WiC Watches: His Dark Materials

Image: His Dark Materials/HBO

HBO and the BBC have teamed up to adapt Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy for TV. We’ve been here before. In 2007, New Line Cinema adapted the first book in the series — The Northern Lights — as The Golden Compass, starring the likes of Nicole Kidman, Daniel Craig and Sam Elliott. The movie was pretty but gutted Pullman’s anti-establishment ethos and pretty much everyone hated it.

The show is better — everyone agrees on that much — but is that enough? Pullman’s trilogy takes place in a world very much like our own, only there are a lot more steampunk influences and everyone walks around with an animal familiar, called a dæmon, that’s essentially an extension of your soul. If you’re young, like lead character Lyra Belacqua (Dafne Keen), your dæmon changes shape along with your mood. If you’re older, like Lord Asriel (James McAvoy) or Mrs. Coulter (Ruth Wilson), it’s set in stone. Much of the original series was concerned with negotiating the transition from childhood to adulthood, and with talented people like Jack Thorne behind the camera, we can assume the new show will at least make a good faith attempt to do right by it.

I think a faithful, passionate adaptation of Pullman’s books could be spectacular, a fantasy saga for the ages, but critics are concerned that the HBO show spends too much time explaining itself, taking away from what made the books so special. We’re gonna be watching the show episode by episode, finding out for ourselves. Come along for the ride!

His Dark Materials

James McAvoy

CR: HBO

Episode 1: “Lyra’s Jordan”

Okay, I think I know what the critics are complaining about. “Lyra’s Jordan” is a solid premiere, but outside of some standout moments, it sort of feels like HBO and the BBC have pressed the magic and mystery out of Pullman’s world.

Some of that has to do with the framing. As I said above, His Dark Materials takes place in a world parallel to our own, but with some key differences. They have technology, but not modern technology — it’s more like souped-up Victorian England-era tech, with a lot of zeppelins. The decor and costumes are also borrowed from that era, with some 1940s glam thrown in when it comes to Mrs. Coulter.

Other differences: everyone in this world has their own dæmon, a physical manifestation of their soul. The relationship between a human and a dæmon is sacred. And the whole shebang is ruled over by an all-powerful theocratic organization called the Magisterium, which takes none too kindly to information that challenges its hegemony. When Lord Asriel posits to his colleagues at Jordan College that there exist other worlds (I love the way the opening credits allude to this idea, by the way), he knows it’s risky; if the Magisterium finds out about this, which of course they do, there will be trouble.

All of this is wonderfully interesting stuff to discover, so why spoil it with a text crawl at the top of the episode? Why identify Lyra as a child of prophecy when the pleasure of the early parts of the story is to see her, an ordinary kid, swept up in events the scope of which we don’t understand until she does? Why visit Asriel in the North and get an inkling of his research into the mysterious substance known as Dust when we should find out about his journey as Lyra does: in incomplete snippets, so that it remains a mystery rather than a fantasy cliche?

There are several moments of clumsy exposition in this episode (Roger to Lyra: “We’re both orphans”) and two moments where Lyra is about to miss an airship departing Jordan and must run to catch it just in the nick of name…that’s two more times than she does that in the book, by the way. I can’t help but feel that writer Jack Thorne isn’t trusting his audience to figure things out for themselves. In his hands, Lyra’s Jordan is a little less wild and weird than it should be.

Come to think of it, Lyra is less wild and weird, too. In the book, she’s described as “a course and greedy little savage,” a girl forever disobeying her scholarly keepers to wage war with the neighborhood kids and secret away booze to share with her hardscrabble friends in the college crypt. She does some of that here, but it’s exclusively in the company of Roger (Lewin Lloyd); there’s no sight of the wider community of kids from the books, gyptian kids with whom she should be conspiring and learning about the Gobblers, mysterious adults who are kidnapping children. Lyra is transformed from an easily sociable girl to a more solitary one, with her electrifying edges wound down. And by more closely following people other than Lyra, her point of view — so important to the energy of the book — is diluted.

Part of the issue is Dafne Keen’s performance, which is mostly solid — particularly when Lyra is taken with the glamorous Mrs. Coulter (Ruth Wilson) — but stiff in places.

Speaking of Coulter, Wilson is the standout from this episode; she’s a tightly wound coil, elegant and stylish on the outside but calculating and malevolent underneath. McAvoy is also appropriately distant and harried as Lord Asriel. Performance-wise, we’re mostly on solid ground here, and that includes the talking dæmons. I just hope Keen loosens up a bit as the series goes on.

At the end of the episode, Lyra leaves with Mrs. Coulter to go to London, both to become her assistant and travel the world, and to find her abducted friend Roger. Maybe the new setting will bring out the best in Keen.

As for the series’ vaunted anti-religious sentiment, it has yet to really raise its head. Still, in a show meant to be enjoyed by children, there’s a bit of a transgressive thrill watching two priests, both clearly up to no good, whisper in a Magisterium stronghold.

This wasn’t the triumphant start to the series I was hoping for, but you heard right: it’s miles better than the movie. The pieces are all there. We just need to put them together just so…

Episode Grade: B-

Image: His Dark Materials/HBO

Episode 2: “The Idea of North”

Last week, I was concerned that HBO’s His Dark Materials was tipping too much of its hand too soon, giving us information about Dust and Lyra’s role in the greater scheme of things before Lyra, our avatar in this story, learns it herself. This week, I had a similar thought when Lord Boreal (Ariyon Bakare) steps through a window at Jordan College into another world — our world — and we see that he’s been living in both, concealing his snake dæmon while texting on his smartphone in the one world and doing dirty deeds for the Magisterium in the other.

In Pullman’s books, it’s not revealed until the second novel — The Subtle Knife — that these multiple worlds even exist, or at least, it’s not explored in any sort of detail. As to why the show would give away this crucial mystery so early…I really don’t know. On the page, we find out as Lyra does, and we feel her wonder and awe. Here, this earth-shattering revelation is reduced to just another plot twist. I doubt any new viewer felt awe; confusion is more likely.

For better or worse, the producers have gone the Game of Thrones route with this show. Instead of making this Lyra’s story, they’ve expanded the canvas to follow the Gyptians, Lord Boreal, Roger, and Lyra all at once — I’m surprised they’re showing enough restraint to keep Lord Asriel offscreen. Sometimes it works — I liked the subplot where the Gyptians search London for their stolen children, and Anne-Marie Duff brings gets a chance to bring some gravitas to Ma Costa. But the stuff with Lord Boreal felt wholly wrongheaded and backwards to me. It almost felt heretical, to use the parlance of this show.

I’m curious: how did people who haven’t read the books feel about this turn? What did you think when you realized the show was going there?

The meat of the episode — Lyra slowly realizing that Mrs. Coulter isn’t as wonderful as she appears — works better. Sure, it proceeds more slowly than it does on the page — rereading The Northern Lights, it’s striking how quickly Lyra’s time in London comes to an end — but the show has fun stretching out the monster movie elements of it, with Mrs. Coulter’s plush apartment slowly turning into an ornate prison, and director Tom Hooper framing Ruth Wilson like she’s the shark from Jaws, but with a better tailor.

Wilson is still the best thing about the show, by the way. Everything she did well in Luther, where she played a purring psychopath, works well here. Hooper can just push in slowly on her face, and it’s spooky. What is she thinking behind that placid mask? You get the idea that, despite all her finery and sophistication, she could lash out in a murderous rage at any moment, as indeed she does when her silent golden monkey attacks Panteleimon, Lyra’s dæmon.

All the same, I think the show makes another iffy choice when, following that terrifying confrontation, Mrs. Coulter comes down to earth a bit and tells Lyra that Lord Asriel is her father, information she doesn’t get until later in the story in the books. We get a better idea of Mrs. Coulter as a wholly rounded character here. She’s evil, obviously — the moment where she throws the children’s letters in the fire is great — but we can a better sense of what she’s striving for, and that she might have at least a little regret over what she’s doing to Lyra.

And I’m against that! The reason this scene is so chilling in the books is because Mrs. Coulter attacks Lyra over something incredibly trivial, and then goes right back to being a a posh pod person. The books eventually get around to fleshing out her character, but right now, we’re supposed to see her with Lyra’s child’s eyes: as purely monstrous. The show is deemphasizing Lyra’s perspective and it’s throwing everything off.

Photo: His Dark Materials: Season 1. Image Courtesy of HBO

Back on the plus side, I liked that this episode made better use of the dæmons. It was more clear this week that everyone in this world has them, from Roger marooned in a London warehouse to the creepy priest who’s bug dæmon surprises Lyra in the hall. Panteleimon (Kit Connor) is becoming more of his own character, too, a voice of reason for the impulsive Lyra. The dæmons are a wonderfully inventive part of Pullman’s story, so I’m glad the TV show is committed to doing them justice.

Still, I can’t like this episode as much as I’d like to. Keen is still fine as Lyra, but she’s not spectacular, and the character’s rough edges have been sanded down, resulting in a less interesting protagonist. And that Lord Boreal twist…no.

Episode Grade: B-

Image: His Dark Materials/HBO

Episode 3: “The Spies”

Okay, after whining about this show for two weeks, I’m happy to say that things steadied themselves a bit with “The Spies.” Although there were some additional dramatics and a couple of extraneous scenes, this episode stuck very closely to Lyra’s story, and to the books. And whattaya know? It was the best episode yet.

Surely, part of the reason I felt better about this hour was because I’ve now had some time to get used to the show’s style, visually and narratively. I still don’t like that we’re following Lord Boreal into “our” world — I think the show should have reserved the revelation that we’ll be crossing into other worlds at all for the end of the season, as Pullman does in his book. But that diversion was minimal here, and I suppose setting up information about John and Will Parry could pay off down the line once they become bigger players.

Still, the big reason this episode worked was because of a bunch of good scenes with Lyra. Her conversation with Farder Coram (James Cosmo) about their dæmons settling into permanent forms is thematically crucial and gives us a window into Lyra’s mind. She doesn’t want Pan to settle as any particular animal, but all dæmons settle as their humans get older, so what Lyra is really saying is that she doesn’t want to grow up. That’s a key aspect to her character, and to what Pullman is trying to say about childhood, adulthood, sin and innocence. We’ll see those themes revisited again and again, and I like that the show took the time to draw them out here.

Image: His Dark Materials/HBO

I also really liked the scene where Ma Costa reveals that Mrs. Coulter is Lyra’s mother. It’s pumped up for TV, of course; on the page Lyra finds out and pretty much shrugs it off. The show’s version is much more dramatic, but it gives Anne-Marie Duff yet another chance to shine. She’s a warm, motherly presence, which is something Lyra needs right now, and very compelling to watch for us.

Ruth Wilson continues to impress as Mrs. Coulter in her brief scenes, tearing up beds and walking too close to the edge. And her golden monkey is the most expressive dæmon we’ve yet met. Even the scene where Lyra succeeds at reading the alethiometer is pretty entertaining, and makes about as much sense as it does in the books, which is to say not a ton but I’m willing to go with it.

Image: His Dark Materials/HBO

That said, the additions the episode does make are still kind of wrongheaded, and create redundancies and plotholes. For example, in the books — and I assumed in the show, based on the wide shot of where the gyptians gather — the gyptians travel days away from London to meet for “the roping.” I mean, they were clearly on the move when the Magisterium searched their boats, right? But then when Tony and Benjamin decade to raid Mrs. Coulter’s flat, they get back to London in a night, so…okay.

And about that raid…No one but Lyra knows that Mrs. Coulter is the leader of the Gobblers. So if a couple of Gyptians show up in her house and look through her stuff, Lyra is the only one who could have told them, which means Lyra is with the Gyptians. Knowing this, why would Mrs. Coulter even need to to use those nifty little mechanical spy-flies to hunt Lyra down? (In the books, Benjamin and his team raid a different facility.)

AND ANOTHER THING. At the top of the episode, the Gyptians save Lyra from the Gobblers, and Tony Costa recognizes her. Back when I was watching the premiere, I wondered why they didn’t  establish that Lyra knew the Gyptians as a child at Jordan, and I wondered it again here, since their being familiar with each other is part of the reason they take her in, and why she chooses to stay.

So the writing isn’t airtight, but this episode was still much closer to the spirit of what I was expecting from a His Dark Materials show produced by HBO and the BBC. May they keep it up.

In the end, the show may have a bigger problem on its hands with Dafne Keen. Talented as she is, I don’t think she’s finding enough different notes to hit as Lyra. She’s at her best when Lyra is angry — which is a lot of the time, admittedly — but her emotions aren’t as textured or deep as they should be. Television is a marathon, not a sprint, so there’s time for her to get better, and she’s not bad, just not at the level I think she needs to be at if this show is really going to sing.

Next week, we meet Iorek Byrnison the armored bear, who looks awesome. We’ll also find out if Lin-Manuel Miranda can convincingly play a Texan, which…we’ll see.

Episode Grade: B+

Photo: His Dark Materials: Season 1.. Image Courtesy of HBO

Episode 4: “Armour”

At one point in “Armour,” Lyra comes to a realization. She wants to draft the fearsome Iorek Byrnison, an armored bear, into the ranks of the Gyptians so he can help them retrieve the children stolen by Mrs. Coulter and her Oblation Board. She and Farder Coram already spoke to the bear, who seems strangely reluctant to leave behind the menial work he’s doing in the ratty northern town of  Trollesund, even for good money and a noble cause. Lyra is talking it over with new arrival Lee Scoresby (Lin-Manuel Miranda), a Texan aeronaut and an old friend of Iorek’s. “He’s an armored bear,” Lyra starts. “What could they…they got his armor.”

This happens about 45 minutes into the episode. Do you know how this sequence of events goes down in Philip Pullman’s book? Lyra and Coram visit Iorek, he tells them straightaway that the townsfolk have stolen and hidden his armor, and says that he’ll help with their problem if they get it back. One helpful hint from Lee Scoresby later, Lyra finds the armor using her alethiometer, tells Iorek, and bippity boppity boo, he’s tearing apart soldiers in the town square, which is a cool scene they actually adapt pretty well on the show. Iorek looks fantastic throughout, and downright terrifying when he’s in his armor. Add in a strong voice performance by Joe Tandberg, and you’ve got yourself a talking bear you won’t soon forget.

But getting there…good lord almighty. We have to make room for a bunch of extra scenes with Lee Scoresby, including one where he cites legal codes to a middle manager, because what thrilling adventure is complete without an explanation of Paragraph 4, Subsection C? We need to have a scene where Lord Boreal threatens a priest with exposure of some illicit sex thing, because remember, this is a family-friendly show. We’ve got to follow Mrs. Coulter as she pays a visit to the Magisterium, and in general do everything we can to keep the plot we care about — Lyra’s — from moving forward.

The bloat is absolutely out of control. I don’t know exactly who’s making the decisions to pad out these episodes — the BBC, HBO, writer Jack Thorne, executive producer Jane Tranter — but they have turned a resonant fantasy story full of talking animals and youthful pangs of emotion into the best looking, most boring slog on TV. I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I think this show should have been made on Disney+, where series like The Mandalorian are allowed to have episodes that run just 30 or so minutes.

LOOK WHAT YOU’RE DOING TO ME, HBO! YOU’RE MAKING ME SIDE WITH DISNEY. I feel filthy.

Image: His Dark Materials/HBO

There were good things about the episode. Like I said, I enjoyed how they rendered Iorek. I also think they’re doing a good job of explaining how Lyra uses the alethiometer, although they missed a bit from the books where Dr. Lanselius gives some details about how they’re made. Lyra’s explanation for how it works it pretty vague on the page, but it translates well, and they were smart to contrast Lyra’s ease of use with Mrs. Coulter having to wait weeks for the Magisterium guy to interpret his own alethiometer. Clearly, Lyra is special.

I have little patience for side dalliances, but Mrs. Coulter’s are consistently the most interesting. I especially enjoyed her scene with Iofur Raknison, king of the bears. Ruth Wilson continues to hold up scenes all by herself.

That said, the show still had some of the same problems it’s had all along. The acting is mostly strong, but Dafne Keen is hit or miss as Lyra. For that matter, Miranda is pretty hit or miss as Lee Scoresby. His southern twang comes and goes, and it’s just hard to think of the guy from Hamilton as a hardscrabble Texan. This was always a strange casting choice.

But mostly it’s the pacing that’s getting to me. There’s so much middling nothing that even the moments that are important don’t land with the impact they should. Take the bit where Lee and Lyra discuss why the bears value their armor so much. It’s a key moment important to understanding what drives Iorek, but it’s not given the focus it needs, so it just blends into the rest of the dreary march.

I did like the running gag about Lyra’s bluff game, though. I want to like this show, truly I do, but at this point I’m losing hope.

Episode Grade: C

Image: His Dark Materials/HBO/BBC

Episode 5: “The Lost Boy”

First the good news: “The Lost Boy” is much better than last week’s snoozefest of an episode. Lyra seems more Lyra, the show is starting to get into the weirder, more interesting material from the book, and any episode that features plenty of Iorek Byrnison is always welcome.

But why talk about the good when we can complain? Although it picked up the pace this week, and thank every god in the skies for that, “The Lost Boy” still took too way long to get going. Last week, I wrote about the show adding scenes to stall for time before Iorek finds his armor and causes a ruckus in the town square, something that goes down in just a few pages in The Northern Lights. This week, it takes forever for Lyra to start on her quest to locate the titular lost boy, a “ghost” the alethiometer tells her she must find.

In the book, Lyra tells John Faa what the alethiometer says straight away, and he’s like, “Sure, I trust that gizmo. Be back by dark.” But not on this show. First Lyra asks Farder Coram if she can go, and he says no. Then she asks Ma Costa, and she says maybe. And then she asks John Faa anyway and the freaking plot starts nearly halfway through the episode.

This. Is. Ridiculous. Once again, these episodes should be shorter. Do they have to hit a time quota or something? It’s the only explanation I can think of.

Happily, once the plot starts, we do actually get somewhere. Lyra finds Billy Costa (changed from Tony Makarios, a rando, in the books) in a sleepy fishing village. He has been severed from his dæmon by the Gobblers, an unthinkably horrible crime in this world.

Image: His Dark Materials/HBO/BBC

The scene where Lyra finds Billy alone is suitably creepy, but I don’t think the show went far enough with it. In the books, there are all these eerie touches that drive home just how lost and pathetic Billy is without his dæmon, and how surreal it is for other people to be around him. He keeps asking for his Ratter, and when he gets back to camp, he absentmindedly holds a dead fish close to his heart, trying to fill the hole where Ratter should be. On the show, he doesn’t have a single line. He’s quiet, not unsettling. The show tries to fill those gaps with dialogue (Lyra: “It was like he wasn’t there…It’s horrible. It’s worse than anything.”), but it’s one thing to tell the audience how to feel and another to make them feel it. I’d rather we felt it.

Another gap: Lyra knows who Billy is when she finds him, even though the show never featured the two of them together in a scene when it had the chance, back when Lyra was at Jordan.

Last complaint, I swear: the episode ends with Lyra arriving at Bolvangar, the Gobblers’ experimental testing facility. She and Pan make a big deal of seeing a plain faded green jumpsuit hanging on a door. It’s the same kind of jumpsuit Billy was wearing when Lyra found him, so this is supposed to be our “Oh shit!” moment — the Gobblers have captured Lyra and she’s in trouble! But it doesn’t read because the earlier scene didn’t focus on Billy’s clothing; it was dark and we didn’t get a good look at it. Pan tells us to be scared through dialogue, but again, if the show has to tell us how to feel, it hasn’t done its job. This is basic setup-and-payoff stuff.

His Dark Materials is full of these weird little storytelling lapses, and it’s getting under my skin. There’s no reason for a show with this much money and this terrific a cast and such excellent source material to be this sloppy and wide of the mark.

But I’ve whined enough. There were things I really liked about this episode, beginning with Lyra. From the start, she hasn’t quite felt like the precocious girl I knew from Pullman’s books. She’s been too muted, too dour, too bland. But the Lyra in this episode smiles and jokes as she treks across frozen tundra on an impossible quest to rescue stolen children. She curls up against Iorek Byrnison and calmly eats an egg while he gores a seal. She openly asks this death machine about the dude he killed back home, and defies him when he tells her Lord Asriel couldn’t escape the bears guarding him by trickery. “Some part of me is definitely bear. You’ll see,” she says, going back to her lunch.

That’s the Lyra I remember from the novels: adaptable, unpretentious and completely fearless, maybe a little too much for her own good.

I think Lin-Manuel Miranda is growing on me as Lee Scoresby, too; there’s an approachable likability to him that may pay dividends down the line. And of course they’re knocking Iorek Byrnison out of the park. His scenes here make me very excited to get to Svalbard. And Ruta Gedmintas makes a commanding debut as the witch Serafina Pekkala.

But the pleasantest surprise was how much I enjoyed the scenes with Will and Elaine Parry, played by Amir Wilson and Nina Sosanya. I’ve been critical of the show’s decision to cross into other dimensions — including our own — this early in the narrative. (In The Northern Lights, we stay firmly planted in Lyra’s world until the very end of the book.) But if the show gave the game away up front so it could set up Will’s story, it might be worth it.

On the page, we don’t meet Will — who will be crucial to this adventure — until the second book, The Subtle Knife, which is packed with flashbacks to and remembrances of his past. In this episode, writer Jack Thorne familiarizes us with some key elements of Will’s story — his good-hearted nature, the cache of letters from his father, the creepy people around his house — which hopefully means we won’t need a bunch of boring exposition later on.

Plus, I just like Wilson and Sosanya in these roles. Although I want to love it, Dafne Keen hasn’t consistently sold me on her version of Lyra, but Wilson immediately seemed like Will: soft-spoken, self-sufficient, and mature before his time. (I could do without the added boxing scene, but whatever.) Sosanya is also very good as his mother, who suffers from mental health issues. You immediately get a good sense of their dynamic, and I never felt like their dialogue was force-feeding us information like I sometimes do in Lyra’s part of the plot.

Honestly, readers, I’ve been having a tough time with this show. Let’s hope it keeps up this trend and gets better from here on in. Lyra has lots of opportunities to shine in Bolvangar, where some of the first book’s juiciest, most disturbing scenes are set. Bring on “The Daemon-Cages.”

Episode Grade: B

Image: His Dark Materials/HBO

Episode 6: “The Daemon-Cages”

For the first time, an episode of His Dark Materials actually cuts away material from the books  rather than adds on unneeded scenes. I suppose Lyra’s time at Bolvangar was interesting and action-packed enough to be adapted more or less as is.

This was the best episode of the show so far. I still don’t see why they need to be a full hour long, but we got a complete tale here. Lyra sees the daemon cages, organizes the kids from the inside, blows up the intercision machine, has a reckoning with Mrs. Coulter, and Iorek Byrnison kills some guys. Everything moved along, and the prison break scene was a lot fun.

But…I feel like this show kind of has an upper limit on how good it can be. Once again, I don’t feel like it’s selling the most intriguing ideas. Lyra’s close encounter with the intercision machine is terrifying — the scientists at Bolvargar are forcibly shoving a young child into a box while telling themselves it’s for the good of humanity; it’s pretty impossible for that not to be chilling. But I don’t think the show has driven home how much daemons mean to the children, and what an unforgivably violative act it is to separate them.

“A life without Pan would not be a better life,” Lyra tells Mrs. Coulter after she’s rescued from the procedure. She can say that, but why do the relationships between daemons and people feel so lukewarm? Why don’t Lyra and Pan leap into each other’s arms the moment they’re set free? Why isn’t a bigger deal made when the one scientist man-handles Pan, breaking a sacred taboo? Some of it comes down to the producers not focusing on the right things, and some of it comes down to the acting of the kids on the show, who just…aren’t that good.

The actors who most effectively underlined the unnatural quality of humans without daemon were the ones playing the nurses. These are adults who have had their dæmons cut away. One nurse stares blankly into space as the scientists perform the severing operation on a young girl. Later, a nurse absentmindedly intones the name of her almost-forgotten daemon, smiling blankly, as Lyra scurries by.

Photo: Morfydd Clark in His Dark Materials.. Courtesy of Alex Bailey/HBO

That’s creepy. That’s what I’m talking about. And that’s just not what I’m getting from the kids, including Dafne Keen. It’s not their fault; they’re learning and they’re doing their best. But at this point it’s pretty clear to me that the show can only be so good going on like this. I don’t see it ever becoming great.

I got a similar feeling when Lyra tells Roger that she’s going to go do “what I’m best at: cause some chaos.” Well, that’s certainly a thing Lyra would say, and I loved the special effects as the intercision machine collapsed in on itself, but I just didn’t feel Lyra’s conviction the way I need to. The show isn’t connecting at an important level.

As always, there’s was lots to like about the episode. Ruth Wilson killed it during Mrs. Coulter’s scene with Lyra, giving us some insight into why the Magisterium is so obsessed with Dust. They think it the origin of sin, something that will prove very important thematically as the story continues. And I liked how Coulter and the scientists thought they were doing good work at Bolvangar; these aren’t cookie cutter villains, but people with misplaced convictions, which is far scarier.

My favorite scene was the last one, where cliff ghasts attacked our heroes in Lee Scoresby’s balloon. Director Euros Lyn created some effectively creepy moments as Lee and Iorek popped their heads out of the balloon only to just miss the ghasts creeping around it. And that cliffhanger, with Lyra falling out the basket, is a hell of a way to end the episode!

Two to go. Although I enjoyed the jail break sequence, you could tell they cut some potentially expensive stuff from the book, where the children make a run for it into the snowy north before meeting the Gyptians. I suspect they’re saving money so they can feature a bunch of CGI talking polar bears in the final two episodes, and I’m just fine with that.

Episode Grade: B+

Image: HBO/BBC/His Dark Materials

Episode 7: “The Fight to the Death”

At long last, it feels like this show is getting to some of that His Dark Materials magic. Outside of some doldrums at the very beginning, I enjoyed pretty much every part of this episode!

The roomful of talking bears helped. The first half the episode — the best half — involves Lyra tricking Iofur Raknison into thinking that she is Iorek Byrnison’s dæmon, artificially created by Mrs. Coulter and her team of scientists. She convinces Iofur that she can be his dæmon, if only he defeats Iorek in single combat. This is so Iorek won’t kill Iofur at the gate to the palace, giving Iorek an opportunity to kill Iofur and reclaim his rightful place as king.

And it works! This might be the first time this entire season when the show adapted something from the books pretty much verbatim, and it was beautiful. This is Lyra proving her worth as a protagonist, talking her way into the good graces of a terrifyingly powerful tyrant and turning the tide of the fight to come, saving herself and her friends in the process. Iofer, like Iorek, is rendered splendidly; it was easy to believe Lyra could be afraid of him, and impressed when she stood her ground anyway. She earned the name of Lyra Silvertongue.

And then the bear fight…last week I noted that the show cut a couple of visually complicated sections of the book, probably to save the budget for Svalbard. Well…this is where it went. Who doesn’t want to see two giant bears go at it, clawing and gnawing and fighting to the death? It was easily the most thrilling action scene the show has had so far, even though Iofur’s death was oddly bloodless. You gotta keep that family audience.

My only complaint about the Lyra-Iorek-Iofur stuff is that I forgot where Lyra learned about Iofur’s desire to have a dæmon, a weakness she wastes no time in exploiting. In the books, she overhears a scholar mention it at Jordan College when she’s hiding during Asriel’s speech, but that doesn’t happen on the show. Maybe they moved it, or maybe it’s one of those annoying little oversights the show really doesn’t have an excuse to make. But whatever, this episode was too fun to dwell on it.

Circling back to bloodless fights, Will killing the guy in his house was fairly tame too, but Amir Wilson sold it with his performance. He and Nina Sosanya continue their excellent chemistry — I feel a real family bond between them — and I’m happy to see the show dive into this plotline so early. I know I was salty in the beginning about the show’s decision to pull the curtain back on the part of the story that takes place in our world so quickly, but at least now I can see the method behind the madness. There’s not much left for Will to do before he stumbles through a gate and meets a certain silver-tongued someone…

The ending is solid, too, even if it shamelessly leaves us hanging on a cliff. Lyra, with Roger, finally get to Lord Asriel, but who’s to say her father has her best interests at heart any more than her mother did? There’s a reason they were together, after all. Iorek Byrnison’s a way better father figure for Lyra, anyway.

I should also mention that Ruth Wilson was once again captivating as the cooing, snake-like Mrs. Coulter, although that kind of seems like a given at this point. This was a good episode. Lin-Manuel Miranda still doesn’t have Lee Scoresby down, though. Pick an accent and commit, guy.

Episode Grade: A-

Image: His Dark Materials/HBO

Episode 8: “The Betrayal”

After a meandering season far too fond of filler, His Dark Materials sticks the landing with “The Betrayal.” The episode succeeds because it doesn’t blink. Lyra gets to the top of that mountain, where her own father has taken her friend Roger to be sacrificed, looks her friend in the eye, and…fails. Lord Asriel severs Roger from his dæmon Salcilia, using the energy released by the intercision to enter a new world where he can continue his crusade to free all mankind. Meanwhile, Lyra’s friend — the one she crossed the world to save — is dead, killed by her father, a man she trusted.

That moment is everything. It gives Lyra a purpose to fulfill, and a frightful enemy. God, could Lord Asriel actually be a worse parent than Mrs. Coulter? Lyra has no luck at all. She’ll have to depend on herself instead.

Still, I like how the show doesn’t turn either of Lyra’s parents into mustache-twirling supervillains, although each could make a good claim to the title. Asriel clearly just isn’t interested in parenting. He’d rather fulfill his epic destiny, and if that means killing his daughter’s friend, so be it. Both he and Mrs. Coulter are selfish creatures, and I think Pullman’s books do a decent job of holding back on immediately concluding that this makes them “evil.” They’re more complicated than that. Their evil is more mundane, and therefore more relatable, and therefore somehow scarier. They’re antagonists who don’t stop being characters.

Image: His Dark Materials/HBO

So the climax is great, and this episode is all about the climax. If “The Betrayal” has a weakness, it’s that the buildup wasn’t as strong as it should have been. The show never really drove home just how horrifying the idea of severing a child from their dæmon was, so we weren’t as afraid for Roger as we needed to be.

I imagine part of that was due to special effects constraints — this show isn’t cheap, and convincingly depicting dozens of characters being inseparable from their computer-generated animal familiars may have threatened to break the bank. Still, I think it ground on the show. Maybe they could have written fewer scenes where Lee Scoresby talks about legal codes and put that money into dæmon rendering? (Oh, and I still think we could do without the adventures of Lord Boreal. This episode mostly stayed focused on Lyra, and it was better for it.)

Sorry, I’m still bitter about the show’s dire middle stretch. This episode looked great, from Iorek’s last appearance for a while (I imagine) to Mrs. Coulter’s artillery barrage to the aurora lighting up the night sky. There were real moments of beauty here.

So what next? Lyra and Will are both walking through windows to other worlds, and according to executive producer Jane Tranter, we’ll see what awaits them next year!

Thanks for watching along with us, everybody! Next season, we put the Subtle Knife to use.

Episode Grade: A-

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