WiC Watches: His Dark Materials

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