His Dark Materials: The City of Magpies

We’re back with the second season of His Dark Materials, which (I’m safely assuming) covers the entirety of The Subtle Knife, the middle book of the trilogy. I’m hoping for an uptick in quality, if not simply because this is brand new material to be adapted, and the series no longer has to sit in the shadow of the 2007 film. (Not that the film was any good, but there was still a sense of contrast/compare at work).

I’ll start with an unpopular opinion: The Subtle Knife is actually my favourite book of the three, though I couldn’t really tell you why. There is some fair criticism that the narrative shifted from Lyra to Will Parry as the story’s protagonist, and I can fully understand why this would be so infuriating, especially after how vividly she was brought to life in Northern Lights.

And yet… I actually prefer the introspective Will to the more rambunctious Lyra, even if that’s purely down to who I relate to more. (That said, the problem of gender-perspective becomes even more egregious in The Amber Spyglass, in which Lyra spends the first few chapters as an unconscious damsel in distress).

The Subtle Knife also taught me that not every plot-point has to be explained, whether it’s John Parry inexplicably being in possession Lee Scoresby’s ring or the unexplained images on the upper right-hand corner of each page (they denote what world the action is currently taking place in, but the reader has to figure that out for themselves), and rendered so many extraordinary landscapes (the streets of Cittàgazze) and heart-stopping sequences (Will and Lyra using the knife to move between worlds in the attempt to steal back her alethiometer).

Reading it for the first time was like flying; I’ll never forget how utterly riveting and immersive it was. Even the tiniest of thought-provoking details, like Lyra entering the museum and seeing the sleigh that took her to Bolvangar or Will pondering the linked etymology between amber and electricity stayed with me for years.

Season two kicks off with a gathering of forces, setting up the three major strands of the episode: Lyra and Will meeting in Cittàgazze, Lee Scoresby accompanying Serafina to the witch enclave, and Mrs Coulter undergoing her usual machinations onboard a Magisterium vessel. So, let’s go through them in order:

I liked all the Will/Lyra interactions, especially the little bits and pieces of characterization that helped to establish not only their personalities, but their rapport with each other. Here it’s Will who first approaches Lyra (in the book Will wanders into a building and is ambushed by Lyra; here we get a patented girl-power moment in which Lyra successfully gets him into a headlock) and the scenes that follow are lovely: Will tries to understand the concept of her daemon, is inclusive in the way he says: “the three of us should stick together”, tidies up after himself (the barrow of spilled fruit on the street), cooks the meals without comment, and thinks on his feet when it comes to cutting off the other children fleeing from them.

Best of all, they keep the exchange in which Will insists on paying for the food they’ve taken, much to Lyra’s bewilderment. For her part, we watch her mistake Will for a kitchen boy, walk over a bed in her shoes and promptly claim his sleeping space, and make a valiant attempt to prepare her own breakfast. It was a nice moment when Will approaches her on the steps, and we can tell she wants to trust him by the way Pan is receptive to his conversation, even when Lyra herself is more cagey in her body language.

They’re slowly getting the measure of each other, trying to understand each other through the context of their own worlds, exchanging words and turns of phrase so as to find what common ground they share. 

In that regard, I’m pleased Jack Thorne kept in their exchange about amber/anbaric and electricity/electrum. Though their joint realization on how the words echoed each other didn’t send chills down my spine the way it did in the book, it at least provided a nice segue into the next phase of Lyra’s plan: to travel to Will’s Oxford in search of a scholar that can help her learn more about Dust. It’s a place of answers that she’s familiar with, so it’s the logical step for her to take.

There is some added drama injected into the proceedings: Lyra is initially cautious of the fact that Will has no daemon, even though in the book she can instantly grasp that he’s “whole” in a way the severed children at Bolvangar were not. Furthermore, she’s harbouring doubts over the alethiometer, blaming it for Roger’s death. This didn’t really occur in the book, and I suspect that it’s a way of limiting the device’s role in the subsequent episodes (after all, it’s difficult to write suspense if you have an omniscient tool that could hypothetically tell you everything) but it also tracks with Lyra’s experiences.

She followed the alethiometer’s instructions to get to her father’s house, a choice which lead directly to Roger’s demise. That’s certainly a lie of omission (if we assume that the Dust controlling the needle is sentient and all-knowing) and this level of deception continues into how it identifies Will as “a murderer.” Urgh, I’ve always resented this scene in the novel, and I’ve no idea what Pullman was going for when he wrote it. Will is not a murderer; he pushed an intruder down a flight of stairs in a moment of panic (furthermore, a cat also tripped the guy up, which was the actual cause of the fall). No jury alive would consider that “murder”, so unless Pullman was simply going for a dramatic reveal, or Lyra was reading the device wrong, this is just blatantly false.

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In plot number two, Lee Scoresby has joined the witches at their enclave, and declared his decision to seek out Stanislaus Grumman. Honestly, I’ve forgotten how he came by this name or what makes him believe Grumman is in possession of “a weapon” that might help Lyra (it’s presumably the Subtle Knife, which he doesn’t have) but hey – it sets him up for the following episodes.

And I loved the entire look of this place: the clifftop, the strange pale grass, the twisted tree, the formation of the witches, the overhead perches of the avian daemons – it was all suitably eerie and otherworldly. I also liked the casting of Ruta Skadi and her expanded role in the rescue/mercy killing of her sister witch.

In the book it was Serafina who did the deed, partly out of mercy and partly to keep details of the prophecy from Mrs Coulter’s ears – furthermore, it was largely a serendipitous chance that Serafina took; whereas here it’s a very deliberate rescue mission, with Ruta (somehow) overhearing the words of the tortured witch and moving fast in order to silence her in time. Though I worry that most viewers wouldn’t have heard the fairly-crucial admission that Lyra has “another name” given that these words were interposed with scenes of Ruta racing through the sky and storm. Finding this out is pretty much Mrs Coulter's key motivation from here on out.

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Finally, we see Mrs Coulter making her next series of moves among the clergy . I don't find these scenes hugely compelling as the bland authoritarianism of the Magisterium doesn’t make for a particularly interesting antagonist, and at this point the concept of a religious institution being corrupt and hypocritical isn't as timely as it used to be. We’ve just spent the last four years watching in disbelief as deranged evangelicals passionately backed a man who shamelessly embodied all seven of the deadly sins without the barest whiff of self-awareness. We KNOW they’re a bunch of creepy weirdoes, so watching it all play out in fiction feels profoundly stale and redundant.

(For the record, The Amber Spyglass preceded the Catholic Church’s child abuse scandals by two years).

So all the interest should lie with Mrs Coulter, though I’ve always found it one of the great ironies of the book trilogy that a story so set on overhauling the most archaic elements of the Bible itself has a classic Femme Fatale as its main antagonist. She’s seductive, she’s manipulative, she wears a red dress… she’s essentially an archetypal serpent/temptress mash-up, and in this episode alone she’s torturing a helpless woman and promising a potential ally that she’ll kill his rival, saying: “I will make it my sin.” There’s not much subtlety at work (see what I did there?)

I love Ruth Wilson, but her performance is quite difficult to pin down, perhaps because Mrs Coulter herself is difficult to pin down. Honestly, I don’t think she’s Pullman’s greatest creation, and her highly sexualized monstrousness is so overwhelming that the little glimpses of her humanity don’t amount for much in the long run. This is something I’ve only just figured out.

Miscellaneous Observations:

Cittàgazze is my favourite location in these books, and though it didn’t quite capture the languorous ambience that Pullman described, I liked the set design and its repeating stair motif (as in literal stairs, but also plenty of zig-zag lines laid out in the cobblestones). 

And the Tower of Angels looked fantastic, especially with those angelic sculptures at the base – is it just me, or is the Tower’s spire meant to resemble the knife’s blade that we’ve already seen in the trailers and Will’s visions?

I noticed that the Tower of Angels made it into the opening credits, and that in fact the entire city now sits in the centre of the sequence’s closing image.

I remember so vividly the excitement I felt reading this for the first time and realizing that there must be a link between Dust and Spectres based on the way they respond to either children or adults, with adolescence as the trigger. That Pullman connected it to that universal experience of growing up and the story of Genesis is truly the genius of this story in its entirety. We won’t know until season there, but man I hope Jack Thorne can do this complexity and interconnectedness justice.

The script takes the opportunity to throw in a little bit of daemon lore: they don’t eat apparently.

I noticed Will taking a picture of the Tower on his cellphone and was about to say that this was clearly an update – but I’ve been reading the book concurrently with the episodes, and cellphones are mentioned (though they probably didn’t have cameras back then). I wonder if the picture will come into play later…

It's Lyanna Mormont!

Mrs Coulter using tweezers of all things as a torture device didn’t really work, especially with the reveal that cloud-pines aren’t broomstick-like modes of transport (like they were in the book), but instead little sprigs that exist under each witch’s skin. I suppose it isn’t a hugely important change, but still a baffling one. What’s the reason for the switch? Surely not budgetary reasons? Though I guess this explains Dr. Lanselius’s cellar, which stored cloud-pine in little jars on shelves instead of actual branches.

Just as I was getting ready to nitpick the fact that the captured witch didn’t dissipate into smoke (as we’ve seen Serafina do in the past, and Ruta do in this very episode) I remembered that the thing I mentioned loving about Pullman’s writing is that he doesn’t waste time overexplaining things. It’s easy to find plot-holes on the screen, so I’ll assume it had something to do with her daemon being incapacitated.

The episode’s best scene was Will and Lyra coming across the man who had fallen prey to Spectres; it’s something like this that’ll always be more eerie and disturbing when seen as opposed to read about. And just as she was with the severed child at Bolvangar, Lyra is kind to him.

Well, one episode down and so far so good – let’s see how the rest of the season plays out!