Dune: Prophecy debuts on HBO on November 17th and while the series is an expansion of author Frank Herbert’s Dune franchise set 10,000 years before Paul Atreides’ story, the upcoming series is already drawing comparisons to another HBO series,

The new series traverses the formative years of the Bene Gesserit sect, the simmering tensions between the great houses of Herbert’s world and the wake of the war with the “thinking machines”. But with an exposition-heavy first episode,

HBO's Bene Gesserit origin story is strange and mysterious, except when it feels like Frank Herbert mapped onto George R.R. Martin.