His Dark Materials: The Daemon-Cages

Whew. Okay, I screamed all my frustration into the void and posted it on the internet, so now it's time to get back to His Dark Materials, which so far has been a reasonably faithful but oddly bloodless adaptation that's squandering its premise and talent with very bland dialogue and set-pieces, as well as a lack of internal consistency (we'll get to that).

This is the Bolvangar episode, in which Lyra is taken captive by the Oblation Board and finds a way to stall for time in the knowledge that the gyptians and Iorek are on their way - making several horrific discoveries as she does so.

It's a suitably gloomy atmosphere, but she finds Roger quickly and there's a nice moment where they communicate through their daemons (which is something you'd think would happen more often when it comes to spycraft in this world). Speaking of Roger, this kid is adorable and he brings so much personality to a character that's little more than a MacGuffin in the book itself.

He and Lyra find the severed daemons, which isn't hugely effective since they still haven't captured the full horror of what all this means, and then their respective children in a separate dormitory. I can't recall this happening in the book; the closest Pullman gets to providing closure on this particular plot is Kaisa taking the severed daemons away with the promise they'll try to reunite them with their children. Whether he does so or not isn't made clear.

I suppose that wouldn't have been a satisfying conclusion on-screen, so here we see the children being rescued (and for some reason they have shaved heads, which seems a clumsy attempt to create a visual allusion to Holocaust victims) and taken away by the gyptians who promise to care for them if their families don't take them back.

It occurs to me for the first time that Pullman did actually drop the ball on these kids. Their fates are never properly explained, and there's no indication of whether they even live or die. That's... pretty strange, actually.

But before we get to all that, we see Lyra hiding from Mrs Coulter who arrives in Bolvangar to oversee the experiments. Again we get a rather pointless extended sequence, in which Lyra hides under the bed in one of the dormitories (though it does establish solidarity between the kids) but then comes the heart-stopping moment when Lyra is captured and put into the machine.

And... she's unconscious when they take her into the room? And only gets a few moments of struggle? Oy. Here's how it's described in the book:

She kicked and bit more passionately than ever, until the man holding her gasped and let go for a moment - and she was free, and Pantalaimon sprang toward her like a spark of lightning, and she clutched him to her fierce breast, and he dug his wild-cat claws into her flesh, and every stab of pain was dear to her. "Never! Never! Never!" she cried, and backed against the wall to defend him to their death.

I mean, whoa. I wanted to see that scene. And they've got Dafne Keen for goodness sake. The kid who took down dozens of grown men in Logan. Let her go off!

But the sequence doesn't have half the power it could have, and there's not even a desperate hug between Lyra and Pan once Mrs Coulter interrupts the proceedings. There's such a bizarre lack of emotional choices here.

Still, I liked the conversation between mother and daughter that followed, especially in the acting choices between Ruth Wilson and Dafne: clearly both of them are bullshitting each other; what's better is they clearly know they're each bullshitting the other.

That's a great dynamic, possibly even better than in the book since Wilson can bring a bit more nuance to the pure evil that was book!Mrs Coulter. The trick Lyra pulls with the beetle is good, as is the shot where they're both screaming at each other from opposite sides of the door.

***

Wrapping things up, we've got Roger making a big speech to inspire the severed children to come with him (solidifying my opinion that this adaptation has totally missed the point of daemons and their relationships with humans), the gyptians, Iorek and Lee Scoreby turning up to help rescue the children, and then a last-minute save when Serafina turns up and immediately kills everyone in the vicinity. So umm.... why didn't they just send her in first? She clearly had the ability to save everyone single-handedly.

Never mind, the day is won and Lyra heads off with Roger and Lee to find her father, only for cliff ghasts to attack the airship and Lyra to fall into darkness. I'm pretty sure she'll be fine.

Miscellaneous Observations:

The general atmosphere of Bolvangar was a bit much; naturally it's meant to be creepy, but the staff also tried to keep the children calm by having them play games and keep busy. This was just wall-to-wall tension and fear, so you would have expected more tears and panic on a daily basis.

The female scientist had a fox daemon, which appeared a few episodes ago when the children were first disappearing. Does this mean she was there?

The empty faces of the nurses were effective though, even if it was a little confusing. In the books there's definitely something wrong with them, but it's never explicitly stated they've been severed. If they have, then why are the children suffering more than the adults? Isn't that nurse the perfect example of an intercision done "properly" (given she's placid and yet still able to complete tasks). And if this woman has been severed, wouldn't Lyra have noticed, I dunno - that she didn't have a daemon with her?

That's the problem: this screenwriter is trying to clarify Pullman's deliberate ambiguity and it's only creating plot-holes.

Meanwhile, in Will's plot we see they've put a date on all this, by establishing that Joe Parry disappeared in the year 2006. This is unclear in the novels, though I guess everyone just assumed they were in the nineties. Not that it really matters, it was just interesting.

There are some attempts here by the adults of Bolvangar to try and justify what they're doing, though I'm not sure there's any point once you see the horrors of what they're inflicting on children. Pullman didn't bother trying to get in their heads, they were just religious fanatics trying to stop Original Sin, and leaves it at that. And it's not until The Amber Spyglass that we get a proper idea of what it actually is anyway.

In a great example of the problems with this show's dialogue, we've got Mrs Coulter giving Lyra a drink and telling her: "If I was trying to drug you, there are many other means to do so other than a drink."

It's such a boring, lazy sentence, and not even one that makes much sense. If I was going to drug a child, then yeah - putting something in their drink would be the quickest and easiest way to do it, so Lyra should feel suspicious. And what other ways are there to drug someone? Inject them? Fill the air with toxins? It's such a nonsensical thing to say.

See also the exchange between Lyra and Lee: "What took you so long?"/"It's good to see you too." Urrrggggghhhh.