The Golden Compass, the 2007 film that failed to turn His Dark Materials into a fantasy film franchise, was clearly an effort by New Line to replicate the success of The Lord Of The Rings, which has historically been a dicey proposition for film studios. The franchise film cycle just doesn’t work that way: just look at Lionsgate, which tried and failed to follow up The Hunger Games with the Divergent series, with the latter limping to a premature finish line by the third film and never resolving its story cinematically. Getting lightning to strike twice is not as easy as latching onto intellectual property in the same genre and thinking the same strategies will play out the same way.
In the case of The Golden Compass, the biggest problem was that His Dark Materials isn’t actually like The Lord Of The Rings, for reasons more numerous than we have time to get into. But at the core, I would argue, is the fact that the first book in the series is subtle—pun intended—about the larger scale of the story. While the critique of religion is certainly present, the actual sense of what’s at stake in the story is mostly left to vague suggestions of Lyra being important, with the actual plot staying fairly grounded in Lyra’s lived experience and worldbuilding. It isn’t until the end of the book that Pullman pulls back the curtain to reveal the multiple universes, and it isn’t until The Subtle Knife that the author lays out Lyra and Will’s place within a cosmic struggle between two forces larger than themselves. In “Tower Of The Angels,” this week’s installment of the television adaptation of Pullman’s work, the man formerly known as John Parry lays this out plainly for Lee Scoresby:
“There are two forces that have always been at war with each other: those who repress, who command, who don’t want us to be conscious, inquiring beings; and those who want us to know more, to be stronger and wiser, to explore. And those two forces are lining up to battle as we speak.”
It’s the big picture the first season only speaks of in riddles, and while it’s technically still a bit of a riddle in this speech to Lee, there’s a much clearer sense of how the pieces we’re familiar with fit into that puzzle. “Tower Of The Angels” is the first time His Dark Materials has felt like a fantasy “epic,” and although I have some quibbles with the way they’re achieving this I do believe it’s having a positive impact on the adaptation overall. Presented as a side quest at the end of last week’s episode, Will and Lyra’s search for the Subtle Knife is immediately reframed as something far more significant in an introduction that not so subtly apes the beginning of the very fantasy trilogy that New Line was trying to replicate back in 2007. The Subtle Knife does bear some similarities to the One Ring, what with each becoming a burden on the one who bears it. But whereas the One Ring is the starting point for Tolkien’s narrative, His Dark Materials tracks closer to The Hobbit: an adventure that starts as a journey before it becomes a quest, and registers as a battle before it’s clear that it’s actually a war. And “Tower Of The Angels” is the point at which that shifts, and is the high point for the series thus far.
Now, I don’t necessarily know if I like the “epic” shorthand that the show is using to achieve this. The riff on the start of The Fellowship Of The Ring was a bit too on-the-nose, and the fact it had no narrative justification kind of bugs me. Additionally, the show’s approach to the witches continues to be nonsensical: I know being able to end on a bit of flashy action and the scale of their assault on the Zeppelins guarding Asriel’s tear in the universe is the show emphasizing the escalation at hand, but the idea that a small group of witches brought down a half-dozen zeppelins like it was nothing is ludicrous. How were the witches not able to use their magical smoke monster skills to stop the attack on their home that allegedly killed hundreds of witches? Why would Serafina have even bothered to bring up the fact that there would be men guarding Asriel’s path to another world if she knows that witches are so overpowered? The show’s approach to the witches is to make them “cooler,” but mostly they just stand around and spout expositional nonsense and then participate in flashy but illogical action sequences. I realize the rest of the story can be a little talky, with a lot of the action happening away from the main story, but they need to be doing significantly more to justify the time we’re spending on the witches than flashing the CGI budget.
Which is why the scenes in Cittàgazze represent the best bridge between the show’s different modes. The fight at the top of the tower between Will and Angelica’s brother Tullio brings action, the subsequent conversation with Giacomo Paradisi (a welcome Terence Stamp) connects the present to the past and sets the stakes for the journey ahead, and then the scene with Will in the bath takes stock of the emotional impact of these developments on our protagonists. It’s the last scene that really pulls the story together, and has what the witches scenes lack: a clear understanding of how the big picture that’s coming into focus actually matters to the heart of the story. As much as the introduction of the knife is—based on Jopari’s understanding—a huge moment in the war for the future of thought itself, the script does a great job of making these scenes just as integral to Will and Lyra’s relationship. Lyra and Pan both get wrapped up in the fight with Tullio, but this really comes to a head as Will is recovering, and Lyra starts to realize that the knife is Will’s alethiometer, and leaps at the chance to help him understand how to tap into the mindset necessary to wield it. And in the most pivotal moment, we see Pan step forward to rub his adorable red panda head against Will’s wound, shocking an unknowing Lyra who doesn’t understand the feelings that Pan is projecting on her behalf. The scenes bring together the various themes, tones, and characters of the series really effectively, and the solidity of the show’s core narrative by the end of it is easily the most momentum the adaptation has achieved thus far.
As previously established, I’m more mixed on the way Young Lee Scoresby is impacting the story, but I don’t think it’s entirely destroyed the effectiveness of the symmetry of Lyra and Will journeying forward while their father/father figure team up to assist them. It’s hard for me to gauge how the “reveal” of John as the shaman would play to a non-reader audience, especially since I don’t know how much Andrew Scott’s casting registered last season, but Scott brings the right pathos to the part. And I at least understand the writers’ desire to have this particular buddy pairing be a little closer in age, even if “Grandchild I never had” is more interesting than the “I haven’t been lucky enough to have children” we get from Lee here as Jopari asks him to explain his love for Lyra. But the core of these scenes is thematically solid enough that there’s positive momentum, and—unlike with the witches—there’s substance beneath the money shots of the rolling green landscape, which add some nice visual diversity to the episode that makes this hour directed by Leanne Welham the most visually impactful yet.
The “turning point” quality of “Tower Of The Angels” also comes for Mary Malone, who is the third side of the triangle of people who are being asked to tap into the forces of the universe in order to play some role in what’s to come. As previously discussed, in the first book this is entirely Lyra’s journey, but the show shifted this by making Will a protagonist from the word go. And so while this turning point comes early in Will’s story in the books, meaning the focus is slightly more on Lyra’s belief—thanks to the alethiometer—that their paths are connected, it registers more as a turning point in Will’s own story here. By comparison, though, Mary Malone was only introduced a couple of episodes ago, and so it’s harder to necessarily see her revelatory connection with the cave—or shadow, or dark matter, or dust—as a huge moment for her character. But I think that was always part of Pullman’s intent: these revelations about a philosopher’s knife and celestial forces out for vengeance are a turning point in Lyra’s larger journey, a pivot in Will’s emerging story, and the starting point for Mary’s. And while the shift in narrative does sort of make it harder to see Mary’s side of this story on the same level, since Will and Lyra are more equally established, I’m continuing to enjoy Simone Kirby’s performance, and she sold the exposition-heavy scene well.
I don’t think that The Golden Compass would have succeeded if they had used omniscient voiceover to tell the story of the epic battle between oppressive forces and free thought, and the circumstances of the forging of the Subtle Knife, and the stakes of what is to come. His Dark Materials is so compelling because of how it uses Lyra’s story to gradually peel back these layers, her gradual discovery of the emotional complexity of her world and her own self the key to why the story works as well as it does. “Tower Of The Angels” suggests that although the less-focused storytelling in the first season damaged that core slightly, and I still have some reservations, there’s an undeniable energy to that central journey that the show is bringing to life at the moment, which is at least enough for me to have raised expectations for the last three episodes of the season.
Stray observations
- The production design for the series has been consistently strong, but I like how they visualized the threads in the universe, which not so subtly match the lines in the readout from The Cave. Happy with how that came together.
- Unfortunately for the sake of science, I can’t say if I would have recognized Phoebe Waller-Bridge as the voice of Jopari’s daemon without prompting, since someone on my Twitter feed who watched the episode in the U.K. last week spoiled this particular Fleabag-crossover, but I appreciate the intertextual wink and hope some of you got to have an unaided moment of realization.
- Non-readers aren’t really supposed to know who’s been doing the omniscient voiceover that started the season and continues here, and frankly even as a reader I don’t think I would have pegged that. But it’s Sophie Okenedo doing the voice, and you can see who she’s playing in the credits if you’d like.
- After Boreal serves as our introduction to Mary’s story here—as she refuses to apply the research to the military application he suggests as Charles Latrom—he meets with Coulter back in their world, and then without explanation he takes them into Cittàgazze, which raises a host of questions the episode doesn’t really answer. If he’s always been able to enter Cittagazze, why didn’t he try to get the knife himself? Curious to see how that resolves itself (and reminder again to the Brits that I don’t actually want you to answer my rhetorical questions with knowledge from next week’s episode).
- Boreal’s sitdown with Marisa was mostly just playing up their sexual tension, but I really liked seeing how Coulter’s daemon responded when Boreal’s was getting close to touching Marisa’s hand as a way of comparing to how Pan embraced touching Will earlier. A nice reinforcement of the meaningfulness of the daemons as a way of testing the limits of intimacy.
- I loved the callback to Lyra backing into the bathroom to visit with Roger when they were with Asriel, and Pan following suit: beyond just being charming, it’s also a reminder that a lot of how she approaches helping Will is feeling like she needs to avoid letting him down like she did Roger, and that little connection drove that home without being too obvious about it.
- Will and Lyra searching for the entrance to the tower reminded me of the kind of scene you’d find in an Uncharted game, as the need to scan an area creates an excuse for some dialogue, and a small puzzle of sorts.
- I hope on set, Andrew Scott broke into a full Daniel Day-Lewis and ripped off an “I Abandoned My Child! I’ve Abandoned My Boy!” during a take of the scene where John talks about leaving Will behind.
- You may have noticed I have been using the provided image of Red Panda Pan for the Grading Widget for several reviews, and no, I will not be stopping. (It actually comes from this episode, when Will is waking up, but that didn’t stop me from using it earlier).
- The scene of Trullio getting taken by the specters didn’t really make a whole lot of sense to me, as it didn’t feel narratively necessary, but learning that the character was supposed to play a role in the Lord Asriel standalone episode that ended up never getting filmed due to the pandemic contextualizes that a bit.
- I was waiting during the fight to get some payoff for the foreshadowboxing from last season, and sure enough it arrived.
Through The Amber Spyglass (Minor Spoilers for the Book Series)
Since the beginning of the season, Jack Thorne has been very upfront that the “lost” Asriel episode isn’t going to happen, but I’m really hoping they release the script, because the idea that Trullio played a part makes me wonder what specifically they wanted it to accomplish. Asriel’s actions before the war begins aren’t actually that critical, since on some level Asriel himself isn’t critical: it’s Lyra who matters, and the war is really more of a smokescreen than anything else. And so while I can see why the show—having cast a recognizable actor—thinks that could be an interesting experiment, the fact they’re so comfortable cutting it makes me wonder what was in it that they thought was valuable in the first place. Any thoughts, book readers? (I still haven’t gotten to any of the expanded universe material that’s come out more recently, I need to admit).
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The specters are what kept Boreal from going after the knife. He’s not comfortable risking being in the city long enough to try and get it so send in those who are immune to do his dirty work.
Right, but why risk going there at all? I get that the Specters represent a risk, so he can’t just chill out indefinitely, but it was a bit too casual the way he waltzes in.
Because gates are extremely rare, and the only way to enter “our” world is through the city? Or was it revealed earlier that he had a direct gate?
But does he have another choice?
I think he has to to go between worlds. The first season is meant to be a “trick” in that there was actually some time/space between him entering the portal in Lyra’s world and exiting in Will’s. With each time being him sneaking past specters.Presumably the cuts he does use are leftovers from a previous user of the knife that did not close the cuts.
He also seems to enjoy Will’s world more than his (presumed) home world.
“Tower Of The Angels” suggests that although the less-focused storytelling in the first season damaged that core slightly, and I still have some reservations, there’s an undeniable energy to that central journey that the show is bringing to life at the moment, which is at least enough for me to have raised expectations for the last three episodes of the season.Agreed. The reason that first season felt quite awkward because it did a poor job of showing “subtle” expositions and explanations of how their world works. It is almost as if the series is asking us to come in with firsthand knowledge from the books, which is NOT how you want to craft a TV show. They should have taken some notes from Lord of the Ring and Harry Potter films on how to rope in viewers and keep them all the way to the end.If he’s always been able to enter Cittagazze, why didn’t he try to get the knife himself? Curious to see how that resolves itself (and reminder again to the Brits that I don’t actually want you to answer my rhetorical questions with knowledge from next week’s episode).
SIGH.It was explained few times this season that the Spectres take/kill the adults. Boreal dared not to go and explore the city because he knew that one could always be around the corner and it would be game over for him.But like I said… the show didn’t do good job of clearly explaining these little things. It appears that he always been able to go into that city. In which case, the window that Boreal used is connecting from Lyra’s world to the City’s world, which leads to another window that connect from City’s world to Our world.Hope that helps clear thing up here.I know being able to end on a bit of flashy action and the scale of their assault on the Zeppelins guarding Asriel’s tear in the universe is the show emphasizing the escalation at hand, but the idea that a small group of witches brought down a half-dozen zeppelins like it was nothing is ludicrous. How were the witches not able to use their magical smoke monster skills to stop the attack on their home that allegedly killed hundreds of witches?
Yeah, they didn’t really do good job with witches this year, even though I liked their mysterious presences. The revelations about the Dust opened the universe a lot and I am eager to see if the witches have bigger roles yet to come (don’t spoil for me, please! I didn’t read the books!)
To be clear: I understand why Boreal can’t just roam freely in the city, due to the Specters, but I was a bit perplexed by the show’s suggestion he regularly enters the city, especially since we’ve seen him use the windows before and never covered the idea that the city is a portal between them.If I’m fixing that scene to make it clearer, I’m having him explain the Specters to Coulter and telling her to stay close to me, and then having them barely escape the Specters because they get distracted by Tullio instead. As it was, they were just too casual.
I’m with you. We know about the specters in the city. We can assume Boreal knows about them because he has said he can’t get the knife himself. So if he goes into the city through a portal I want some damn sense of urgency in getting to the next portal that they are presumably going to. They did not communicate that and it would have been easy to do. Marisa is just curiously checking out the strange movement.
Non-reader here. How could Boreal access Will’s world without passing through Cittàgazze? Isn’t Cittàgazze the nexus of all the universes?Also, well, of course they couldn’t show us Cittàgazze last season. First of all because the set didn’t exist, and second of all, it would be confusing as hell for the viewer, and not particularly meaningful, the specifics of his crossing over weren’t as important as the idea that he was, in fact, crossing over.Speaking of which: how long has he been doing it? He made himself a billionaire entrepreneur, how much time did it take to not merely learn how the world works and build a fake identity robust enough to withstand scrutiny, but also to master the game of life in order to create wealth and power and influence and a network of lackeys and connections?This said, I vastly enjoyed an upcoming scene from next episode (sorry) that makes it clearer how Boreal isn’t just an utilitarian grand schemer, he genuinely enjoys himself in Will’s world. I mean, his love for coffee alone was an indication, he extols the virtues of off-world coffee so much and to everyone who will listen, it becomes almost endearing.
Based on what Stamp’s character said about making sure that if you open a portal, you must close it as well or bad things will happen, I am wondering what the explanation for the the tears that are being used to hop between worlds that are existing. Obviously someone had the knife (Stamp) and opened them up, but never closed them. BTW, my favorite character in the whole series is Lord Boreal. Such a steely cold, put you at unease character.
That could explain why the Spectres have been coming to the City. Someone with the Knife might have left these portals open for easy access to other worlds so they could pillage their wealth. Since there’s a portal in City that lead straight back to Kyra’s world (that they didn’t know of yet!), perhaps they could start closing up these holes and make a break for Kyra’s world, leaving whoever chasing after her and Will trapped in the City.Then again, I never read the books, so I dunno where all of this is going. This episode had slightly regained my investment in the series for good as I am excited to see how this season resolves itself and build toward the next season.
Is Kyra an alternate Lyra?
He gives off a wonderful aura of elegant menace, like Giancarlo Esposito in The Mandalorian.
Additionally, the show’s approach to the witches continues to be nonsensical:Granted, it’s been years since I’ve read the books – something which I’ve been meaning to remedy since the series began airing last fall – but my recollection of the witches is that – to borrow a phrase from Agnes Skinner – they’re more than capable of killing you five times before you hit the ground.So how their combat abilities are being handled in the show seems to track. With my memory at any rate. I’m honestly more fussed by the fact that their sole role thus far has been to spout exposition like a chorus of Galadriels.
Right, but they did it with bow and arrows, and weren’t able to just evaporate into smoke and warp around willy-nilly to kill everyone in sight.Like, how in the world did they ever capture the witch they were torturing if like 5 well-staffed Zeppelins could be taken down that easily?
I never really gave it that much thought. I mean, we’re mostly seeing the high ranking witches in action – maybe they’re just more capable?It honestly doesn’t bother me seeing as basically every fantasy or superhero franchise has played at least somewhat fast and loose with their respective character’s powers and abilities. That said, I doubt even the smokiest of witches could’ve likely done much about several tons of ordinance being dropped on their heads once them shits is falling. Particularly since the attack was framed as being both excessive and unexpected even by Magisterium standards.
As you may have seen, I have given it much too much thought, and this is an occupational hazard I want to be very clear you should not adopt for no reason.
Well done for pointing this out, was also mystified (and not in a good way) at the marvelisation of the witches as uber-superheroes. They should just take over the entire world already. Characters with seemingly no limits to their powers never make for a good narrative. See also, Rise of Skywalker.
They should just take over the entire world already. But it seems to me the narrative point here is that only because someone is able to do something, it doesn’t mean they would or should or would care to. In the case of the witches, they had never been provoked into war until now.
My only other thought is that, given the similarities to The Lord of the Rings which must’ve been apparent to the creators early on in this production, a conscious decision was made to ditch the bow and arrows lest the witches basically just become elves.Along roughly the same lines, while a bow and arrow works quite well in prose, depicting that sort of combat – particularly in close quarters like a zeppelin or submarine – would’ve possibly been somewhat clunky on screen. And, again, they’re equal parts Galadriel and Legolas knock off at that point.I dunno, there are things I don’t love about the witches in this production, but how they fight isn’t one of them.Besides, I’m too hung up on not being able to reconcile the character of Lee Scoresby with the soft baby man depicting him on screen every week. I don’t have time or energy for minor bullshit like witch smoke.
I just figured that the queen is stronger than most, and the rest of the zeppelins got taken down by less showy means. There really is not much a zeppelin can do to stop a flying individual from sticking five bombs onto the lifting body and flying off cackling.
Again, isn’t there an entire thing in the books about the witches being able to fold themselves into the shadows, which is how she bears witness to the one witch’s torture and comes to her as Ruta Skadi or whatever? I get that the book describes it differently, but like appirition in Harry Potter, i figured the smoke was an artistic choice
IIRC (and I could me totally wrong about this) they captured her daemon first and then captured her. That would at least be my best theory. It has been MANY years since I read the HDM trilogy.
As a non-reader, the show left me with the impression that yes, the witches could have been able to vaporize the entire Magisterium long ago, but they willingly chose not to, since they’re true neutral and didn’t want to meddle in the affairs of men or some such. On its part, the Magisterium is unwilling and/or philosophically unable to admit to its people and its members that, yeah, the witches are basically allowing them to exist. (Plus clearly the Magisterium don’t know as much as they think they know).
I think the show is making sense. The witches are OP if they see you coming.. The magisterium (?) carpet bombed the fuck out of them by surprise.. hard to turn into smoke and stabby stabby if you are sleeping
And I briefly thought the show finally Stockholm Syndrome-ed me. This was a terrific, grade A, episode. It was exciting, the emotional stakes landed, the action was good, it was scary with the nice visuals of the spectors, and it did feel like an epic. There was great character work. Terrence Stamp playing Obi-Wan! Will’s sadness at his brief father-figure choosing to die motivated by his own father’s absence, was poignant.It’s been a while since I read the original books, and I was never a superfan, so forgive the following. Seeing the angel talk to Mary made me think how New Age-y this story is. Conscious fundamental particles of the universe you can only access and be one with if you put your mind a certain way. (Star Wars is New Age-y too, and maybe Pullman was deliberately taking from that series.) I didn’t like so much the angel telling Mary that they guided human evolution, though did like and was surprised by the reason why. If this is in the books, okay, but I would have preferred a more equivocal answer like the angels set something in motion but didn’t know humans would be the result of the evolution. Let’s not do the intelligent design myth. Maybe Pullman didn’t and we’ll get a clearer explanation in future eps.
I don’t recall the books suggesting that causation at all, if anything it was almost more like the other way, where intelligence attracts them. Or at least that’s how I read it.
“guided” is not the right word.To quote from the book:Mary: “And did you intervene in human evolution?”Answer: “YES.”Mary: “Why?”Answer: “VENGEANCE.”Mary: “Vengeance for – oh! Rebel angels! After the war in Heaven – Satan and the Garden of Eden – but it isn’t true, is it? Is that what you”then they cut her off.
They should try not to turn Pullman’s Atheism for Kids into Satanism for Kids. I guess the latter would be teaching kids to not blindly believe in what they’re told and always question the claims of and rebel against the Authority.Uhm. Wait a minute…
I guess if in this world there is God, or The Authority, and Angels, then we’ve already left scientific realism behind and evolution might as well have been teologically interfered with.
Conscious fundamental particles of the universe you can only access and be one with if you put your mind a certain way. The one thing that still bothers me is that apparently there was a serious scientific research that was funded with this goal in mind? Like, Mary didn’t react like, “Dark matter is sentient?! Whaaaaaat?!”, but rather with, “Dark matter is sentient! I knew it!”Like, I’d really like to read that paper. Or witness how they pitched the project at fund-raisers.
“Getting lightning to strike twice is not as easy as latching onto
intellectual property in the same genre and thinking the same strategies
will play out the same way.” I mean, I get what you’re saying, and I’m sure you know all this already, but Peter Jackson had enormous creative autonomy and resource investment from New Line, whereas Chris Weitz was constantly being undercut, and his whole movie was kneecapped from the start by the astoundingly stupid decision to finance the project by selling off the non-American distribution rights, thereby betting everything on the major market not terribly familiar with the books, without a great track record of female-led genre movies, and with the largest religious intensity. Not a great plan.
All fair. Let’s define “strategies” here as a broad concept, rather than a specific one, insofar as New Line followed handled the “1. Buy rights to fantasy novels” in the hopes of getting to “3. Profit” but didn’t quite remember how the “2.” went.
Interesting point. It probably didn’t hurt that Peter Jackson was so very geographically distant from those funding the project–that would tend to reinforce a sense of autonomy on both sides.
I totally get what you are saying and I had no clue about the books prior to the movie.. but as a counter point it had an armored polar bear in the trailer so it has no excuse for doing as poorly as it did
Prior to the first Hunger Games movie in 2012, there simply weren’t genre/action/fantasy movies fronted by young women that were big hits in the US. (Okay, the first Twilight did well enough in ‘08, if we must count that, but both the Hunger Games and Twilight series had the home field advantage of being American stories, and a pronounced romance angle, while The Golden Compass had neither.)
I always thought Lee was 40-50 at most in the books, was he really supposed to be that much older?? I assumed his career started young, given how active it was.
for me it was mostly Sam Elliot’s performance in the movie that made me think Scorsby was supposed to be…. well, Sam Elliot.
I was sooo ready to answer rhetorical questions with knowledge from next week’s episode. Rule Britannia, God Save the bloody Queen, etc.
Next week’s episode is good! We’re allowed to say it!
In the case of The Golden Compass, the biggest problem was that His Dark Materials isn’t actually like The Lord Of The Rings, for reasons more numerous than we have time to get into. Well, also the studio’s decision to avoid overt mentions to God and Judeo-Christian overtones, both of which are kinda REALLY FUCKING IMPORTANT when you’re adapting HDM.
It really brings up the question, why even bother getting the rights to such a famously controversial series if you’re not prepared to deal with that controversy?
YUUUUUUP.
why even bother getting the rights to such a famously controversial series if you’re not prepared to deal with that controversy?Because cute talking animals!Which then they didn’t use that much in season one.
I’m open to the argument that the Golden Compass would have been a better movie if they hadn’t cut that off at the knees, but I don’t know if it would have necessarily been more successful? But obviously, we can’t really test the counterfactual.
Oh, definitely not responding to the success argument, sorry for the confusion. More of a sidebar there. I wanted to like the flick, but it was like…no. Nope, it’s neutered.Oddly enough, it’s like HDM is fated to be an ill-equipped substitute for a previous smash hit. It isn’t LotR and it isn’t GoT, it’s its own thing.To that end, does the shoehorning into the “we NEED a new GoT” mold hurt it? Is it even a real thing that I’m talking about? I’ve been reluctant to try the series based on how thoroughly diasppointed I was with the movie.
Script? They should film it as soon as it’s safe.
Thorne has already said that the way the standalone Asriel episode—I don’t know where they intended to put it in the episode order, actually—no longer makes sense after the entire season had aired, so it’s dead and gone.
One really weird bit: Will’s immediate response to seeing the Knife cut through a gold statue like it’s air is to wrap up his hand, like he honestly thinks that’s going to help.
I think he was preparing to box the guy
Same, I think the episode writer was trying to visually remind viewers of way-back-when in season one when he was boxing at the gym.
I really like this show but I hate the fuckin’ witches. They make no sense, they’re overpowered and yet also somehow helpless…like, what are we even doing here? What’s the point? All their scenes are the same.
1. One or two witches meet, talk using some jargon and references to places I don’t know or have been given little to no motivation to care about.2. One wants to go do something, the other either agrees but demurs, or disagrees entirely.3. They then go float up to an airship and destroy it.The exception being the torture scene, I guess, which gave us a little context about what makes them so magical but little else.Either fuckin’ do something with this sideplot or not, but it’s middle of season 2 and I still don’t give two fucks about these people. They need a bottle episode or something. Maybe show what their day-to-day is like so I can actually feel bad for that village getting bombed (which as this reviewer points out, makes no fucking sense because these women seem more than capable of just TEARING SHIT UP when necessary, and also have BIRDS AS DAEMONS who apparently didn’t notice a fucking fleet roll up on them).
As I noted above, being capable of destroying the world doesn’t mean you want to.The “daemons have aspects that match the person’s inner self” thing annoys me, though. Mostly because it’s done in the most obvious ways, and makes use of trite metaphors like “insects and snakes are evil” and “birds are noble”. Or somehow even worse ones, like guards having guard dogs as daemons.
Will and Lyra searching for the entrance to the tower reminded me of the kind of scene you’d find in an Uncharted game, as the need to scan an area creates an excuse for some dialogue, and a small puzzle of sorts.I half expected them to scale the tower on the outside because of Uncharted, lol
Seeing that Andrew Scott is John Parry is really getting me wanting to watch the series now. I also want to reread the novels beforehand, but I might just kick out the current episodes in the upcoming holidays.
I didn’t know I needed my Hot Priest to have tattoos and chant while wearing a hood, but damn. Hell yes please.
Not to mention his dæmon is Fleabag! What a series.
just look at Lionsgate, which tried and failed to follow up The Hunger
Games with the Divergent series, with the latter limping to a premature
finish line by the third film and never resolving its story
cinematically.
The failure of Divergent to reach it’s conclusion was less that it was late to the party chasing the YA trend and more that it tried to chase the other sub-trend: Splitting the final book in to two movies.Can’t remember if it was Harry Potter or Twilight who went first, but that set the tone that Hunger Games just BARELY got in under the wire with and Divergent missed completely.It was a self-inflicted wound. They don’t do that and the series wraps with a whimper, but wraps nonetheless.
As someone who owned a pretty good percentage of the second movie in my box office fantasy league, I can assure you its problems did not only start with the decision to split the final book into two movies. (I mean, that was obviously an exacerbating decision, but the wheels were off before that).
Oh I’m sure there were a host of bad decisions that got them to that point, but they still got that third movie out the door despite it all. It was one last dumb decision that was the nail in the coffin.
It started with Harry Potter, which in all honesty needed the two films. The pacing for the two was uneven though- Part 2 felt like whiplash that could have used another half hour at least, and Part 1 probably could have benefited from some trimming. Though: Potter would have been even WORSE if part 1 ended where it was originally intended to end.Twilight was a series of books scrambling for content that became a series of films scrambling for content. Mockingjay could have fit into a single film, but unlike Twilight and Divergent, the strength of the cast masked the sin of the split film (IMO). Divergent was trash from day one, and by the time the adaptation rolled around, folks had tired of the generic YA savior and half assed rebellion story.
I thought I remember them also originally planning to split the final 50 Shades book but I can’t remember if it was only speculation or if it was in the cards before ultimately being scrapped.
Was it Harry Potter, Twilight, or the godawful Hobbit movies that should have been one movie?
Yes.
Hobbit should have been two, planed from the start, and stuck to the source material.
The Subtle Knife does bear many similarities to the One Ring, what with it having been forged for good and then corrupted by evil, before becoming a burden to the one who bears it.NOPE NOPE NOPE. The One Ring was ALWAYS meant to control the other ring bearers. It was NEVER forged for good.
Yeah, that’s fair. I’ll adjust that language, not my intent to suggest otherwise.
An elf would see it that way. Sauron just wanted order! He was looking out for everyone!-A mysterious rider in black(But seriously awesome to see this coming from you, always wondered if you were an LOTR/Tolkien person or just liked the joke.)
Didn’t the books have Boreal able to go to Cittigaze, but opting not to try for the knife because of the Specters?
I’m glad the Phoebe Waller-Bridge wasn’t spoiled for me.So far, the only things that has anyone else in my family even barely curious about this show is 1) Pan as the red panda, and 2) the Fleabag reunion.Speaking of the red panda, you can tell that Pan isn’t going to settle in that form, because when he was threatened, he just took a kick to the face, instead of taking this “intimidating” stance that real red pandas take when threatened:
I mean, clearly I can concur on #1.
After this episode and, even more, next week’s, I’m now legitimately excited for this show, which never happened before. I was sort of watching out of a sense of duty toward the material and production. But this season everything came together: the locations, the SFX, the cast (Amir Wilson still didn’t win me over, but Dafne Keen did, and of course Ruth Wilson and Ariyon Bakare are terrific), and more importantly the thematic and narrative flux.There’s a bit of an enhanced high fantasy aspect at play right now, with fairy tale-like passages like the philosophers’ guild that created a magic knife and then exploited it to get rich. And there are more sentient objects, chosen ones with mystical destinies, and shamanic spellcasting than I would have liked. But I’m confident Pullman’s anti-religion metaphors will eventually get across.
If he’s always been able to enter Cittagazze, why didn’t he try to get
the knife himself? Curious to see how that resolves itself (and reminder
again to the Brits that I don’t actually want you to answer my
rhetorical questions with knowledge from next week’s episode).
He was able to enter Cittagazze in the book as well. He used it as the bridge between Lyra’s Earth and Will’s Earth. He wanted the knife because he knew that Cittagazze was dangerous for adults and thought that with the knife he could bypass it, and he couldn’t just go and get the knife himself because staying there long enough to get it risked getting himself got.
i love the show, and i think it’s getting better and better each week, but i must agree regarding the witches, seems like an odd choice.
Question: For a show that has consistently averaged a B or higher overall rating, why is there such a disparity between the grades and critiques in the actual reviews themselves? You consistently focus on the negatives, and so rarely on the positives, that there’s a disconnect between the ratings—a B is historically a high rating — not the glorious heights of an A, but certainly respectable. Yet week after week for both seasons, the reviews just seem to neg away, focusing on what doesn’t work rather than on what does (and what made you decide to give a high rating to begin with). This week is no exception, as while the review grade may be an A-, fully half the review text here focuses on all the things you don’t like about the show and episode.
It just becomes numbing and frustrating for me as as reader, and as someone who loves the books — and who also really enjoys the show. I was excited to see your feedback and rating this week, because I felt it was an extraordinary episode of television. But once again, it was just a launchpad for (largely) another rundown of all the mistakes you feel the show creators are making week after week.
I will say that it was a nice surprise that the headline this week is actually positive — most of the time, even with those B ratings, they are about how terrible the show is or how an episode misses the mark.
I just feel like, at a certain point, the reviews fall into a trap. To paraphrase Ego in “Ratatouille,” it’s easy and fun to write the negative stuff, and it probably generates clicks. But there is certainly room for a positive spin on the show here if you like it as much as the ratings suggest. Instead of week after week going, “I wish Mrs. Coulter was the characterization I prefer,” or “I wish Lee wasn’t presented as a younger man,” since this isn’t going to change, what if you just accepted the show you were being given, and reviewed that? Instead of the show you wish it was?
Just my 2 cents. Thanks and happy holidays!
Angela, thanks for reading, and for your comments throughout the reviews.I have a simple answer to your question: grades are dumb—I wish I didn’t have to give them, and that they weren’t a framework through which the reviews are read—and the function of these reviews is to work through my response to the show, and that response has been a pretty steady “this is fine but here are the things holding it back from being excellent.” To be honest, talking about how much I like something is…just not interesting to me? I just don’t know what the purpose of that is, given that the goal of the review is to spark conversation and dialogue on these topics.Which is to say that my best advice is to see the review as the start of a conversation instead of the end of one, and the focus of the review is designed to shape that conversation. And I don’t think “Here’s what I liked” is actually a productive framework for that compared to “Let’s think about the short and long-term consequences of decisions that, while they cannot be undone, continue to reverberate.”The last thing I’ll note is that I want to be clear this is not about clicks: no one is directing me to write in this fashion, or suggesting this is what I need to do in order to keep writing about it. This is just the perspective that I find offers the best starting point for a dialogue I’m pleased you’ve joined.Happy Holidays to you as well!
Myles, first off — thanks for the very kind response to my grumpy reply to your recap. I’ve really loved the show and found the adaptation to be pretty terrific, but that also doesn’t mean that everyone needs to agree with me. I fell into the trap of “Whyyyy don’t you like it tooooo?” Apologies. Especially for the cynical “clicks” comment — that was in poor taste, and unfair.
However, while you make some excellent points on why critiques are important, including the negative feedback — all of which I agree with — can I ALSO argue in favor of “Here’s what I liked?” I know it seems like it’s a less productive avenue, but it’s not.
Part of the reason I read critiques like these episode by episode is not just to hear what someone felt the show did wrong, but simply to re-experience the episode with a smart, literate critic (which you absolutely are) — as if I’m having the best “after the episode” conversation ever. I want to hear what did and didn’t work for you — what you didn’t like, sure, but just as much — what soared! I would love to hear what made you go, “Wow, this is why the books had to be a series versus a film,” or “this is a great example of how an adaptation can bring us something more” even given the flaws you might have found there.
But no pressure. Meanwhile, thanks for the kind reply — I will continue to look forward to your takes going forward.