Jᴀᴄᴜʀᴜᴛᴜ - Tʜᴇ Cᴀsᴛ Oᴜᴛ

Now, wouldn't that be a more fitting name for Hunters and Sandworms?

Can someone please state which of the past characters have been resurrected as gholas in those two books? I haven't read them myself so I'm not too sure. I'd like to discuss the in-text purpose of each and every such resurrected character and what became of it.

Now, AFAIK, these are among the gholas:
Paul Atreides, Yueh Wellington, Leto 2nd(henceforth AKA 'God Leto'), Stilgar, Gurney Halleck, Baron Vladimir Harkonnen, Chani, Lyet Kynes.

Is that all? I think I forgot quite a few, so please expand on this.

The reason I thought of making this thread is(aside from another excuse to call jihad upon P&B) that while reading a Hunters review by Dave Itzkoff(link courtesy of Chig's blog), he mentioned Yueh being resurrected.
This made me, not for the first time, wonder to myself "WTF?! Why did they bother bring HIM back? What's next, gholas of chairdogs that Glossu Raban sat on?"

I'll be ever so happy to get the names of all victims of this most heretical and pointless resurrection.

Let's see...

Duncan and Teg to begin with.

You've got two Pauls (Good Paul and Bad Paolo...the latter a naming choice which makes about as much sense as Ithaca for the no-ship.)

On the (stupidly named) no-ship:

Good Paul
Chani
Jessica
Alia
Thufir
Yueh
"Worm Boy" Leto (Please don't call him "God Leto". He isn't.)
Stilgar
Liet
Scytale

(I think I'm forgetting someone....)

They try to make ghola-babies of Serena Butler, Xavier Harkonnen and Leto I, but they come to messy ends. (Jessica gets her Leto I boytoy in the end, and Sheeeeeanna gets a little girl Serena to play doll with as well. Xavier gets screwed, as usual. )

Amongst the bad guys:

Paolo
The Baron H
Waff (a whole gaggle or two of them, in fact. Simply stupid.)

Gurney Halleck also got the shaft. There was really no need to have Yueh, and I can see no real reason to have Serena come back, especially since she somehow made it into Sheeana's OM. I'm not sure what Gurney would have added, but at least he was an interesting character. Xavier Harkonnen would probably be the only one from the Legends series I would have wanted to see again considering the Harkonnen-Atreides feud and the fact that he was also the forefather of the Corrinos.

Well at least Serena came back

Well, Teg and duncan have already been introduced, so I didn't count them as new gholas, also Scytale.

I agree not to call Leto II 'God Leto', since there was only one God Leto, and calling his ghola that would be blasphemous.

SandChigger wrote:and Sheeeeeanna gets a little girl Serena to play doll with as well

You sure? If Sheeana hasn't jumped into bed with Duncan in Hunters(has she? I'd have heard about that I think), as P&B are wont to do, what with her being...a woman, and Duncan the stud that he always is, then I think Sheeana has different plans in store for her little Serena. Oh c'mon, it's just the sort of thing P&B's readers are waiting for!

Ok, so lets start with the lesser characters and what they were used for, accomplished and why the hell they were even thought of in-story wise.

I'll start with Yueh:
So what has he been ress'ed up for? They had no one to betray the Atreides gholas anew? Did the characters say?

In the final analysis, the ghola babies served no purpose whatsoever.

Supposedly they were brought back to provide knowledge, skills and tactical prowess. But that very idea ignores the fact that most of these "heroes" are five thousand years behind the times. Remember that the Duncan at the time of GEoD was easily bested by Moneo.

Sure, FH mentioned the cells in Scytale's nullentropy tube at the end of CH:D. But who can say that it wasn't a red herring?

Well, my point in this thread was to examine each ghola in turn and determine why the characters(the Ithaca crew and Omnius Prime&Erroneous) thought to ress them.
I already get the idea that most of them ended up being totally irrelevent to the stupid plot itself, but that's not my point.
I want to analyze them one by one.

So statements like "In the final analysis, the ghola babies served no purpose whatsoever" are not only obvious, what with the authors being P&B, but also ruin any point of having this thread(well, we can always close it then).

You say "knowledge, skills and tactical prowess", well, Yueh can only mean the first two.
Now, considering he's not really that great and legendary a doctor and that they had their own BG doctors IIRC, then it's not his medical skill and knowledge.
Did they try to use him for something else(like awakening murderous thoughts in all their other Atreides gholas )? What happened to him etc?

I can't point to any specific passages at the moment (haven't scanned the whole thing yet and can't be fooked looking through the book), but weren't there several points where they made you wonder if certain gholas weren't there just to be used in awakening the memories of others. (Chani for Paul, Yueh for...just about anyone else.)

But I don't remember any of the adult characters who are supposedly in control ever clearly saying WHY Yueh was there. Kind of an Everest/Hillary thing, maybe? "Why did you use the Yueh cells?" "Because they were there!"

Anyway, what happens to Yueh?

He gets indoctrinated from childhood with the knowledge that the person whose memories he will eventually recover was one of the most reviled traitors in history. (That little boy Yueh "But I don't want to be who I was" scene...so poignant! Jesus wept.)

Sheeana awakens those memories by giving in (again) to her pedophiliac tendencies. (She has to register with the authorities every time she moves into a new neighborhood now.)

He gets conned into destroying the Leto I ghola ("Oops, I killed him again?") by the FD passing as the Rabbi, provoking lots of cheap melodrama with the Jessica ghola.

He gets his revenge (at last! after ten millennia!) and kills the Baron H in the showdown at the O.E. Chorale. (In the Synchrony Cathedral.) I think he ministers to the striken Paul (knife to the heart...but he heals himself, so again, Yueh's skills are not needed) and looks after the comatose Paolo after he gorges himself on ULTRA-SPICE!!!

I forget if the rosy final chapters say where he eventually ends up. Maybe changing Paolo's IVs and diapers?

I don't know, does that help any?


(I've seen people comment that they found Yueh one of the better drawn characters in these two books. That's not saying a lot, really. I wasn't moved by the pathetic attempts to evoke sympathy for him; to me they came across as simply variations on killing a baby...which there's altogether too much of to begin with.)

Ok, Yueh's there to awaken memories, and functions as(again) a Leto slayer, but gets to kill Vladimir at long last and ends up with a fate fit for a traitor- changing diapers for the rest of his life(hey, I guess "a million deaths" were indeed "not enough for Yueh" ).

Not that I get why he's needed to awaken memories when they have, err, Leto(that's how Duncan gets his from Teg in HoD after all), but it'll be excused as redundancy due to poor writing.

I think you've convinced me this thread is indeed useless. So they're all for just about the same purpose? As extra firepower against Omnius Prime and Erroneous? Maybe I'll pass over the opportunity to expand on this then.

Oh, and I admit my error in assessing Sheeana's motives. Seems there was another reason why she and Duncan haven't made-out all over the place...he's just a bit too old for her.

Unfortunately when you try to analyze what those two dip-shits were doing with their "books" you just wind up staining your own soul. Leave it alone, man.

I prefer to pretend they don't exist at all.

Mandy wrote:I prefer to pretend they don't exist at all.

I've also come to that realization as well. The only good thing about the Prelude to Dune is that it introduced me to the originals.

It saddens me that there is more "new canon" than FH's Dune works.

Orald, sorry about the negativity. I didn't mean to squash this, was just in a crabby mood last night.

Even though we know that it turns out to be Duncan and that fartbrain Norma that save the day, we can still look for reasons stated by the characters as to why they're resurrecting these old people. (My impression, though, is that these are few and far between, and that for P&B as well it was very much a "because it's there" situation. "FH gave us this nullentropy tube full of cells of past HEROES. We HAD to use them!")

In connection with the Paul/Paolo twins, one question that boggles the mind is WHY the machines thought they had to have a human KH in order to win to begin with. Makes NO sense.

There's also the "baby-done-gone-wormy-and-bit-da-bad-BG" scene with Baby Leto in the nursery, which is COMPLETE BULLSHIT unless you assume that he is really some kind of worm/human FACE DANCER. (In the Duniverse, only Face Dancers can effect anything even remotely like the physical transformation described.)

There's still plenty of ghola biz to discuss!

I think P&B are really into this trasformation stuff, what with Norma doing it, Erroneous having "liquid metal" skin and all.
Just goes to show they both want a sex change.

Ahem.

Erazflow is just another of their Terminator movie rip-offs.

But Norma...I don't know whereTF they got her from. No doubt she sprang from them, fully formed, like Athena from Zeus. Only in Norma's case, judging from the stench, it was out of their asses.

Back on T: let's list where all the ghola babbies end up, how's about:

Good Paul & Chani end up living happily-ever-after, leading a new hippee Fremeen commune back on Arrakis.

Jessica orders a boy Leto I ghola and, after getting lots of pointers from Sheeana, retires with him to Caladan.

Alia was killed by the Baron H soon after the no-ship arrives on Synchrony. She had, however, killed the nasty Rabbi FD...but not before he/it managed to alert the machine armada as to the location of the Ithaca. (Here's another puzzler: if the machine ships use only "lightspeed" engines, how the fuck do they get to where the no-ship is so quickly? I guess Omnius doesn't mind space-folding when it's something really important. ) The Baron H is knifed by Yueh, as already mentioned.

Thufir bites it on the Handler planet along with the Rabbi. The FD that takes his place gits ett by a sandworm in the no-ship hold.

Yueh lives more-or-less happily ever after, changing Paolo's diapers. (Paolo stays in a coma until rescued in the rivetting yet still-to-be-written fanfic by Sandworm Joe.)

"Worm Boy" Leto thinks he's Sheeana and tries to deep-throat a worm like she did after the rampage (such good fun!) on Synchrony; the worm absorbs him and then all the worms coalesce into a towering, throbbing mass of muscular wormmeat. (Anyone miss the phallic imagery here? Need it spelled out any clearer? THEY MAKE A GIANT BONER. I'm surprised the damned thing didn't get all excited and spew spice essence all over the place. Instead, it wilts, unfulfilled and burrows into the ground, where we're told the worms will again divide and go their messy...I mean, merry ways. So there's still more Leto-based transformation for ya!)

Stilgar and Liet were left behind on a planet being ravaged by one of those BG wormspreader missions. (The planet, named Qelso, was originally settled by descendants of Demi Moore and her jailbait-when-she-nabbed-him? husband with the silly name.) Stil, as a Fremen-leader-in-search-of-sietch, and Liet, as planetologist-with-porfolio-but-no-planet-to-ologize, decided to remain behind and help the Qelsonites come to grips with the desertification of their world when the no-ship moved on...emphasizing the fact that they really had no purpose in the coming fight with The Enemy.

Scytale (the ghola son-of, that is, the original already having fussed himself to death) ends up creating a new People of the Yaghist on Synchrony, where Sheeana and her new daughter Serena ghola remain to set up an alternative (Orthodox Reformed?) Bene Gesserit school to compete with Murbella's New Sisterhood. But this new Scytale is a kinder, gentler, friendlier version of the old Master and has vowed to treat his new females better. (Which leads me to believe he never did regain his memories. Knowharramean?)

Waff and his stunted sandworms are eaten on Arrakis during the triumphant return of the original sandworms there. (Yea! They weren't dead, just hiding under the heat-glassed sands! What were they eating? How did they survive? Who cares! Kevin rules, right Brian?)

I thought that there were, like, 64 little dickless waffs running around at the end of Hunters. What happened to the rest of them?

Most of them were killed trying to awaken the memories of the last one, weren't they? Sticker or Stukha or whatever-her-name-was took great joy in dispatching them, IIRC. (And Kevin much too much joy in describing it. Or is it Brian who is the borderline sociopath?)

The Waff we know was saved from the carnage by Fuxtal when he got some of his memories back, no? Presumably any other Waffs-in-da-Wings were whomped when Murbella and Da Goils invaded Bangadong...Bangdahor...whatever...and Waffy flew up to the waiting Guildship.

Fuxtal.

Ah, that makes much better sense then(not really, it's P&B). Thanks Chig.

Anytime!

I still remember the double-take I did when I read that bit in Grunters about Khrone having snipped Uxtal's naughty bits before sending him off to create the Baron ghola; the matter-of-fact description of the act just seemed so out of character, given how the Two love to dwell on gore and grotesquerie.

Anyway, here's something from the opening quotes of Sadworms, purportedly giving Duncan's view on the ghola sitch:

In re-creating particular gholas, we reweave the fabric of history. Once more, Paul Muad'Dib walks among us, with his beloved Chani, his mother the Lady Jessica, and his son Leto II, the God Emperor of Dune. The presence of Suk doctor Wellington Yueh, whose treachery brought a great house to its knees, is at once disturbing and comforting. Also with us are the warrior-Mentat Thufir Hawat, the Fremen Naib Stilgar, and the great planetologist Liet-Kynes. Consider the possibilities!

Such genius constitutes a formidable army. We will need that brilliance, because we face an opponent more terrible than we ever imagined.
—DUNCAN IDAHO, Memories of More Than a Mentat

The tenses and situation described in this indicate that Duncan would have had to have written it while the Ithaca (snicker) was still hopscotching it across the bumcheeks of the universe avoiding the tachy net. Evidently he thinks the antiquated heroes constitute an "army".

Beats me why, but then I'm no ÜberKH.

SandChigger wrote:I still remember the double-take I did when I read that bit in Grunters about Khrone having snipped Uxtal's naughty bits

Good god! At least it's not Khorne...

Bloodthirsters of Doom, err, Dune.

-holed?

No, they spared us that. (Or Kevin did.)

But the little Fuxter does get raped near the end (but no, not in it) by a really old and skanky HM named Hy...um, something or other. (Talk about yer leathery netheries. I imagine sandpaper. Vigorously applied. )

Oh, GAWD, my EYES!!!

I was looking for the eunuch grinder granny's name (Ingva. Sexy, huh?) and happened by accident across the scene where Sheeana lets Duncan dip his cream horn in her donut hole. Oh oh oh! Damn, that stings!

But oh, you gotta love those oceanic waves when they collide, the salty smell of seabrine sweat burning the hairs right out of yer nostrils!

Err, was that refering to my post, or just another elaboration about how sexually depraved P&B are?

SandChigger wrote:-holed?

No, they spared us that. (Or Kevin did.)

But the little Fuxter does get raped near the end (but no, not in it) by a really old and skanky HM named Hy...um, something or other. (Talk about yer leathery netheries. I imagine sandpaper. Vigorously applied. )

Oh, GAWD, my EYES!!!

I was looking for the eunuch grinder granny's name (Ingva. Sexy, huh?) and happened by accident across the scene where Sheeana lets Duncan dip his cream horn in her donut hole. Oh oh oh! Damn, that stings!

But oh, you gotta love those oceanic waves when they collide, the salty smell of seabrine sweat burning the hairs right out of yer nostrils!

Dumbest scene ever. Damn, those HM are sooooo sexy; they can even control someone with no genitalia (like Kevin).

I wish they would have quit beating around the bush, and just opened up the book with all the Tleilaxu characters lined up in a toilet and KJA taking a giant shit all over them. I mean seriously, that's pretty much what he did, right?

The evil Tleilaxu deserve to be shat(?) on!

Just messin' with ya, Mastah B.

One thing that really pissed me off was how useless Leto II was.
I mean, its been pointed out already that they were all pretty useless, but the God Emperor? That should be kind of a big deal, for more reasons than I can count (I don't think its realistic that anyone would have brought him back, but that's another story).

I kept waiting for something, but his big finale was being eaten by a worm, and causing some minor destruction on Synchrony, while the new Better-than-Leto-KH (and Norma) saves the day.

They certainly tried to make his worm-rampage a big deal, as if the destruction he caused distracted/occupied the machines and allowed his friends to succeed. But its a handful of worms on an entire freaking planet of machines.
He could have had a worm-hoard 100 times the size, rampaging for a year, and it still would not even make a dent.

I really just imagine the young Leto shouting, "I helped too, you guys!"

It made me sad