His Dark Materials buckles under the weight of its missing daemons (experts)
TV Reviews His Dark Materials
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.
When evaluating an adaptation, it’s impossible not to “read ahead” a bit as you’re watching. The very function of these “experts” reviews is to think about the long-term ramifications of changes made by the television version of this story, even if the nature of episodic criticism means that I’m also evaluating each individual episode as a piece of television drama.
Over the past few weeks, the tension between those elements of His Dark Materials has shown a bit. I would—and did!—argue that the past couple of episodes have essentially worked as pieces of television drama, but in the comments there was a significant conversation about the way choices made would impact future developments, and it’s hard to disagree in light of “The Daemon-Cages.” It’s a pivotal moment in the conflict of the season, but one which is rendered inscrutable by a season-wide struggle to depict the human-daemon relationship in a legible way. As a book reader, our brains will subconsciously fill in potential gaps in the story logic being presented, and the show has been “close enough” to getting it right in the big moments in the past few episodes that it’s been able to skate by. But in the case of this episode, the show’s attempts to generate tension and consequence come routinely undone by the cumulative effect of daemons being inconsistently and generally poorly depicted.
I understand that CGI is expensive. It’s clear in this episode alone that the budget really wasn’t enough to depict this show at its proper scale: just look at how the battle at Bolvangar is reimagined in close quarters, and the entire group of witches is trimmed down to just Serafina Pekkala. And so if the show is going to exist at all, then there needs to be sacrifices, and so it makes sense that there isn’t going to be enough money to give every single character a clearly depicted daemon. It’s understandable that shots will often be framed in a way that cuts out the daemons below, and that not every character will have a fully developed daemon of their own.
However, it’s unfortunate that none of the producers seemed to be aware of the problem this would create when they got to Bolvangar. It’s a sequence that depends heavily on understanding the uncanniness of a person without a daemon in this world: it’s about Lyra’s fear of losing a part of herself, and her fear for the other children who could face this fate. But despite being mostly fine with the adjustments to Billy Costa’s fate in last week’s episode, the second Lyra joins the other children in Bolvanga’s cafeteria I realized the whole piece wasn’t going to work. Only a handful of children have daemons, and none of them have any personality or dialogue with their humans. Outside of the poor girl selected to be separated as soon as Lyra arrives, none of the subsequent kids that are introduced are given daemons with any kind of identity. And so when Lyra breaks the news that the kids who disappear are being separated from their daemons, the actual meaning of that is lost because they might as well all be separated from their daemons anyway.
Now, Jack Thorne’s solution to this is to focus on the effect of the procedure on the children themselves. In other words, the threat is not the loss of the daemon and its connection, but rather the loss of awareness of your surroundings, becoming almost zombie-like. We see this with the Bolvangar assistants whose daemons were stripped away to ensure their pliability, and the show veers away from the books to suggest that the children themselves are being kept in Bolvangar along with their daemons, trapped in a separate dormitory and then eventually rescued by the Gyptians. The show’s argument is that seeing these consequences of intercision—beginning with Billy Costa, of course—provides enough of a sense of danger and concern to fuel the episode’s tension. But just because the audience knows that something bad could happen doesn’t mean they truly understand the reasons it’s bad, and those reasons are what make the daemons such a powerful part of this story. Sure, “The Daemon-Cages” articulates that Lyra and these children are in danger, but the very specific idea of separating from your daemon needed to be understood on a deeper level than what’s depicted here.
And there were numerous opportunities to explore it. There’s a brief scene of Pan and Roger’s daemona conversing while their respective humans pretend not to know each other, but why not depict a whisper network of daemons, all spreading the word about the coming threat? Why is that the show never depicts other characters conversing with their daemons, so that they don’t just seem like pets to everyone but Lyra, Serafina, and Lee? Why not give us at LEAST a couple of closeups of daemon-on-daemon fights in the midst of the battle at Bolvangar, instead of just occasionally throwing in a bird flying through the air as though that’s the same thing? When literally no one but Lyra is seen having a close relationship with her daemon, and even that relationship is consistently underplayed (where was Pan during her encounter with Mrs. Coulter?), the very idea of a daemon is mostly irrelevant at the very moment when it was supposed to become absolutely pivotal. Would an average viewer even notice that the Bolvangar assistants don’t have daemons, when so few characters seem to have them?
Lyra’s conversation with Mrs. Coulter is the most the show has actively talked about what daemons represent, but it felt trivializing to me. Marisa describes daemons as “wonderful companions and friends to you when you’re young,” but asserts that they “bring all sorts of troublesome thoughts and feelings.” It’s an effort to position the daemon as the source of dust, but the whole point of the story is that Lyra instinctively knows this isn’t true. She knows that the daemon is part of her soul, and that their connection is not defined by sin but rather something far more profound than that, but do we as the audience know that? As Mrs. Coulter makes her argument for intercision as a concept, the show has failed to provide an alternative view of daemons to counter it, beyond simply the fact that we know taking away daemons turns kids into zombies and we instinctively don’t want that to happen. That’s enough to create conflict, yes, but it’s a shallower conflict than the one depicted in the books, and could have been avoided if they had done more work building the human-daemon connection in previous episodes. I understand that budget constraints might have forced their hand, but the fact it wasn’t a priority is disheartening, and fundamentally caught up with the show in this hour.
Mrs. Coulter is at the heart of the episode’s other change, which continues the effort to move a significant part of her character development forward. In the books at this stage, I would argue we’re given no reason to trust her, or believe that she could be “redeemed” in any significant way. And while she’s still the antagonist here, the episode goes out of its way to suggest that she is simply caught up in the doctrine of the church and her own shame over her affair with Lord Asriel, and experiences regret about what went down at Bolvangar when she (weirdly) eavesdrops on the reunion of the Gyptians with the kidnapped children. It’s a choice that I’m struggling with a bit: I understand where it’s coming from, but I dislike the idea that a non-reader would never question whether Marisa would save Lyra from the intercision at this stage in the story. And the fact that she slinks away without the sense that her position on this might have changed now that Lyra tricked her and destroyed her entire operation feels like a missed opportunity to reintroduce a sense of danger to a relationship that feels stripped of it.
As always, though, it’s important to remember that only book readers experience this as a “stripping” of meaning: non-readers wouldn’t know the show is reframing the effects of intercision, or softening Mrs. Coulter’s edges. However, while I can’t say for certain and a glimpse of the Newbies review suggests I may be mistaken, “The Daemon-Cages” feels like the point where the cumulative impact of the show’s various struggles to articulate the central human-daemon relationship turned into something even a non-reader would recognize as being “off,” and takes what was once a climactic moment and turns it into just another stop on Lyra’s journey.
Stray observations
- Jack Thorne really loves using Serafina and her daemon to lay out exposition, and her speech to Lee is extremely on-the-nose about his new role as Lyra’s protector. The turn to “love” in there rankled me a bit for reasons I’ll get into below, but the cliff ghasts interrupted things, so we’ll explore Lee’s position in this more as it progresses.
- There’s no actual story value to cutting to Will beyond reminding us that he exists, but thematically the ability to cut from Lyra directly to Will—each in bed reflecting on their relationship to their parents—does continue to draw a line between them that will prove important moving forward.
- I liked the exterior production design on Bolvangar better than the interiors, which just felt like three different hallways from different angles, and played out too much like a stealth video game level with the guards up above for me to get a real sense of the entire facility.
- Speaking of: I liked the design of the Intercision chamber for the shot of Coulter above Lyra, glass between them, but I didn’t love that the facility as a whole remained standing, and that the entire place wasn’t destroyed. (It also made no sense to me why Lyra didn’t immediately start running as soon as it started exploding?)
- Love how Farder Coram is all “poor things, they can’t even speak anymore” about the intercised daemons when we have literally never heard 99% of daemons speak.
- Another week, another unsatisfying neck snap—they at least kept this one offscreen, but I still think it would have been way more satisfying if Ma Costa had stabbed that Tartar, and I don’t know what kind of content note is pushing them to these neck twists.
- Okay, obviously Billy Costa’s father is of African descent given that Ma Costa is a very pale-skinned white woman, but are we meant to believe that Lord Faa or a member of Lord Faa’s famiy is related to Billy in some way? The way the show framed their relationship as romantic made me wonder if we’re meant to see him as Billy’s father, but it would be weird if the show never explicitly acknowledged this, and just in general I don’t know what the takeaway is supposed to be from that final Gyptian scene as they prepare to march home with the severed children.
- I have more issues with some of the acting choices from a direction standpoint—mostly related to Lyra, whose prodding of the workers at Bolvangar felt too aggressive and not playful/coy enough—but I did like Euros Lyn’s work on the staging of the cliff ghast sequence, which was a nice jolt of horror I’d have gladly skipped in favor of more daemons earlier in the episode.
- Selected All Caps observations from my notes: HOW THE HELL IS THERE ONLY ONE DAEMON. WHERE IS HIS DAEMON. WHERE IS HER DAEMON. SO MANY BIRD DAEMONS. WHERE IS HIS DAEMON. WHERE IS IT. THERE is his daemon. WHERE WAS PAN DURING ALL OF THAT.
Through The Amber Spyglass (Warning: Explicit book spoilers)
So, two notes here. First and foremost, my biggest issues with The Amber Spyglass boil down to my feeling that its on-the-nose pivot to being about “love” doesn’t feel earned, so hearing Lee throw out the word during his chat with Serafina got my back up a bit. I’ll admit it worked better on my recent reread than it did when I was in college and even more jaded than I am now, but back then it really soured me on the thematics of this story, and it’s why I’m worried that the show will REALLY lean into love both for its efficiency and because it lets them sidestep the religious side of things more easily.
Secondly, though, I think it’s a shame that we lost the scene of Lyra letting all of the daemons loose from their cages and setting them free. Not only was it a pivotal scene for establishing the burden on the daemons as well as the humans involved in the intercision process, but it also offered a productive parallel to Lyra’s role in freeing the ghosts in The Amber Spyglass. I would hate to think that the scene doesn’t exist solely because they didn’t have enough money (or the right priorities) to depict it, but it just isn’t the same for the Gyptians to be carrying the daemons back south with them. That was Lyra’s moment!
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Can NOT wait for next week’s jaw dropping moment. 😀
Also lol remember when the movie ended with the breakout? God I hate New Line soooo much.
The worst part is they actually filmed the book ending but didn’t release it in the film. It’s bonus material for the video game and apparently out on YouTube.
Yup. Those cowards
It’s a great moment in studio-cowardice. You have to feel sorry for Chris Weitz who took on so much, compromised to get to make the movie, and then was taken off the project a couple of months before its release because New Line got even more nervous.
You also have to love the creatively bankrupt way the executives thought they could ‘fix’ the movie, add some old British actors to spell out the movie’s themes and dub in Ian McKellen’s voice. They got rid of legendary editor Anne Coates and replaced her with a bunch of hired hands to recut the whole thing.
This episode was incredibly frustrating for lack of daemons and they had SO. MANY. OPPORTUNITIES. to paint the human/daemon connection correctly. Show Pan jumping into Lyra’s arms and the two of them sobbing the moment the chamber is opened? Nah, just have Lyra stand vaguely defiantly looking at Mrs. Coulter. Have Lyra (or shit, even Roger!!! I would have taken that as payment for his very lame speech.) free the children’s daemons and watch as they desperately rush towards each other as fast as they can? Nah, just free the zombie kids who aren’t at all troubled about leaving their daemons behind apparently. This has implications beyond TAS even… In TSC, we see people without daemons and daemons without humans who, while they may not feel whole themselves, are still characters in their own right, not soulless husks of people. The people in this rendering of the universe don’t even seem to care about their daemons as much as I care about my dog like??! At least give me dog levels of companionship FFS.
But in The Secret Commonwealth they haven’t been hacked apart, they’ve just left. The connection that intercision severed was still there for the separated daemons because separation was fundamentally different. It was more like what the witches did at the Tungusk crater, allowing the daemon to be much greater distances away. Even the daemon sellers made it clear that it was just separating and that the daemons were still connected to their other halves and just pretending the connection to their new owner, unlike intercision where there was no connection left between them at all. And the priest’s daemon, I think it was, told Lyra how unnatural other daemons could tell the attachment was.
It’s been a while since I’ve read TGC but don’t the people at Bolvanger say the initial intercession process was just ripping kids and daemons apart physically? That’s similar to what Lyra/the witches go through (albeit probably a lot more traumatic). And Tony wasn’t a zombie when she found him in the books, like he was definitely emotionally injured but I just wonder what would have happened had he been reunited with Ratter, which was all he could think about.
Yes, but at the point where Lyra is in peril, they had moved past that to cutting the daemon away entirely, severing the connection rather than just physically separating them. That was why the machine was so devastating. Even the forceable separation often killed people, as the discussion of the Tajik victims that the daemon sellers often used to supply their market showed. That’s what really separated intercession at the time of TGC from simple separation; Mrs Coulter’s project had found a way to go a step beyond mere separation.
The longer run time from having a season of TV
does have the only-obvious-in-hindsight problem of making daemons
uneconomic. We’re probably going to end up with more Pan screen time and lines than in the movie, but it’s so spread out it seems like any newbie would be thinking of them more like magical pets than actual Christian-cosmology souls.
I do think giving her more time has made Mrs. Coulter more interesting (maybe it’s just because I haven’t read it since I was much younger, but she seems more “I never thought the Leopards Eating Faces Party would eat MY face” in the book, while in the TV show I’m getting a sense of “this illegitimate child ruined my career and I’ve had to claw my way back through the ugliest projects available, but now I can’t help my maternal instincts”).
it seems like any newbie would be thinking of them more like magical pets than actual Christian-cosmology souls.This is what was happening early on with some friends of mine who are watching but have never read the books. I’ve had to explain the much deeper connection involved because the show has done fuck all to make it abundantly clear what a daemon is to its human, and vice versa. I can’t believe this very fundamental aspect of this story is the one they’ve jacked up the worst.
Okay so, witches can fly around like Dementors and Death Eaters now?Beyond that, I agree wholeheartedly – this is really the episode where the lack of proper storytelling regarding the daemons in this show really came to a head. Last episode’s disappointing treatment of finding the Ratter-less boy in the hut started to really show the consequences, but this finished it.I remember when I first read this book when I was a teen, I experienced real fright when I realized they were going to cut Pan away from her. I remember her fighting and crying because her beloved Pan was separated from her with the blade between them and the impending horror struck me forcefully.What happened in the show? She spends the whole time facing away from her daemon (who was nowhere to be found for more than half the episode) and yelling about being Mrs Coulter’s daughter. Then when she gets out, she just steps out and Pan follows along behind her like a good little fox. Where was the immense relief, the joy at being together again?Apparently touching someone’s daemon knocks them to the ground cold?Also, (It also made no sense to me why Lyra didn’t immediately start running as soon as it started exploding?)Thank you! Why was she standing there frozen, twice? So bizarre.I have to give it to Ruth Wilson, she is killing it, even if the character they’ve given her is not true to the books.
Replying to myself to add – what was up with the feral screaming on both ends of the door when Lyra escaped from Mrs Coulter? Why.
I think that moment could have been great, but it just wasn’t earned by the preceding scene or relationship generally. Lyra and Mrs. Coulter have not reached that pitch. The preceding conversation didn’t play on a sense of surpressd rage on either side. The show just forces them there. I went to see this episode at a review screening (amongst an audience of people who were very positive on the series) and this moment just got a collective titter.
She seems to be her mother’s daughter after all.
My roommate and I both spontaneously laughed uproariously at the screaming. Was it intentionally humorous? Or did they mean it sincerely?
Coulter is definitely one notch below raging all the fucking time. I thought she was gonna go girzzly and tear Benjamin to pieces before he threw himself down the elevator shaft. She definitely aspires to be better than her reptilian brain but the primal rage & anger are too much. Can’t say she deserves a swell Mother’s Day card this year.
There’s some crazy shit going on with Mrs. C and her monkey friend. Even her physicality can become simian, as when she drops onto the desk from the air duct. Would love to know the deal.
and apparently witches have super speed
As I recall in the books, at some point Serafina sees another witch captured, and she takes everyone out by slowing time the hell down while she acts at normal speed. I reckon that would look like super speed.
I have to agree with you regarding the intercision sequence. In the books, that was one of the few scenes I’ve ever read that made me squirm in my seat with how tense it was. In the show they never really sold what was happening.
Also, I get that for budgetary reasons they can’t fully flesh out every single character’s daemon but it seems that this should have been taken into a bit more consideration during the initial production of the show. I guess it’s harder to quantify how linked a human a daemon are by showing it onscreen rather than being able to read the thoughts in Lyra’s head. Again though, this is something that could have been accounted and planned for and maybe allotted more time.
I’m a bit concerned with the show as a whole based on where we are versus how much more story we have left. IIRC, the show is two seasons and then done. We’re nearing the end of book one and the end of season one and we’ve got 2/3 of the story to go. I’m not jumping ship, but I’ve still got a bad taste in my mouth from how rushed the final GoT season was. At least here they have a full set of source material available, with an actual ending. An ending that, to me at least, was very bitter but also the only real way it could have gone.
Again I’m laying the blame squarely on producer Jane Tranter’s shoulders, who seems not to ever have read the source material nor even seen the previous movie.
I’m with you on that, actually. I went to the preview screen of this episode which was followed by a Q&A with Trantor, the other EP Dan McCulloch, Jack Thorne, head of prouction design Joel Collins and the head of VFX o/b/o Framestore Russell Dodgson.I asked a qustion about how reflexive they’d felt re. previous adaptations – specifically the move and the play, the two pretty major ones. They were all pretty firm on the point that they ignored them. Even Framestore guy and Framestore WORKED on the film.
They talked about not being critical of any previous adaption and Thorne said he’d read the play script and was a big fan of Nicholas Wright… but they didn’t have much else to ay.
And other fans asked about how they tackled the themes of the book, how they decided what to pull out from the rich mix etc. One person asked had they looked to the material that helped inspire the books, Milton and Blake?And again there was an almost defensive response (and bear in mind these were not people being critical or challenging but questions in tones of admiring interest) that ‘they’d just gone back to the books’. That line cam especially from Trantor.
And that is a smoking gun of lack of imagination to me. What they clearly regard as a virtue and a fidelity of approach I think just means they’ve engaged in a very surface-level way. Like, no, you don’t have to read Paradise Lost to get HDM. And sometimes is can be a mis-step to react too hard to a previous adaptation. But that instinct of ‘ignore everything else, our vision is pure’ can present so many pitfalls.For one things I think there are a BUNCH of things taken from previous adaptations, I guess unconsciously. Trantor and co might imagine themselves to be working from first principles but I can see the influence of the movie everywhere from costume design to plot changes (both play and movie did the Tony Makarios/Billy Costa swap). So imagining your vision unfettered from influence can just be a way to make sure you’re ONLY reactive, or dull, or unimatinative… urgh, anyway, I only really meant to say I agree and from my eperience of seeing this team in conversation the stink of this adaptation’s dull literalness and oversights* comes off Trantor the most.*I don’t actually hate the seires, I am able to enjoy it for the pleasures it offers safe in the knowledge I already HAVE a great perfect version of the story available so if I sound vitriolic it’s more cheerful contempt.
Yeah, if the show has an overriding feeling it’s that this is a job for the people in charge, and not exactly a passion project. There’s an element of ‘well this is good enough’ that comes through the direction, the visuals, music, everything.
There was an article on Slate the other week about the difficulties of adaptations and it noted that the trouble with His Dark Materials is that Pullman’s narration is the books’ greatest strength and the one thing that’s impossible to adapt. But I feel that’s where a great director steps in, someone with a distinct voice, style and perspective, can give a project a focus that this series does not have.
The movie was chopped to death after the studio fired the director, but Weitz despite his inexperience did actually have a vision.
Yes! I do wish that The Golden Comapss had gotten a director’s cut release or at least that the missing scenes – being that they were 90% complete with VFX and everything – had been included on the DVD release, because I do think there’s a good adaptation in there. Most of what tipped TGC into being firmly in the realms of ‘not good’ was structural, the last-minute hacking apart that chopped off the ending and reordered the Svalbard/Bolvangar parts. A lot of it’s individual moments work really rather well – the Silver Guillotine scene being the most pertinent example.
I mean, it’s not like it would become my ideal adaptations or anything. The daemon stroytelling there is better than in the series but still lacking (I seriously don’t understand why daemons are such a problem when they ought to be a gift to any screenwriter, and were literally invented to serve a storytelling purpose in the first place). The pacing and reconfiguring of events is a little TOO neat and and it leaves no room in the gaps for the imagination to take seed etc. But I’ve never been totally down on TGC and it’s got some nice bits of writing in it, and perhaps because it no longer has to bear the weight of being THE adaptation, it’s suddenly a lot more possible to appreciate what it did do well or interestingly.I’ll try to find that Slate article, sounds interesting. They certainly make a good point about the narration. I’ve actually been writing a series on how Pullman establishes daemons in the novel. It’s a bit sprawling at present and after all five sections are out I’ll look at taming it and trimming off some of the more tangential points. But the first two parts are here for anyone interested.
https://www.kathrynrosamiller.com/post/daemons-in-his-dark-materials
https://www.kathrynrosamiller.com/post/daemons-ins-his-dark-materials-pt-ii
As far as I remember Weitz was asked about it and said that there’s no chance there will be a director’s cut, because the whole ending was never finished. It would have involved a lot of effects, recording more of the score, etc.
It would have been a better film, but probably still not a great one (the design was too whimsical and fantastical for my taste).
Started reading what you blogged, and the whole thing of Pullman drawing on renaissance art is fascinating!
(also hello fellow illustrator:)
Ooh thank you very much! We illustrators know what we’re talking about 😀 (actually I do find to fend fellow illustrators thoughtful and analytical – I wonder if it’s because we all tend to listen to a lot of audiobooks, podcasts etc to babysit our verbal brain while we get on with visual work?) I’ll hopefully get a third part up into some kind of order and up this week.Ahhh I must have misremembered about the movie. I remembered some shots were done and even included in the tie-in game, and some good soul on Youtube cobbled them together into a kind of alternate ending. But I guess it would have been pretty nuts for Ne Line to order cut half an hour of vastly expensive, completed VFX work.And yes – totally with you on the whimsical, magical aesthetic, though I find more of place in my heart for it now we have a more grounded version to balance it out.
Thank you for that insight. It seems to confirm my instincts on Trantor. With regrets I might add. This has/had so much potential.
I have given up on this show. It becomes more clear to me each week that they have not read the books
This seems like such a major fumble, it’s really turning me off watching the show (eventually. stupid australian tv). I’ve never cried harder over anything than Lyra leaving Pan behind to go into the world of the dead. The physical and emotional pain of that scene is so palpable I get choked up just thinking about it. God, and that line at the end about the atoms of Lee’s being floating off to find the atoms of Hester is pretty much the most beautiful thing ever. What even is this story without the human-daemon connection?
“I’ve never cried harder over anything than Lyra leaving Pan behind to go into the world of the dead.” Ooooooh, boy, just wait until you read The Secret Commonwealth.
This legit put the fear of god into me. Better start steeling myself now.
I’m so disenchanted with their adaptation of this book I didn’t even think about how they will not do the scene in the world of the dead justice. It’s so effectively heart wrenching when she has to leave Pan behind. They’re setting it all up for failure now.
They really seem to be dropping the ball on so many important parts of Lyra’s characterisation. If she’s not the one opening the daemon cages, how do you draw the parallel to her releasing the spirits later? Her characterisation and arc are so perfectly calibrated, I don’t get why they’d want to mess around with it.
Honestly I hope they just skip the world of the dead altogether at this point and do something else instead.
To be honest, after last weeks episode, the weak daemon-human relationship on the show felt so irreparable that I was really wasn’t as upset about that aspect after this episode because I didn’t expect anything more from it, thought I completely agree with everything you’ve written above. Any critiques on lack of daemons will most likely be played off as “budgetary” and “not wanting to crowd the screen” though these are not great excuses for their overall lack of importance. What I’m more confused about are changes they made in the sequencing that simply… had no clear reason for being made. It’s like they took an already exciting section of the book, altered it for no apparent reason only to make it…. less thrilling? I loved the sequence of Lyra crawling up in the vents to spy on Mrs Coulter’s meeting, where we get an update on Lord Asriel and they mention he discovered the alloy that allows the separation (might be important), Mrs C leaves to go to bed, Lyra falls through the ceiling, and she’s thrown in the intercision machine as a punishment basically. It’s much more exciting, cruel on the part of the doctors, and there’s more panic involved because we genuinely don’t think Mrs Coulter will save her because she isn’t even aware they’re running the experiment. It’s frustrating as a book reader because while yes, the episode captured the sense of horror in Bolvangar, it had the potential to be even better. I only point out this sequence because there wasn’t any good reason to change it. They swapped Lyra spying in the ceiling vents for her just holding herself up under a bed to hide, which was… fine, and then had Marisa climb through the vents instead. (Cool? We’ve already seen her fighting so we know she’s physical. Why even bother showing her getting out if she isn’t going to fight for Lyra till the bitter end like in the book?) While other issues in the episode were more pressing (DAEMONS!!, why has Serafina turned into the Flash and what does that mean for the witches later on, etc), these plot changes were odd and makes me question the writers/producers judgement.
Quick question, as I kept nodding off towards the end of the show: Did Lyra saturate the air with flour to help exacerbate the explosion she set off, as in the books? Because they foreshadowed that when she was learning to cook with Ma Costa in an earlier episode.
This part
of the books is so straightforward, it should be easy to adapt. The movie
actually did a great job, and I even forgave them skipping the freeing of the
daemons. The show … I don’t know what the hell Jack Thorne is doing. It was so
hard to feel any impact for what was about to happen to Lyra when we barely
ever see Pan at all. I really felt that moment in the book and in the movie.
Here, it is completely lost because instead of Lyra’s despair being focused on
Pan, she’s shouting for Mrs. Coulter to save her, which is smart, but it almost
made me forget Pan was there. I also wasn’t
on board with Roger just getting the kids to flee with a speech, because I can’t
understand how much of a conscience these kids are supposed to have after the
separation on the show. In the books, they are supposed to be like zombis, so
they should have been docile and blindly obedient, no? Roger getting them to
make a choice to save themselves doesn’t make sense. They shouldn’t be thinking
for themselves ever again.
Don’t get me
started on Serafina being super fast. Barf. So lazy.
Yeah, I’ve only watched the first episode of the series so far, and agree with all the usual complaints about the movie, but fair is fair: its intercision was suitably and legitimately horrifying. If this show can’t even do that right… I wonder if I should even bother with it.
I completely forgot the show was even on last night. I watched a public television documentary instead, with nary a twitch to indicate there was something else I had been intending to see. That’s how bad a job this series is doing. And it shouldn’t be. Mrs Coulter is being played absolutely stunningly by Wilson, the kid that plays Will is damned near perfect, the expanded role for Lord Boreal works for me, and even though they’ve taken a different tack with Scorseby, I find myself eager to see what Miranda might do with him. But I can’t even say that the show slipped my mind, because that would mean it had occurred to me at some point in the day to watch it, and it just hadn’t.
The movie really nailed Lyra’s and Pan’s panic and Mrs. Coulter’s horror. I knew she would be fine, but I still felt that scene, and the weight of it also informs how bad what Asriel does at the end of the book is. I think the show’s take just didn’t have much of an emotional punch and that’s a big a one to screw up.
The thing is that the book is so solid that you can’t really go wrong with a straightforward adaptation. You can skip a few detours like mrs Coulter taking Lyra away after Bolvangar before she gets on Lee’s balloon, but there’s nothing a writer needs to ‘fix’.
Pretty much every change the show has made from the books has lessened the intended impact of those story beats.
The movie for all its flaws (most of which can be traced back to the studio getting nervous), knew that the emotional core was that human daemon connection. Hell, they even fired the director who wanted to make the movie about Lyra finding a family.
Serafina’s super powers were distracting, and unnecessary. It would have been cheaper to just rain down a bunch of arrows from the sky and say that they were from the witches who came to help.
I think some of the characters are pretty talkative, so I would understand if they trimmed some of the book for time’s sake. I also understand that effects are expensive, so it would have been reasonable for example if they cut the cliffghasts to save money for daemons, and had Lyra falling out of the balloon for some other reason. I also don’t mind when they condense characters, like Tony and Billy, to save time, but then they introduce all those Church characters and add a bunch of scenes that don’t add much to the story, so I’m not sure they are that worried about juggling too many balls. I would much prefer your solution for the witches dilemma, for example, and I wish Lyra had had more of a role in the fight, since in the books she breaks the kids fully out and gets them to blind the tartars, but here she spends a lot of the time just running through Bolvangar. To me, that dimishes just how formidable Lyra was is in this book, so I think you’re right that these changes are lessening some of the impact of the story.
Serafina’s super powers were distracting, and unnecessary.I liked that sequence, though. It felt like, after all the talking about the witches, now you see what they can do, and why they’re crucial allies for the humans. On the other hand, Iorek did kind of nothing during the battle, mostly some growling offscreen. You didn’t get the sense they couldn’t win this battle without him.Also, the machine’s destruction involved some of the most embarrassing CGI they ever used, and Ma Costa’s neck snap was terribad. What’s with the neck snaps to begin with? This ain’t Conan the Barbarian.
Although I did enjoy this episode more than most there were still a lot of really frustrating parts. The daemons, of course, which the article covered sufficiently and which as this point me complaining about feels like beating a dead horse, but other things too. They couldn’t even keep their internal continuity straight about the effects and effectiveness of intercision – they talk about how they’re making progress but not yet there. They tell Coulter that the intercisioned (intercised?) kids might be responsive with time and refinement of the process. Yet then suddenly the nurse is a past victim of intercision who is responsive, if docile and distracted, and able to carry out tasks and commands not just follow zombie-like. (I use ‘suddenly’ loosely since it was heavily telegraphed even though it doesn’t make sense. It also wouldn’t have needed to be heavily telegraphed if they had clearly shown staff daemons other than the main doctor’s and thus the nurse not having one would have subtly stood out but there goes that dead horse again….)
To be completely fair, I think I remember that intercision affects adults and children differently, which is the difference in the nurses vs the children.
The problem is that if you’ve read all three books in this trilogy, you know that Lyra gets seperated from Pan later on and isn’t affected like these people. It’s further compounded by the Secret Commonwealth, which deals largely with separation and the longer-ranging effects of it and how people deal with it.
This! It’s a completely different effect doing this to per-pubecent children.
I very much appreciated the show portraying the guy who feels kind of bad about ripping kids’ souls away, but not enough to actually do anything about it, as not deserving a shred of mercy because of that. Nope, just a neck snap for you.
I actually enjoyed this one a bunch more than most. I think last week’s disappointment in how they handled Billy’s discovery finally let me get over being disappointed and I just enjoyed it for what it was or something. I definitely appreciated the pointed out issues, but I think because this episode actually had momentum for once that I just enjoyed the ride. My biggest gripe was Lyra and Pan not immediately clutching each other after the attempted intercision. I swear this show would have been so much better if they just established that Pan likes to hide in Lyra’s shirt pocket or something and included him as a disembodied voice for most of the time so we could keep his conversations with Lyra without sacrificing budget. I’m sure I would have rolled my eyes at something like that initially, but ignoring Pan so completely is not a good option either.
I’m loving the show, and people I know who haven’t read the books are too. Sure it can be a bit not great in places, and some of the changes whether for budget or not have been annoying, but they’ve set up the Subtle Knife pretty well and that’s where the story really gets good. Rereading the books growing up the Golden Compass was my least favorite, minus Svalbard, which we’re finally getting next week! The series maybe hasn’t been great, but it’s been consistently solid to good and I think a second season will finally see it reach its potential.Also, Mrs. Coulter’s reaction to hearing about Billy Costa’s death was fantastic
I think I’m alone, but I thought this week’s episode was so much better than last week’s in terms of daemons. Last week daemon absence hit me so forcefully I could barely watch, but this week it seemed like they at least tried to include more daemons than usual. (There was at least a scene of daemons talking to one another, Bridget’s daemon, the staff member’s daemon, at least some daemons present during the fight). I agree that I wish there were more, but the points about daemons seemed less flat this week to me. HUUUUUUGE agree about Lee’s talk in the balloon. It was a super quick pivot, nd felt very weird. But the corresponding scene in the book also fel t weird to me, bc Lee hasn’t known Lyra very long and says she’s like a daughter to him. All this to say, yes, it was weird and a huge leap, but it’s not jus Jack Thorne this time—it was also Pullman. I really wish they’d shown the kids break out of Bolvangar and try to run away into the miles and miles of ice, like they did in the books. To me, that moment demonstrated Lyra’s leadership.
I was definitely under the impression early in the season that Lord Faa was the father of Ma Costa’s kids. But then he wasn’t present during Billy’s death, so I just assumed I misread something. But then they’re heading south holding hands, and now I’m ¯\_(ツ)_/¯Also, I was SHOCKED when Lyra entered the common area, and there was ONE daemon shown amongst the 25+ kids. Fuck man, give some of them turtles and ferrets to hold if you don’t have the CGI budget. But do SOMETHING other than that.
Another week, another HDM review that it’s cathartically satisfying to read.It was in some ways the best ep so far, I thought, and at the sam time contained the most damning misses. I really liked the production design and how for once the show makers found their own creativity within budgetry limitation, transforming the battle scene into a confusing close-quarters raid… Even if the battle kind of whimpered out: having everyone still loitering in/near the building at the end kind of undermined the destruction and Roger’s heroism in getting the zombie kids out. It seemed like there was going to be plenty of time to go and get everyone anyway.And as for the daemons… this ep confirmed that the daemon story has been well and truly flubbed at every level in this series. It’s a profound failing.
It’s kind of impressive the showmanages to survive that loss as well as it does: there’s only a hint of the zombie child about this version of the story ith its daemons cut off..Obviously the crators believe in the show they made and they’re hardly obliged to cop to fan and critic… er….criticism of the daemon stuff. And they had massiv obstacles in realising this. It’s obviously hard to create something and easy to spot what’s wrong in someone else’s work. But the way they talk about the choices they made with daemons does make me feel like they just fundamentally did not understand the text very well. They didn’t understand how – or even that – Pullman used storytelling.
I went to a Q&A with the lead creatives and Thorne and exec producer Tranter that Pullman has advised them not to include the daemons where they weren’t important. Based on what I have read of Pullman’s thoughts elsewhere and my own reading I think they totally missed the point entirely of what he meant: that daemons shouldn’t be a picturesque, and that you can tell a story where budget only allows for limited screen time if you make sure the moments you’re paying attention to are the important ones.
Like you mention, Thorne has redirected the emotion o the big moments so far so what should be felt as existential horror etc around these daemon beats into things like the mother’s grief. And now focusing on the effect of the severing on the children themselves. And he might have got away with that as a choice -no where near as good as the book, of course, but an internally satidfying story – except the profound hopelessness of their state is undermined by Roger’s speech and their response to it. If they are still capable of hope and choice they haven’t lost what the show tries to land with us.I’m also, like you, thinking ahead to the end of the series, and I’m realising that it is another moment that is alraedy set up to be much less than it was in the book. In the book the emotions and drama of that scen hit hard because they are something new. HAving previously leaned on the existential horror of intercission, the ending blindsides us with using the mechanic again but this time the big shock is who it happens to and what that means to Lyra. This adaptation has already played that card, making the Lost Boy episode more about who the horror happened to than what the horror was. So by failing to reserve that beat for the end, this story kind of becomes a repetitive, manipulative story that just throws a dead friend at Lyra whenever it wants a dramatic peak.That’s in addition to the fact the Asriel’s achievement is inevitably going to feel fa more predictable and far less grand and climactic since othr worls and travel between them is already established.
“If they are still capable of hope and choice they haven’t lost what the show tries to land with us.”This was bugging the HELL out of me. There’s no coming back from losing your daemon, and the show sort of left that door open. Just another in the list of thematic faults here.
I wish they’d used puppets.
I love the books and hated the movie i had great hopes for the story being stretched out to a miniseries. I am sad and a bit disappointed. The total lack of daemons and the clearly skirting the anti-religion themes of the books is making me sad.
For the most part you can leave the church out of the show too, they barely figure into the story until Asriel reveals what it’s all about. But the show has gone out of its way to show all the villainous fathers and cardinals, while trying to keep them as secular as possible. It’s ridiculous.
This was the first episode where the glaring absence of daemons in most of the scenes really bothered me. I barely even noticed that the nurse didn’t have a daemon because half the time no one seems to have a daemon. And the show has absolutely not managed to show what the daemons are and why they are so important, which means the danger in this episode falls completely flat.
What are non-readers even making of this? If they aren’t (made) aware of the stakes, how can any of this be anything other than an unexciting mess?
I’m so thoroughly glad I never read these books, apparently that lack of knowledge makes this show much easier to enjoy, because this episode was amazing. The whole series has been amazing really, lack of apparently necessary background daemonds be damned.
Omg read the books. Read them.
I will, after I finish the series. At this point, it seems I’ll enjoy the series less if I read the books, so I’d like to wrap up the series then dive into the books. But they are for sure on my to buy list.
If the people making the show can’t afford to rent some damn dogs, or make a little effort on depicting daemons, what the hell are they going to do once they get to Amber Spyglass? There are multiple major characters and entire species that are going to be CGI.
I know I am just one of a million other fans screaming into the void about the same thing, but this was the first time this series really just made me frustrated. There have been other points where I’ve had a big meh reaction, but I’ve really tried to have an open mind and understand the limitations of the series.However, this episode really revealed how poorly they’ve done daemons, as everyone has said a million times over. I mean I was practically yelling this episode WHERE IS PAN WHERE IS PAN. When she’s taken to the splicer thing, knowing what will happen, yet isn’t holding her daemon? They just dont seem to get it.Which again worries me about the future. If they are failing to establish that here, and instead want to make it about human-human connection, it nullifies so many things that happen later. The abandonment of Pan going into the world of the dead, Will’s daemon and Pan and their separation from Lyra. The end where ALL LYRA HAS IS PAN. None of that will have any weight because they’ve switched away from it. And I get there needs to be changes to make it a succcessful show, but they are changing core thematic elements of the series, for the sake of what? Why? Budget? This series has really made me feel that maybe HDM is really unadapatable. Mainly because of technical/budgetary limitations on daemons and a fear of Christians and a fear of actually embracing the humanist, anti-religious themes that become central later on. This show is already shying away from them and I can’t imagine them being bold enough to actually have the death of the Authority. But who knows. *To be fair, the entire 3rd book seems like a nightmare to adapt. People the size of hands? Wheeled sentient antelope like people? Birds that are boats? Angels you can barely see? Ghosts? Specters fighting ghosts? The death of the Authority, the war in heaven? Most of these would not really work on screen.
I don’t even care that they made Serafina a ridiculous Death Eater ninja! And there was only one witch! But witches are superheroes! Those are the changes I can take. BUT THE MAIN CORE THEMATIC ELEMENTS THAT MAKE THE SERIES GREAT?
Co-sign on the daemon problem. But it’s a sign of a larger production problem. Large portions of the show look like they weren’t story boarded or blocked with effects in mind. If there’s a scene with effects, they shoot actors center frame and sort of fill in details (e.g., dump some birds above when there’s action). I can’t tell if the budget got expanded or slashed in post, but it seems like they didn’t trust the audience to care about anything but the actors (or the effects shop to do much of anything besides the bear). I understand they can’t afford to have the daemons and humans interact much, so Pan and Lyra don’t hug, but during the intercision they could have held a two-shot with Lyra and Pan pounding on the glass. Even the non-effects decisions are weird: Ma Costa snaps a neck in the middle of a bloodless YA battle and they decide to cut in the middle of a head turn? There’s not really any grasp of tone here and the production feels really soulless (zing).I will say I liked the N64 Goldeneye design for Bolvangar, and I thought they made good use of the cramped space to stage a frenetic fight. But even then it lands in an open room with a static shot of paired off fighters where you can practically hear the director say “action” like its the first season of Buffy.
This was really glaring when Roger first meets Iorek. The actor wasn’t even looking in the right direction and obviously talking to nothing wasn’t helping him act.
That scene was so weird! Roger was looking in the wrong direction, but also talking about Iorek like if Iorek couldn’t hear him, while being like, “Talking polar bear, uh? Mmkay”.
This review is spot on! (Very spoiler-y comment ahead) I have a question about your reading of TAS, though. Where do you see a pivot to love? In the marzipan/Will section? I’d always understood that as a sexual awakening, not a romantic/love one, which is what makes the (SPOILER!!!) subversion of the temptation of Eve actually work; instead of the discovery of sexuality being what casts Eve out of the garden, Lyra is made whole with sin (which is cast as positive here)/Dust/Pan settling. So from my understanding this love stuff is actually really odd, but I’d love to hear others’ thoughts on this!
Honestly one of my favorite moments in the book is when Lyra comes out of the intercision machine and Pan transforms into a cat and digs his claws so hard into her chest as they’re holding each other that he makes her bleed. It was just this desperate and violent display of love for one another after they’d almost lost each other that I was so disappointed was absent from this adaption. Genuinely, I love the source material so much that I can overlook a lot of missteps in this adaption and often look at it as just fun, and time spent in a universe that I genuinely enjoy. The performances are mostly good, there are moments that I genuinely loved, and usually I can just forget about the problems and enjoy the show, but it is extremely disappointing that this might be the last adaption we get, because I agree with other commenters, there is a profound lack of imagination and joy that I feel within the storytelling.
In The Secret Commonwealth, Pullman says that Pan is a human, and it caught me totally off-guard. I mean, it’s self-evidently true, but I’d never thought of it in those terms.
On top of everything said in the review, didn’t this also feel pretty rushed? Lyra sounds the fire alarm, suddenly the Gyptians appear out of nowhere, Lee is on his balloon, then he’s in the corridor (also appearing out of nowhere), Serafina does her Captain Marvel entrance, and poof! the Tartars are defeated, moments later Lyra is already flying away on Lee’s balloon to her father’s rescue (did they ever discuss this further trip? Are Iorek and Lee just part of Lyra’s posse now?) and waving goodbye to everybody on the ground.Also, “What took you so long?” “Is that all you’ve got?” – Man, is this really Pullman’s dialogue? Ridiculously trite one-liner central?
“Is that all you’ve got?” – Man, is this really Pullman’s dialogue? Ridiculously trite one-liner central?Just because it’s LMM, I mentally followed that line with “I am not throwing away my shot.” So at least I enjoyed that aspect of it lol
I agree with everything you wrote here, and I also think this show needs to be rescued from Jack Thorne before he murders it.I do want to expand on one observation you made:“Love how Farder Coram is all “poor things, they can’t even speak anymore” about the intercised daemons when we have literally never heard 99% of daemons speak.”This is a trend in the series. There is no reason to include this line other than because Farder Coram says it, verbatim, in the book. There are lots of other times in the first 5 episodes where a random line from the books is diligently recited, completely out of nowhere, seemingly only as fanservice. You can see it too in Iorek’s discussion about how bears can’t be lied to, which has none of the feinting setup you find in the books, or even the continued insistence on unnecessarily calling her “Lyra Belacqua” (as in Coulter’s question to Fra Pavel) with absolutely zero setup for the surname. It’s like they can’t decide if they want the show to stick to the books or to be a true adaptation of the universe, and instead of executing the latter (which is clearly the right option), they oscillate wildly between complete and total fidelity to the books and Lord Asriel hanging out of an airship yelling “EVERYONE’S SPECIAL.”
What are people’s thoughts on the John Parry reveal so early? I don’t know if I like it at all, but it COULD be well-done. I’m skeptical.
I would have rather had it at the beginning of the second season. Should’ve pulled a Lost and had a Desmond-esque episode for Will as Season 2 episode 1.
It’s frustrating because there are moments that are very good – the scene with Mrs. Coulter and Lyra was well done and intense. But I agree with pretty much all the criticisms below. Where’s the daemons? What’s going to happen when they switch to the world *without* daemons (more full-time) – it just won’t have an impact at all. I had heard whispers about them toning down the religious tones even before the series started, and it’s a bummer to see it happen.
I can understand not showing every daemon in any other public situation. They could be small and hidden or on the ground out of frame but they really should have done something to indicate to non-readers that the attendants were daemon-less beyond their empty demeanors. Not a dealbreaker for me since I can fill in the blanks but a newbie might be confused. Still, I’m looking forward to the bear showdown.
A lot of comments on here about Serafina and it made me realize that as much as I like high fantasy, if it includes a group that 1) has unlimited knowledge of what’s going on 2)unlimited power to change the outcome and 3) doesn’t help hardly at all cause of reasons I’m not going to like the series as much as I might.
Would an average viewer even notice that the Bolvangar assistants don’t have daemons, when so few characters seem to have them?I didn’t notice that they didn’t have daemons, and I’ve read the books! That’s how bad it is. They made me, as a book reader forget about daemons.
I know I’m late to the party here but (as well as whole-heartedly agreeing with the above) I’d like to add that I really feel that lack of attention to detail with respect to the world / environment has also prevented the series from getting close to realising its potential.
In this episode the most noticeable feature was that it doesn’t actually appear to be cold. No snow stuck to clothing, coats open at the neck, no one shivering, no visible breath. “furs” looking more like fashion items than something to keep you alive in the arctic. The parts of the journey north filmed on location looked like they had been shot in midsummer and once they actually arrived on the snow it has all looked so obviously like it’s filmed in the studio – I even saw an interview with James McAvoy saying that wearing the costumes in the studio was a “nightmare” because of how hot it was. Surely, with the budget they have, they could have invested in some air conditioning for the studio and dressed people up properly? If you compare this to snowy/cold/northern GoT scenes (or even the original LOTR trilogy from the best part of two decades ago now, for heaven’s sake!) you see the difference between forgettable TV and an immersive fantasy world. One of the joys of good fantasy is losing yourself in a rich and compelling world, and on a screen production that means looking the part.
The same lack of attention to detail can be seen in the previous episode – for all of the attempt to build Will’s character, by placing him in what appears to be a multi-million pound house straight out of the architecture-review, the producers completely lose the crucial part of his story: that he’s grown up poor, with material insecurity and had to fend for himself (and perhaps an opportunity to mirror some of Pullman’s themes on advantage and disadvantage in British society).
The daemons issue is the most unforgivable, though. They were the central inspired innovation that really made the books what they are, and they seem to have been treated as an inconvenience to be explained away wherever possible and only shown when absolutely essential to advance the plot.