At the end of a solid finale, His Dark Materials solidifies its first season as a missed opportunity (experts)
TV Reviews Season Finale
Welcome to The A.V. Club’s “Experts” reviews of HBO’s His Dark Materials. It is written from the perspective of someone who has read all three books in Philip Pullman’s trilogy, and intended for an audience of viewers who have also read these books. While the main review will not actively spoil details from future books, there will be a spoiler-specific section at the end of the review, and the conversation in the comments will feature spoilers from all books in the series. For those who wish to avoid these spoilers, please visit our “Newbies” reviews.
Although there have been some elements of His Dark Materials that have given book readers reason to think back fondly on the choices made in 2007’s The Golden Compass (see: Bear Jaw), there is one particular choice made in the final edit of the film that means no true fan of the books would ever defend it as a successful adaptation of the core text. That choice, of course, was to completely remove the ending of the book despite it having been filmed.
We could spend an entire review parsing the reasons behind that decision, but there is no justification for it. I don’t care that Asriel’s actions reinforce his plan to wage war against God which caused producers so much anxiety, and I certainly am not concerned about the fact that the ending is too “dark” for a crowd-pleasing blockbuster. The ending of The Golden Compass is pivotal to the success of this story, and to leave it out is to deny viewers a proper understanding of the stakes of this world and the truth about the consequences of Lyra’s journey. And so even as the BBC/HBO adaptation of the books has stumbled at times, there has always been the confidence of knowing that there was no way they would make the same mistake New Line made over a decade ago. We were going to get the scene on the mountain where Lord Asriel murders Lyra’s friend Roger in order to open a door to other worlds and begin his war against the Authority.
“Betrayal”—referring, although fairly indirectly for an average viewer, to Roger’s death as the betrayal Lyra was destined to make according to the Master of Jordan College—does not shy away from the facts of this ending. Lord Asriel kills Roger in order to complete his experiment and open the portal to other worlds, with Lyra witnessing the horror before bidding farewell to her friend and vowing to avenge his death by searching for dust herself. The primary difference from the book is that Jack Thorne’s script doesn’t treat the specifics of the scene as a surprise. Asriel’s reaction to Lyra and Roger’s arrival last week heavily foreshadowed his plans for his daughter’s friend, and when the action shifts toward the mountaintop Lyra (inexplicably, without referring to the alethiometer) realizes exactly what Asriel is planning so that the audience’s focus shifts from “What is about to happen?” to “Is Asriel going to really sever Roger from his daemon?” I’m not entirely sure why Lyra jumped to that conclusion, but I wasn’t upset by how the clearer stakes reemphasized the gravity of Asriel’s actions. It makes it feel plausible (for a non-reader) that Lyra reaches Asriel in time and stops him, but the episode then commits to the darker truth to kickstart the story.
Dafne Keen’s Lyra was explicitly built for moments like her tearful farewell to Roger, or her steely dialogue with her father. Keen never quite got on the wavelength of the more playful sides of Lyra, and I’m not going to pretend I’m not still disappointed about that, but she is immensely skilled at capturing the devastation Lyra feels in this moment, and the determination it creates within her. The final shot of Lyra walking through the window is a stunning visual, but it also really does feel transformative for this character, and her work in the final scenes does far more than any of the exposition-heavy preparation for next season that’s scattered through this finale and last week’s episode. I would have made a range of different choices in terms of telling Lyra’s story, in particular as it relates to her relationship with Pan, but I can’t deny that these final moments landed like I’d always imagined, and successfully paper over the season’s issues to make me more or less excited about The Subtle Knife (although I think we can all agree it becomes a lot less subtle when we see Boreal get his answer from the alethiometer about the knife and the tower).
However, although the show committed to the book’s ending as I expected, I was still dumbfounded with the way this season actually ended. When the show introduced Will early—which the producers have suggested was partially due to child labor limitations making it difficult to film a full season if Lyra was central to all of it—it destroyed the surprise that opens The Subtle Knife, but it created a new opportunity to link these two characters’ paths together. I don’t think Jack Thorne ever figured out how to pace Will’s story effectively, but I was always a firm believer that it would be valuable if the season could end by promising that these two journeys were about to collide. The beginning of The Subtle Knife is frankly a bit awkward, and the idea that we could enter the second season knowing who Lyra and Will are and then watching them feel each other out registered as a productive change, and something that Thorne could use as a hook to bring people back for a second season.
Instead, there is no hook. Lyra and Will both walk through windows into another world, but we don’t see where they end up, and I’m doubtful that any non-reader would presume their paths are about the cross. You could argue it is an ending comparable to, say, the first season of Lost, where they open the hatch but don’t show viewers what’s inside. However, I would argue that this kind of open-ended mystery only would have worked if they had not included Will’s story and Boreal’s crossings, which create the impression that windows only travel between Lyra’s world and Will’s world. And so while a non-reader might be investing themselves in the idea of Lyra and Will in each other’s worlds, they have no reason to anticipate that they’re about to end up in the same different world on the same journey, which to me is a far more interesting hook than the one on offer. Were they just not able to financially justify building Cittàgazze when it wouldn’t be used this season? Was there not the option of prioritizing the post-production on the early episodes of season two—which filmed earlier this year—to be able to create the promise of a team-up to sell viewers on what’s to come?
It’s a missed opportunity in a sea of them. That is, ultimately, what I would call His Dark Materials: a missed opportunity. It is not a failure, as “Betrayal”—like the season before it—avoids committing any sins of adaptation that would destroy the fabric of the story. There are parts of this episode that are actually really effective. For example, there’s an electricity to Coulter and Asriel’s reunion that speaks to Ruth Wilson’s tremendous work throughout and the energy of James McAvoy’s take on Asriel, and the subsequent conversation doesn’t shy away from the war on God to come (even if the show is being a bit fast and loose with the Magisterium as a whole, more on this in the spoiler section). They even gave us a moment of their two daemons interacting as they talked, a rare effort to explore how daemons impact how characters connect to each other. But I still couldn’t help but think how much stronger that would have been if the show hadn’t botched the implementation of daemons throughout the season. Does the show get credit for successfully evoking our appreciation for the books in particular moments if they haven’t done the work to allow non-readers to appreciate the story in the same way by failing to generate meaning beyond that?
On the subject of opportunity, in my view His Dark Materials’ problems originate from poor choices as it related to opportunity cost. It’s a concept central to the problem solving of making television, particularly an adaptation of an existing work, and it’s a difficult one to evaluate because we are mostly guessing at what problems they faced and what decisions those problems necessitated. And so it’s very possible that the writers had a conversation with their effects team about what it would take to include more moments between Lyra and Pantalaimon, particularly during this finale where they are long stretches where he seems to disappear entirely. And it’s plausible that the effects team told them how much it would cost, or how much time it would take, and they realized it would force them to cut corners in other parts of the show. It’s also possible this conversation never happened at all. But if the show is made up of dozens of these kinds of decisions, I’m not convinced Thorne or the producers understood the opportunity cost of their choices. It was like no one followed the thread to how—most prominently—erasing the daemons from so much of this world would make them largely incidental to the story at hand.
And this is what makes me nervous about next season, even after the show committed to this ending and delivered a resonant finale overall. Nothing about this adaptation generated faith—pun somewhat intended—in Thorne’s understanding of this story. If we take Lin-Manuel Miranda’s take on Lee Scoresby as an example, the choice to introduce a younger version of the character wasn’t a bad one in my view, but it never paid off in any meaningful way. I mostly liked Lee’s scenes, but his final one was a terrible exposition dump with Serafina in last week’s penultimate episode, and the change never amounted to anything. Why have Lee profess the fact he loves Lyra to Serafina instead of, say, his own daemon, or even Lyra herself? Or Iorek, even? I could expand to relitigate a host of small and large decisions I dissected over the course of the season, but my ultimate conclusion is that I’m not convinced that Jack Thorne understands the story he’s telling, and that feels like such a fundamental burden on the future of the series.
That being said, though, I found this finale striking and at times thrilling, and if it had ended with Lyra and Will meeting in Cittàgazze, I wonder if it would have been enough to override my objections to so many of the choices and embrace the show’s future wholeheartedly. But in the end, rather than embracing what felt like a real opportunity to create a moment only the television adaptation could generate based on the choice to move Will’s story forward, the show settled for recreating the novel’s cliffhanger without really acknowledging either the opportunity of doing something different or the consequences of not building to this development in the same way. And I suppose it’s a perfect microcosm for a season of television that was executed as though the producers had read enough of Pullman’s series to deliver a close facsimile of the plot, but not enough to understand what was important to the heart and soul of His Dark Materials.
And knowing that they’ve already filmed a second series with these decisions in mind makes it hard to be deeply optimistic that their approach will evolve come season two.
Stray observations
- I hadn’t watched the recreations of the film’s ending, but I was reminded that the choice to have Lyra walk into the door without ever confronting her parents is a change, and makes it a little bit less reactionary. I don’t mind the change, exactly, but it does make the final scene a bit more introspective than intense.
- I liked the idea that Lyra claims Silvertongue as her last name in defiance to Asriel, but I chuckled that she claimed she “enlisted the witches,” when in fact she apparently only enlisted a single witch. I don’t know if that was a budget problem or just something they wanted to keep until the second season, but turning Serafina into a flying-smoke-assassin thing and writing out any other witches in her clan wasn’t worth whatever it saved them.
- There was a definite lack of daemons in parts of the episode, but I did love when Roger’s daemon was also walking backwards into the bathroom while Lyra was in the bath (which was a nice scene in general). I think it was a mistake not to have Roger talking to his daemon more, as it made the idea of separation kind of lost in the conclusion, which was more just “Roger will probably die.”
- I’m still perplexed at Mrs. Coulter’s role in the Magisterium invasion. Was she in charge? Was Father McPhail in charge? What kind of power did she have? Did she know that they were going to fire indiscriminately at the bears and potentially kill Lyra, which she had been so vehemently against so recently?
- As I noted last week, the show is doing a bad job of articulating Will’s reaction to killing a man. We get some of it when he’s in the restaurant and the cop comes in, and he’s on his phone searching to see if it’s in the news, but it feels like we’re missing a scene of him working through his feelings and expressing the panic that seems necessary here?
- I was confused by the scene where Boreal gets the reading from the alethiometer and he’s all confused, like “Are you sure it said a son?!” I realize that I already know how the pieces come together, but he seems almost confused, as though he isn’t smart enough to immediately put two and two together. I don’t know if they thought viewers wouldn’t be able to make the connection if his logic wasn’t discussed out loud, but his inability to grasp the concept without clarification was bizarre.
- This brings our journey into His Dark Materials season one to an end. I wanted to thank everyone for reading before we get into the spoiler section, since I know at least some people (based on the comments) have been just reading the rest of the reviews. I don’t think the show lived up to my expectations, but I was really pleased with the dialogues we were able to create in these comment sections, which covered some really great ground across a wide range of different responses. I’m certainly too invested in the story as a whole not to tune back in when the second season debuts (which could technically be before next fall, depending on scheduling), but I do think I’ll enter that season with lower expectations of the show itself, but high expectations for the discussions it will inspire.
Through The Amber Spyglass (Warning: Explicit book spoilers)
Is His Dark Materials the TV show making an explicit argument against organized religion?
I was really curious watching Asriel’s monologue to Coulter, wondering how far they were willing to go. A lot of the language is there (a new republic of heaven, for example), he’s explicit that his war is with “The Authority,” and that the idea of dust is tied in with Adam and Eve, and so I think it is now impossible for anyone with even passing knowledge of the creation myth to say the show isn’t at least critiquing that aspect of religious thought.
However, the Magisterium was depicted early in the show as a generic authoritarian government, and the idea that their corruption emerged from their ties to religious doctrine is never present: instead, I would argue, the most logical reading is that religion was corrupted by power, as opposed to being itself a form of corruption. It’s clear that the show is committing to the religious dynamics of this story, and Lyra as another Eve, but I can’t shake the way the show’s lack of clarity on what the Magisterium actually is muddles everything.
If the show commits to the angels (they’re super cheap, they’re like a shimmer in the air most of the time), then I think the door is still open to go all-in on these elements of the story, but the religion side of things is another case where the show feels non-committal despite a lot of the groundwork being laid.
108 Comments
Looking at the season just as a season the Will storyline feels like an empty misuse of time. Yes it starts the character building and parallels that will eventually be important but there must have been a better way to do that then what we experienced here. Also, while I understand that their world is contemporaneous to ours just with different developmental events, it felt really out of left field to suddenly have paratroopers with machine guns.
Jesus there are a lot of typos in this.Yeah, this adaptation has been pretty disappointing so far despite a few bright spots. It’s about what I expected from a hack like Jack Thorne to be honest. Maybe in amother decade we’ll finally get the adaptation the material deserves.
I only counted four, but fair.Merry Christmas!
Sorry that was a bit harsh, the first sentence missing a word just meant it jumped out at me. Merry Christmas to you too.
I imagined the finale would be like every other episode this season, in that I’d be mildly disappointed with it, like I am with the show, but actually thought – all things considered – that it was pretty great, but perhaps it’s just because it’s the first time the show felt like it had actual momentum, at least for the parts in Lyra’s world. I don’t mind Will being introduced early, but most of the time spent in his world hasn’t kept me interested.I didn’t think the season was a travesty, but it really had its low points, though the actors generally roseabove the adaptation. The show itself turned out so much less imaginative than I would have expected it to be. The movie, for all its flaws, had some incredible art direction. The show is kind of drab and dour, and not enough daemons! I missed the book line, “You? Dare not? Your child would come. Your child would dare anything, and shame her mother.” The whole Asriel/Marisa exchange is better in the book. I guess the whole last scene is better in the book, but at this point, I’m just hoping that the momentum from this episode carries into the next season.
I r-read the last chapters after the finale so I was surprised that they cut out Asriel telling her he knew about her lovers and and didn’t care.
See, I thought the whole season that they would end it with both Will and Lyra crossing through the windows at the same time. It seemed quite fitting to me, and I think they did a great job with it. There were a lot of things I wish could have been done differently, but watching the slight awkwardness of having Lyra pick up Pan at the end of the episode confirmed my suspicions that it just wasn’t convincing having the daemons interacting too much with real people. Overall, I’m really excited for season 2. I had great fun watching this season, and I think the core themes of the story are still mostly intact. I just hope they haven’t taken out Mary Malone, since there has been no word that I’ve seen on casting.
I think she’s been confirmed to be in it? It would be a huge mistake to cut her. But you are right, no casting announced, which is killing me. Extremely curious to see what the mulefa end up looking like.
If they chop out Mary and the Mulefa, that will shave a hell of a lot of story from the last book….
As well as the amber spyglass itself, which was only possible with the Mulefa’s resin. But given that Mary’s computer program approximates an alethiometer itself and causes its own difficulties, I really doubt they’ll be able to find a way to not include her. She is as pivotal to the ending of the story as Asriel and Mrs. Coulter are.
I keep mentioning the stage version, which must be frustrating for those who never saw it, but that’s what they did! They cut out at least half the plot of The Amber Spyglass, having the spyglass itself be something Serafina Pekkala had all along.
In fairness – there was more than enough story already without adding all that, and I can’t imagine how you could have done the mulefa on stage anyway (doing it with CGI will be hard enough). But hopefully the show won’t do something similar…
I know it’s a long time since you posted this but I was just rereading these reviews and comments and had to say, hi fellow stage-play-seer!
Honestly much as a I enjoy Mary and her plot I think it totally worked to reroute her vital story functions via Serafina, who happens to be pretty well set-up to carry them.
With the TV adaptation adaptation I tend to hope they stay pretty faithful to the book because I think the storytelling etc is pretty desultory so the chief pleasure for me is simply seeing book images realised. And Framestore will inevitably do an outstanding job on the Mulefa. I think the talents and priorities of the chief creatives on BBC/HBO HDM are probably better suited to multi-stranded storylines than the more focused one presented by Northern Lights, so I can see TAS as written being comparatively firm ground for them.
And if they do include Mary Malone, the person I would love to see playing her is Anna Maxwell-Martin – the original stage Lyra!
Hi! No problem for the slow reply, I’m always replying to months-old comments myself. 🙂 Great casting suggestion! :
The lack of interaction between Lyra and Pan (and everyone else with daemons that couldn’t perch on their shoulder) was one of the major shortcomings for me, but I agree. Short of having Pan occasionally played by an actual animal, I don’t know they could have made it convincing with CGI. It’s just a shame, though, because the intense physicality of their bond was so very clear in the books.
Mary is the serpent to Lyra’s Eve; if they cut her out then I will be thoroughly convinced these showrunners have no understanding, affection, or respect for the story they are adapting.
I’m sad, this was not the adaptation we all wanted; maybe in a decade or so we can have a 5 part movie production with 3 hours each? I’m dreaming, yes, not very excited for season 2, but I will hope for the best!
I don’t
think I’ve ever been as excited for an episode of this show as I was for this
finale. Though this has less to do with the show, and more to do with the fact
that I love Asriel and Marisa’s very messy relationship relationship. They are very compelling antagonists for Lyra and even in the books, they are the most entertaining, while always being the worst (aka making out next
to the dead body of their daughter’s best friend). This might have been the
first episode I loved. Yeah, it had its issues. For me, it’s mainly the show’s insistence on
filming action scenes by focusing on Lyra cowering on a corner with some shit
happening over her shoulder and in cutting Lyra’s contributions to the action. I’m
sure it would have been a nightmare to choreograph that scene, but I wish she
had gotten to try and wrestle Roger out of Asriel’s clutches, like she does in
the book. But all the parts I wanted to be good were really good. I’ve made my
peace with the fact that they are softening Asriel from his coldness in the
books, since they’ve also complicated Marisa in a great way, so I liked his
scenes with Lyra, and I loved Marisa’s scene with Thorold. Most importantly, Asriel
and Marisa together was great and set up their relationship for TAS nicely.In general,
I was left satisfied with this episode, but I still feel like it’s in my best interest to skip
season two. I’m not crazy about the second
book to begin with, except for Mary’s introduction and getting to know Will. But the show has already shown it doesn’t really
understand this side of the story, or at least, I didn’t feel the anxiety and
heightened sense of danger I got from the books. I really don’t think season two will do anything that exciting with the material, so I think I’ll wait to see if they renew
it for a third season.
What it feels like the series keeps missing is the philosophical difference between Asriel and Mrs.Coulter. They almost got it here, but still missed it. Mrs.Coulter doesn’t work for the Magisterium because she believes in the Magisterium, but because she believes in the Authority. The Magisterium is a means to an end for her, and a way to do what she thinks is best and right with less interference from them. She legitimately believes in “oblation,” as she tells Lyra, once the project is refined and made safe, everyone, Lyra included, will undergo the process. She is murdering children, but she sees their sacrifice as a horror that is necessary for the good of all. Asriel, on the other hand, has lost faith in the Magisterium, and the Authority. He is fine with the concept of a god/Authority, as long as he is that god. That is why Mrs.Coulter walks away, and that is the fundamental difference between the two of them. This is the only episode to have even nudged up against that difference.
I don’t know, while I always felt that Marisa does believe in sin and is obsessed with dust because of her own sinful relationship with Asriel, she is also pretty quick to betray Metraton for Lyra. I’ve always seen her as someone who used the Church to retain the power she lost when her husband died and whose relationship with the Magisterium’s dogma has more to do with trying to understand her own faults and mistakes. I like to think she refused to go with Asriel because he’s a straight up asshole to everyone and she can feel he’s lying about wanting to work together to destroy dust. She knows he hates the Authority/Magisterium, and I think she also probably knows he only wants her if she can be of use to him. He pretty much says that. I feel like their philosophical differences are more that Asriel would like to remake the world, and Marisa just wants to survive in it. But they are very similar in that they both willing to lie and kill and cause mayhem if it furthers their goals.
I also think the alethiometer referred to her later betrayal of Pan on the banks of the Rover Stixx as her betrayal against herself
Well yes, Pullman redefines that later.
God I have still never recovered from that. But she really had no choice. Excruciating.
In the stage adaptation, that scene was one of the most heartrending moments of anything I’ve ever seen. I really hope the show does it justice.
I was frustrated that Mrs Coulter apparently loves Lyra so much in the show that she stays in that world for her. I feel it undercuts the moment in the book where she professes her love for her daughter
Welease Woger!
For something that was supposed to be terrifying, tragic and sad that was just about as bad of direction in the death of Roger that could possibly have been shot. It had no weight, no sense of loss, no conveyance of the cold, not any sense of dread or terror, never mind the terrible light effect upending the murder that followed because your mind wandered to how cheap it looked.Which kind of sums up the direction of this show. Save for the episode breaking out the kids, the series just unfolds, it “tells” with no sense of drama or finesse.Probably didn’t help having a series so accomplished as Watchmen breathing down it’s neck on Sundays. Watchmen delivered such compelling storytelling in just about every way Materials failed
As a huge fan of the books, I loved the entire season. I’m surprised at the relative antipathy being expressed here. I would have done a few things differently, but one of the things that makes the story so compelling is the narrative details can be interpreted and presented many different ways (unlike several other “Children’s Books” – no way should HDM be simplistically classified as such).
Having recently reread the trilogy, I can attest that the show was way more true to the books than I had expected going in, especially on the religious authority angles. The daemon connection was always going to be difficult to portray the same way it was written, but I felt the focus for the show should be on the narrative and keeping it moving forward and they didn’t linger on the daemon novelty any longer than needed. I did not feel a significant loss in the adaptation by not giving more screen time to them than what was presented.
Also, the complaints about Lee’s feelings about Lyra are off base. Before the Alamo Gulch stand off in TSK, he articulates those same feelings out loud just as he expressed the previous two episodes. The two don’t have another meeting up to that point, so really nothing wrong there as it pertains to staying true to the originial stories (just to Serafina instead of Grumman); it was actually one of many examples I spotted of the screenplay reading forward and weaving elements into the first overarching act in ways that worked well I thought.
I think weaving things forward is not a bad strategy, but I would argue that in the case of Lee/Serafina it crossed a line into “roadmapping” the meaning of the story, and telling us things instead of letting them unfold.I’m totally fine with weaving elements into the first act, which I think is honestly smart, but there were very few cases where it felt like the actual interweaving felt as natural as I wanted it to be. Moving Will’s story forward was fine in theory, but in practice it didn’t amount to much. Similarly, yes, you can move Lee’s realization forward, but why not leave him more conflicted about his continued role? Why not let that be something he discovers during his time with Grumman?All that said, I’m glad you’re enjoying it more than I am (an occupational hazard of writing these experts reviews is getting into the weeds with the adaptation choices), and hope the second season rewards your optimism.
Soooooo… all told, not that either adaptation is any patch on the book, would the best way to put the story in your eyeballs be to watch the movie, and then this final episode? (And, through the dark magic of fan editing, restore the proper Bolvangar/Svalbard order, and cut all of Will’s story/our world?) :p
I think, ultimately, the best way to eyeball this story is to watch the show: it has a greater potential to be a richer text, and I think it has enough subtle shifts in characterization with key characters that it will still be preferable to frankensteining the movie together and missing parts of the season that did work. (I know this is not an entirely serious suggestion, but I do like the idea of someone creating a 3-hour movie out of all the pieces).
That’s a totally serious suggestion, in certain quarters! The thing for me, though, is that as much as I love and admire TSK/TAS, I’ve never been all that interested in seeing them on screen; they’re just too grim and heavy, so the idea that the series might get better from here just doesn’t inspire me at all. From what I’ve seen and read, the movie characters are closer to the text, so, unless this first season had been amazing all around, I’m afraid I’m not a happy camper. 😛
Ah — the BLADE RUNNER solution!Watch the theatrical release first so you know the story (leaden voiceover and all), then watch the other versions so you can better comprehend Ridley Scott’s vision for the movie.
I bitched about the bear fight to my wife and then showed her the movie version of the fight. The show really screwed that piece up, which I’m still somewhat dumbfounded by.
Skip the movie. It’s very bad.
I’ve seen it. For all its many, many faults, at least its Lyra acts like Lyra. Movie Lyra lies with conviction, whereas series Lyra (in, say, her fibbing to Iofur), is visibly bad at it, stuttering and darting her eyes all around. I can accept a lot, but I can’t accept a Lyra who isn’t a total badass from the start.
My wife, who’d read the series when we went to see The Golden Compass in theaters, couldn’t really figure out who was who or what was going on! The best parts of it were Sir Ian McKellan’s voice acting as Iorek Byrnison, and Sam Elliott’s doing Lee Scoresby as The Sam Elliott Part. Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Han Solo knockoff interpretation is fun, and he makes a better young Solo than Alden Ehrenreich did, but T and I both missed Sam Elliott gazing at everybody over his mustache as if to say
Nah, honestly, the first fifteen minutes and theb fight are the only parts the movies did better, the rest is trash. They do a really good and efficient characterization of Lyra and explaination of the world that the show somehow failed up, but generally this has beenna huge step up
All right, as a film-viewer non-book-reader, this has now entered parts I know close to nothing about, so I’m not sure if I’m criticizing the show or the book here (I like to assume it’s always the show’s fault). But… I failed to grasp what everybody’s intentions were at this juncture.What was Asriel’s plan? He knew he needed a kid to use as fuel to open the rift, but apparently he wasn’t actively trying to procure one. What would he have done if Roger didn’t just randomly appear at his door? Doesn’t look like he was improvising because he had the kid cage already prepared on the mountain, minus the kid.What was Roger thinking? He explicitly said he thought Asriel was looking at him like a wolf with prey, and then Asriel woke him up in the early morning, asking him to march through the Arctic wilderness without saying a word to Lyra (who was sleeping next to him, so I’m not even sure how that could be logistically achievable). “We’re going to make a surprise to Lyra, but in order to do that, we’ll have to reach that remote mountaintop through the Bridge of Icy Death”. “Sure. Is the surprise a cake?” “In a way. It will involve cutting.”What was Will doing? He’s escaping from random burglars because the mother he’s been thinking was insane told him to protect some letters he didn’t even bother to read, and the idea was, what, become a runaway and live on the street from that point on? And then he stumbles upon a magical portal, which nothing in his experiences or background prepared him to understand or recognize, and he’s like, “Ooh, cool! I’m definitely going to step into this mysterious luminescence without so much as a second thought, it’s totally going to help me with my entirely mundane predicament”.What’s Asriel’s plan now? How opening that rift means the Magisterium is done? It appeared in the middle of the Arctic wasteland, and there was nobody to witness the event except Magisterium men. Does he bank on word of its existence spreading spontaneously and unopposed throughout the world, and its implications being immediately understood by the population at large? And what made him think that just by walking through the rift he’s going to reach the source of the Dust? And that he’ll be equipped to successfully survive on the other side, let alone wage war on God?
Those are all valid questions, and, as I recall, the answers don’t really matter, because this trilogy is fundamentally about Lyra and Will. (But primarily Lyra, to the point where when she goes missing from the narrative for a bit later on, both Will and the reader are freaking the hell out until she returns.) And that’s the huge, obvious downside to watering down Lyra’s character throughout the season, supposedly in order to give her an 8-episode-long dramatic arc/origin story: much like Hawkeye in Sokovia, none of this makes sense, but we’re entirely along for the ride nonetheless because Lyra herself is so ferociously engaging and winning a protagonist. And from what I’ve seen of the series’ portrayal… meh, alas.
Asriel supposedly can summon people to him, which earned an eye-roll from me even when I was very young. It’s not at all explained how this works, and whether that’s why he manages to get so far in his War despite causing overnight climate change to every single world and causing untold chaos and destruction for some of the very people that are on his side, and we never see him use this “ability” again. I love Asriel and Mrs. Coulter because they are interesting antagonists for Lyra, both determined to somewhat protect her while destroying everything around her to achieve their goals, but Pullman is never fully consistent with their characterizations, and I don’t think the show has the disciplined writing to fix that, despite McAvoy and Wilson’s fantastic work. Asriel thinks he can do impossible things because he does. He thinks people will hear about his quest and join him, and they do, and build weapons for him, and he thinks God will come to him, and he sort of does (though Marisa has to do some heavy-lifting there). He’s very much a very lucky white man, and things just work out for him.I’d have to double check my e-book, but I’m pretty sure Asriel just straight up kidnaps Roger. I don’t know why the show changed that. As for poor Will, he’s supposed to be panicked, thinking he’ll be charged with murder, and running out of places to hide. He’s also supposed to see the cat go through the window and be fine, so that it seems like a safe idea to follow it and hide for a few hours there. I think Will didn’t even touch the guy in the show, which is a bit of a cop out, as Will actually shoves the guy in the books. It’s still an accident that the cat is there and the guy trips down the stairs, but he has a bit more reason to be fearful of the police.
Asriel supposedly can summon people to himWait, you mean canonically he has a supernatural power?Well, I guess Lyra has in turn the supernatural power of surviving falls from great heights.
Well, basically the quote from the book, from Thorold, is: It was because he needed a child to finish his experiment, miss! And Lord Asriel has a way special to himself of bringing about what he wants, he just to call for something and …So, yes? But I don’t remember they ever explaining what this special way is and whether it is even real. But it does seem Asriel’s servant believe it is, and so does Asriel, since he was just sitting around waiting for a child to show up (that’s why he says he didn’t summon Lyra in the books, because he believes for a moment he made her come to him to be sacrificed).
This is all very strange. The quote “has a way to bring about what he wants” might well be intended as metaphorical. And Asriel didn’t know who Roger was, so he didn’t “summon” him specifically, he just tuned his “power” generically on “a child”? Whom he expected to be able to reach him in the middle of the Arctic on his or her own?
I don’t think Asriel’s meant to have superpowers of any kind; he’s just a world-class rogue who’s spent decades making friends in all kinds of low places, so even when he’s under house arrest in the far north, if he writes a few letters cashing in old favors asking for a kid that no one will ask questions about, he’ll get one, and his butler hasn’t the foggiest idea how. As for the allies he’ll meet in the other worlds… luck and sheer cojones. (Probably helps if you picture the movie’s Daniel Craig rather than a non-telepathic Young Xavier, to be honest.)
Probably helps if you picture the movie’s Daniel Craig rather than a non-telepathic Young Xavier, to be honest.I don’t know, Craig felt a bit apathetic and non-threatening in the movie, McAvoy always looks like he could sacrifice you to some dark deity at a moment’s notice, even when he’s the romantic lead.
Well, I guess Lyra has in turn the supernatural power of surviving falls from great heights.Noticed that too, did you, Kumagoro? Maybe she’s a Tigger, who’s head is made out of rubbers, and bottoms are made out of springs!
Can’t answer any of your other questions, Kumagoro, but it looked to me like the series had had a scene where Will sat down and read the letters, which was why he knew to go to that park and look for…something….I’m with isthispurgatory on why Will ran — he smacked a home invader with a belt wound around his hand, said home invader (who really had had zero training for this kind of thing!) fell over the railing and broke his fool neck, so now Will’s got a dead body in his apartment and blood on his hands (metaphorically, at least). He doesn’t know Lord Boreal’s had the body disposed of, so all the police think happened was a burglary.
I was actually fairly pleasantly surprised at this episode, and gave me a little more hope for next season. I think I remember reading that season 2 has a writer’s room instead of just Jack Thorne writing all the episodes, which that alone will hopefully up the quality. Dafne Keen also totally stepped up to the plate here, and I got some flashbacks to how good she was in Logan again.
This was actually the first episode this entire series I didn’t have any major gripes with. They finally let the scenes breathe, gave us quieter moments with better written dialogue, and successfully built up the tension the whole episode. This episode gave me the same feelings I did when reading the book – that odd mix of despair, guilt, wonder, and amazement. That’s something the other episodes haven’t captured – they’ve followed each plot point from A to B but often failed to capture the emotion. I’ve done my share of complaining about the season-long problems (daemons, Will’s scenes, exposition overload) so I won’t reiterate them here, but as a stand alone episode this definitely gives me hope for next season. My only issue I will say is the added dialogue for Mrs. Coulter about how she’s choosing to “stay in this world for Lyra.” I don’t completely hate it, considering they’ve altered her character a bit in this adaptation, but I think they needed some added lines to show that she still fundamentally agrees with the Magisterium and sees Dust as a bad thing (and thus would not want to partake in Asriel’s religious war) and that she’s not willing to give up the power and life she’s built up for herself in this world. The way the conversation went, it did seem like Lyra was the sole reason she stayed behind. Unfortunately, this feeds dangerously into the “mother will give up her dreams and ambition for her child while her husband gets to go off exploring” trope. They really should have made it clearer that she had reasons outside of Lyra to stay behind. Looking ahead, I’m curious about her arc for the next season. If she’s already shown to care so much for her daughter, there’s a lot less tension in her search for the prophecy, as we as an audience feel she will never actually hurt Lyra, whereas in the books there was a genuine fear Mrs. Coulter could still hurt Lyra if her existence ultimately threatened her faith. Based off her change in dialogue, it’s as if she’s already reached the same point emotionally as her character in Book 3. Where can she go from here in a way that still keeps her as a villain? and that makes her unconventional Cave decision surprising? I agree they’ve added enough interesting layers to make her sudden change between Books 2 and 3 less abrupt, but she still needs to earn her “cesspit of moral filth” title next season and this change makes me a bit worried on that front.
I thought Boreal was acting confused as he didn’t want the other guy (can’t remember his name) to know that he understood some of the reading.
Yes, I thought it was clear from the little shifting in the eyes from the actor that his mind was working a mile a minute on how to get to Grumman through Will without giving the game away to the Magisterium. It did not read as confusion to me at all.
“I’m doubtful that any non-reader would presume their paths are about the cross.”Fuck off dude.
There’s a warning at the beginning of the review that these are for people who have read the books, but I’ll admit that is closer to an explicit spoiler than usual, so I get where you’re coming from. However, it’s literally the first thing that happens in the second book, and so for the sake of a book reader conversation it felt too fundamental to leave for explicit spoilers. I’d be shocked if they didn’t reveal it in the trailers for season two, so I chose to discuss it in the body of the review. The cover of my copy of the second book is literally the two characters together, so I ultimately feel nothing about your experience with the show has been damaged by this revelation, promise.
Why assume this is about “spoilers”? We’re all adults here on this site, if a steadily dwindling number of them.
The only reason I could see for a “fuck off” is that you’re underestimating their intelligence…
That’s how I read it at first. If it’s a spoiler “fuck-off” then the guy’s an idiot. If it’s a “don’t underestimate my intelligence” fuck-off, then okay, but kinda harsh. “Fuck off’s” need a qualifier sometimes.
If you click a review marked “experts” don’t get mad if something gets spoiled for you. Are you a newbie? They literally have a review marked newbie.
There are plenty of jerkwads in the world as-is without you attempting to be one also. And: read the damn books.
I mean why wouldn’t you think their paths would cross. Non-reader or not.
Exactly – the assumption in almost any tv series is that, at some point, everyone’s path will cross everyone else’s.
These are the “experts” reviews, and you’re telling the reviewer to fuck off over spoilers? What the fuck is wrong with you?
If you walk into an Experts Review, you either have to have read the books, or aren’t anti-spoiler…of a BBC adaptation of a book trilogy that’s anywhere from two decades to a quarter-century old.
Three people starred Joe’s dopey pouting, which means that a grand total of four assholes have been in this thread.
I was more excited for your review this week than the actual episode. And as I predicted last week… no punch to the gut.Lord Asriel’s discussions with Lyra about Adam and Eve was the highlight for me. It finally explored some anti-religion issues and gave the two actors a chance a shine. McAvoy IS a wonderful actor. I find him to be too likeable for the role (whereas Daniel Craig’s coldness was clear and obvious), but I’ll take him nonetheless. Will I watch season 2? Yes. Am I excited? Not really. Did I enjoy season 1? There were very good scenes, but no “really great” episodes. I might have even liked this episode the most, but the overall pacing is so slow and strange. Wish they learned to fill it with useful dialogue or ANYTHING remotely interesting. This is world full of daemons for goodness sake!!! I honestly was thrilled to see the cat in front of Will. Anything besides him just sitting around. OMG! A CAT!!!!
There’s such a strong austerity vibe to the narrative choices, as though someone very strongly determined that there can be no scene that costs money which doesn’t have an explicit plot function. That meant, ultimately, no scenes between daemons and humans that wasn’t in some way either a key piece of exposition or a plot action. It’s…a bad choice, but maybe an inevitable one on a BBC budget.
The show makers talked about this at a Q&A I wen to, they said that Pullman advised them that daemons should only appear for a purpose. I forget the exact phrasing, unfortunately. And the way they talked and the show they made leads me to think they utterly misunderstood this advice. I think it was more ‘daemons have to earn their keep in the story or else they’re just a picturesque detail’ (something Pullman has certainly talked about elsewhere) rather than ‘hey don’t worry about it if their presence is a bit spotty’.
This is why I’m hoping that Season 2 might be a bit better. There’s less scenes/characters with daemons, so there’s less opportunity for plot beats to fall flat because the importance and nature of the relationships haven’t been developed.
When I realized this was primarily a BBC show with HBO distribution, I lowered my expectations accordingly. They really needed HBO tentpole money to do this story justice.
I’m still deciding if I’ll finish season 1. We watched the first episode with my won, who read the books for the first time last summer, and he ragequit the show like a good little nerd because it wasn’t exactly how he thought it should be. I thought it was fine, and have’t read the books in over a decade. 😀
We watched the entire season over the holiday break, ringing in the New Year around the final episode of the first series. I though McAvoy actually hit the right notes as Asriel — not a bad person, but an obsessed person doing Very Bad Things in the pursuit of what he believes is a Greater Good. I liked that about Ruth Wilson’s Mrs. Coulter as well, especially as compared to Nicole Kidman’s Avaricious Ice Queen. I believe Wilson’s Mrs. Coulter actually loves Lyra — only problem is she and Asriel are both brilliant, self-centered fanatics, a combination that seldom results in good parenting skills. She’s also got a hair-trigger temper buried very close to her smooth glossy surface, which horrifies her but which she either can’t, or doesn’t think it’s important enough to, control. (That scene in Ep. 6 where she and Lyra are wordlessly screaming at each other on opposite sides of a locked door is very telling.)
I felt the same way! I’ve been looking forward to seeing the end of this book onscreen for over a decade and the CAT was the only thing that got me even a little excited.
I call bullshit on their “child labor laws” excuse for the ridiculous amount of time spent with Will (who really doesn’t do much himself, besides say “not here, mom!” and kill a dude). It was 100% because it’s miles cheaper to film hours in a London apartment than it is to film 20 minutes of an armored bear.I thought I read that HBO came to the project late and season 1 was mostly on a BBC budget, but that future seasons should be more, I don’t know, grand? I’m not entirely sure what I was hoping for, but this wasn’t it. It wasn’t terrible, and it had some really nice moments, but it was disappointingly mediocre.
That said, I will give them points for having the guts to commit to the “war on god” story line.
Even if HBO has pitched in a lot more money for the next two seasons, the story’s scope expands so much that their money will surely still be stretched to the limit even so…
The mulefas alone … (They better get that right.)
A sudden and unexplained S02E01 set entirely in “the real world” and revolving around a Will who we’ve never met before would have had way more impact than his introduction here. I mean, I can guess they thought we would have more connection to him if he was introduced earlier, but I think they’ve just watered him down to the point where most people are annoyed when the story cuts to him. His plot would have (very) comfortably fitted into a single episode, and the shock of it being set in our world would have been far more effective after a season where the parallel worlds stuff was only mentioned by academics.I was excited at the shock moment when the story jumped into “real” Oxford in episode three, but looking back, they didn’t do anything with that that improved the story telling.
Something about the whole series has felt a little bit flat and lifeless to me. I’ll keep watching though and see if next season is any improvement.
These reviews have become a bit of a bore to read as Myles can’t seem to make peace with the diversion into WIll territory, something that I have adored. Some of it has certainly seemed like padding, but I love that we get to start Season 2 more or less where book 2 started, but without having to do too much exposition as it begins, and it makes Boreal seem like less of an afterthought. (Pullman might have known his significance in his brief scene in book 1, but to me it always felt like a retcon).I feel that the you can say a lot more in a few book pages than you could have on screen. I really enjoyed the slipping sanity of Will’s mum in this, and you needed screen time to show it.Can I read other reviews? Yes. Is a reviewer supposed to bring their own feelings and thoughts to their reviews, which at the end of the day is only an opinion? Also yes. But’s just a bit of a downer to see Myles going on and on about it when it wasn’t going to change, at least not in this season.
I understand where you’re coming from, but to be honest I think I went into Will’s story moving forward completely open to it: if you go back to the review of the second episode, I was thinking about the consequences of shifting focus to Boreal (and, inevitably, introducing Will) but I also saw the potential in the story. The problem came when that potential never really manifested: I agree that the story with Will’s mother was able to play out effectively, but the pacing of the thing was all over the place, and it became progressively clear that the potential of the story wasn’t going to be realized.I appreciate your acknowledgment that you’re responding to a fundamental reality of this kind of review, which charts the evolution of an opinion over the course of a series and inevitably can become a bit repetitive in the instance where a series progresses in ways that compound a particular opinion. But for all the reasons you outline, I think the second season SHOULD benefit from the work done this season: just not as much as it could have, and not in ways that also benefited this season in kind. Thanks for continuing to read against your instincts, and I hope our views on Will’s story converge next time around for you and the show’s sake.
Yes, with all this time there should have been more ordinary people crushed by the religious oppression of the Magisterium. I’m not sure Jack Thorne misunderstands that Lyra supposed to be the focus as much as possible. But then, I do think the chronological unfolding of the overall plot does add coherence. A fifteen year old is past puberty, even if not fully mature. This Will is so badass he cannot express ordinary feelings of guilt and shame, much less fear of being caught or even being confused by matters beyond his ken.
I don’t recall watching a show where I was so frequently reminded of the the budget constraints, and reading that they’ve already got SK filmed makes me very nervous. The finale was okay, but I think I’m going to need some time and a rewatch to get the proper perspective on the season as a whole. The missing fish, Iofur’s missing doll, and the underwhelming Iorek fight among other things are making me very grumpy right now.
Someone refresh my book memory, please: were we aware that Lord Boreal could go in and out of our world/Lyra’s at the end of The Golden Compass? If we think that Asriel’s bridge is the only way, it makes Asriel’s killing Roger almost a gray area – if the only way to cross is through the death of a child, and crossing is absolutely necessary to defeating the Magisterium . . . then is it OK to kill a child? The first book forces you to sit with that, and to make the comparison between between Asriel and Mrs. Coulter, both who are willing to sacrifice children to what they believe is the greater good.
But, if we know that people can cross already, Asriel is just killing a kid because he didn’t do enough research to know that he didn’t have to (which I guess is ultimately the case, anyway, so maybe it doesn’t matter). I don’t know – I think it just really detracts from the big climactic ending of the first book when we know beforehand that Asriel isn’t doing anything new
At the risk of sounding petty, as excited as I was, am, and will be for this story to be made in full, Jack Thorne does not exactly have a sparkling track record with taking beloved children’s literature and turning it into something universally appreciated. That said—I am optimistic at the moment that season 2 is going to fully and accurately address the text’s opinion on organized religion and the central conflict Pullman created about it. I think that we’ll get a lot more of the Magisterium through Coulter—the second book is a bit more focused than the first so in order to hit the same length, I imagine we’ll have to expand. I can’t imagine them NOT doing the angels—that’s sort of an unskippable aspect of the world. At least I hope they wouldn’t consider working around it.
can somebody tell me how the f*ck Bears make and use weapons? How do they make & use metal for armor and for their bear lair doors and cells? How do they start fires? I love the idea of the bears but come on … that’s just some dumb make believe going on there.
The book mentions they have opposable thumbs, though I don’t think either screen version portrayed that.
I’m sorry but gorillas, chimps, orangutans, certain frogs, koalas, pandas, opossums, many birds and many dinosaurs have/had opposable digits but not a goddamn one of them are making armor, crafting cells, or sculpting doors & keeps. I’ll let you have polar bears that talk but it’s a big leap to have them Etsy-ing craft goods.
Uh, gorillas, chimps etc. don’t speak human language either. Also there’s no such thing as witches or a mechanical device that can tell the future. We don’t have souls that live outside our bodies in the shape of animals. I can’t believe I have to say this but it’s a fucking fantasy story.
Yeah, this is one thing that the screen versions make you realise just does not work. You’ll note we’re never shown the bears locking and unlocking Lyra’s cell door, or crafting or putting on their armour, or firing those cannons… and it’s not really imaginable how they could have done so. Maybe they have some bear cubs around to help?
As someone who did not read the books, can someone explain why Roger seemingly died right after getting severed while others seem to be able to continue living after it happens?
Although I’ve missed the omissions the streamlining hasn’t really bothered me. Changing the nature of Lee Scorseby’s character made sense as he, and his daemon, needed to be a little more vibrant and talkative and he still fills the same function. Also, saying that he should have told Hester he loved Lyra ignores the fact that he IS Hester, she would already know. I’m also not sure we need to worry about what non-book readers will speculate is on the other side of Lyra’s and Will’s portals. It’s just part of the cliffhanger. I also don’t think Will’s guilt about the intruder’s death needs to be spelled out yet. He hasn’t had anyone to speak to about it so he’ll just spill to Lyra, as he did in the books. He was shown constantly refreshing his news-feed so he’s obviously worried. Although they have been skimpy with the daemons, I liked the touch of the Magesterium paratroopers’ bird daemons (hawks?) diving out of the plane with them. Uneven season but a great wrap-up.
apart from not featuring the daemons enough, which is admittedly a cardinal sin, i think this adaptation got pretty much everything else. and i have to commend them on the “new” scoresby, lm miranda was a great choice after all.i’m excited for season 2, but i wonder if they will introduce TAS’s storylines in S2. they probably should, given that TSK is pretty short compared to the other two.and inasmuch as i’m expectant, i still hold my opinion that TAS is pretty much unfilmable, so i’m truly curious how they will deal with it.
Lyra tells Asriel about the severing of child and daemon and he mentions that it releases an enormous amount of energy. Roger tells Lyra that he is scared of Asriel because of his reaction. Lyra, being a person with half a brain at least, concludes that her missing friend and father must be because her father needs the energy from cutting Roger. If you’re writing a review watch the episode more than once please.
But should anyone care what a “true fan of the books” thinks is “a successful adaptation”, because they’re a “true fan”? It seems to me that by itself doesn’t qualify anyone for jack shit. (Note I’m not saying you aren’t qualified to write this article, just that the quality of “true fan” may not be important to judging an adaptation’s success and may even muddle that task.)There has been more than one successful movie or TV adaptation that has enraged fans of the source material in how the movie or show departs from it, or approached it satirically in a way that mocks those fans’ sincere interest, and so on. It seems unwise to look to the opinions of “true fans” of the source material to judge whether an adaptation is a success.
I also find it extremely hard to be optimistic about season 2 addressing these issues knowing its currently in post production. Still, they say you tell the story for a third time at the edit and its doubtful they’re close to finishing any of that. Editing could have saved basically every problem with season 1, so fingers crossed.
‘I’m not convinced Thorne or the producers understood the opportunity cost of their choices. It was like no one followed the thread to how—most prominently—erasing the daemons from so much of this world would make them largely incidental to the story at hand.’My feelings precisely. I am more than up for an adaptation changing things. but so much in HDM just seemed borne out of a poor understanding of the book. How it did what it did and why that was important.In the series I’m writing abut daemons in adaptation I wrote, ‘Again and again the screen adaptations make decision which are safer and clearer without seeming to quite realise that they are in fact adding up to a much smaller, less interesting and moving idea. Dæmons are made of storytelling, and if the storytelling is made small and safe and tropey and clear, the idea reduces with it’In the end, in the book, we find that the core of the book has been daemons all along. Lyra and Pantalaimon understand through a wisdom they have earned‘that they were both one being, both of them were one’ in a way they took for granted with an innocent ignorance at the start. A progression which is kind of the running theme of the series.Thorne inverts this sentiment. When Lyra says ‘We’d be alone..’, Pan doesn’t reply ‘Just us, then. Don’t matter. We’re not alone anyway.’ He says, ‘We’ve always been alone.’And to be sure, this series couldn’t carry the weight of the former conclusion based on its paltry storytelling with daemons so I guess it’s good it didn’t try to do something it hadn’t earned. But ‘we’ve always been alone’ falls so vastly short of the towering heights of emotion and thought that Northern Lights reaches. This series isn’t horrible, but I have been left with little but cheerful contempt for Thorne, Trantor and the rest in imagining they were up to the job with the mediocre and dull imaginations and skills of display here.
I loved the season. It made me feel like I was in a library reading epic fantasies all day long. I’ve yet to read the books, but now that the season’s over, I’m about to dive in.I was about to say your review was too harsh, but you brought up some interesting points… namely the fact that Will killed someone. I… forgot this during the episode? I just thought he was comfortable that his mum was finally safe and he now wanted to see how he could find his father, which I presumed was hinted at within the letters. I didn’t even catch on that he was avoiding the police because of manslaughter (?), which obviously makes sense.Reading through the comments also has me a little disappointed that the show may be pulling away from an anti-authority narrative to appease certain viewers. Since the entire point of the show seems to be built on the dangers of austerity and censorship, it’s a shame that the producers (or, more likely, the network/studio) feel they had to restrict this narrative as much as they could. I still felt it was there, but I can see how they could have been clearer with it. It doesn’t seem logical that a series like this should even be made if they’re concerned with offending people with old, irrational values. Guess it’s where we’re at now…
Wait, is Will already in the first season? I haven’t watched the series yet but I absolutely love the books.
We must now ask: is the series’ portrayal of Lyra a fail? San Francisco Chronicle critic Mick Lasalle, who hadn’t read the books, wrote of Dakota Blue Richards/: “A 13-year-old girl with no previous screen experience, Richards has slightly messed-up English teeth, wide-set eyes and the alert, knowing face of a smart 32-year-old woman […] it’s no stretch to believe that this girl is special enough for the fate that destiny has set aside for her – to be at the center of the battle between knowledge and ignorance, free will and oppression.”
Would anyone who hadn’t read the books, then, think similarly of Keen’s/the series’ Lyra?
I think people are reluctant to criticize because it’s a child actress. But yeah, I think the movie Lyra captured the character much better. Throughout the season, Lyra has seemed more like a scared and shrinking little girl than a defiant troublemaker and practiced fabulist who wages “wars” with the local kids. I don’t see this as entirely the fault of Keen (though her default approach to serious scenes is to simply deliver her lines in a stage whisper); the writing/direction are mostly to blame. The fact remains that this portrayal of Lyra is a huge disappointment. She seems more like the jaded and deflated Lyra in The Secret Commonwealth (the most recent addition to the series) than the rambunctious, precocious miniature adult of The Golden Compass.
Thanks for the reply! Yep, after Logan, I’m certainly not one to question whether Keen can play fierce. As far as I’m concerned, her misguided performance is entirely the fault of the showrunners.
I admit I never watched the film as a whole, so I’m only going by the clips of it I’ve seen on Youtube, but I think Dafne Keen is way stronger than Dakota Blue Richards in the role. She doesn’t capture everything of the Lyra in the books (which is probably more down to the writing and direction choices) but she does convey a steely determination and fierce sense of justice, which might be the core of the character. From the little I’ve seen of the film, I don’t feel Richards could have portrayed what Lyra has to go through in the later books well at all.
“From the little I’ve seen of the film, I don’t feel Richards could have portrayed what Lyra has to go through” – Given that I (and San Francisco Chronicle critic Mick LaSalle) have seen the film, albeit not even the shot-but-cut ending, you’ll excuse me if I hold my own, correct opinion on this count. 😉
As a huge fan of the books, I think all of the exposition and “tell-don’t-show” would be forgivable if the daemons had the roles and weight they needed. While Lyra was hiding from the gobblers, she said something along the lines of “I’m cold” while pan stood beside her woodenly. When they (calmly) walk out of the incision device, they don’t touch or run towards each other, barely even looking. The daemons just aren’t being treated as anything more than glorified plot device / exposition pet, and it’s really frustrating that this magic and chemistry is missing. I thought I could forgive the huge amounts of exposition. I was dubious of the self-important text at the start of the season explaining everything instead of letting us figure it out, a habit that the show leans on heavily. TL;DR: it’s a show that wants to be smart but thinks it’s audience isn’t, so it handholds and condescendingly leads us through without giving us much to think about.
Though I’m a non-reader, I’m not too concerned about spoilers. I wish the show had both more daemons, and more to why Will found the portal the way he did – I assume it’s location was revealed in the letters – but since the show never says, it comes off as though he just wandered to it accidentally. All that said, I like that the show is going with Adam & Eve & the Garden of Eden literally happened, and I would offer this hope for disappointed fans: at the very least, confusing and incomplete season endings are being thought of more and more like just another episode when factored into a show’s future bingeing. Maybe the showrunners wants to include Will’s story in dialogue with Lyra, next season, and it’ll be a smoother transition for future binge-watchers where S1 & S2 just flow together seamlessly. That’s the hope, anyway.
I’m not sure that anyone’s really gotten the strictly-textual reading of the Magisterium right. It’s generally been read as a blanket criticism of organized religion, and specifically Catholic Christianity, which is true to a substantial degree (Mary Malone’s somewhat infamous comment in the 3rd book is the most obvious example), but it’s not clear that has to be the case. There is a clear implied alternate history in the books that is usually forgotten. In Lyra’s world, John Calvin takes over the Catholic Church and restructures it completely, along the lines of Geneva under the Calvinists. They do what we’d expect that kind of organized religion to do. In any event, it’s not religion generically – it’s a particularly extreme and dogmatic sect that captured a large religious institution. All this is handled in one sentence in The Golden Compass; it doesn’t really need to be spelled out in detail. But it can undercut Catholic critics who see it as an attack on Catholicism. It’s much more a criticism of what Catholicism could have become if the wrong people took over. Which implies a clear criticism of organized religion: it’s a dangerous power that often ends up in the wrong hands (the books are great at illustrating the process by which the wrong hands end up controlling the institution). And the existence of the Authority does imply a guiding force behind repressive religion, which is a much more pointed criticism of organized religions (and specifically monotheistic religions). But again: there are other forms of religion that aren’t necessarily inconsistent with the books. And the Republic of Heaven idea that ends the series doesn’t sound dissimilar to the protestant attacks on Catholicism. Open control of the faith to adherents, etc. It’s not exactly what Pullman means. I think he’s been pretty open about the books being in part about science/rationalism being a better guide than religion. Mary is the exemplar of this. Some of his subsequent writing in the same world focuses more on the pitfalls of this view, however, which is interesting (The Secret Commonwealth). So it’s a more nuanced position than he gets credit for, I think.
Overall I enjoyed the season. I don’t understand why adaptations of these books always garner so much criticism (except of course for the end of the ‘07 film). Ruth Wilson’s dark moments were stellar, and I actually found myself sympathizing with her daemon, but I otherwise don’t find her as charismatic as Mrs. Coulter is meant to be. I also wish there were more daemons but wasn’t surprised given the production cost. (Compared to GoT direwolf coverage, this is generous..) The Magisterium imagery looked more like Nazis than the church, but I think it’s amazing they’re going into the anti-religious dialogue on television. Loving Amir Wilson’s performance. My main concern is hoping they don’t shortchange the later books with such short seasons. Eight episodes isn’t nearly enough for The Amber Spyglass. I hope Mary Malone shows up eventually, too. The Mulefa storyline is one of the richest in the series.
Thanks for these reviews this season, Myles. I may change my mind, but I’ve decided not to watch S2. I just think, as you say in this review, that Jack Thorne doesn’t understand the story well enough to do it any sort of justice. And most of my non-book-reader fans gave up on it before the halfway mark, so there’s no one in my life with whom to discuss it. Good luck with S2 reviews.
Midway through re-reading the trilogy finale, and to complement my fix I re-watched the movie. I thought that they actually did a not bad job of telling the story, Nicole Kidman was reportedly Pullman’s choice for Mrs. Coulter anyway, but of course not having the religious theme was ludicrous and the ending is a huge WTF. It was like telling the story of Jesus and ending at the Last Supper.
I read the golden compass a decade ago and it still got me fucked up.