NOTE: While The A.V. Club’s coverage of His Dark Materials looked at the first season from both Expert and Newbie perspectives, we’ve moved to one review for the show’s second season. Be forewarned that there may be light spoilers for the books toward the end of the review and the potential for significant spoilers in the comments.
In the world of professional wrestling, each storyline is building toward a final showdown where two unstoppable forces meet in the ring to settle their differences. This is similar to all forms of media, of course, but there’s one challenge: Whereas most fictional narratives are able to build anticipation by keeping those forces naturally separated from one another to build anticipation, the conceit of professional wrestling is that it is a sport, and every wrestler is traveling from city-to-city and sharing locker rooms. It is only natural that they will come into contact before they eventually meet in the ring, and so wrestling has created conceits—live in-ring promos, diegetic interview programs hosted by wrestlers, contract signings—where combatants face one another without giving audiences the showdown they’re anticipating.
No, you haven’t accidentally stumbled into the wrong review of His Dark Materials, and I promise I won’t go down a rabbit hole about how limited contracts for stars like Brock Lesnar disrupted these types of narrative development (although those in this Venn diagram are welcome to discuss further in the comments). But I was reminded of these forms of narrative development when it became clear that “Theft” was contriving a situation where Lee Scoresby and Marisa Coulter would find themselves in the same town as they each searched for Lyra. It’s not as though their natural narratives led them to this point: Coulter’s zeppelin stops there unexpectedly, while a mysterious figure magically shifts the winds so that Lee makes a stop at the Samirsky Hotel looking for information. Of all the northern towns in all of this universe, they both happened to land in this one, and it delivers a confrontation that’s exciting—because the characters have never interacted before, and they’re two major characters in the show—but also a tease, knowing they will surely meet again along their journey.
This “contract signing”—here’s a wrestling example from a few weeks ago, if you’re curious—is meant to be revealing about both characters, and it certainly clarifies Coulter’s position in the story after her assertion of independence from the new Cardinal and the Magisterium last week. We’re meant to be skeptical about Coulter’s motives for Lyra after knowing what she willingly did to other children in the search of answers about dust, but we know that she loves her daughter, and the show has been doing more work than the books in clarifying that Coulter is a split-decision away from heroism when push comes to shove through a collection of small shifts in how the character’s point-of-view is articulated. And so while we don’t want Coulter to be the one to find Lyra, the story doesn’t want us to see her as an absolute villain, and her confrontation with Lee is about softening her edges: she is still willing to enact pain to get what she wants, but the conversation leans into the pain she suffered at the hands of her own parents, and her decision to set Lee free in the interest of knowing there’s someone out there looking for Lyra who cares about her is the clearest signal yet that her love for her daughter is more powerful than whatever else drives her.
I’ve long accepted that the show is committed to amplifying the duality of Coulter: They want to let Ruth Wilson loose to torture and manipulate, but they don’t want her to be a straight villain, and so they’re also heightening her love with Lyra. I would argue that a subtler approach to the character might have been more interesting, but Wilson plays both sides well, and I understand that the choice to adapt the book as a four-quadrant, all ages series may have dictated this choice. And I will say that I really appreciate the moment where, after Hester shared an intimate moment comforting Lee after the two characters had gone through the emotional wringer, the Golden Monkey offered its paw to Coulter in the closest thing they have to intimacy. While the expanded daemon budget has mostly been helpful for just making the daemons a visualized part of this world—the spider on the barkeep’s arm, for example—here we see one of the strongest scenes yet for the connection between human and daemon, and a nice bit of character development in the process. Although Coulter’s actual plot is unchanged by this detour to stumble into Lee—she’s still looking for Lyra, and still represents a threat—I ultimately liked what came out of it for her character.
I wish I could say the same about Lee. As I noted in the premiere, the motivation behind his quest to find Lyra has been pretty paper thin, and lacks the pathos of the book given that we’re seeing a much younger version of Lee, rather than a grizzled veteran foregoing retirement to protect a young charge. After a clunkily-choreographed encounter with a religious zealot at the observatory where Lee fires in self-defense and kills a man, his arrest pushes him to self-reflection, and when Coulter interrogates him he starts digging deep into his past. And frankly, I just don’t find the idea that Lee’s driven by “Daddy Issues” interesting or really that convincing. I realize that it pushes the surrogate father dynamic with Lyra, but Lyra already has actual complex relationships with parents, and I don’t think a rote “my father beat me up when I was little” does much to make Lee’s journey more interesting. It’s another piece of evidence that while Lin Manuel-Miranda’s casting may have been the clearest signal the show’s version of Lee was headed in a different direction, the real issues have rested on simply not calculating how to translate the Once Upon A Time In The North version of Lee into the narrative fabric of the main books.
The rest of “Theft” sticks largely to the books with that main narrative, as Lyra returns to Will’s Oxford to discover that news of her and Will’s adventures are starting to spread: not only is there a mysterious figure—maybe a police officer, maybe not—at Mary Malone’s office looking to ask Lyra some questions, but she escapes his grasp only to fall into the hands of Lord Boreal, who takes advantage of her panic to steal the alethiometer. It’s a sequence of events that depends on the fact that Lyra is still a kid, in a world that isn’t her own, and her stumbles place her and Will in more danger. And while Lyra has been alone before, she’s always been in a world where she had protectors, and the only person from her world who knows where she is is the same man who’s blackmailing her with the alethiometer in hopes they will secure him what he really wants: the knife in the possession of the shadowy figure inside the tower in Cittàgazze. And while I deeply miss the literary device of Latrom being revealed as Boreal to the audience and Lyra at the same time (which, like the Arstan Whitebeard reveal in Game Of Thrones, may just have never been feasible in a visual medium), I do appreciate how much the energy of Will and Lyra’s situation changes: Ariyon Barake does a great job of flipping the switch when he reveals his identity, referring to Will and Lyra by their names and shoving them headlong into a new conflict.
Mary spends the episode trying to tap into whatever Lyra was able to pull out of “The Cave,” and when she consults the I-Ching she discovers that the universe will surrender “to the mind that is still.” And the truth is that this is difficult in this story: there’s a lot going on, and finding the focus necessary to tap into the greater truths of the universe isn’t going to come easily. The principle of “Theft,” ultimately, is His Dark Materials resting for a moment: Coulter and Lee run into each other on a stopover on their respective journeys, and Will and Lyra’s movie date does feel like a breath of sorts, lest we forget that there’s nothing to these characters’ lives between tough scrapes and close escapes. I don’t think the breath accomplished much for Lee, unfortunately, but it mostly worked for the other characters, and the momentum generated feels substantial enough to warrant optimism regarding the rest of the season.
Stray observations
- We got a bit more clarity in terms of what happened with the bombing of the witches last week, although all they really confirmed was that some witches did die: we still don’t really know why they couldn’t just smoke monster away, so I still think that was some shoddy storytelling.
- While the new budget meant that we got a great aerial view of the landscape around the Saminsky Hotel, the show has largely not chosen to explore the frisson among the population of Lyra’s world at how Asriel opening a door to other universes created an aftershock of climate change. We get a bit of exposition from Iorek—there’s not enough ice or seals for his kind of survive—when Serafina’s daemon visits him to learn more of Lyra’s fate that night, but that’s one piece of the puzzle the show is not doing much to articulate.
- That said, I will say that there is a fundamental limit to the number of scenes of other characters talking about Lyra’s prophecy that I can take in a given season. It really doesn’t add much to anything, and just seems like exposition for the sake of keeping the audience primed to the concept. Happy to see Iorek, wish that drop-in felt more meaningful.
- Will takes a really long time to find Lyra’s note, suggesting that he didn’t find time to binge watch Arrested Development before the whole running away from home thing.
- I don’t know why a movie theater was showing Paddington unless this is a period piece, but I can only applaud their choice, and also admonish Will and Lyra for some truly terrible movie theater etiquette. Just because I haven’t been to a movie theater in nine months doesn’t mean that I wasn’t aghast at the blatant talking and phone use during the movie. The disrespect to those other patrons and to Padidngton himself is unconscionable.
- Just as a reminder, I know that the U.K. is a full eight days ahead, so please try to avoid alluding to or outright discussing events from future episodes if you’re watching on that schedule. This is as much for me as it is for everyone else, just to be clear.
Through The Amber Spyglass (More spoilery discussion of the books)
Everything about Lee as a surrogate father does track if they’re going to be expanding his story with John Parry—it’s already significant, of course, but the slightly expanded role for Lee as they try to build out the different narratives and balance the story differently will put more emphasis there, and the idea that you have Will’s actual father and Lyra’s father figure there does sort of track. I just wish it was more interesting to Lee as a character, instead of feeling manufactured to serve Lyra’s story.
The other book-reader thing that struck me here was how differently Will’s narrative plays out when it isn’t being discovered by Lyra and the reader at the same time. When you’re introduced to Will’s story at the start of the second book, it pushes us to think about Will mostly as a lens into Lyra’s own story, thinking about what his experience adds to her own and to the narrative as a whole. Here, however, we’ve experience Will’s narrative concurrently with that, and so as the story shifts into his quests—the knife, finding his father—I will be interested to see how audiences respond to what in the books was an integration of Will into a larger narrative, and here is theoretically the payoff to the time spent on Will in the first season. His acquisition of the knife is going to be a really interesting pivot point between those two audience perspectives.
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As a non-reader, I have questions and considerations.1) So the scholar is using paranormal methods, and I-Ching, trying to communicate with a computer like it’s a living being? Isn’t this a bit strange for a scientist, even for one that was previously a nun?2) Shouldn’t Lyra be more impressed by modern cinema? Shouldn’t she and Pan think Paddington is a daemon? Are there movies in their world? Can daemon be filmed? (In both senses of the question: is it physically feasible and is it culturally allowed?)3) I believe this was brought up last season as well, but I don’t remember: does killing a daemon kill the person? Doesn’t that make killing people way too easy in Lyra’s world? (Where, by the way, verifying a death seems very easy, you just check if the daemon disappeared). 4) When Mrs. Coultier was grabbing Lee by the throat and the monkey did the same to his daemon, does it mean a daemon is made powerless the moment its human is? Because there was no reason for Hester not to fight back at least a little.5) Is Mrs. Coultier’s usually harsh relationship with her daemon indicative of self-hatred?
6) When a witch’s daemon talk with someone after having moved far away from her, does the witch immediately know? Is there a telepathic link between human and daemon or they have to speak to each other? (All in all, daemons are a fascinating creation, but it’s sort of hard to understand why Pullman devised certain rules for them if they’re an extension of a person’s soul).
1) She’s communicating with Dust through the computer, not communicating with the computer. But yes it is far-fetched. However Mary Malone was always portrayed as being very spiritual despite having strayed from the church. She kept the I-Ching and used it regularly after all. That’s why the alethiometer directed Lyra to go talk to her. Another Dark Matter scientist wouldn’t have been open to Lyra’s story.
2) I guess. Don’t think they have movies in her world. Daemons are tangible, physical representations of a person’s soul. They are not insubstantial ghosts. So yes they can be photographed and presumably filmed.
3) Yes I think there are book examples of killing a demon which kills the human. A relevant aside is that in the books the kids at Bolvangar weren’t missing their daemons. But they had had their bond broken which is kind of worse. The daemons still hung around until the cut person died, they didn’t disappear.
4) Yes there is a direct link there. Humans and daemons feel each others’ pain (and I assume other physical states). If one is knocked down the other is usually helpless. Unless they’re just tied up and not in disabling pain or unconscious.
5) Yes
6) As far as I can remember they can feel each other’s emotions and physical sensations but they can’t talk telepathically.
1) I guess what I question is more if one can be a prominent physicist and simultaneously believe in the I-Ching and that they can talk to the dark matter.2) Their technological level seems to be around late 19th century, so they could have cinema, though it’s possible they never invented it. About filming daemons, more than wondering if it’s physically possible, I’m wondering if it wouldn’t be a social taboo. Touching them seems akin to touching someone’s intimate parts, and put them on film could be on the same level.
Lots of scientists have spiritual beliefs, and the story deliberately makes parallels between scientific theory and religious texts, so I don’t think it’s particularly implausible that a physicist has some I Ching sticks lying around in the show.
It’s not about having spiritual beliefs, though. She’s suddenly try to talk with the subject or her research, without any proof beyond what a strange little girl said. Scientists at CERN might believe in God, but they don’t usually believe Higgs boson can be asked questions.
Asimov once said that the most exciting words in science were “that’s funny”; taking a cursory look into things that seem a little odd isn’t really out of character for a scientist to me. In a series that involves daemons, armoured bears, and sentient dark matter it’s not the point that will break my suspension of disbelief.
I, sadly, know way way too many creationists physicists (most are physics teachers)
Creationists are not considered scientists by anybody that matters, and certainly not by Pullman.
They still hand out bachelors of science in hard sciences to creationists if they do the classwork. (sadly)
Re. film and photography, it’s useful to remember that Lyra’s world is hampered technologically because of the power of the Magisterium, which bans anything they don’t like. It’s not that they can’t make stuff, they’re not allowed. However they definitely do have photography, and they don’t seem to have any problems with photographing daemons. There were definitely photos of scholars with daemons mentioned at Jordan College. So I don’t see why film would be different. Daemons are part of a person the same way their face is. If it’s not taboo to include people I don’t see why it would be taboo to include the daemon. They’d probably be weirded out by a recording that didn’t include a person’s daemon. Like we’re a bit weirded out by photos where the face is obscured or a limb has been edited out badly.
Thanks, brilliant answer!It’s just the idea of the daemons is endlessly fascinating, but I feel like it could exist in a fairy tale/magical realism setting, or it could be thoroughly developed in a more sci-fi way, and I don’t know which approach Pullman took, and how faithfully the creators of the show translated it (and I’m in the camp that the show should be allowed to be the show, not continuously compared to the books like Myles does, and it gets tiring fast).For instance, I get that the books are aimed at a young audience, but do we know what the daemons do when their humans have sex?How physical are they? A kid’s daemon changes form constantly, and in the show that’s portrayed like a magic puff, so that seems magical/ethereal. Can they be bitten by insects? (A scene with Lee and Hester in the fourth episode made me wonder that.) Can they be bruised or scratched? Do they need health care? Can they ingest things? Can they get sick?And another thing is: some daemons essentially grant their human powers other humans don’t have. If you have a flying daemon, you can send it inside a building through the windows and tell you what’s there. That’s not just an extension of the human faculties, it’s something a human without daemon couldn’t do, and neither could a human whose daemon has a different shape.
Yeah, the telepathy angle doesn’t track, because why would they ever talk to each other then? I’m not sure, but it seems, based of what I’ve witnessed, that human pain doesn’t affect the daemon like hurting a daemon does to a human. I’ve seen the human getting beaten, whatever, and the daemon still have the ability to retaliate, but as soon as the daemon was restrained, the human was immediately affected and incapacitated as well. That’s what I’ve seen, at least.
Also a non-reader, but killing a daemon, does kill the person, this I know. It’s the one thing I’ve been hung up on. Especially with some of the bug deamons that are so, so, easy to accidentally squish.
I’m also still unclear on if all daemons can talk. Mrs. Coultier’s monkey doesn’t seem to, among others, and I wonder why that’s so.
Shouldn’t she and Pan think Paddington is a daemon? I’m hoping that’s exactly what they thought, which is why they were so into the movie, lol. Daemons seem to be physical and visible, and Will made it clear to Lyra that Pan needs to stay hidden, so cameras, lenses, relfections- they can probably be filmed. I too expected her to be more amazed by the wonders of cinema, but maybe she’s familiar with it. Maybe in Lyra’s world they have daemon movie stars and everything.
Especially with some of the bug deamons that are so, so, easy to accidentally squish.Exactly, it seems hard to accept this part of the world-building. Also, wouldn’t it create a social hierarchy based on a scale of resilience of people’s daemons?I’m also still unclear on if all daemons can talk. Mrs. Coultier’s monkey doesn’t seem toNo, he does, we heard him speak once in season one. He just doesn’t do it much. Apparently, it’s the same in the books. It probably has to do with Mrs. Coulter’s inner life.they can probably be filmedYeah, but I wondered more if they are allowed to be filmed (touching them is a taboo, like touching someone’s intimate parts, so filming them could be similarly frowned upon). Also, Lyra vs Paddington really felt like could have used some dialogue. If she thought he was a daemon, she would asked Will about it. But even if she understood it was special effects, it could have triggered a discussion with Will about how people in his world still depict something similar to daemons, and why.
That poor reporter in the car was killed when Boreal crushed her butterfly daemon.
I think on #1 the show implied that since her time with the super-computer is almost up, it means she wrote a grant proposal (“out there” though it may be) and she earned her time for a few weeks to futz around on the equipment. The next guy who comes along might use his time modelling uses for tofu. I’m winging it here a bit, but at CERN they have a campus and different nationalities in residence, and they’re not all working on the God Particle, for example, though that might be the project that pays the bills. I imagine there’s a lot of schedule jockeying.
Without spoiling the story, I’ll say that Mary DOES eventually divulge why she left the Church, and a lack of spirituality isn’t really the whole of it. Her behavior isn’t that far fetched. Pullman’s series (IMHO) is less of a treatise on the existence of another power, but more of an examination on how people use that belief in a corrupt way and ultimately whether that power is worthy of the deference and worship shown to it.
The first few eps I watched, before I couldn’t stand Lin Manuel trying to cosplay as a grizzled Texan, there’s an incident where some woman has a daemon that is a butterfly, and one of the baddies crushes it, killing the woman instantly.
The prequel books have one instance of someone’s daemon being killed which leads to that character’s death, but it’s notably extremely rare in the books. It’s considered a serious taboo to touch someone else’s daemon. As for how someone with, say, a bug daemon could thus be easily killed (a la the reporter in season 1), again, the taboo mainly prevents this in the books, and also I think the shape of the daemon doesn’t necessarily indicate its resilience. In this episode, Colter’s daemon smashes the head of a snake daemon to knock a guard out, and I don’t think that is something that would have happened in the books. In the one case I can think of where the daemon is killed, it was NOT an easy proposition.
I’ve just recently re-read the main series and the Book of Dust series so it’s pretty fresh. Very very mild spoilers for The Book of Dust series. Others have answered some questions pretty succinctly but I’ll add the following1. In the books it comes across more like the computer is showing a visual display of brain activity, something like a cross between an MRI and an ECG (the heart function test that looks like a seismogram?). Mary has to do a lot of coding and engineering to get it to interact with her/Lyra in a way that humans can interpret, and even then it’s in an old school MS DOS/command promt sort of way. It certainly comes off much more sciency and less woo-woo in the book.
2a. Lyra is super impressed by the cinema in the book. She says they have lots of stuff thats great in her world but her world doesn’t have anything as good as the cinema. It’s not particularly clear why, but TV, radio and cinema are never mentioned as being part of Lyra’s world. Music gets a cursory mention in The Book of Dust sequels but only in reference to a live performance of classical music.
2b. In The Subtle Knife it’s clear that while there are non-daemon animals in Lyra’s world, they don’t have pets – she find’s Will’s interaction with the cat kind of odd. To that end, in The Secret Commonwealth (Book of Dust pt 2) it’s also made clear that people in Lyra’s world can tell instinctively tell daemons and regular animals apart. So she’d know that Paddington wasn’t a daemon.
3. This is explicity referenced in the Secret Commonwealth- Pan says that if he died so would Lyra. Pullman doesn’t ever really go into how that would affect someone who had say, a butterfly for a daemon. That being said, these animals clearly outlive their ‘real’ animal counterparts by a long way, so they’re different in some fundamental way from the get go.
4. The series doesn’t do a great job of showing daemons as being somewhat independant – they’re not puppets, the person doesn’t have to direct them and they don’t have to mirror exactly what the person is doing. The books show daemons fighting all the time, so yes Hester could have fought back. It’s usually more that the person is incapacitated by harm to their daemon than the other way around, although I’m not sure why.
1. Yeah, that I would like, a scientist stumbling into the supernatural and using a scientific approach to it, because they don’t switch their frame of reference. Someone said that scientists can believe in God. Yes, but those who do reconcile that belief with science, they don’t believe God created the Earth 5,000 years ago (at least if they’re serious scientists held in any regard by the scientific community). An astronomer doesn’t believe in astrology.2a. Most fictional worlds skip the detailed portrayal of mass media, because it’s a huge and pervasive world-building effort. You can come up with a few famous books and a few famous songs, like in Game of Thrones, but if you introduce an equivalent of movies and TV, then you’re introducing pop culture on a larger scale, and suddenly you need fictional titles, stories, trends, stars, personalities. Just the depiction of the room of a teenager from another world (let alone the production design in visual form) would require a ton of work with countless ramifications.2b. Paddington isn’t a regular animal, either. Both in his fictional universe (where bears talk) and in Will’s universe (where he’s a bunch of digital data with a human voice on top). I guess I just wanted Lyra to ask questions instead of focusing on the popcorn. If she wasn’t going to comment on what she’s seeing, then it would have been better if they were watching a live action film with no particular significance, instead of following up the “in my world, animals don’t talk” discussion with a talking animal.3. It’s clear they’re not animals, but it’s confusing when they’re interacted with as if they were the animals they resemble. I would believe they’re all equally resilient (maybe give or take the difference in their humans’ resilience), but then you can’t grab a hawk daemon the same way you can a bug daemon.4. Yeah, it almost looked like the monkey automatically grabbed Hester’s throat because Mrs. Coulter did the same to Lee, didn’t it? Instead, Hester could have at least dodged the attack?The show has been struggling with daemons since day one, and not just because there were too few of them on screen. I knew about the concept going in, but I bet a lot of viewers who didn’t read the books thought they were like familiars, i.e. creatures sharing a bond with the person, not one single entity expressed in two sentient forms. They explicitly said it this season for the first time, and just in passing (though I understand that it would make for awkward exposition between characters that were all from Lyra’s world).
If I recall correctly, it’s mentioned that Mary has toyed around with the I Ching since college and it’s kind of a soothing ritual for her, because she gets into the same frame of mind that Lyra uses for the aletheiometer. I don’t know that she’s implied to take it that seriously until Lyra turns up.
2) I’m so glad they included the cinema scene, which is one of my favorite scenes in the book. They do not have cinema in Lyra’s world, so she is entranced. If I remember correctly, it was a cartoon. So Paddington is a reasonable substitution, though maybe one of the Pixar films might have been better? The look on Lyra’s face at the end of the scene conveyed her wonder, I thought.
The look on both Lyra and Pan’s faces expressed wonder even if it wasn’t put into words. I clearly got the feeling from Pan that he was wondering if Paddington was also a daemon.
Lyra is still a kidThis made me wonder. I know they shot season 1 and season 2 back to back, but will Dafne Keen look “still a kid” enough for season 3? She’s probably not that much older-looking yet, right?Ouch.
Whoa! Looked her age up and she was born in 2005. But she looks like a 20 something there.
No she does not she looks about 15…Stop sexualizing children!! As a women who just read the devastating amanda seyfried Interview where she talks about being pushed into semi-nude scenes as a teen because she thought she had no other choice this type of thinking needs to end.
You never met my 15-year-old daughter…
That picture is from October 2020. I imagine she was actively trying to look older. There are plenty of even 20-something who can still be believable as teenagers, anyway, but there’s a limit past which the suspension of disbelief doesn’t hold anymore, and Lyra not being yet an adult is an important plot point.
She’s literally 15 right now and in the picture she… looks it. She’s just a teenage girl wearing make-up, high heels and a nice dress.
I was told that too when I was 16, it’s weird..
Looks like they’ll have a Maisie Williams situation…
let’s hope so.
But Maisie went from like 15-23 over the course of Game of Thrones. That’s way different than 13-15 for Keen. It’s more like a Millie Bobby Brown situation, who can (I suppose) look adult, but plays her age regularly. Keen can definitely look age appropriate if there is a season 3 (which I still think is only 50/50), because she IS age appropriate.
Wait, so there’s a time jump between the story of season 2 and the story of season 3? Because so far I don’t think much time has passed in-universe. Lyra traveled from Oxford to, like, Norway, then crossed over, and after that, maybe a couple weeks passed? I’m pretty sure she’s still the same age she was at the beginning.
No time jump. As you say, they shot seasons 1-2 at the same time, and now two years have passed before they’ll be shooting season 3, so Keen will have gone from 13 to 15. But she can easily still play the same age, just like Millie Bobbie Brown, who aged about the same from the first season of Stranger Things until the 4th, but there isn’t a four year time difference between the first and fourth seasons. This isn’t a 9 year production like Game of Thrones was.
I knew she was in her teens, but I looked up her up and found out her real life dad is now the head of the Magisterium, William Keen.
Oh, I didn’t know that! That’s cool! So she has her dad with her on set. Even if they don’t share many scenes – or probably any at all in season 2.
Yeah, I had no clue.
Interestingly, he studied at Oxford University. :)But then married in Spain, and both him and his wife, Dafne’s mom, are very active in the theatre scene, managing venues and directing plays. He directed Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet in Spanish. His two sisters, Dafne’s aunts, are both poets.I wonder if he was cast after Dafne, or if Dafne auditioned for this show because her dad was already in.
Man, Ruth Wilson has a magnetic quality. Loved the close-ups of her face. She looked fab in that red outfit.Not on-topic and a political rant no one wants to hear, but the “only person can save the world” narrative doesn’t really play right now, if it ever did much at all. I’d like a fantasy series—or a superhero series—where it’s a collective, a group of people, a community or nation, who are the great hope and prophecy of saving the world. I couldn’t help but think of tech ads that disingenuously extol the creativity and power of you. The concept in fiction of the lone hero destined for greatness is much, much older, but I wish there were more genre fare about groups instead of a special single person.The writers had Will find Lyra’s note much too slowly.
I think they are already subverting that by the fact she has Will as a major protagonist as well. I think it’s more that she’s a lynchpin but not a sole savior. She’s the final piece that completes the puzzle. She’s obviously not doing all this on her own, she earned the support of the bears, her mother and father have both helped her as has Lee and the Witches. She’s a critical part, but not the whole machine.
Yes, this is the perennial weakness of science fiction and fantasy. The only counterexamples I can think of off the top of my head are Foundation and Empire and The Last Jedi.
There never needs to be an excuse to screen Paddington, but the scene they were watching is the one where he steps into a new world, so that was clearly done for metaphorical significance.
Lyra on popcorn: “It’s disgusting. It tastes like wood shavings.
“Then stop eating it.”
“I can’t!” These are the moments that are making this part of the plot worth it. Lyra in The City.
I agree about Lin-Manuel though. I can’t square his investment in the girl with what little we’ve seen of their relationship, and how he comes off as a character. Imagine if Lee was played by someone like Jonathan Banks (Breaking Bad/Better Call Saul’s Mike). Rather than being driven from emotional place, I think he should just be tasked. He’s endeared to us then by his codes, his age, and his dedication to the job, without cheap excuses.
In the world of professional wrestling, they have daemons too!
I agree about Lin-Manuel though. I can’t square his investment in the girl with what little we’ve seen of their relationship, and how he comes off as a character. Imagine if Lee was played by someone like Jonathan Banks (Breaking Bad/Better Call Saul’s Mike). Rather than being driven from emotional place, I think he should just be tasked. He’s endeared to us then by his codes, his age, and his dedication to the job, without cheap excuses.That image is hilarious, and there are few people on the planet I could think of as worse to cast as Lee Scoresby. Maybe James Corden. I would’ve settled for Dame Judi Dench in drag, would’ve been a better choice than a Theatre Kid from New York. Miranda was nothing but stuntcasting, done at the peak of the Hamilton-mania that gripped the sorts of upper-middle class peoples that tend to make up the bulk of cultural institutions. In the books, Lee is seen, essentially, as a good, honourable man, who despised violence, which is why I found that fight they (unconvincingly) put the NY Theatre Kid in in the first episode so annoying. He helps Lyra because it’s his contract, and, later, the right thing to do. There’s no daddy issues whatsoever.
You almost sound like Sam Elliott could have been a good casting for Lee!
Ya know, you might have something there…Seriously, he was a perfect Scoresby. Got the right amount of calm, gentle reserve mixed with mesquite-smoked grizzledness. If they wanted someone who could still do “funny” while being actually, y’know, Texan, Woody Harrelson. Brolin would’ve been a great choice, too.
Love the popcorn dialogue. And I generally really liked this epsiode, thinking the writing and pacing was unusually good by the standards of the series. But I have to disagree about the use of Paddington. If there was any metaphorical significance I have no idea what it was!
Much as
love the Paddington films, I think the choice of film shows a shallow
reference pool for the adaptors: at a time where they could be bringing
out all sorts of useful and illuminating (not to mention, badly needed) notes by their choice of film
(e.g. the use of Shane in Logan) they have a meaningless ‘yay Framestore’ bit that distracts instead of informs.I
think the intention, as you say, was that it was… a thing… that these two clips
it looks a. like Paddington is Mr. Brown’s daemons and b. Paddington is
crossing into another world. But it has nothing to say about that and
it’s all too lingered on to just register as a cute, brief gag. It’s like ‘save Martha’: the idea that pointing out that ‘these two things vaguely match in this one minor, superficial detail, that’ll automatically Mean Something if we put it on screen’.If I didn’t already feel this series showed such scant evidence for real intelligent curiosity and imagination, and such a shallow relationship with the text, I guess I’d be more forgiving and accept that the effects/animation house have worked damn hard on this series and are allowed to give themselves a shout-out. As it is, I wasn’t able to enjoy the moment much because it felt like it summed up so much
about this adaptation.
I can’t square his investment in the girl with what little we’ve seen of their relationshipYeah, I don’t get Myles talking about Lyra seeing Lee as a father figure. They’ve basically been together for five minutes. Not to mention, he’s never been very paternal with her (even factoring the very low bar set by Asriel). At most, he’s a big brother, or a cool uncle.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! Oh, lord. This pic is the funniest thing I’ve seen today. “Theatre Kids Plays Indiana Jones”.
The question is are we going to get Mary Malone meeting the mulefa in season 3? Are how will they do it?
I am sure that if they can depict believable daemons they can depict mulefa. I just hope they don’t look silly.
The mulefa bring about one of the most hateful beats in Boreal’s character. I hope they keep that in.
Dang, I was hoping there would be a picture at the link. (Spoilers for one of the weirdest creatures from the Amber Spyglass)
Where is this from? Pretty close to how I imagined them, though I had them as more browny/orange and a little shorter and fatter.
I just got it from Google Images, but it’s from a deviantArt page: https://www.deviantart.com/jamesmargerum/art/Mulefa-from-The-Amber-Spyglass-75011691
It took me a bit of time time to get into it the first season but I’m really enjoying this show. The articulation with “our” world makes a lot more sense as well. like the parallel they make between “magic” and real physics (even if it’s far fetched)
After this, writer’s painful “Why are they treating complicated human beings as complicated human beings, I don’t like it, the bad guys must be bad and only bad, maybe I should try and insinuate false things about this show” stuff last week, it was actually kind of interesting to come back and read this week’s recap more critically. Sure enough, he spends a long section pretending that knowing how confrontations are set up is an insight, then a lot about how it’s nice that Coulter is given more depth. But surely giving people more depth is a bad thing we should be suspicious of, as per last week’s recap? Adorable.
I’m with you on how changing Lee’s age has really taken the legs out from under his character. I don’t think the film did anything great with Lee, but Sam Elliott’s casting brings an automatic grandfatherly energy which covers a lot of ground. Personally I think an adaptation could successfully go with a young version of Lee. Northern Lights in particular is a story with a loooot of old men in it and I don’t object to changing that up for different energies where there’s an alternate angle to take. I can imagine a properly young Lee working – the pathos in a young man having the attitudes of a veteran. That thing of how in places/jobs with a high attrition rate (the trenches, early aviation etc), you’re an old man if you’re 30, both because few survive very long and also because you’re been prematurely aged by what you’ve seen. I think the – or a – problem with LMM’s casting is that he’s neither old OR really young and whatever end of the spectrum you place Lee at, age does need to be part of his story for it to work.
I think the other thing that’s fundamental to Lee’s working in the book/s is how damn competetent he is. He’s an old-school adventure hero. This adaptation tends to treat everything Pullman wrote with po-faced solemnity but HDM as books also embrace schlocky pulp adventure. We enjoy and route for characters who we see being clever and good at what they do. This Lee keeps getting played as kiiiind of feeble. That doesn’t work great when you’re trying to play him as a story player. His motivation is to try and help protect Lyra but all I keep seeing is how he can’t protect himself.
1. As for the people who died in the bombing. I imagine it was mostly children of the witches, and any witches who tried to protect them instead of running off. 2. It’s been quite some time since I’ve read the books, so I don’t remember if this was addressed, but is there a lot of bigotry over the type of daemons people have? I would have a hard time trusting the bartender with a wicked looking spider daemon. Is this just part of translating for the screen, or visual sort hand? All the magisterium have creepy crawler daemons. Most soldiers have attack dogs or hawks.
I guess im one of the few that doesnt quite get all the hate towards Lin. Yeah he’s a theatre guy but to me to translate to TV he’s a great choice. Booker reader of all 3