Review: His Dark Materials Episode 205, “The Scholar”

Mrs. Coulter (Ruth Wilson) is a highlight in the latest episode of His Dark Materials, which deepens her character without taking away any of her bite.

For the first stretch of “The Scholar,” I was pretty bored. This show has a bad habit of stretching itself out unnecessarily, although I admit that my experience with the His Dark Materials books might be clouding my judgment. But even then, some of the early stuff just seems like lazy plotting. For example, why do they add in a subplot where Will has trouble using the subtle knife to cut windows into other worlds only for him to solve it by trying harder minutes after the credits? The effects when he opens a window are still cool, but it really feels like the script adding problems just to pad out the run-time.

And I was prepared to be bored when the episode gave us scenes of Mrs. Coulter and Lord Boreal are just hanging out at his house, listening to music while they wait for Lyra and Will to show up and try to take back the alethiometer. But Ruth Wilson is so good as Coulter it’s hard to not enjoy it. And Lord Boreal becomes more interesting when he’s around her, revealing a crush that he hopes will turn into something more, which gives her opportunities to deliver juicy lines like, “My dear Carlo, if you actually got me, you wouldn’t begin to know what to do with me.” That’s high vamp right there.

I also enjoyed, almost despite myself, Mrs. Coulter venturing into our world to talk with Mary Malone about Lyra; at one point she even contemplates putting on jeans! In Mary, Coulter meets a woman who doesn’t need to be a complete bitch on wheels to be respected; it may be harder for Mary to succeed in her field than it is for a man, but she isn’t completely shut out of the sciences like Mrs. Coulter is back in her own world.

“Impertinent,” is how Coulter describes Mary later. “Intelligent. Free.” Coulter is jealous of her, and although part of me doesn’t like the idea of the series showing a vulnerable side to a character who’s pretty much impenetrable in the books, her struggle here is very believable, especially with Wilson at the helm. “Do you know who I could have been in this world?” she asks Boreal, and I feel her buried rage.

All of this leads up to Lyra and Will confronting Coulter and Boreal in search of the alethiometer. In the books, they snatch back the device without having to interact with them at all, but I almost prefer it this way. The whole scene crackles with tension, particularly between Mrs. Coulter and Lyra — Dafne Keen steps up her acting game for the occasion.

Also, Pan completely handed Coulter’s golden monkey dæmon his ass, didn’t he? It was also sad watching Coulter leave the golden monkey alone in the Boreal’s house while she went to meet Mary; it was bad week for the monkey all around.

So Mrs. Coulter was a highlight this week, but giving her so much screentime had some consequences. For instance, in the books, there’s a great stretch where Mary is about to be shut out of her own lab after her research partner agrees to accept Boreal’s funding, so she has to bluff her way past a security guard into the lab, talk to Dust, and then manually destroy all the equipment so no one else can use it for evil. It’s a tense section that shows just how willing Mary is to take things on faith, and to go to the ends of the earth for the sake of discovery.

But because they wanted Mary to have a scene with Mrs. Coulter on the show, all of that is gone. Mary isn’t on any kind of clock here; she talks to the Dust through her computer (and I still think it’s dumb that the Dust literally speaks to her rather than communicating through text as she programmed it to), the computer destroys itself, and Mary leisurely makes her way towards the window Lyra and Will had been using to travel between her world and Cittàgazze. It’s still cool to see Mary step into a new world — all told, it’s one of the better endings of any episode this season — but they really hobbled what could have been a great plot for her.

Speaking of Cittàgazze, tensions rise between Lyra and Will on the one hand and Angelica and the rest of the kids in the city on the other, after Angelica discovers her brother struck dumb by the Spectres. The book version of this is stronger — Angelica sees her brother attacked by Spectres, sees Lyra in the tower and puts two and two together without the need for any loud child acting — but like I said, they’ve got to fill time.

So “The Scholar” is like a lot of His Dark Materials episodes: there are slow parts and there are inspired parts. There are dull stretches and scenes as good as this story deserves. In this case, the good outweighed the rest.

Episode Grade: B

His Dark Bullet Points

• I’m glad Pan stays in his adorable fluffy raccoon form for a while.
• After the Magisterium hears about the witches killing some of their guys and going through the anomaly, the Cardinal blames some random dude who couldn’t possibly have been responsible and has him thrown in jail. That’s real leadership, right there.

To stay up to date on everything fantasy, science fiction, and WiC, follow our all-encompassing Facebook page and sign up for our exclusive newsletter.

Get HBO, Starz, Showtime and MORE for FREE with a no-risk, 7-day free trial of Amazon Channels