of their famous “punishments” on the Atreides for defying them, and they also may have wanted to eliminate Paul since they couldn’t afford a rogue KH existing. Their new plan was to have the Harkonnens eliminate the Atreides wholesale and to have Margot Fenring mate with Feyd to salvage as much genetic material from the bloodline as they could. It would no doubt take some time but they’d rework the genetic path again to find the KH several generations down the line. Irulan would likely have to be paired with someone else for the time being, possibly the child of Feyd and Margot as the next-best available option.
Shaddam no doubt wanted to get out of his deal with the BG any way possible so that his own bloodline could keep the throne. He apparently promised the Baron CHOAM directorships for going along with the plan to destroy the Atreides, as well as the fiefdom of Arrakis, but no Imperial prospects. He was also disposing of Leto, who was becoming a threat to his power in popularity and with his new fighting force that was better than the Sardaukar.
The Baron agreed to the deal for obvious reasons and was even willing to front the entire transport cost for the Sardaukar legions, but his aim as we know was the insert Feyd as ruler of Arrakis and do the same thing that Paul eventually did by blackmailing the Guild and taking the throne. I have a side theory that Piter was personally grooming Feyd to trust him more than the Baron and once Feyd was inserted Piter was going to eliminate the Baron and control the Empire from behind the throne. I rather think that Piter was behind Feyd’s assassination attempts on the Baron, and the Baron even thought that Piter would kill him eventually.
The Guild had to be brought in to the conspiracy at this point because they were needed to break the Great Convention and deliver Sardaukar troops against a Great House in secret. The moment Paul was born the Navigators no doubt became immediately aware of the nexus in time they couldn’t see past, and their objective would have been to eliminate Paul at any cost (as seen in the Lynch movie). In destroying the Atreides they would also be putting the nail in the coffin of the BG’s original scheme, and even if they didn’t quite know what it was they were no doubt always happy to set the BG back a few steps. Likewise, by agreeing to transport Sardaukar in secret the Guild would have blackmail material against both the Corrinos and the Harkonnens which they could leverage in the future. Neither party could afford to be exposed since according to the Great Convention the Great Houses would have to unite against them in response. The blackmail wouldn’t go both ways, though, since there was effectively no way for anyone to retaliate against the Guild no matter what it did. Who knows, maybe the Guild had designs to marry one of their members to Irulan after the affair was over as part of the terms of their blackmail.
Just a small detail about the plan, but I believe that the BG set up Yueh with his wife in order to compromise the Atreides should the need ever arise; a contingency plan of sorts. Once Jessica bore a son it was needed. I expect that Wanna may have been an imprinter, since an imprint may have been the most likely possibility to break a Suk conditioning. Piter took credit for breaking the conditioning, and indeed he was the one who conducted the task, but he may have received instructions from the BG on how to do it. I like Piter as a character, but if any old clever mentat could just break Suk conditioning then it wouldn’t be worth much. But the BG – that’s a different story. I could see them finding a way to break it. Once Yueh was imprinted it would be easy to use that to break him since he’d be willing to do anything at all to save Wanna. She was also a truthsayer, which is no mean feat, so it would seem that they paired him with someone quite talented for a reason. I somehow doubt they would match a random Suk doctor with a truthsayer unless it was for a serious purpose.
On a side note, I believe that Mohiam was acting alone and not under BG direction when she visited Caladan to test Paul. I think she did this out of caring for Jessica and frankly out of curiosity, but the BG had no intention at that point of keeping Paul alive.
For his part, Leto obviously knew the whole Dune thing was a trap, but his plan was to rally the Fremen more quickly than his enemies could move against him and to do exactly what the Harkonnens were planning: to use the Fremen and the spice mining to secretly blackmail the Guild and Shaddam into placing Paul on the throne with Irulan, while in public it would be described as a great alliance which the other Great Houses would favor since they liked Leto. I’m not sure whether Leto actually had designs on the throne prior to being given Dune, but Shaddam thought he did and may have been right about that. Thufir no doubt had a plan of some kind going forward which was interrupted by the Atreides being given Arrakis so suddenly.
That’s all I can think of for now. If I’ve left something out or gotten anything wrong go shoot.
ETA: I'll add in one more objective the Guild may have had in the conspiracy. The Fremen had been bribing them to avoid surveillance on Dune, but the Guild was no doubt aware that they were altering the ecology of Dune subtly. Since this would jeopardize spice production they would want the Fremen dealt with, but they knew the Harkonnens had been failing to succeed at this. Part of why the Harkonnens couldn't afford to spend much in the way of resources controlling the Fremen was, I suspect, due to their costly feud with the Atreides, and with the Atreides eliminated the Baron could focus fully on maximizing spice production and stopping whatever it was the Fremen were up to.
By “grand plan” I mean the conspiracy of which we only see glimpses in Dune, and which is referred to either in passing or in the epigraphs. I’ll try to detail who was involved in the conspiracy and why, but first I must mention that there was not just one conspiracy but two. The first was arranged prior to Paul’s birth, and the second was made upon Jessica bearing a male child and the first plan being scrapped. I’ll try to be as specific as I can but I’m going to avoid finding the quotes to save time and space. If they’re needed later on I’ll hunt them down. I’m trying to gather my thoughts here so if I make a mistake let’s talk about that.
The initial plan was made many years prior to the start of Dune, and I believe it was conceived around the time of the death of Elrood, Shaddam’s father. The plan involved the BG ‘allowing’ Shaddam to succeed the throne, and in exchange he would agree to have only daughters and to allow another bloodline to combine with the Corrino to continue the dynasty. The BG were to breed Jessica with Leto, and the Baron with a once-mentioned BG, and their children (Feyd and Paulette) would marry and breed the KH. The KH, in turn, would marry Shaddam’s eldest daughter, Irulan, and take the throne as the new Emperor, thereby joining the Harkonnen and Atreides bloodlines to the Corrino dynasty. It’s unclear whether the KH would legally take the name of Corrino or would keep an Atreides or Harkonnen title, but from the BG perspective that probably didn’t matter. They likely told Shaddam he'd be called Corrino. At this point in time the Guild probably didn’t need to be included in the conspiracy since it was an entirely political plan and would involve the ending of kanly between the Atreides and Harkonnens. The benefit to Shaddam was that he got to become Emperor with BG support, and that his bloodline would be retained at least in part. Since the Atreides were already his cousins it wouldn’t have been a problem in that regard, although mixing in Harkonnen blood was likely a sticking point at first. The Atreides and Harkonnens may or may not have been in on it at this point. If they were, then Leto requesting Jessica to bear a son would have been a deliberate scuttling of the plan, which might mean he was against it. The Baron also might have had designs to scuttle it, since he would have preferred Feyd to become Emperor rather than Feyd’s child under BG control. Another thing I’ll just throw in there is that Fenring was certainly a BG asset, and him paired with Margot would make a good set of double agents working both for Shaddam on the surface as well as for the BG in reality. I kind of want to believe that Fenring was the BG insurance policy against Shaddam going against their plan, which goes into my belief that Fenring was by no means Shaddam’s subordinate in real terms. I suspect that Fenring would have been the one to enforce the BG plan if Shaddam strayed from it. As a failed KH Fenring would surely have been brought up with BG teaching, and he is the only person in the entire series as far as I can recall that had an active alliance as equals with his BG spouse.
From the BG perspective the plan wasn’t, of course, to merely end the feud and combine the warring Houses with the Corrinos to establish a new peace, but rather was to “put a BG on the throne” who would be under the control of the BG and would lead the Fremen in a jihad to establish a new order in the Universe. They would also completely control spice production and have complete leverage over the Landsraad, the Imperium and the Guild. It seems to me this was going to be the ‘unveiling’ of the BG breeding program and the culmination of thousands of years of quietly gaining power, where once the KH was in control it would be all too apparent that he was allied with them. In this sense the BG may have been quite similar to what we see of the BT in books 4-6, where they, too, planned in secret so that they could reveal themselves at the correct time. In fact, Scytale in DM tells Paul that the BT religious engineering people learned a lot from Paul’s rule, which in a sense means they learned it from the BG.
Should they have known about it the Guild would have been accepting of the apparent plan since on its face it looked like it was going to usher in a time of peace and stability.
Once Jessica bore a son the plan was killed, and a new plan was made, this time involving the BG, Shaddam, the Harkonnens and the Guild. We see it play out over the course of Dune, but each side has its own take on how they want it to turn out.
The BG no doubt decided to invoke one of their famous “punishments” on the Atreides for defying them, and they also may have wanted to eliminate Paul since they couldn’t afford a rogue KH existing. Their new plan was to have the Harkonnens eliminate the Atreides wholesale and to have Margot Fenring mate with Feyd to salvage as much genetic material from the bloodline as they could. It would no doubt take some time but they’d rework the genetic path again to find the KH several generations down the line. Irulan would likely have to be paired with someone else for the time being, possibly the child of Feyd and Margot as the next-best available option.
Shaddam no doubt wanted to get out of his deal with the BG any way possible so that his own bloodline could keep the throne. He apparently promised the Baron CHOAM directorships for going along with the plan to destroy the Atreides, as well as the fiefdom of Arrakis, but no Imperial prospects. He was also disposing of Leto, who was becoming a threat to his power in popularity and with his new fighting force that was better than the Sardaukar.
The Baron agreed to the deal for obvious reasons and was even willing to front the entire transport cost for the Sardaukar legions, but his aim as we know was the insert Feyd as ruler of Arrakis and do the same thing that Paul eventually did by blackmailing the Guild and taking the throne. I have a side theory that Piter was personally grooming Feyd to trust him more than the Baron and once Feyd was inserted Piter was going to eliminate the Baron and control the Empire from behind the throne. I rather think that Piter was behind Feyd’s assassination attempts on the Baron, and the Baron even thought that Piter would kill him eventually.
The Guild had to be brought in to the conspiracy at this point because they were needed to break the Great Convention and deliver Sardaukar troops against a Great House in secret. The moment Paul was born the Navigators no doubt became immediately aware of the nexus in time they couldn’t see past, and their objective would have been to eliminate Paul at any cost (as seen in the Lynch movie). In destroying the Atreides they would also be putting the nail in the coffin of the BG’s original scheme, and even if they didn’t quite know what it was they were no doubt always happy to set the BG back a few steps. Likewise, by agreeing to transport Sardaukar in secret the Guild would have blackmail material against both the Corrinos and the Harkonnens which they could leverage in the future. Neither party could afford to be exposed since according to the Great Convention the Great Houses would have to unite against them in response. The blackmail wouldn’t go both ways, though, since there was effectively no way for anyone to retaliate against the Guild no matter what it did. Who knows, maybe the Guild had designs to marry one of their members to Irulan after the affair was over as part of the terms of their blackmail.
Just a small detail about the plan, but I believe that the BG set up Yueh with his wife in order to compromise the Atreides should the need ever arise; a contingency plan of sorts. Once Jessica bore a son it was needed. I expect that Wanna may have been an imprinter, since an imprint may have been the most likely possibility to break a Suk conditioning. Piter took credit for breaking the conditioning, and indeed he was the one who conducted the task, but he may have received instructions from the BG on how to do it. I like Piter as a character, but if any old clever mentat could just break Suk conditioning then it wouldn’t be worth much. But the BG – that’s a different story. I could see them finding a way to break it. Once Yueh was imprinted it would be easy to use that to break him since he’d be willing to do anything at all to save Wanna. She was also a truthsayer, which is no mean feat, so it would seem that they paired him with someone quite talented for a reason. I somehow doubt they would match a random Suk doctor with a truthsayer unless it was for a serious purpose.
On a side note, I believe that Mohiam was acting alone and not under BG direction when she visited Caladan to test Paul. I think she did this out of caring for Jessica and frankly out of curiosity, but the BG had no intention at that point of keeping Paul alive.
For his part, Leto obviously knew the whole Dune thing was a trap, but his plan was to rally the Fremen more quickly than his enemies could move against him and to do exactly what the Harkonnens were planning: to use the Fremen and the spice mining to secretly blackmail the Guild and Shaddam into placing Paul on the throne with Irulan, while in public it would be described as a great alliance which the other Great Houses would favor since they liked Leto. I’m not sure whether Leto actually had designs on the throne prior to being given Dune, but Shaddam thought he did and may have been right about that. Thufir no doubt had a plan of some kind going forward which was interrupted by the Atreides being given Arrakis so suddenly.
That’s all I can think of for now. If I’ve left something out or gotten anything wrong go shoot.
ETA: I'll add in one more objective the Guild may have had in the conspiracy. The Fremen had been bribing them to avoid surveillance on Dune, but the Guild was no doubt aware that they were altering the ecology of Dune subtly. Since this would jeopardize spice production they would want the Fremen dealt with, but they knew the Harkonnens had been failing to succeed at this. Part of why the Harkonnens couldn't afford to spend much in the way of resources controlling the Fremen was, I suspect, due to their costly feud with the Atreides, and with the Atreides eliminated the Baron could focus fully on maximizing spice production and stopping whatever it was the Fremen were up to.