His Dark Materials takes a detour to armored bear territory, with mixed results (newbies)
TV Reviews Recap
It is deeply unfortunate that as terrible as Lyra’s mother is, His Dark Materials is at great pains to remind us that her father is…also bad. Is the man incapable of giving a hug?
But let’s get to that later. The majority of the episode is focused on Armored Bear Court Intrigue, and specifically unseating Iofur Raknison, the bad king of the bears, and replacing him with Iorek Byrnison, the good king of the bears. And we are following the court intrigue right now because Lyra fell out of a hot air balloon, survived, and got picked up by an armored bear.
It all feels a bit disjointed after the urgency of the Save Roger campaign, which is not helped by further unnecessary scenes of Lord Boreal being creepy in London. What possible purpose did the scene of him stepping menacingly through the portal serve? It separates the scenes of Lyra encountering the bear, and going into the bear fort, but does almost nothing dramatically. We know Boreal has been slipping into London, so seeing him walk in again didn’t provide us with new information. This episode did finally push some forward momentum on Will’s story, but it was so brief and abrupt that it’s hard to see why this couldn’t have all been established in one episode. What was the point of all the wandering around? Maybe the skulking will turn out to be really meaningful at some later point, but up to this point it’s been like watching someone else go bird watching.
The bear intrigue is most notable for Lyra’s demonstration of an ability to improvise and lie really spontaneously, and really usefully. The random researcher in the prison cell with her provides about 30 seconds of exposition, and then she’s off to the races, telling Iofur exactly what he needs to hear to give Iorek safe passage into the bear fort. The eventual bear fight was impressive, with the periodic glimpses of Lyra providing an important perspective on just how large they are. But after all the armor talk, why weren’t they wearing their armor? The action is clear enough to distinguish between the two of them, but why didn’t they fight with their suits on? And the tasteful pan away during the killing blow was oddly squeamish of the show. We already saw Iorek get dragged by his neck. It’s not like we need to see Iofur’s brains dripping dramatically onto the floor, but it’s an odd moment to switch to Lyra’s perspective.
Meanwhile, over in Coulter-town, she’s not doing so hot. A single child has completely derailed her experiments, and she’s deeply on the outs with the Magisterium. Father MacPhail lets himself be talked into bringing her on the trip to kill Asriel, but at this point, it’s hard not to wonder what he’s thinking. She has repeatedly made bad decisions that have now led to this point where they’re going to fight a difficult, costly battle in the north. What intel does he really think they’re going to need on Asriel at this late point?
But one way or another, everyone is now heading for Asriel’s lab up in the north, where he has been hiding out for a while doing his heretical experiments, and where he seems concerningly invested in Roger’s appearance. If you were Roger, you would probably head right back outside at this point, right?
Stray observations
- I will admit to not being overly familiar with British television practices, but how many YouTube clips are there from 2006 of random military figures talking about going exploring? Is the BBC maintaining a very thorough online archive?
- The tragic worker from Bolvangar does not inspire too much sympathy from Mrs. Coulter, who snaps that they’ve taken her daemon, not her brain. But obviously taking the daemon did this to her. It is perhaps a bit beside the point by now, considering the state of the experiment, but what was the ideal conclusion of this process supposed to look like?
- Everyone else is worried about Will’s cat now, right? Is someone going to go back and retrieve it from the murder house? Similarly, perhaps someone could release that researcher from bear prison?
- Much as I’m enjoying Mrs. Coulter, the show is treading a little close to having her be so unstable that it doesn’t make sense for her to occupy the position of power she has, given how patriarchal this society clearly is. Only a woman of rare control would make it that far, and while she sometimes demonstrates that skill, she also does a lot of screaming and breaking things.
33 Comments
Good grief tonight was bit of slog. I could care less about Will’s Mom, the guy who goes back and forth between both worlds. Or maybe it’s how dull they are telling that story in fits and starts. (now we must leave the bears to check in with ……..). I have been finding Ruth Wilson’s performance inconsistent. She makes such sudden leaps into being a Hammer Pictures villainess that it draws one out of the story. That scream at the destroyed lab? Then the strangulation attempt…..umm no. When I find myself drifting aimless at the sets like Iofur’s throne room (ooh cool, whale bone trusses holding up the flaming sconces!) examining the precision in his armor (clearly on loan since he couldn’t wear it to battle) and one remarkable bit of CGI, him walking a circle behind Lyra and then coming up behind her until his face came into focus (amazing) all of that and more pull me to many of these episodes end.There is an impotence to the storytelling. Not sure there’s a pill for that.
Very delayed reply, but…I think the only cure for this show to improve is to hire better writers, and perhaps, directors. This Thorne person who wrote many of the episodes really doesn’t seem to have the competence of even basic storytelling down. For instance, it’s really peculiar to me that we find out a lot of things through expository dialogue – things that just about any other story would show you, because it could be interesting. For instance, the capture and imprisonment of Asriel/James McAvoy’s character and the guarding of him by the bears… and then the subsequent deal the king bear makes to allow Asriel to conduct his research? Every single bit of that is told through a couple of disjointed scenes of dialogue across the past couple of episodes, and we never once checked back in with McAvoy and saw it for ourselves (until the end of this episode). That’s REALLY weird as far as storytelling choices go. Why would any writer stray away from showing some political machinations and betrayals happening amidst these characters? Why did we see Ms. Coulter netogiating with the bear only to find out, secondhand, that the deal went to hell? The fact it’s secondhand robs that scene of any dramatic weight at all. I even questioned whether Asriel was being released to his laboratory, because again, we heard this through secondary character’s inferences – which all apparently comes from rumors in this world, where this world is worse with gossip than a high school girl’s locker room.I want to like this show too, but man, they really, really need to hire different writers for future seasons, if there are any. Or they need to send their current writers back to basic creative writing courses. It’s a shame.
I couldn’t agree more!
Glad I’m not the only one who found this episode disjointed. I’m wondering if perhaps I should be binging the whole series, because I watched the first four episodes in one hit and it was really good.
But as I’ve said elsewhere, did Lyra go to Jodie Whittaker’s school of how to fall at the end of an episode and be perfectly fine in the next?
Seriously though, we don’t need to see what every character is doing every episode. Game of Thrones best episodes were when they focused on just two or three storylines. Could have kept the world-hopping Magisterium guy out of this episode and just focused on Lyra and the fallout from the previous ep.
I know enough about the story to know Will’s importance but haven’t read it myself so don’t have any investment to him as a character. So, yeah, his portion of this just does not work. It is flat and wooden and I am not invested in it at all. Which is a shame because the actors don’t seem unskilled – they’re just not being given much to work with at all and only these weird small snippets to do it in.
Plus, it feels to me like Lord Boreal would be more than capable and would (somehow) command the resources necessary to simply pose as an authority figure, then gently but firmly ask Will’s mom for a copy of those letters. Instead, he chose to go for the “reinforce her panoia” route, then acted as much creepily and suspiciously as possible, in order to make sure she would NOT want to show him the letters. And if breaking and entering was next (or worse, he seemed to order his more ruthless-looking goon to proceed by all means necessary), I mean, they’re a mentally ill woman and a kid, there was no reason to be too stealthy about it, especially considering Lord Boreal can just reenter the portal – even if they would describe him (which, they still could), good luck tracking him to the other universe, Scotland Yard.
The good ol’ “I can see the show is telling me he’ll be important but these scenes feel like part of a checklist for plot” section of book adaptions.
So Asriel is upset that Lyra came until he sees she brought a friend, then suddenly looks really, really happy, like Dracula in a blood bank happy.Run, kid.
I’m glad that the actor playing Roger was able to give a decent reaction to that. You could see on that cute little freckly face that he knows something is up, and doesn’t want to leave his friend there to face it by herself. Too bad all the direction Keene is getting seems to be “look stunned” because everyone else around her is pretty much acting circles around her simply because they seem to have been given the room to do so. I would really like to know why the people making this are so deadening the central character of the trilogy? If I were new to this and watching, it would look almost as if the series is more about her parents than it is about Lyra, they’ve certainly gone to more effort to give them more interesting characterisation than they have her.
Wait, Lyra has characterisation?
I thought it was just “everyone tells her she’s Jesus, and she can do or not do anything the plot demands”.
Which is pretty much what I said, they’ve given everyone else more interesting characterisation, including Serafina Pekkala (before turning her into deus ex Pekkala, anyway) than they have Lyra. Lyra’s just kind of been…there. Is something (that should be) interesting happening? Oh, look, there’s Lyra. Is something tragic happening? Look, Lyra’s there. Did something disturbing just happen? Lyra’s over there. It’s almost like she’s a part of the background in her scenes, the character direction they’ve given her has to be a large part of the problem, she’s just so flat. And she shouldn’t be. As much as I’ve always despised her in the books, Lyra is an interesting character. In this she might as well be a highly mobile piece of furniture.
No no no, see they’re not allowed to tell her she’s the saviour. If they tell her, she’ll fail. So they just tell us over and over that she’s the saviour instead of showing us why she’s important to the story.
Similarly, perhaps someone could release that researcher from bear prison?Lyra asks Iorek to do that immediately after the fight and he agrees. Hopefully he also spared a bear to make sure he got home ok.
Man this show does just not let stuff sit. Iorek arriving to bear castle and finishing the fight was all of what, 8 minutes? And finishing the fight offscreen is such a weird choice. We’ve been told by characters at every turn that bears are ruthless and when it comes down to see that side of them it’s framed offscreen like the witch dying in Wizard of Oz.
Think I’m just going to read the books instead of watching season 2.
You will understand much more why so many of us both despair at what these incompetents behind the camera are doing to it, and why we keep watching anyway.
Are we going to ignore that Lyra can fall from the skies with no parachute onto densely compact snow only to suffer from momentary pain?And her toy box is just as invincible?
I think we were supposed to take it that she hit that conveniently smooth rock face behind her at exactly the right angle and gently slid the rest of the way down. But it was truly odd storytelling that they entirely skipped not just her landing, but also Iorek and Roger apparently falling out of the balloon none the worse for wear too.
Yeah, the storytelling has gotten really lazy.I’m guessing a lot of it is from the source material, but if you’re going to adapt it to a big budget BBC/HBO production, maybe have your creative people figure out a way to bridge the gap.It’s really frustrating to set up that daemons can be killed fairly easily, or that they share pain, but falling from the sky means nothing to Lyra. Or that Lyra was clearly uncomfortably strip searched, and everyone’s supposed to believe she can sneak multiple plot device boxes into prison.They couldn’t afford to have her hold onto one of those flying goblin thingies to slow her descent for 15 frames, or just have her wonder for a second how they’re okay?
No, the laziness has NOTHING to do with the source material. It’s like production did a cursory read of the books and chose exactly all the wrong things to focus on. This show just exposits things at you. The books tell a thematically rich story.
People are wondering why they keep cutting to Will’s story. The showrunners are thinking ahead because Will doesn’t appear in the books until the second volume and you get his whole backstory in one giant chunk, which is fine in the book but would stop the show dead in its tracks.I think the reason that Iorek’s killing blows are obscured is because, in the book, he kills Iofur by completely ripping off his jaw which would be pretty gruesome.
Lord Boreal is crossing into this-world Oxford, not London. I find him (the actor, actually) to be strangely intriguing, even though he is from the Dark Side.I skipped the bear fight. It was icky enough in the movie, and when I checked the text it was just as icky.
Boreal seems interesting; sadly, his screentime so far has vastly outpaced the amount of actual plot he’s been alotted.
If Asriel seems unfeeling in the show, he’s Mr. Rogers compared to the book version. Book Asriel is much more brusque, dismissive and prone to temper flares than Macavoy, and Daniel Craig before him, have portrayed. I always pictured an imperious Timothy Dalton when I first read the books.
But after all the armor talk, why weren’t they wearing their armor?This the question I want answered? I knew two things about this series when I started watching:First, the title is reference to Paradise Lost. So, I assumed it was about Satan. Second, it has armor polar bear. This is the reason I watched. Fuck Satan and while I am ok with people ragging on the Catholic church generally, it is not particularly original and I am not ok with British pricks. So for me the whole point of this series is to watch some armored polar bears whale on each other. We finally get to armored polar bear action and they take off their armor? Jumping Gee Hosa Fat, I might not be a fancy Hollywood producer but it seems to me to pretty axiomatic in the show with armored polar bears you have them fight in armor, because that is objectively cool.
I am really not feeling this show at all. What about everyone else here?
I was going to ask if James McAvoy was ever coming back, lol. He’s the reason I tuned in, and I didn’t know he didn’t matter, and would disappear from the story, so I’ve been a tad irked by that, lol. But I still like Daphne Keene and Ruth Wilson alot. They are very good. A lot of the cast is, even if I don’t fully understand the logic behind making someone’s ‘soul’ a separate animal. The concept has too many holes (some talk, some don’t, many are easily killable, etc). Between the movie and now the show, my question is, is this as good as the adaptations can be? The money and talent is certainly there. What could either do to possibly make it better? Because the problems I’m having seem to be book-based, so I’m starting to wonder if the source material might be overrated.
I would say a big difference betwen the show and the book/s is that the books tell you the story, the series thinks it’s the same to just exposit things at you.So for example, the big one; daemons. This show (like the movie before it) races to tell you up-front that ‘a daemon is a person’s soul in animal form’. And the book doesn’t actually EVER say that. It’s one of the ideas it raises in the course of the story, perhaps the one it steers into, but it does that by showing us a story and making us empathise with and understand the particular central pair.Because ‘daemon = soul’ is a pretty meaningless statement in itself. Like Kyle Kallgren once said in a video about Cloud Atlas, discussing its deceptively simple themes and conclusions,
“There’s your kindergarten teacher teaching your little toddler brain
that one plus one equals two, and then there’s Bertrand Russell’s 1910
Proof published in Principia Mathematica using only symbolic
logic, basic mathematical axioms and inference rules to illustrate… that
one plus one does in fact equal two.”And it feels like this is a series which if it even realises that the story here is built to explore certain ideas and themes through emotional, intriguing storytelling is helpless to do any of that itself.The beats of the show are very faithful to the book but largely emptied of the things that made them worth anything in the novel. The series feels like a dull plod through a lot of theoretically arresting images unconnected by a story to really invest us in what we’re seeing. The book is quite the opposite, a r
The money and talent is there… on screen. I’m afraid I don’t think sufficient talent is there behind the camera. Thorne is not up to this kind of storytelling as a writer and the directors have been most lacklustre and incapable of sophisticated (or sometimes even particularly competetent) visual storytelling in a series which badly needs that to work hard. Funnily enough the visual storytelling of the non-visual novel is superb!I hate to think of people thinking this is as good as HDM gets, or even having a subsequent reading spoiled by experiencing a badly-told version first. My best advice, if you’re half-inclined to give the novel a go, would be to skip out on next week’s episode and leave some surprises for yourself! If you’re considering a read but lacking in time, I also highly recommend the full-cast unabridge audiobook.
I want to like it so much more than I actually do. The pacing and storytelling feels completely disjointed to me. I can’t tell who they want you to feel invested in since they jump around and seem to discard characters at will. Major plot beats don’t land because they are rushing to cover so much ground. It feels like they’re trying to cut corners to save time or budget. Admittedly i have not read the books so i’m just judging it as a TV show.
As a book reader, if I’m honest, it’s like production did a cursory read of the books and choose exactly all the wrong things to focus on. Things happening on screen is not the same as telling a story, and I don’t think the people behind this show understand that concept.
I’m enjoying the show-ish, but it’s hitting one frustration I always have with adaptations of fantasy properties: massive amounts of exposition. I’m pretty sure directors or producers or studios (or all of them) think audiences are very stupid. I also think they forget that film is a visual medium and you should show, not tell. Also, I don’t need every damn thing explained.I always go back to “Fifth Element.” There was some amazing, unexplained world building. Apparently car theft is a capital crime in that world, but at no time did one of the police stop to say, “Blast him… Because, of course, as you know, car theft is considered a capital crime after the great car massacre and resulting law A532-C, which gives me the legal right to…” *Yawn*I don’t need you to spend so much time and clunky dialogue explaining the minutiae of the world. Show some of our and let me figure out the rest. If this show did that, I’d forgive it many sins.
I found the scene with Lyra and the bear king particularly annoying, maybe it was the painfully flat dialogue, the predictability of the whole thing or the fact that I seem to remember being told that bears cannot be tricked and yet it was the easiest thing for a girl to trick their king… The feeling that more than telling a story the show is keeping a list of scenes that need to be checked doesn’t help getting invested in those scenes either.
The most interesting item I’m getting from this show is that the actor playing Father MacPhail is Dafne Keen’s father.