The second episode of His Dark Materials had a lot of work to do after a beautiful, but slightly overstuffed pilot. Did it accomplish all it needed to do? No, but it got a lot done. Lyra and Mrs. Coulter arrive in London, and Lyra is in awe of her fancy penthouse flat. Not in awe enough to forget about Roger, though that’s clearly the effect Coulter is trying to achieve. Every time she brings Roger up, Coulter has a fresh distraction. First it’s lunch at the North Institute. When she asks to help search for him, she promises to train her how to wield knowledge. So that the old men of the institute can’t belittle her. Coulter tries to mold Lyra, to change her hair and distract her with training to be extraordinary. Whatever that means. Even if she weren’t giving an obvious “I’m totally not evil” performance, her monkey daemon is acting suspiciously enough to let us know something’s fishy about this whole situation.
It’s also clear that she doesn’t have anyone looking for Roger. Despite her pushing for Lyra to trust her, the Gobblers are able to move the stolen children about the city freely. The Gyptians are actively searching for the children and they come very close. We see Roger pushed into a small room where tons of children are being kept. There, he runs into Billy Costa. A short time later, the Gyptian search party finds that same room, but the children are gone. They find an item of Billy’s clothing left behind, though. They’re on the right track.
Ariyon Bakare, Ruth Wilson (Via HBO)
One thing I’m loving about this series is how it’s able to expand on characters’ stories other than Lyra’s. The first book sticks close to her perspective. We only get to know other characters as she meets them. Here, we follow the Gyptians’ search for Billy, and how painful and desperate it becomes. If his story goes the way I think I remember it going, we’re all going to be in tears before the season’s over.
We also get a lot more with the Magisterium. Their role looks to be greatly expanded from The Golden Compass. We see one Lord Boreal sneaking into the Jordan College crypt to find the head Lord Asriel brought back from the North. When he finds out the skull is a fake, he surmises that Stanislaus Grumman must be alive. And he decides to go looking for him. He passes through a portal and finds himself in our world. Modern-day London, to be exact. This is a huge change from the books, which didn’t bring our world into it until the second one. I like it. It was kind of a jarring transition, going from The Golden Compass to The Subtle Knife, so introducing it early on is a smart move. It also shows us the concept of multiple worlds in a visually interesting way. Gets the point across much better than having Lord Asriel talk about it in the pilot.
(Via HBO)
One thing the show continues to struggle with is presenting Daemons to us. The opening text in the pilot didn’t do the trick, and the show’s having trouble depicting the exact nature of the connection. It’s tough because Pan is one aspect of Lyra’s personality, while she mostly presents another. As a result, it can feel like they’re two different characters entirely, rather than parts of the same being. That’s why, when Lyra discovers Coulter’s monkey in the study, far away from her, we don’t quite understand why she’s so disturbed. She tells us how painful it is to be that far apart, but we’ve never seen that. If I hadn’t read the book so many times, I doubt I’d understand this part at all.
To the episode’s credit, it does get there eventually. As Lyra continues to investigate Mrs. Coulter, she’s caught eavesdropping on a conversation between her and officials from the Magisterium. It would appear Coulter knows more about Dust than she let on. When she’s caught, Mrs. Coulter sics her monkey on Pan. As the monkey grabs pan, Lyra is physically in pain. As Coulter scolds her, the monkey twists pan, causing Lyra more pain. Later, when Coulter and Lord Boreal find a journalist has infiltrated her party, Boreal brings her out to his car and crushes her butterfly daemon in his hand, killing her. The scene is as horrifying as it needed to be, thanks to the work this episode did establishing the connection between humans and daemons. I’d still like to see them more as the series goes on, but it’s looking like budgetary constraints preclude that possibility. If they can’t fill each shot with animal familiars, I hope they continue to stress how important these characters are.
Ruth Wilson (Via HBO)
The show spent a ton of time last week just trying to establish the world, packing the episode full of exposition. This episode didn’t have that burden and could pack in a lot more drama. I loved the scene where Coulter leaves the flat to visit the kidnapped kids. As she’s having them all write letters to their families that will never be delivered, and snickering when she meets Roger, Lyra is digging through Coulter’s desk. She finds references to a strange facility and something called the General Oblation Board. She also finds plans for a device that has a scary-looking blade on it. She doesn’t know quite what it does yet, but it scares her. It’s only at the party, when the journalist tells her that the General Oblation Board is commonly known as the gobblers, that Lyra decides she has to leave. My heart was pounding as she made her escape, which set up a worrying cliffhanger. As Lyra and Pan try and figure out where to go, she appears to be kidnapped by the same gobblers that got Roger and Billy.
Adapting this series into a TV show was never going to be easy. There’s so much about the world that you have to explain. There’s so much that you can read in a book and accept as fact, but is really hard to show on screen. In its second episode, the show saw some improvements, but it still has a ways to go. It did a lot of necessary work to establish the connection between humans and daemons. That’s going to be really important before too long. Now it’s going to need to explain all this Dust stuff in a way that doesn’t sound like technobabble. That’s going to be a real challenge, but if it can do that, the show will be so much more enjoyable to people who aren’t quite as obsessed with the books as, well, I am.
His Dark Materials airs Mondays at 9 p.m. on HBO
Previously on His Dark Materials
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