His Dark Materials follows its characters into a new world, but the story's much the same (for better or worse)
TV Reviews His Dark Materials
By the time a television adaptation of a book series reaches its second season, it needs to feel as though it can stand on its own. This is not to suggest that those who have read the books and those who haven’t will be on an even playing field: even when Game Of Thrones reached the point where the series ran out of books to adapt, the “experts” and “newbies” were still coming from very different perspectives. But by a second season, the two audiences share the experience of carrying the weight of expectation, albeit a bit heavier in one case than the other.
As you may have noticed, these audiences will now be experiencing His Dark Materials together here at The A.V. Club, as two reviews converge into one. I acknowledge this upfront because I’m not going to be able to “shut off” the fact that I come to the show from the perspective of a book reader, but I want to be clear that these reviews will not solely be gripes about changes or adjustments to the original text if you’re a “newbie.” This is partially because I had my fair share to say about that in my reviews of the first season, sure, but it’s also because the show itself has now given us plenty of material to work from in terms of evaluating what it has set out to accomplish in a different medium. Although the second season begins Jack Thorne’s adaptation of The Subtle Knife, the second novel in Philip Pullman’s trilogy, it is now primarily understood as the byproduct of work done last season to set the stage for the next step in Lyra Bellacqua’s—sorry, Lyra Silvertongue’s—journey.
“The City Of Magpies” is at its best when it’s focused on Lyra, who wakes up in a jungle after having followed her father Lord Asriel through a beam of light in search of answers to questions and revenge for the death of her friend Roger. She is torn up by her grief, but marches on until she reaches a seaside city on a hill, towering above the ocean in a fashion similar to France’s Mont Saint-Michel. After spending much of the first season jumping from guardian to guardian, Lyra enters Cittàgazze alone, with only Pantalaimon to walk her through the eerie, empty streets of the city. If there was one central critique I had of the first season, it was how rarely the show just allowed Lyra to work through her feelings in conversation with her daemon, and so it was refreshing to see how her isolation forced the show to reinvest in their dynamic. In the moments before Lyra realizes she isn’t the only new arrival exploring Cittàgazze, we get to see what makes the connection between human and daemon so valuable, as their anxieties and feelings become manifest through an extension of themselves. Lyra refuses to turn to the alethiometer for assistance, believing that it led to Roger’s death, and that leaves her only Pantalaimon to process the uncertainty of the path forward.
Her encounter with Will Parry is the beginning of the next stage of her journey, which plays as something of a reboot in the context of “The City of Magpies.” Even if it’s harder to imagine someone dropping into the second season of a show in the streaming era, where catching up is as easy as downloading an app, the second season of His Dark Materials has a built in form of exposition in Will, who understands nothing of the world we just spent a season exploring. If Lyra’s isolation helps to bring Pantalaimon into the story more significantly, Will’s confusion at the very idea of a daemon—the talking seems like the biggest hurdle for him, mentally—is an excuse to lay out the terms of their relationship more closely, forcing Lyra to vocalize something that it would have been weird for her to discuss with people in her own world. Some of the other exposition for Will—like the stuff about dust—ends up being a bit clunkier, but it never crosses the line of acceptability that I generally afford premieres given that I too occasionally need to be reminded of where things left off a year ago.
It’s a bit weird, though, that despite spending all of that extra time on Will’s story in season one instead of introducing him in the second book as Pullman did, the series still struggles to articulate his perspective on these events. Eventually, Will pulls out his satchel of his father’s letters and Lyra uses the alethiometer to remind us that Will murdered someone, but the premiere was missing a clearer articulation early on as to why Will would be suspicious of Lyra and secretive regarding his own origins. The scene where the two characters piece together that they are each unable to safely return home is a decent start, but everything up to that point was told through Lyra’s perspective, and I don’t think that serves Will’s arc. This is always going to be Lyra’s story, but there needed to be more work threading what we know about Will’s experience into his early interactions with Lyra. Subtlety is one thing, but the delay in pulling Will’s point-of-view out in the episode seems counter-productive to leveraging the complexity that the choice made last season was intended to create. I am on the record here that the choice of introducing Will last season—necessitated by child labor laws needing to reduce Lyra’s screentime, per producers—could be beneficial to this season, but that benefit didn’t materialize here as it could have, and switching to Lyra discovering Will as opposed to the other way around—which is how it plays out in the novel—didn’t quite live up to the story’s potential.
That having been said, the Cittàgazze portions of the episode remain the strongest parts of this premiere. Although the production design eschews the empty promenades and open spaces of an abandoned resort town that I got from reading the books, the choice to focus on the close-quarters of a fortress city is logistically sound and often beautiful, particularly in the shot of Will reading through the letters in front of the cafe. You don’t get the full impact of the city’s emptiness, but the iconography works, and I was thrilled to see Bella Ramsey—also known as Lyanna Mormont—show up as one of the sisters Will and Lyra encounter to provide some helpful exposition regarding the spectres. The mythology of Cittàgazze remains fairly abstract, but Pullman was never really one for subtlety, and so the parallels between Lyra’s world’s obsession with dust and sin and the idea of soul-sucking creatures that attack only those who have reached adulthood form quickly and effectively. While the characters’ quest narrative is quickly repositioned to returning to Will’s Oxford in search of answers to the truth about dust, the world-building is enough to kickstart the next step in Lyra’s journey, which I’m hopeful will leverage the development of Will’s character more moving forward.
I have to admit, though, that the rest of the premiere didn’t do a lot to suggest the other pieces of this story are going to match this momentum. As much as Ruth Wilson smooth-talking the Cardinal or whisper-yelling at her witch prisoner plays into what remains a compelling performance, the inner workings of the church continue to feel more isolating than immersive, and the claustrophobic feeling aboard the submarine didn’t help matters. The takeaway here seems to be that Coulter is on her way to taking control of the church and steering toward something different than the denial of dust that the Cardinal was advocating, but the show shifts this away from a matter of circumstance—the Cardinal is killed in the chaos following the interrogation of the witch in the books—to a political machination, and I don’t know if that really benefits the story. I see the logic of taking a story wherein Coulter’s motives are questioned and generating more characters to be suspicious of what is really driving her search for answers regarding the witches’ prophecy and the name they have for Lyra, but I wish I cared more about the result if it’s going to be the second rail of three in the story this season.
The third rail, meanwhile, is Lee Scoresby and his parlay with the witches. As I noted last season, the version of Lee the show is deploying is not the one from Pullman’s books, pulling moreso from his prequel novella about Lee and Iorek’s relationship. And I’m curious to see how that version of the character plays out through the rest of Lee’s journey, but this introduction to his story does nothing to take advantage of the change in energy between characters. The machinations necessary to get Lee into his own quest to find Stanislaus Grumman in the book involve a fair amount of aftermath from the battle at Bolvangar, as well as some connective tissue going back to Lyra witnessing Lord Asriel’s presentation to the scholars at Jordan College that Lee pieced together with his own knowledge about Grumman from his travels. It also comes at the end of a chapter that uses Serafina Pekkala as a window into both the Church’s torture of her fellow witch and the investigation into Asriel’s experiment. Here, though, Lee arrives to speak to the witches without a clear purpose, and just announces that he heard a rumor about a guy who has a weapon that could help, without doing the work to connect the dots. It results in what feels like a paper thin quest narrative that doesn’t do what it needs to in order to reinforce Lee’s relationship to Lyra and the story broadly. And while I’m open to the swashbuckling Lee playing the hero and doing his part to see the story through, there was a narrative propulsion to the book Lee putting off retirement to care for Lyra that was poetic, and none of that poetry came through here.
Filled with prophecies and clearly-defined goals, His Dark Materials is never without basic narrative momentum: by the end of the premiere, we know where characters are headed, what their goals are, and what kind of threats could stand in their way, and there’s something satisfying about that kind of clarity in an adventure story like this one. And at least for this episode, some of the problems that kept this satisfaction from blossoming into something transcendent are less of an issue: with Lyra now in a world without daemons, their absence for budget reasons is less troubling, and between the novelty of Pan to Will and the scene of the witches’ daemons arguing in parallel to their humans we got plenty of daemon action. But the clumsiness of some of the plotting serves as a reminder that this season was filmed at the same time as the first, meaning that any adjustments to the show’s narrative approach had to happen in isolation from audience or critical responses. And although the core components of the show will carry His Dark Materials at a certain level, the execution is what held back the first season, and I’m not convinced there’s enough self-reflection embedded within this premiere to suggest this is going to change in the season to come, as much as I’d like to be wrong about that.
Stray observations
- Welcome back to our reviews of His Dark Materials, and welcome to those who were perhaps reading the Newbies reviews previously. I’m hopeful that these reviews can provide a space for discussion for both audiences, but to those who are book readers I hope you’ll understand that we may need to avoid explicit book spoilers in the comments if it seems there’s a large Newbie presence. Feel free to reach out to me on Twitter if there’s something explicitly spoilery that you want to discuss.
- I thought about writing a full paragraph about this but decided that I didn’t want to dwell on it, but boy howdy is the decision to turn the witches into smoke monsters incredibly dumb. It makes them far too powerful: why, for example, does Ruta Skadi not murder Mrs. Coulter at the same time as she’s giving the tortured witch a noble death? I understand why someone was excited about the idea of cloud pines being twigs embedded in their skin instead of actual brooms, but the execution of their magic just doesn’t make any sense, and it’s never going to.
- If you, like me, were wondering what was up with a third season: they say they intend to film it next year, although how they’re going to explain the kids aging so significantly is anyone’s guess.
- While I always read Cittàgazze as tropical, the lengthy period of Lyra traipsing through a jungle was a little bit confusing to me, spatially speaking.
- The alethiometer is a really convenient plot device to articulate themes and motives, and one thing Lyra’s story does well is withhold its use as part of her grief over Roger, which pushes for more consideration of Lyra’s agency and her choices, and spawns some good dialogue with Pan.
- There’s a whole class commentary about Lyra’s presumption that Will was a “kitchen boy” because he could cook, but the idea that Lyra never even saw someone cook an egg struck me as a bit strange, even if I loved the moment where she went to clean up the broken egg and just, like, rubbed it into the floor.
- Pan’s Red Panda form reminds his cutest form, and it’s not even close to be honest (the official Twitter agrees).
- “If bad people think it’s bad, maybe it’s good?”—words to live by, Lyra.
- I liked the little shot of Lyra’s fist balling up when she went to approach the older boy who had been attacked by the specters.
- I realize that setting this in a contemporary context means Will having a cell phone makes sense, but I refuse to believe he remembered to pack his charger when he was running away from home.
- The show’s opening credits are mostly the same as before, and while they already featured some subtle spoilers for the second season if you were paying attention, there’s been some adjusted that foregrounded those details if you want to dig a bit deeper.
Through The Amber Spyglass (A Note on Explicit Book Spoilers)
So, given that we’re only doing one review at this point and I don’t want to incite discussion in the comments that involves spoilers unnecessarily, I’m may retire the original purpose of this section, which was to create space to discuss long-term story ramifications of adaptation choices. If there’s a huge demand for this to remain a part of the reviews, and if it seems like the readership invested in the comment section is mostly people who have read the books, we can revisit this down the road, but for now we’re going to let season two be season two.
That said, one small thing before we go: it’s interesting to think about how differently the idea of the Subtle Knife as a macguffin of sorts plays when it isn’t the title of the book. We see it show up here—in the credits, in Will’s weird vision—but when it’s the title of a book you’re thinking “What’s that?” in a way that the show doesn’t really push to the same degree.
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And at least for this episode, some of the problems that kept this satisfaction from blossoming into something transcendent are less of an issue: with Lyra now in a world without daemons, their absence for budget reasons is less troubling, and between the novelty of Pan to Will and the scene of the witches’ daemons arguing in parallel to their humans we got plenty of daemon action.
With regard to the filming of season 3 next year, it may well be a blessing that the kids will have aged several years. (Trying not to be spoiler-y.)This is one of those sagas wherein if you didn’t see Season 1 they are not going to explain it for you and you are just going to have to catch up on your own. As Snoop Dog said, if you don’t know, then you don’t know. Just go with it.Great to have you back, Myles.
Is this show airing a week ahead in the UK? Episode 1 errr magically appeared in my Plex last week, and Episode 2 showed up yesterday (Sunday)
It is, yes. It definitely makes social media a minefield if you’re following hashtags.
Myles, with your (Explicit Spoiler tags) I think us newbies won’t be spoiled. Advantages of being said newbie, I thought the Witches having the ability to turn into smoke was very effective. Not sure what it upends going by statement “it makes them too powerful”. The CGI was well done, certainly improved ten-fold from say from X-Men Nightcrawler. I thought the town being at once familiar as if in Italy strangely foreign created great unease.Is it me or is Dafne Keen actually a bit better in her performance?
Agree completely on all counts. I liked this premiere more than the entire first season combined. Lyra felt likable for the first time – not that she was unlikable; she was just there, more of a signpost for a protagonist than an actual character to care about. And yes, Dafne Keen has grown on me too. Not having to yell “Roggiah!” every other line, and instead getting a peer to banter toward, might have helped.As an Italian, the (perfectly spelled in a retro 1940s-ish style) Italian signs were particularly unsettling, because I knew that wasn’t filmed in Italy. Discovering it’s actually a huge set they built from scratch on a parking lot in Wales blew my mind. https://www.radiotimes.com/news/tv/2020-11-08/his-dark-materials-cittagazze/They definitely seem to have been provided a larger budget this season. There are more daemons around as well.
Thanks for that link!
Lyanna Mormont! I knew she looked familiar! Now I’m wondering who would win in a fight between her and X23. Badass kids need to crossover in shows more.
The scenes with Lyra and Will were all quite good (“I’ll take that bed.” “I was sleeping there.”) and as the review said, this premiere felt like a bit of a reset. The exposition they get to bounce off each other was a good refresher, because as a newbie, I’d basically forgotten everything last year, lol.
I have been waiting a week for this since I watched it when it came out on the BBC!I’m an “expert”, so be aware to newbies that my comment may contain some spoilers…boy howdy is the decision to turn the witches into smoke monsters incredibly dumbThat was exactly what I thought as well. If witches are so powerful and can basically teleport anywhere like Nightcrawler, how could that witch possibly be have been kept prisoner? And like the review said, why didn’t Ruta just kill everyone on that ship? I don’t think they really thought about the implications of changing what witches can actually do. It is nice to see that there is more than one witch in the whole world now, though. one thing Lyra’s story does well is withhold its use as part of her grief over RogerI disagree with this, however. One thing that’s particularly magical about Lyra’s character is her easy skill with the alethiometer, which down the road in her story leads to the deep sorrow over not being able to read it easily anymore, and her lifelong journey to learn to use it again. This character diversion now will take some weight off the later developments. Also, we lose the subtlety of the wonderful character moment where Lyra asks it immediately who Will is, and the “he’s a murderer” answer relaxes and comforts her, without the show having to try and justify it with “the good kind”.Otherwise – what was up with Will having visions of the knife and the tower to go along with Lyra’s exposition about how he’s connected to this place? I wish they’d just shown the glimpse of the brother in the tower that happened in the book, so we the audience could connect seeing that with Angelica’s deliberate omission of her brother’s name when they first spoke together.Some scattered notes:Appreciated the weird sexual energy in the room when Mrs Coulter was kissing the cardinal’s ring.How could Hester have possibly known that “the whole world is talking about that hole inc the sky” when they have been in the balloon the whole time?I do think that Cittagazze was realized very well.Apparently Lyra is some kind of self-defense expert now?
Also Mrs Coulter:
the weird sexual energy in the room when Mrs CoulterThat’s just every room Ruth Wilson is in.
I’m touched you were waiting for it, glad it’s a valuable part of your experience with the show.I take your point on the alethiometer, but really once they committed to showing us Lyra’s journey into Cittagazze instead of Will’s, the efficiency of that great chapter ending was always going to disappear. But yeah, I went back to skim over that chapter and it’s hard to lose what’s such a propulsive start to the story on any level.
And the vision was super weird, and I didn’t really know what to make of it: I understand its narrative utility, but I don’t really know what they want to accomplish with that as of yet.
I’m touched you were waiting for it, glad it’s a valuable part of your experience with the show.Definitely is valuable, thanks for sharing your thoughts with us here, especially from the expert perspective.I guess we will have to wait and see on the visions.
we lose the subtlety of the wonderful character moment where Lyra asks it immediately who Will is, and the “he’s a murderer” answer relaxes and comforts her ARRRRRRGHHH, HOW COULD THEY CUT THAT, oh boy I hate this show so much, not watching past the first ep of S1 was my best decision of the past year, even with quarantine. 😀
I know…to be fair, they did kind of tack it onto the end of the episode but it just wasn’t as satisfying.Honestly, since I’ve now seen ep 2 of this season, your decision not to watch any farther is probably the correct one.
Perhaps I was unclear, but I meant I didn’t watch past the first ep of S1! Any Lyra at the start of her journey saying she “doesn’t like secrets” = automatic fail. 😛
To be fair, the moment/line is still there, although there’s a bit where she’s like “No, the good kind of murderer.” But it’s delayed until a bit later on (the end of the episode), so it doesn’t have the same pop.
It always bothered me that Pullman used the word “murderer”, because while Will killed a man, it wasn’t murder, it was unintentional in the course of self-defense.
Yeah, as much as a book purist as I am, I wouldn’t mind if they’d changed the word to “killer.” Same effect, and more accurate.
I wouldn’t mind if they’d changed the word to “killer.”Will the Manslaughterer.
I’m guessing that’s partly just Lyra’s interpretation of what the alethiometer tells her. She’s told he killed someone and given the impression that he’s trustworthy. In the most Lyra way ever she puts that into words as “Murderer! Awesome!”
Ah, my favorite hate-reading feature returns! (That’s loathing for the butchering of my favorite books, not these reviews themselves.)
switching to Lyra discovering Will as opposed to the other way around WHAT
(I mean, I guess there isn’t the urgency to identify with the new character since he isn’t a new character, but, way to keep de-fanging Lyra.)
the idea that Lyra never even saw someone cook an eggWHAT.Completely misrepresenting Lyra yet again – she’s not an egoist because she lived in luxury and was taught she was superior to others, she’s an egoist because she grew up with unusual autonomy and tolerance, but without the emotional support that gives a child the strength to embrace altruism and respect for others. In other words: of course she’s seen eggs cooked.
Like I said, first-rate hate-reading! 😀
I’m from the UK, and so have consequently seen a lot of BBC literary adaptations over the years. While HDM is very watchable, it’s also very BBC in its flaws – like the Gormenghast, Dracula (2006), and The War of the Worlds adaptations it makes umpteen changes for the sake of it, and every one of them, without being catastrophically bad, just drags brilliant stuff down to mediocrity. Lee’s characterisation – it’s like they were amazed that they’d got a trendy name interested, and so figured they’d tailor the character to suit him rather than greying Lin-Manuel Miranda up and having him do a different performance.The witch’s powers – it’s as if they were so impressed with the special effects they could do (the BBC has a habit of showing off stuff that is no longer amazing internationally) that they pooh-poohed the massive, obvious holes it creates.Establishing travel between the worlds during Episode 2 in Season 1 was so shockingly dumb a move it amazes me that professional writers came up with it. The timing of that reveal at the end of book 1 is crucial to making that ending so great (it might be the greatest ending to a trilogy-opener in history), and it also makes the opening of book 2 feel almost disorientating in how quickly the scope of the story explodes. But they literally explained that this was to get audiences used to the idea, completely fucking missing what makes it so great in the first place.
Preach! Also: if your excuse to crowbar Will into S1 of your HDM show is that, due to minor labor laws, you can only shoot so many hours with your lead actress per day… how about a longer shooting schedule, and not kneecap the story?!
I’d not heard that excuse before, and while it originally answered a few questions for me, when you think it a bit more thoroughly there are plenty of instances of kids younger than Dafne Keen(who was in a major Hollywood film at a younger age herself) it seems a little week to justify jettisoning that amazing opener of The Subtle Knife, where we get to see the perspective of Lyra from someone completely unfamiliar of the world she comes from. As a result, this came across a little lifeless. It looks great, and the performances are all there, but there’s this wonderful sense of weirdness in the opening chapters of The Subtle Knife that just isn’t here, unfortunately.
they were amazed that they’d got a trendy name interested, and so figured they’d tailor the character to suit himSo when is Lee going to sing and dance already!
I submit that torture scenes are boring, dramatically insipid and inert, and should go extinct.This episode was ok. Not terribly exciting nor interesting. Visually good. I did like the banter, such as there was, btwn our leads. They have chemistry, which is good, since the writers should take special care in developing the relationship.
I think the daemons are way better this season – I like to think taken on board some feedback though I know unlikely. We see them more! They’re actually talking to each other! But Jack Thorne still doesn’t really get them – Lyra’s introduction to Will, a person without a daemon who still seems to have a soul, was just not dramatic enough.
I really wanted to love the first season, but it was hard to get through despite some good acting, bit of a lack of tension I felt. But fuck, I’ll probably still watch a whole second season lol so I don’t get left behind if it really picks up.
He was unboxing the charger, which implied to me that he bought it when they returned to Oxford.
His Dark Materials is one of my all-time favorite series and I was so excited to have it adapted as a series vs a movie. So I’m a biased party. I’ll still check out the show, but it isn’t must-see-TV. With the heightened production value, great cast and the HBO budget, I still can’t fathom how a show about daemons, armored bears, witches, war zeppelins, etc. manages to be so bland. The opening credits are more visually imaginative than the show itself.
I’m very much a newbie since I’ve never read the books and only heard bout HDM from the movie adaptation of ‘The Golden Compass.’ Some of the questions I have, may them be minor or major, has some bits to do with season 1. I might have missed the how’s and why’s but here they go…1. Is there a reason Pan can shift to other animals? What makes him special to the other people’s daemons that he can do that? Also in this episode his fur kept changing from brown to white and vice versa. What was that all about? Is the white version a marmot and the brown a ferret? And I’ve noticed not everyone has a daemon. Why is that? I noticed not all adults and children have them….especially the Magesterium.2. So I might have missed this guy’s storyline from season 1 but what is up with Carlo Boreal? Is he able to travel to both worlds? And if so, why and how? So he’s not a part of Will’s world? And if he’s not, how did he know about Will’s dad’s letters?Sorry about all the questions, like I said, newbie.“why, for example, does Ruta Skadi not murder Mrs. Coulter at the same time as she’s giving the tortured witch a noble death?”I was thinking the same thing. But obviously Mrs. Coulter is a main character to help move whatever her story is this season so of course she’s not going to get killed off in the first episode.“Will having a cell phone makes sense, but I refuse to believe he remembered to pack his charger when he was running away from home.”Lol this! He said he’d been at that place for like 3 days? That’s a very good battery to last that long if he hadn’t been using it. And also, if he did bring his charger, he must have been lucky that that village uses the same outlets as London does. Smh…
No offense intended, but I will definitely miss the other reviewer.Anyway, this show’s dialogue continues to be as stilted as ever. Nobody ever sounds like a real person. Makes it very hard to care about all the plot going on.
Am I on acid, why wouldn’t Lyra know what an omelet is? And how to, like, clean? I know she was raised in that one school but wasn’t she around the help and whatever a LOT?
Did they really not invent fucking omelets in that dimension? And she didn’t know to remove egg shells before eating eggs? Do they just put eggshells in eggs there?
Missed a fun little scene where Will could show off his cell phone as the thing he has instead of a Daemon, commentary on how important tech is to us nowadays while also showing it’s not as comforting as, like, having half your soul on the outside or whatever.
Everything involving the witches and the church is just boring right now. My wife and I both looked at each other and were like “Why doesn’t that witch just do that to every single blimp?” Because plot, that’s why. Now imagine if you had, I dunno, DOZENS of witches. Why don’t they just rule the fucking world?
Did they really not invent fucking omelets in that dimension?“So, your world’s like my world, but with the words mixed up.” If they have omelets, they’re not calling them omelets, just like they call amber “electrum”. Also, not all cuisines on Earth have omelets, eh.As for Lyra being a mess in the kitchen, she’s a fricking child who never had to take care of herself on her own. It seems pretty realistic she doesn’t know the first thing about cooking.
I’m impressed with how much the actors for Will and Lyra match my mental image of them when I read the book. Lyra’s casting especially.
We don’t have HBO and so have not been watching this (also I never truly recovered from the film adaptation) but I HAVE been reading your expert reviews to get a good insight into the show without actually having to subject myself to it,. The first chapters of The Subtle Knife when Lyra and Will meet in Cittegaze and encounter the feral colony and the spectres have always been one of my favorites both for place setting and how they established the characters and how they so quickly and accurately summed each other up; mysterious Will with all that simmering violence that Lyra recognized immediately and affirmed through the alethiometer, and cagey, secretive Lyra always a bit feral but full of knowledge that comes from observing and collecting other people’s secrets. I too always envisioned a vast, empty resort town, an abandoned Jersey Shore or Panama City Beach, which would have been such a fun set to play with, so I’m super disappointed to see they went with French Riviera castle instead 🙁 Anyway, from someone who loves the books and can’t bring herself to watch the show, I’ll keep reading your great analysis!
Thanks for reading, even if you’re not watching—I want you to know I take this responsibility very seriously.
Is there any plans for people to buy HBO Max shows off of itunes or google play? It really fucking sucks that I can’t watch season 3 of Infinity Train because of this exclusivity bullshit.
Now more than ever, library titles are a critical framework to convince people to subscribe, so that’s unlikely.
Woo, delighted to see you back to review season 2 (though
sad to lose the newbie reviews – it was always fascinating to get that
outsider’s perspective). Your reviews last season gave me much food for thought
and articulated much of what I felt beautifully and have become an important
part of HDM-watching for me.And sure enough I’m right there with all your points on The
City of Magpies – Lyra’s character being the strongest part; how nice it was to
see Pantalaimon being utilised; how cool this different take on Cittagazze
looked.And on the less good side, the fact that Will’s character
and story disappears quite badly here. No sense of the rather emotional and
dramatic events he’s coming off.Thorne is definitely showing much stronger story/character writing
than he tended to in season one but it’s still not really his strong suit. He
just frequently misses those beats where the story ought to live. E.g. what
makes Will go after Lyra when she initially runs away? What happens with the
cat after they rescue it? It’s not that there are logical gaps, more that it
feels like we’re often missing the kind of stuff that makes this a story.When there is a big moment (like this cat rescue or the end
of the episode) there’s little feeling of the build up or consequence.E.g. in the book when Lyra learns from the alethiometer that
Will ‘is a murderer’ it’s an interesting character beat: it’s interesting to
see how she reacts and sets us up to be interested in this relationship because
her reacting with ‘terrific! I LOVE murderers!” is a hell of a starting point
for a relationship. But the show rarely seems to understand such bats and
instead turns this into a moment that doesn’t really do anything in the story. It come after they’ve already really
ormed a stable relationship and doesn’t affect, or give us a surprising angle
on, Lyra’s attitude. Here it’s not that Lyra is going ‘yay murderer’ which is
story-opening intrigue, it’s the alethiometer going ‘he killed someone but
don’t worry he’s chill’ which is story-closing
reassurance.Well put about the Magisterium scenes being more alienating
and boring than intriguing and immersive. I guess they’re going for a GOT thing
but its doesn’t suit the story. And in GOT there were always relatively
sympathetic characters whose fates we cared about present. Like you say it
would help if they’d established stakes better about Lyra’s ‘secret name’. It’s
a mystery of a mystery – we don’t know what it is so we can’t know what it will
mean, what effect it will have. Not to give that name away for non-readers, but if they’d even established firmly the idea that
this name will decide the Church on whether to view Lyra as a friend or enemy
(and that being an enemy is not a safe place to be), we might care a bit more.Also I just want to quote a line I’ve recently picked up from
Sarah Marshall on her Why Are Dads? Podcast. Talking about James Cameron, she
said: “He’s not bad at being subtle; he’s great at being unsubtle.”. If I
compare Pullman to a director it’s more Spielberg than Cameron, but I think
this quote could apply to all of them. It’s not that the tools of nuance are
unavailable or underused by them – they just also know how to do big and
blatant too; where to be broad in one part so you can be fiddly in another etc.(And in Thorne’s hands this Spielberg-y big-ness often turns
to soapy OTT-ness because he’s not mastering the storytelling necessary to make
it feel earned.)
I think the distinction between story-opening and story-closing elements is really critical here. I’m not sure where this instinct from Thorne comes from, exactly, but it explains the struggle for the show to find momentum (although simply adding other major story threads as a consistent presence is enough to do that in and of itself).Thanks for returning for Season 2 yourself!
Aw thanks!Yes, if I had to boil down all my issues with Thorne’s writing to a single simple idea, I think it would be that, his (inadvertently? Nervously?) closing down stories just as they should be opening up. Some of the big relationships haven’t really taken off because he doesn’t allow space for any questions or tension at the beginning to be progressed and resolved with further story beats.
But there’s been a big improvement with series 2, I think, quite possibly because Thorne is now working with co-writers. Series two actually feels like it is ticking along in a way series one hardly ever did for me.
Maybe it’s just because I’m still bitter over the horrendous movie and have low expectations, but I’m glad this show exists. It’s not a perfect adaptation but I’m never angry that I watched it when an episode finishes. To see some of my favorite moments from the books in live action form excites me enough that I can ignore most of the other issues.Either way, this is a pretty good review and I’ll definitely be back next week.
I’m still so bitter about the movie that I can’t bring myself to watch this show. What made the movie all the worse was that the casting was AWESOME and then they felt like the had to neuter the entire story in a harry potter inspired cash grab. I’m thinking about re-upping HBO to watch…should I?
I mean, look: it’s not perfect, but if you care about the source material in any way I think it’s worth seeing what they’re up to.But it does depend on whether you feel like rationalizing your way through another inherently finicky adaptation is something that you’d enjoy: it’s definitely not the full-throated retribution for the text that it maybe deserved, but there’s at least the promise that it isn’t fully neutered in this format.
What’s strange is I’m NEVER precious about adaptations of my favorite books, I always enjoy seeing how they’re interpreted, but when Roger was alive at the end of that fucking movie version I was furious.I’m fine with the hollywood tweaks made to liven up the visuals (witch smoke monsters…I mean it doesn’t make sense but it sounds dope so I’m into it) but they better not pussy out of ultimately mercy-killing god. I think I’ll re-up HBO and we can binge this over the holiday. The Golden Compass and World War Z are the only two adaptations that stuck so solidly in my craw that I couldn’t get past how mishandled they were (Sam Elliot being perfect Lee, notwithstanding).
OMG, World War Z was so bad. I always felt it should have been done as a Ken Burns documentary series, but I can understand why that would never happen.
It should have been a series and they should have done an episode for each chapter. They didn’t even have to change anything, it was right there laid out perfectly in book form.
“The alethiometer is a really convenient plot device to articulate themes
and motives, and one thing Lyra’s story does well is withhold its use
as part of her grief over Roger, which pushes for more consideration of
Lyra’s agency and her choices, and spawns some good dialogue with Pan”Quite the opposite from me. They don’t seem to understand Lyra’s character much at all, particularly all the ways she was purposely written to be different from other teen protagonists.It took running into Lyanna Mormont to remind me that Lyra wouldn’t be caught dead in trousers, much less overalls. That’s a minor point, but it’s emblematic. Worse is her guilt over Roger. She wouldn’t openly sulk over him, or even dwell on it. That’s just not her nature. Roger’s name appears exactly four times in the whole second book, basically only in passing. This is not to say she doesn’t have guilt about it, but it doesn’t manifest until [some stuff happens].
That bit with her stepping on the egg felt dead on, which is why this is so frustrating. And her terrible omelet is straight from the book.
I definitely think the show is resting on the belief that actually experiencing Roger’s death, and also the fact that we followed Roger’s side of the story throughout the first season moreso than in the books, means that Lyra’s mourning is in part an acknowledgment of how the audience may have felt his death more acutely.And see, for me the stepping on the egg was positioned not as “Lyra is chaos personified and she can’t be bothered” and more “she didn’t know how to clean it up,” so really it’s a matter of the show’s grasp on Lyra being more slippery than necessarily wildly wrong for me.
Didn’t Coulter walk through the gate with Asriel? Maybe that is a major plot point but I just find all the scenes with the magisterium confusing and I don’t understand Coulter’s motivation to child torture at the magisterium’s bidding but also protecting Asriel who seems to be a main counterpoint to the magisterium. Like she wants to protect Lyra but only if its convenient but is her main motivation power?
Those scenes are all confusing, yes. But I think the best way to think about Coulter is that whereas the Magisterium’s leadership believes in stamping out dust and what it represents, Coulter wants to harness its power for a greater purpose. But she’s also wrestling with the fact that her purpose as a mother is constantly forcing her to rethink her priorities, which is definitely something the show leans on in an effort to draw a more consistently sympathetic view of the character in these early stages of the story.