Review: His Dark Materials Episode 202, “The Cave”

The newest episode of His Dark Materials introduces a fan favorite character and does her justice. It’s still not a GREAT show, but it keeps getting better.

So far, this season is sticking closer to Philip Pullman’s book, and so far, I’m liking it more than the first. The bloat’s not completely gone, but there is less of it.

“The Cave” brings in Mary Malone, a physicist studying Dark Matter and a beloved character from the books. She’s the scholar Lyra is hoping to find so she can learn about Dust, which as it ends up is the same thing as Dark Matter.

It was important that the show get Mary right, and actor Simone Kirby is just about perfect. She’s humble, relatable, curious, and a great stand-in for the audience, who up to this point have been spending time with forces of nature like Lyra and killers-on-the-run like Will. It’s great to see someone react to Lyra’s otherworldly abilities the way anyone else would: completely agape in shock. I sympathized with her immediately.

Her scenes with Lyra are the highlight of the episode. To start, Kirby brings out the best Dafne Keen, who seems to need a good scene partner to do her best work. These scenes also help us understand Dust, which is a huge part of this story but also a pretty nebulous concept. Dust is conscious, it responds to things that are mad-made, and Lyra is one of the only people who can easily make contact with it, whether with the alethiometer or Dr. Malone’s computer, the Cave. And when you put Lyra’s certainly next to Dr. Malone’s befuddlement, you have scenes with layers, and a pair you want to see more of.

The rest of the episode is…fine. While Lyra meets with Mary, Will looks up a lawyer who can tell her more about his missing father (in the book, he just calls a lawyer). The writers add a couple more hoops for him to jump through, like him having to visit his distrustful grandparents who call the police on him, and he actually ends up learning less from this excursion than he does on the page. But Amir Wilson is so sympathetic as the desperate, exhausted Will that we go along with it. He also has a good scene with Lyra towards the end of the episode, where they sit on a bench and commiserate over their dire situations and promise to trust each other. My heart went out to the kid. He needs a break.

I sort of wish that had been the final scene of the episode. The other storyline takes place back in Lyra’s world, where Mrs. Coulter encourages Father Hugh MacPhail to take bold action in the wake of the Cardinal’s death last week and establish himself as the new leader of the organization. He follows her advice and bombs the witches. These scenes are shot like they’re very important, with swelling orchestral music and slow-mo explosions, but we don’t know either the witches or the members of the Magesterium all that well, so it falls a little flat. In general, the show has a harder time when it strays from Lyra and Will’s story.

Although as usual, Ruth Wilson is there to liven things up as Mrs. Coulter. I love her vampy funeral wear, and she continues to serve great slithery villain. Still, ending the episode with her leaving to go find Lyra through Asriel’s gate — she finds out about it from the guy who looked after Lord Asriel’s northern research center, now a prisoner of the Magesterium — is pretty weak.

These are the parts of the show I think could stand to be cut down, although the writers are doing their best to make them interesting. Father MacPahil (Cardinal MacPahil by the end) may be a bit of a limp character, but he could go places: I liked his lizard dæmon telling him to burn himself as punishment for committing the “necessary sin” of bombing the witches. Nice and creepy, that.

So yes, the problems from the first season are still here: the show is still too bloated; the episodes are too long and there are too many of them. But with meatier source material to adapt, the show doesn’t hang so loose around the story as it does before. And if things keep going like this, the fit will only get better as we go along.

Episode Grade: B

His Dark Bullet Points

• I thought they rushed through the bit where Lyra is hit by a car immediately after entering Will’s world. “The cars aren’t as fast in my world.” Do they have cars in her world at all?
• The scene between Lord Boreal and Lyra in the museum at Oxford was effective — I liked the way she immediately lied and told him her name was “Lizzie.” In the books, it’s implied that Boreal’s interest in Lyra goes beyond just wanting to use her gifts to better his position. I wasn’t picking that up from this scene and wouldn’t be mad if they cut it.

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